Posted on 11/04/2019 3:19:12 PM PST by NoLibZone
Travel far enough in the universe and you could end up back where you began. Measurements from the Planck space observatory have shown that the universe might be shaped like a sphere rather than a flat sheet, which would change nearly everything we think we know about the cosmos.
The Planck observatory, which operated from 2009 to 2013, mapped the cosmic microwave background, a sea of light left over from the big bang.
One set of observations showed that there was more gravitational lensing – stretching of the light due to the shape of space-time, which can be distorted by heavy matter – than expected. Alessandro Melchiorri at the Sapienza University of Rome and his colleagues calculated that this could be because the shape of the universe is different from what we thought.
All other cosmological data suggests the universe is flat, meaning it has no curvature, similar to a sheet of paper. These Planck measurements indicate that it could be “closed”, or spherical, which would mean that if you travelled far enough in one direction, you would end up back where you started. That is because the extra lensing implies the presence of extra dark matter, which would pull the universe into a finite sphere instead of a flat sheet.
According to these observations, the universe is 41 times more likely to be closed than flat. “This is the most precise cosmological data and it is giving us a different picture,” says Melchiorri.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
LOL - that’s why his name is “Cosmo” Kramer.
The cosmos revolves around him, and all is well.
But the Flat Earth society successfully lives in a 2 dimensional world, as do many political ideologues.
I’ve been to Flatland. It’s boring.
Carl Sagan Cosmos. Once favorite of mine and I even reviewed Broca’s Brain for a national magazine.
The smug atheism was ahead of its time for today’s style. Sorry to disagree but there was at least an implied knock on religion when he said something like (condescendingly) it was understandable that with the limited scientific knowledge of their times that people would turn to superstitious beliefs in large forces working behind nature and affecting their lives for mysterious purposes from beyond. Then when showing galaxies and so on the music goes into the motifs used for King of Kings or the Ten Commandments-—implying the substitute for God is science. Smug atheism.
At the gathering of people sitting in rows in a large room to say nice things at a lectern after he died, one said “Our being here and doing this today does not mean Carl had a late life conversion to religion and that we are honoring that. He refused to believe right to the end and this is just a gathering, not with a spiritual meaning to it.” (My paraphrase).
It’s too bad the conservative religious commentary writer Dennis Prager couldn’t have debated Sagan. He reportedly did a good job against some God deniers recently.
Stephen Hawking had his arrogant dismissal of God as unnecessary in Hawking’s own superior working out of all knowledge. Aggravating.
Who cares about the shape (clearly spherical)? What matters is why so much of it is black! Literally everything is controlled by black authority.
Fair enough. I of course didn’t know either in their personal lives. Were they fools in them, as the Bible says? Maybe. Hawking certainly sounded like one near the end, with his warnings of aliens and global warming. “The wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight”, and “the fool sees only foolishness in God’s wisdom”.
good quotes.
Non Bible one from William Shakespeare (which I heard on a Christian minister's brief radio ad after he referred to millions of abortion murders. He said the tiny infant just born and then the mother and doctor deciding for the baby to be quickly killed by the current savage methods might glimpse our world briefly and cry...)
'When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.'---King Lear
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