Mmmmm...Cosmic dougnut!

The New York Times ^ | 3/11/03 | DENNIS OVERBYE

[gomaaa]

Fascinating stuff! I love the comment about halfway through that "God's on a budget."

I had a friend who took a class on topology once. Lots of ideas that sound completely insane unless you really know what's going on.

I wonder if a hundred years from now, people will look back on us and say what fools we were for not realizing that the universe is isn't flat just as we look back on pre-Columbus ideas about the earth and scoff.

I know it's not really the same thing at all, but it's a fun idea.

[gomaaa]

And yes, I know I spelled "doughnut" wrong.

[martin_fierro]

It's a beautiful thing. <|:)~

[jigsaw]

And yes, I know I spelled "doughnut" wrong.

Hey, it's spelled dougnut in my universe.   ;-)

Thanks for the post - bump for reading later.

[Oberon]

And yes, I know I spelled "doughnut" wrong.

That's a relief. I was really wondering who "Doug" was, and hoping he wasn't in pain...

[dirtboy]

"There's a hint in the data that if you traveled far and fast in the direction of the constellation Virgo, you'd return to Earth from the opposite direction," said Dr. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ping

[Wolfie]

Damn, that blows my chocolate eclair theory out of the water.

[jjm2111]

Fascinating article. I, for one, like the concept of a finite universe.

[amused]

Well Steven Hawking did say he was going to steal Homer's idea.

[Junior]

"Cosmologists have built a house of cards and it stands," said Dr. James Peebles, a cosmologist at Princeton.

Figure we'll see this quote rendered as "Cosmologists have built a house of cards" in some future creationist posting.

[Archangelsk]

That's a fair representation.

[Paradox]

All this was already theorized by this infamous cosmologist:

[MikeD]

First, I find it interesting that he mentions travelling toward the constellation Virgo. The nearest cluster of galaxies is in that direction -- perhaps that is a source of contamination.

Second, anyone and everyone can post to astro-ph. There is no peer review on that site. There is no mention that this article is slated for publication in a peer reviewed journal such as MNRAS or the Astrophysical Journal.

Just my bit. I am intrigued by the possibility of an assymetric universe, but I want to see more than an astro-ph paper and a follow-up in the New York Times.

MD

[Physicist]

You can find more information here, and even download the paper if you dare.

Max Tegmark is a physics geek's physics geek, and a truly nice guy.

[RobertYates]

Does this mean God is a giant cop?

[RightWhale]

chocolate eclair theory

Holding out for the cored apple hypothesis.

[MikeD]

OK, I take back one of my earlier criticisms. The paper has been submitted to Phys. Rev. D. Thanks for the link -- I'll check it out in more detail.

MD

[MikeD]

OK, open mouth insert whole leg. The paper looks cool. The crazy universe thing is mentioned in one sentence near the back -- the bulk of the paper is about removing contamination sources from the raw data. Looks like the NYT may have jumped the gun.

Either that or I'm misreading things.

Either way, my gut says there's some other source of contamination that was missed.

MD

[AndrewC]

Figure we'll see this quote rendered as "Cosmologists have built a house of cards" in some future creationist posting.

A much more likely event will be some Darwininian claiming that the donut universe was a prediction of Darwin.

[Physicist]

Either way, my gut says there's some other source of contamination that was missed.

My gut says "statistical fluctuation".

Look at the maps in Figure 1. The largest cold spot happens to lie just to the right of center, and the largest hot spot happens to lie just to the right of that. The hot spot roughly lines up with one of the two hot spots in the quadrupole plot (Figure 14a) and the cold spot roughly lines up with one of the two cold spots in the quadrupole plot.

Furthermore, that hot spot and cold spot also roughly line up with hot and cold spots in the octopole plot. Since the alignment of the quadrupole and octopole moments is dominated by those two features in the CMB map, perhaps it's not surprising that they roughly line up.

What are the odds of a random fluctuation of that size, in the absence of any preferred direction in space? I haven't the foggiest idea. I suspect it's not negligible, but I could be wrong.

I'll go ask Max.