Dark matter: Absence of evidence, or evidence of absence?

COSMOLOGY and particle physics--or at least, the popular versions of them--tend to the grandiose. The Higgs boson, recently discovered at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory, is not just any old particle. To the despair of many physicists, it has been dubbed the "God particle". Books on cosmology promise to reveal the "fabric of the cosmos", while their academic authors discuss different flavours of a "theory of everything".The reality, though, is more disappointing--or perhaps more excit...