Shedding light on dark matters
posted 1-9-2009 - 7:33 am

 
I started my day yesterday by reading through my usual selection of news sources, then skipped over to check my e-mail, where I was presented with yet more headlines, and ran across a science story in Time magazine that piqued my interest. I ended up pissed off at the reporter, the Nobel prize committee, and academia in general. And thus, a rant developed, but not without cause.

Let me back up a bit here and give you the name of the article first:

The Milky Way: Bigger, Faster, Better Understood
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1870049,00.html

The first thing that struck me was the rather middling handling the reporter gave the story; nothing grossly wrong, just not much in the way of putting this item in perspective so that I know why it's important for me to know any of this. Besides, I've read far better science reporting than this mediocre little bit. The second thing that struck me was that Mark Reid, the Harvard astronomer she interviewed, is really just tweaking the kind of work Vera Rubin has been doing for more than 40 years — and without half as much fanfare and very little public credit.

Who's Vera Rubin, you ask? Ahhhhhhhhhh, here we come to it.