Winner of 2012 AIP Science Communication Awards for Science WritingAuthor Richard Panek honored for The 4% Universe College Park, Md., Oct. 10, 2012 – The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has selected author Richard Panek as winner of this year’s AIP Science Communication Award in the Science Writing category for his book The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. The selection committee praised the book for its excellent writing and accurate depictions of the process of scientific investigation. “The mysteries of cosmology easily capture the imagination,” said Catherine O’Riordan, AIP vice president for Physics Resources. “This particular book presents the underlying physics of dark matter and dark energy in a way that draws the reader in and tells an engaging story of researchers at the frontiers of discovery.” Panek will receive a $3,000 honorarium, an inscribed Windsor chair, and a certificate of recognition at the 221st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), to be held Jan. 6-10, 2013, in Long Beach, Calif. The 4% Universe
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In recent years, a radically new vision of the universe has emerged:
Only four percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, and every
planet, star, and galaxy. The rest – 96 percent – is completely unknown. The
4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality tells
the dramatic story of how astronomers reached this cosmos-shattering
conclusion, and how they are currently inventing ways to try to find dark matter
and something even more bizarre called dark energy, which is speeding up the
expansion of the universe – the discovery that was recognized by the 2011
Nobel Prize in Physics. Through extensive on-site reporting and hundreds of interviews,
Panek offers an intimate, behind-the-scenes portrait of the bitter rivalries
and fruitful collaborations, the blind alleys and the eureka moments, that have
redefined science and reinvented the universe.
Richard
Panek has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (in
Science Writing) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (in Literary Nonfiction),
as well as an Antarctic Artists and Writers grant from the National Science
Foundation. The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race
to Discover the Rest of Reality was long-listed for the 2012 Royal Society
Winton Prize for Science Books. Panek’s books also include The
Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes and Seeing
and Believing: How the Telescope Opened Our Eyes and Minds to the Heavens. His
background is not in science; it’s in journalism and fiction. But by
combining the exploratory sensibility of journalism with the storytelling
techniques of fiction, he tries to illuminate and humanize the history and
philosophy of science even for readers who, like himself before he began writing
about science, would know little or nothing about the subject. His books have
been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in New York City.