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ward Earth or away from it. This frequency shift is called a Doppler shift. The same kind of
shift happens with sound waves as a car passes and the sound of its engine seems to change
to a lower frequency. The greater that shift, the greater the objects speed. Rubin wanted to
see if she could use Doppler shifts and Kents new spectrograph to measure the speed of
stars in distant galaxies.
She found that the stars near the outer edge of Andromeda moved just as fast as the
stars near the galaxys center. That wasnt the way it was supposed to be.
Over a period of two months she completed 200 spectrographs. For every galaxy it was
the same. The velocities of stars she measured were all wrong. According to every known
law of physics, some of those stars were moving too fast for gravity to hold them in their
galaxies, and they should fly off into space. But they didnt.
Rubin was left with two possible explanations. Either Newtons equations were wrong
(something the scientific world would not accept) or the universe contained extra matter no
astronomer had detected.
She chose the second explanation and named this extra matter dark matter since it
could not be seen or detected. Rubin calculated how much dark matter would be needed and
how it would have to be distributed throughout the universe in order to make Newtons
equations correct. She found that 90 percent of the universe had to be dark matter.
It took the rest of the scientific community a full decade to grudgingly accept Vera Rubins results and the reality that most of the matter in the universe could not be seen or detected by any means available to humans.
However, Vera Rubins work in that summer of 1970 changed every calculation and
theory about the structure and origins of our universe. It vastly improved astronomers ability to correctly calculate the distribution and motion of matter. Meanwhileluckily
Newtons laws of motion still survive.
Fun Facts: NASA has tried to take a photograph of dark matter (something no once can see or directly detect) by combining X-ray telescope
images from the ROSAT satellite with other satellite imagery; the photo
shown at http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/rosat/gallery/display/darkmatter.
html is the result. It could be the first photo of dark matter.

More to Explore
Golway, James. Where Is the Rest of the Universe? (video). Los Angeles: KCET, 1991.
Kraus, Lawrence. The Fifth Essence: The Search for Dark Matter. New York: Basic
Books, 1993.
. The Mystery of Missing Mass in the Universe. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Rubin, Vera. Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter. New York: American Institute of Physics,
1997.
St. Bartusiak, Marcia. Through a Universe Darkly. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Tucker, Wallace. The Dark Matter. New York: Morrow Books, 1998.
Yount, Lisa. Contemporary Women Scientists. New York: Facts on File, 1994.

The Nature of Dinosaurs

Year of Discovery: 1976
What Is It? How dinosaurs really acted, moved, and lived.
Who Discovered It? Robert Bakker

Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?

Dinosaurs were plodding, cold-blooded monsters. They were sluggish, dull-gray, and
so dumb they werent capable of decent parenting. That was the classical view of dinosaurs
through the first half of the twentieth century. That was how dinosaurs were depicted in illustrations. That was what expert paleontologists believed. Robert Bakker shattered those
beliefs.
Robert Bakker was the first to claim that dinosaurs were warm blooded, colorful, and
quick, intelligent, and agile. He also first proposed that birds were descended from dinosaurs. The images we see of dinosaursfrom Jurassic Park to science museum displaysall owe their dinosaur concepts to Robert Bakkers discoveries. Robert Bakker
completely rewrote the book on dinosaurs.

How Was It Discovered?

A great revelation swept over Robert Bakker one night during his sophomore year at
Yale University. As he walked through the darkened museum, faint bits of light caught the
dinosaur skeletons and made them appear to move through the shadowed stillness. It occurred to Robert as he studied the familiar bones that these creatures had ruled the earth for
165 million years. They couldnt have been stupid, cold-blooded and sluggish. Intelligent
mammals were around. They would have taken over unless the dinosaurs kept winning because they were fundamentally better.
Robert Bakker set outall aloneto prove that the prevailing view of dinosaurs was
completely wrong. Bakker turned to four sources of information to develop his case: comparative anatomy (comparing the size and shape of similar parts of different species), latitudinal
zonation (where the animals live), the cumulative fossil record (all previously collected dinosaur bones and skeletons), and ecology (relationship of a species to its environment).
For three years Bakker exhaustively studied the bones of mammals and found that
they, as were dinosaur bones, were rich in blood vessels and lacked growth ringsjust the
opposite of cold-blooded reptiles. He found that Cretaceous dinosaurs thrived in northern
Canada where cold-blooded reptiles could not have survived. Finally he studied African
and North American ecosystems and found that warm-blooded predators eat six to eight

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