Less than one part in twenty of the universe is made of anything we can see, touch, or name on the periodic table. The Planck spacecraft's meticulous mapping of the oldest light in existence has given cosmologists their most precise accounting yet — 4.9 percent ordinary matter, 26.8 percent dark matter, 68.3 percent dark energy — a set of numbers that describes the cosmos not as a warehouse inventory, but as a statistical portrait inferred from the faint echoes of creation. We find ourselves, in this reckoning, as a small flourish in a vast and largely illegible story. New instruments are now