Note: Dr. Lisa Randall is a professor of science at Harvard University. Her latest book joins her two previous New York Times best sellers in examining, for the lay reader, contemporary thinking in the fields of physics and cosmology. Research of what is termed dark matter—invisible matter that fills the universe—has garnered much attention recently, not only in scientific journals, but in the popular media as well.

From Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe 

By Lisa Randall

Dark matter is the elusive stuff in the Universe that interacts through gravity like ordinary matter, but that doesn’t emit or absorb light. Astronomers detect its gravitational influence, but they literally don’t see it ….

When I started concentrating on the concepts underlying the ideas in this book, I was awe-struck and enchanted …. To be clear, mine is not a religious viewpoint …. Yet I can’t help but feel the emotions we tend to call religious as we come to understand the immensity of the Universe … and how it all fits together. It offers anyone some perspective when dealing with the foolishness of everyday life ….

Although we might experience the illusion of a self-contained environment, every day at sunrise and every night when the Moon and the far more distant stars come into view, we are reminded that our planet is not alone. Stars and nebulae are further evidence that we exist in a galaxy that resides within a far larger Universe .…

The science this book presents is part of a larger history—13.8 or 4.6 billion years according to whether you focus on the Universe or the Solar System. However, the history of human beings’ unraveling these ideas is little more than a century old.

From Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall. Copyright 2015 by Lisa Randall. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 

Editors’ comment: Dr. Randall subscribes to the dominant view within her field that—despite appearances and long-held assumptions to the contrary—by far the greatest share of the substance comprising the universe is dark matter, which cannot be seen, but instead is known indirectly through effects, as described by the science of gravity.

The Sentinel’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy, made use of similar illustrations—of the supremacy of science over ordinary appearances—in articulating her discovery of the Science of Christianity 150 years ago. For example, she wrote of the astronomer Copernicus’s work that demonstrated that the earth revolves around the sun, contrary to what had long been believed—“Copernicus has shown that what appears real, to material sense and feeling, is absolutely unreal” (No and Yes, p. 6).

But it was within the Bible that she found the timeless guidance for distinguishing between what may appear to be and what actually is. She points to biblical writers, such as Paul in his letter to the Romans: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (1:20). And she comes back repeatedly to the healing works of Christ Jesus. Within his healing ministry, the founder of Christian Science saw the confluence of the unchanging Truth that is God with the proof in daily life of divine Truth and Love—a system of healing that anyone, including young children, can comprehend and demonstrate in small and large ways.

Mrs. Eddy deeply admired the intellectual wrestlings that have led to broader conceptions in astronomy, natural history, chemistry, music, mathematics. She said, “Observation, invention, study, and original thought are expansive and should promote the growth of mortal mind out of itself …” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 195). But she was under no illusions that these endeavors were the pathway to divine Life and Love. The expansive beauty and wonder of a starry, moonlit night does not negate the cataclysmic destruction of comets and floods.

The “astounding interconnectedness of the Universe”—to borrow Dr. Randall’s arresting phrase—can be seen as pointing to the unity and supremacy of God, who, as the Psalmist wrote millennia ago, “hast set thy glory above the heavens” (8:1). The God “who healeth all thy diseases; who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies” (103:3, 4). Christ Jesus led the way in seeing indestructible, spiritual substance as the only reality of the universe. In reference to the Christ, the spiritual Truth through which Jesus stilled the storm, redeemed the sinner, healed the sick, and taught his followers to do the same, Mrs. Eddy named her church, the Church of Christ, Scientist—“… the spiritual spire of which,” she wrote, “will reach the stars with divine overtures, holy harmony, reverberating through all cycles of systems and spheres” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 13).