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Another severe blow to the cosmological principle.
by carsongross 12y ago
Another severe blow to the cosmological principle.
- genwin 12y agoThe principle is meant to apply only at a sufficiently large scale. If any particular scale goes against the principle, one can enlarge the scale to see if the principle still applies.
- baddox 12y agoThat still sounds like a blow to the meaningfulness or usefulness of the principle.
- genwin 12y agoWhy would it? If you enlarge the scale and find that the principle applies, it's useful.
- hachiya 12y agoAnd if all else fails, just scale out further... until you're effectively outside the universe. Stipulate the presence of additional universes. Then call the whole theoretical collection a "multiverse." Voilà. We have no reason to believe this reflects reality, but it must be assumed... ...in order to preserve the Cosmological Principle.
- carsongross 12y agoExactly
- Dylan16807 12y agogenwin is talking about actual measurements, not speculation. Why are you throwing out a strawman?
- genwin 12y agoYou never get outside the universe, if it's infinitely large (and there's no evidence to the contrary).
- 3rd3 12y agoThe alignments are exactly on the same scale of the filaments. It would be a contradition to the cosmological principle if, say, the alignments occurred only on one celestial hemisphere.
- carsongross 12y agoIs a line of basketballs all found to be spinning in the exact same direction more or less random than a line of basketballs spinning in random directions? I know, I know. "Sufficiently large scale." (lol)
- nitrogen 12y agoBasketballs are not formed by gravity. Edit: quote from the article: “A correlation between the orientation of quasars and the structure they belong to is an important prediction of numerical models of evolution of our Universe. Our data provide the first observational confirmation of this effect, on scales much larger that[sic] what had been observed to date for normal galaxies,” adds Dominique Sluse of the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie in Bonn, Germany and University of Liège. So clearly this was expected.
- AaronFriel 12y agoNo, because the quasars weren't aligned with each other globally (cosmologically), it appears they are aligned with whatever structure they are embedded in at large scales. I think the term is a filament, but I'm not sure. If every quasar wherever we looked was aligned such that their axes of rotation were parallal, that would be a huge blow to the cosmological principal. Or more spookily, suppose all of the quasars studied were oriented with their poles lining up to some point in the universe. A good hint that some God created the universe for us, for example, would be for every single quasar's axis of rotation to be pointing at the earth. But those things do not seem to be the case, and the cosmological principal appears to hold. Look at any corner of the universe, and quasars point in an arbitrary direction. Look at another corner, and they point in a different arbitrary direction. Zoom out, and now there is no cohesive direction. Homogeneity is preserved at scales much smaller than the largest structures we've observed, because the chains of quasars are themselves much smaller than the filaments and other super-structures that snake through the observable universe.