95% of the universe is invisible. Here’s why that should fill us with wonder

Who's in the Video Janna Levin Janna Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is also director of sciences at Pioneer Works, a center for arts and sciences[…] Go to Profile

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Become a Member Login The Well 95% of the universe is invisible. Here’s why that should fill us with wonder Everything ever seen — every star, mountain, and face — makes up less than 5 percent of the universe. Astrophysicist Janna Levin reminds us that the rest — dark matter and dark energy — is invisible, mysterious, and everywhere. We are the luminous exception in a universe of darkness. ▸ 13 min — with Janna Levin Description Transcript Copy a link to the article entitled http://95%%20of%20the%20universe%20is%20invisible.%20Here’s%20why%20that%20should%20fill%20us%20with%20wonder Share 95% of the universe is invisible. Here’s why that should fill us with wonder on Facebook Share 95% of the universe is invisible. Here’s why that should fill us with wonder on Twitter (X) Share 95% of the universe is invisible. Here’s why that should fill us with wonder on LinkedIn Sign up for Big Think on Substack The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. Subscribe

Everything ever seen — every star, every planet, every person — is part of less than 5 percent of the known universe. The rest exists as dark matter and dark energy: invisible forces that shape everything, yet remain beyond our reach.

In this talk from Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation’s A Night of Awe and Wonder, astrophysicist Janna Levin explores how this cosmic mystery reframes our sense of existence. She describes how dark energy drives the expansion of space, how dark matter sculpts galaxies, and how our luminous world of atoms and light drifts through this vast, unseen sea.

Rather than despair, Levin finds in this realization a profound humility. “You are not a drop in the ocean,” Rumi wrote. “You are the entire ocean in a drop.” To understand our smallness is to glimpse the beauty of belonging: a fleeting brilliance in an immense, invisible cosmos.

JANNA LEVIN: It’s such a pleasure to be here tonight.

I wonder how many of you have reflected on this phenomenon: everything anyone has ever seen, or ever will see, makes up less than 5% of what is out there in the universe.

All the people, all the faces, all the mountains, the moon, the stars, the galaxies, supernova—everything we’ve ever seen—is less than 5%. The rest is in the form of dark matter and dark energy, as yet unknown.

And the “dark” phrasing is a misnomer. The dark energy is in this room right now. It fills the room. The dark matter is coursing through you right now. They’re not dark; they’re invisible.

I wonder—and maybe you’ve wondered yourself—what is all this dark stuff? Where does it come from? What is it? Or maybe you study astrophysics and you actually build detectors deep in mines, waiting patiently for years for one dark matter particle to strike your detector. Yet, despite its abundance, the dark matter has never revealed itself.

It could be that it never will, that we’ll never identify exactly what it is. But maybe you’ve reflected on this strange disparity between us and this dark universe. Or maybe this is your first time hearing all of this.

Imagine us as a collection of confetti tossed amongst this impassive void—sparkling because we are luminous—and yet, to the dark matter, we are as invisible to the dark sector as the dark sector is to us.

Consider the visible universe: you can see your hand because the atoms in your body scatter light, your eyes absorb that light, and that light triggers an electrical impulse along nerve endings. That ignites in your mind an image, the qualia of the visual world. You can feel your fingertips because atoms interact. You can smell and taste because of chemical interactions. Your heartbeat is regulated by electrical impulses from specialized cells.

This is the world we know: the visual world. It’s electrical, it’s magnetic, it’s the world of atoms and of light.

But it’s not just our microcosm. This is the same material that burns in stars, the same light that shines from stars, the same matter lingering from the Big Bang. This is everything everyone has ever seen and ever will see.

If we spiral out to the large scale, we enter the domain of dark matter and dark energy.

The astronomer Edwin Hubble, working not far from here at Mount Wilson Observatory—the largest telescope at the time—made a remarkable discovery. He realized that our collection of stars, this spiral Milky Way, was not the only galaxy. He was the first person in the 1920s to observe another galaxy. When Einstein was working, he didn’t know other galaxies existed.

Looking at these galaxies—collections of hundreds of billions of stars—Hubble observed that the space between the galaxies is stretching. This was an incredible observation, and it had been predicted as a consequence of the Big Bang.

The universe was thought to expand out of the Big Bang in all directions. Over time, galaxies would form, and the world would unfold as we see it today. But the expansion was expected to slow down.

Many years later, the Hubble Space Telescope observed that the universe abounds with galaxies. There are as many galaxies in the observable universe as there are stars in our own Milky Way—hundreds of billions. Further observations revealed that the expansion between galaxies is not slowing; it’s getting faster, as though something were driving the universe to continue to expand.

Astronomers tried to measure this invisible source, this peculiar pressure on spacetime. They found an unknown, unidentified form of energy—dubbed the dark energy—which permeates all of space. We don’t know what it is. It might literally be the energy of empty space. But it doesn’t shine, and it doesn’t interact. Atoms pass through it unimpeded and oblivious.

Dark matter behaves differently. It collects on unseen filaments. In the early universe, it created depressions, wells, into which ordinary matter collected, forming galaxies and galaxy clusters. Dark matter pools in vast translucent halos surrounding galaxies, yet unseen. Even clustered around galaxies, it does not collide with atoms. Atoms stream through it, and dark matter through atoms, totally unimpeded and oblivious.

These dark components are significant because on vast cosmological scales, they dominate the evolution and structure of the universe across billions of light years.

The luminous universe we see—with instruments or with the naked eye under a rare dark, clear night—is suspended from this unseen architecture.

Now spiraling back in, you are submersed in a static ocean of dark energy. There are rainstorms of dark matter in every room you occupy. Millions of dark matter particles are coursing through you at hundreds or thousands of kilometers per second.

Our solar system orbits the Milky Way, circling a supermassive black hole at its center. As we orbit, we stream through this dark matter halo, generally toward the constellation Cygnus. When you look up at night, the dark matter streams through us as we move through the halo.

We don’t know how complicated the dark sector is. There could be dark forces, dark laws of physics, maybe dark stars or dark planets, maybe even dark creatures—though that last idea is science fiction. Still, we simply don’t know. There could be eddies and turbulences; a storm around us. If we could see dark matter, we might see a tornado swirling around us without our awareness.

Regardless, we factually must accept that we are not everything. We’re not even much. And with that astronomical perspective comes a shift. Some people feel dread or existential terror from these dizzying realizations.

For me, it gives a sense of being part of a grander story, connecting all the way back to the Big Bang. It offers a moment of quieting the thoughts and gaining perspective on our obsessiveness over everyday concerns.

Let’s enjoy the humility of the astronomical perspective for a second.

This reminds me: many people like to indulge in our insignificance when taking an astronomical view. There’s a great New Yorker cartoon of a guy standing on the edge of the world with a cosmic vista behind him. His companion runs to take his photo, and he says, “Make sure you can see how insignificant I am.”

Imagine that the next time you admire a starry sky. That saturated abyss behind the stars is almost everything.

And now, I feel we need a Rumi quote to save us. Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, said: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”

It’s a beautiful quote, and very appropriate here. You are the glowing, luminous exception in a universe of darkness. You are an arrangement of agnostic atoms, forged in stars, that can only act and react as prescribed. Yet you contain multitudes.

You are the history of collisions in the universe—the explosions from stars that threw matter back out to form planets and your body. You are evidence of the universe grinding into being.

You hold in your hand a fistful of the ocean—streams of dark energy, storms of dark matter. You are a droplet precipitated from the 5% of the residue left from the Big Bang. You are briefly aware and briefly illuminated.

So you are not a drop in the ocean.

You are the entire ocean in a drop.

Thank you.

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