In this week’s installment of Scott Solves Your Everyday Problems, I’ll get to the bottom of this pesky issue of the 96 percent of the universe that’s gone missing.

I’m not making up this problem.  I learned about it in Michael Brooks’ new book, “Thirteen Things That Don’t Make Sense.”  We can be certain it’s a sound scientific work because it features a cover blurb from “New Scientist,” a magazine so prestigious it was once edited by noted scientist Michael Brooks.

Anyway, according to Brooks’ book, only 4 percent of the cosmos can be accounted for.  The way scientists figured this out is, they looked into their telescopes and, using knowledge accumulated over the centuries, discovered the lens caps were still on.  So they looked again and found that certain stars are accelerating away from us at rates higher than the laws of physics can explain, though frankly, considering some of the stuff that happens on this planet, you can hardly blame them.

This acceleration can’t be explained by the known mass of the universe; it would take 25 times as much mass to generate enough gravity.  The missing substances, completely theoretical at this point, are referred to as “dark matter” and “dark energy.”  Not much is known about them except they would defy most laws of physics and be capable of holding together Donald Trump’s hair.

That’s one theory, anyway.  Another group of scientists contends there’s no such things as dark matter or dark energy, but that the stars are accelerating because Isaac Newton’s original gravity calculations are wrong.  The implications of this are obvious:  your high school physics teacher gave you an incorrect grade.

As you can imagine this is a big deal to traditionalists, some of whom became so upset they tried to prove Newton’s theories by jumping from their roofs.  But there’s an easier way to test gravity that requires only a simple telescope.  What you do is, hand the telescope to your significant other and tell her to make herself useful by setting it up while you drink a beer.  After she bashes your skull with it, note the speed of the stars circling your head and report them to your E.R. doctor.

Also possibly disproving Newton’s calculations are two NASA spacecraft, named “Pioneer,” which are veering off course.  See, the craft were launched decades ago to travel to a distant solar system and broadcast a message for any space beings they might encounter (“We need you’re help in prossessing FOUR BILLIONS SPACE DOLLARS yours truly supreme US leader Mr JIMMY CARTER”).

But they’ve gone off track by something like a few thousand miles per year.  According to Brooks the only possible ways this could happen are if dark matter and energy exist or Newton was wrong, unless somehow 70’s-era scientists made some mistake they’re now too embarrassed to admit in the design of extremely complicated spacecraft.

Of course, this doesn’t get us any closer to finding the missing part of the universe, and neither has anything else NASA has tried, including offering a reward and posting the universe on milk cartons.  I personally think the missing cosmos is made up of taxpayer money NASA has spent over the years, but I admit the real solution could be something much simpler, such as dead angels.

So let’s find out for sure by sending a number of human beings into the recesses of the universe and ask them to report back, if their heads don’t pop in the vacuum of space.  We can start with Michael Brooks.

This was written by Scott Green for The Daily Blank. It is licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. If you love it, please re-post the complete article (including this blurb) on your site. We'd be flattered.