Finite universe

[boooeee]

Originally posted by Underemployed
The universe could not possibly be spherical, it would fall off the turtle's back.

Silly rabbit, it's turtles all the way down AND all the way across.

It just rolls on to the adjacent turtle's back.

 

[Bikewer]

On the NPR "Science Friday" cosmology segment that aired today, they brought this concept up. The physicists present said, "we're going into the conference today to refute this idea."

 

[arcticpenguin]

On the NPR "Science Friday" cosmology segment that aired today, they brought this concept up. The physicists present said, "we're going into the conference today to refute this idea."

Was it these guys? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031015032001.htm

Competing theories about the shape and size of the universe are going head to head, with Montana State University-Bozeman physics professor Neil Cornish taking the lead on explaining his group's belief that the universe is endless.

Momentum had been building the week of Oct. 6 over whether the universe is relatively small and finite or whether it's large and endless, with Cornish emerging as a key spokesman for the large and infinite theory.
...
Driving the controversy is an article published Thursday, Oct. 9, in the prestigious journal Nature by independent mathematician Jeffrey Weeks. Weeks and his team posit that the universe is small and spherical, consisting of curved dodecahedrons that together create a shape akin to a soccer ball. If you travel far enough in this relatively small, contained universe, this theory says, you would circle back on yourself and end up at the starting point.

The idea seems appealing, Cornish has answered, but his group has found no evidence of a finite, closed universe shaped like a soccer ball. Or a doughnut or a bagel, as has also been suggested. Working with Cornish are David Spergel of Princeton and Glenn Starkman of Case Western.

"Weeks and friends are making a dramatic claim, perhaps one of the biggest science stories of the century," Cornish told the New York Times, "but extraordinary claims require extraordinary support."
...
"The universe is not a soccer ball. Sorry, Nature," Cornish said at his MSU seminar. "It's probably not a small world after all. Sorry, Disney."
...
WMAP went into orbit June 30, 2001 to detect background radiation, or "echoes" left over from the Big Bang. Within months the probe began sending back data that Cornish's team began analyzing right away. His team is the "official" science team for the NASA probe, although WMAP data have been accessible to other scientists and mathematicians over the Internet.

Ironically, those data are behind both the assertion of a closed shape and its refutation.
...
Cornish, Spergel and Starkman have posted their findings on the Internet (http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310233)

 

[TillEulenspiegel]

This reminds me of ummm something
Put a person in a room full of a big pile of shoes say, Imelda Marco's shoe room ask them what the see in the "larger " sense, they will catalog pictographs of various sorts.."the yellow shoes make a comma, the pink shoes are in the shape of a cross! All bow to the miracle of the shoe!

Ever look at a TV when the channel was not transmitting? Ever see a pattern?

Ever look at the stars? See a pattern?
The Big dipper is a arbitrary set of stars that share nothing in the way of common locality, yet we see the pattern of some sort of a pot with a handle.

Orions belt? Same thing

The human brain seems to strive for patterns as that seems to be the way in can find a commonality between the experienced and the novel. We seek to quantify the unknown by using templates from the known. Thus we try to superimpose "theory" on top of "actualization". Patterns do exist no doubt , but the need to see order where there is none gives us the drive to place order ( however outlandish ) against a compleatly arbitrary universe that doesn't care.

One could introduce a compleatly false explanation of cosmic behavior and make it plausible thru the use of rhetorical skill and grasp of mathematics. The fact is we can square the rhetorical with the actual means nothing unless there are interactions that are demonstraitable in regard to the supporting principles of the` accpted and proved lemme. From what I understand in reading both the Nature paper and critiques there are many restrictions on the application of the INTREPRITATION of the WMAP data. Hey it's just another avenue of exploration isn't it ?

 

[Bikewer]

Articpenguin: yeah, I believe it was. They were broadcasting Science Friday live from that conference. Should be archived at thier site.