Hypatia...Woo or Wow?

[Wangler]

Hey, anyone have any opinions on the "Hypatia" theory?

See website here: http://quasars.org/hypatia/hypatia.htm

And techical paper here: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0210052

Apparently, Hypatia is the 5-d sphere that our universe is a part of.

Supposedly, this 5-d sphere interpretation answers a lot of the current cosmological riddles, for example it explains the dimming of Ia supernovae no dark energy or accelerating expansion needed!

If a thread has been started before now, I apologize, I couldn't find it!

It seems the website author makes some big leaps from the technical paper subject matter.

 

[Reality Check]

Hey, anyone have any opinions on the "Hypatia" theory?

See website here: http://quasars.org/hypatia/hypatia.htm

And techical paper here: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0210052

Apparently, Hypatia is the 5-d sphere that our universe is a part of.

Supposedly, this 5-d sphere interpretation answers a lot of the current cosmological riddles, for example it explains the dimming of Ia supernovae no dark energy or accelerating expansion needed!

If a thread has been started before now, I apologize, I couldn't find it!

It seems the website author makes some big leaps from the technical paper subject matter.

A big indication of woo is the spooky music on the main page and the absence of a link there to the Hypatia page.

The author (Eric Flesch) of the linked page starts with

Hypatia is the name given to the 5-D spherical body around which the brane of our universe is wrapped.

where he is the only person that I can find using that term.
The paper's first paragraph is:

There is currently considerable interest in the possibility that our universe could be a submanifold embedded in a higher-dimensional spacetime. This brane-world paradigm is motivated by the D-brane solution found in ten-dimensional superstring theory. Technically, in type IIB superstrings, an AdS5 × S5 geometry is formed near the stacked D3-branes [1, 2, 3, 4]. In simple terms this
means that a model can be proposed [5] whereby our universe is represented as a thin three-brane embedded in an infinite five-dimensional bulk anti-de Sitter space (AdS5). In such Randall-Sundrum (RSII) models, physical particles are trapped on a three-dimensional brane via curvature in the bulk dimension. Gravitons can reside as fluctuations in the background gravitational field living in both the brane and bulk dimension. This representation of large extra dimensions is an alternative to the standard Kaluza-Klein (KK) compactification.

An anti-de Sitter space does not look like a 5-D spherical body to me.

The paper is about disappearing dark matter and has nothing to do with the conclusions on the web page.

I can find 3 papers by co-authored by Eric Flesch in arXiv and in each his address is a PO Box number here in New Zealand (no institute affiliation) so there is no indication of his qualification or experience.

 

[Reality Check]

Found a reference to Eric Flesch on this page:

Impatient with waiting for some of the survey groups to do so, New Zealand amateur astronomer Eric Flesch put together an extensive catalog of over 100,000 possible QSOs based on associations among catalogued X-ray and radio sources, which matched starlike objects from the US Naval Observatory scans of the Palomar Sky Survey. Listed on his FTP site as Free-Lunch, this has proven statistically useful in its own right.

 

[Overman]

Impressive on the cataloging!

Stuff like this goes more under theory than woo. Still though, its nothing that can be tested by any means...

 

[Wangler]

That catalogue bit is interesting; I couldn't find anything on the linked ftp site, though.

Makes sense, as the website is under the "quasar.org" domain.

Does sound like a personal delusion/pet theory, though.

I notice that one paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9907219) was coauthored with Halton Arp.

See this thread for some recent discussions about Arp's angle on things cosmological:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=107779