LOS ALTOS HILLS, Calif., Oct. 14, 2008 (AScribe Newswire) — Many Americans working in the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology were hoping that research astronomer Vera Rubin of the Carnegie Institution of Washington would share in the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics, but it didn’t happen. In the mid 1970′s, Dr. Rubin’s creative astronomical research had confirmed the existence of massive amounts of a mysterious invisible substance, dubbed dark matter, that greatly outweighs visible matter.

Unfortunately for Dr. Rubin, the nature of dark matter, which represents about 83 percent of the mass of the universe, has not been agreed upon by astrophysicists or cosmologists even though they have been researching the subject for 30 years. Without mainstream scientific agreement on the physics of dark matter, the Nobel Prize committee may have difficulty awarding a share of the physics prize to Dr. Rubin.

Actually, some progress has been made over the past thirty years in identifying the physics of dark matter; there are apparently only two dark matter Nobel Prize candidates left standing. The first candidate involves theoretical, cold, uncharged, non-baryonic weakly interacting, massive particles (WIMPs), reported in a 1984 issue of “Nature” by three professors at the University of California, Santa Cruz, that have not been confirmed by observations or laws of physics after 24 years of world-wide dark matter research.

The second dark matter candidate involves positively-charged, baryonic (protons and helium nuclei) particles, announced in a 2003 book by astro-cosmologist Jerome Drexler, that are massive and weakly interacting, but only when moving at relativistic velocities. Such relativistic positively-charged particles are observed continually bombarding Earth’s atmosphere as cosmic ray protons/helium nuclei, which Drexler posits are stragglers from dark matter relativistic particles orbiting the Milky Way in its dark matter halo.

How can we decide which of the two dark matter candidates is the right one? Fortunately there are many astronomically observed phenomena which can be used in conjunction with Occam’s razor logic to crown the winning dark matter candidate. Jerome Drexler’s three astro-cosmology books and his two scientific papers listed below successfully utilize about twenty cosmic phenomena for this purpose.

Because of their 24-year history, almost all astrophysicists and cosmologists have relied on the uncharged WIMPs during their education and careers and are not inclined to adopt a different dark matter. However, more support for charged dark matter is coming to light. For example, the 1979 physics Nobel Prize winner, Harvard Professor Sheldon L. Glashow coauthored a scientific paper, in 1989, entitled, “Charged Dark Matter.” The first sentence of the abstract reads, “The authors propose that dark matter is made of CHAMP’s, charged massive particles that survive annihilation in the early universe.”

A BNET.com article, “Weighing the CHAMPions of the universe – charged massive particles,” by I. Peterson, about the Glashow paper reads: “People have been excluding the possibility of charged dark matter for no good reason and limiting themselves to neutral particles,” says physicist Sheldon L. Glashow of Harvard University.

“If you don’t know what dark matter is, it would seem wise to be open-minded …”

“Glashow and his collaborators propose that dark matter consists of stable, very massive, electrically charged elementary particles left over from the Big Bang. These hypothetical particles would have masses between 20,000 and 1 million times the mass of a hydrogen atom.”

Last month, Professor Edward W. (Rocky) Kolb of the University of Chicago’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, coauthored a scientific paper online, entitled, “Reopening the Window on Charged Dark Matter,” that focused on the 1989 Glashow paper. The Kolb paper’s dark matter, in the form of electrically charged massive particles (CHAMPs), boosts Drexler’s five-year-old charged-relativistic-mass dark matter theory and undermines the 24-year-old cold-dark-matter WIMP theory.

Moreover, Drexler’s dark matter cosmology provides plausible explanations for five major cosmic mysteries, namely, the big bang, cosmic inflation, the accelerating cosmos, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, and the cosmic web, whereas the uncharged WIMP dark matter theory has no explanations for any of them.

Also, the last sentence of the abstract of Prof. Kolb’s University of Chicago paper, (arXiv:0809.0436 v1), highlights the significance of charged dark matter. It reads, “Further, we find that charged massive particles [CHAMPs] may simultaneously solve several long- standing astrophysical problems, including the underabundance of dwarf galaxies, the shallow [mass] density profiles in the cores of the LSB [low surface brightness] galaxies, the absence of cooling flows in the cores of galaxy clusters, and several others.”

A recent Amazon.com book review, by Dr. Chris Dyball, of Drexler’s 2008 book, “Discovering Postmodern Cosmology,” illuminates some of the preceding points: “This third book in a series by Drexler shows how his thesis, that dark matter is composed of charged ultra high energy relativistic protons, is capable of solving up to 25 previously unresolved mysteries of the Cosmos. Older cold dark matter concepts, now generally discredited, relied on too few observations and have required additional hypotheses to account for each new experimental finding. In significant contrast: each new data set gathered subsequent to Drexler’s first publication of his thesis has appeared to reinforce his concepts without the need for adaptation. Most recently the publication by astronomers at the University of Chicago titled ‘Reopening the window on charged dark matter’ which occurred 6 months after Drexler’s third book first became available, lends considerable additional support to the thesis that dark matter is composed of charged particles. While this book is sure to prove controversial amongst conservative astrophysicists, I would encourage the reader to keep an open mind. Remember there was a time when conventional wisdom had it that the sun revolved around a flat earth!”

Drexler utilizes the overwhelming evidence provided in his three books, his two scientific papers, and the papers of Prof. Glashow and Prof. Kolb to stake his claim to the discovery of the precise identity and physics of the universe’s dark matter, which he first publicly disclosed in his December 15, 2003 book. The following five publications cover the physics of Drexler’s dark matter, the supporting evidence, and the dark matter cosmology that provides plausible explanations for the universe’s accelerating expansion, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, big bang, cosmic inflation, and cosmic web:

1. Book, March 1, 2008, “Discovering Postmodern Cosmology: Discoveries in Dark Matter, Cosmic Web, Big Bang, Inflation, Cosmic Rays, Dark Energy, Accelerating Cosmos.
2. “Scientific paper, physics/0702132, Feb. 15 2007, “A Relativistic-Proton Dark Matter Would Be Evidence the Big Bang Probably Satisfied the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
3. Book, May 22, 2006, “Comprehending and Decoding the Cosmos: Discovering Solutions to Over a Dozen Cosmic Mysteries by Utilizing Dark Matter Relationism, Cosmology, and Astrophysics.”
4. Scientific paper, astro-ph/0504512, April 22, 2005, “Identifying Dark Matter through the Constraints Imposed by Fourteen Astronomically Based ‘Cosmic Constituents.’”
5. Book, Dec. 15, 2003, “How Dark Matter Created Dark Energy and the Sun: An Astrophysics Detective Story.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE THREE BOOKS: Jerome Drexler is a former member of the technical staff and group supervisor at Bell Labs, former research professor in physics at New Jersey Institute of Technology, founder and former Chairman and chief scientist of LaserCard Corp.(Nasdaq: LCRD). He has been awarded 76 U.S. patents, honorary Doctor of Science degrees from NJIT and Upsala College, a degree of Honorary Fellow of the Technion, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship at Stanford University, a three-year Bell Labs graduate study fellowship, the 1990 “Inventor of the Year Award” for Silicon Valley and recognition as the original inventor in 1978 of the now widely-used digital optical disk “Laser Optical Storage System” and the LaserCard(R) nanotech data memory. He is a member of the Board of Overseers of New Jersey Institute of Technology and an Honorary Life Member of the Technion Board of Governors.