Nobel origins
The 2011 Nobel Prize in physics was announced early Tuesday — and all three winners have connections to Harvard. One was an undergraduate at Harvard College. Two others did work as Harvard graduate students that put them on a path to the prize. The physics Nobel this year acknowledges the 1998 discovery that the universe is accelerating, pushed outward by “dark energy,” a mysterious force that acts in a way opposite to gravity. The vast scale of this unknown shook the world of cosmology, the science of how the universe originated and developed. Dark energy accounts for about 70 percent of all mass and energy in the universe. Combined with “dark matter” — undetectable particles with detectable gravitational pull, that figure is 96 percent. Meaning: All we see and know in the visible material realm, from stars to sand, makes up only 4 percent of the universe. “It was a theory we couldn’t believe...