[TheWasteLand]

team member Jeff Weeks, a freelance mathematician based in New York

From the "jobs you never knew existed" file...

[Shadow44]

Ok, my head exploded.

[aft_lizard]

Wow, who would have guessed that the ancient Greeks would have gotten the shape of the universe correct so long ago. Obviously they were talking something slightly different, aether, but the fact that Plato and Aristotle postulated the shape of it to be the dodecahedron is very interesting indeed. Did the scientist who did this study belong to the Pythagorean cult?

[EggsAckley]

Wow! I live in a dodecahedron. 12-sided round round house. I can tell you that it is a real challenge doing interior decorating. And the only interior walls are the bedroom and bathroom. The rest is open.....kind of like a circus tent.

Everyone calls it an octagon. They’ve never heard of dodecahedron.

[rfp1234]

So THAT’S why soccer is so popular...

[steveo]

[The_Reader_David]

The article posted was clearly written by someone who didn't understand the findings. The claim of Weeks et al is not that the space forms a finite dodecahedron (with a boundary consisting of 12 pentagons), but that it forms a copy of the Poincare dodecahedral space (also known as the Poincare homology sphere): the result of starting with a dodecahedron oriented so 'north' goes through the center of one face, and gluing each face in the northern half to the face in southern half that becomes opposite to it when the northern half is given a 1/5 twist.

The result of is finite volume, but has no boundary. (Just like the surface of a sphere has no bounding edge, but is of finite area, but up one dimension.)

Here's a link to an article in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society with more details.

[6SJ7]

...they show that the predictions of a model in which space consists of 12 curved pentagons joined together in a sphere agrees with the WMAP observations. Their ‘small’, closed universe should be about 30 billion light years across.

Hmm. If the universe has a boundary, doesn't that imply a frame of reference external to the universe? That would seem to violate the concept of universe.

[LS]

And all this time I thought the universe was shaped like Raquel Welch. You learn something every day.

[Salamander]

Vindication *ping*

[Beowulf9]

So, does this dodecahedral shape repeat itself on infinitum?

[dangerdoc]

When you travel to the end of the Universe, can you ride again if nobody is waiting in line?

[shibumi]

Did someone say “Platonic Solids?

[PureSolace]

d12s baby!

[r9etb]

For those wondering, the "phi" in the headline and not mentioned in the body of the post is the golden ratio:

[JoeFromSidney]

The standard model of cosmology predicts that the universe is infinite and flat.

I don't think this is correct. Ever since Einstein, the universe has been thought to be curved, finite, but unbounded.

It has long been known that the universe was not infinite. See the Wikipedia entry on "Olbers Paradox."

I think this error is due to the writer of this article, not to the scientists being reported on.

[DouglasKC]

It's interesting that 12 has some interesting usages in the bible.

Rev 21:12 And had a wall great and high, and had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and names written thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel:

Rev 21:21 And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.

Twelve tribes, twelve apostles.

[mjp]

The dodecahedron is a symbol of manifested Nature, or Prakriti. This is because in its relationships to the other regular polyhedra, it demonstrates the most concise manner in which the truths about the manifested universe can be presented. If we press the question: why is this so? We can only say “It is the nature of things.” There is no other reply.

The Mathematics of the Cosmic Mind,

By L. Gordon Plummer, 1970

[oiler]

I will have no opinion about this until I hear from Matt Damon.

[Centurion2000]

A dodecahedron?

Somewhere there's a REALLY REALLY REALLY big Dungeon Master rolling our universe around to determine damage from a long spear against a frost giant.