It all seems so relative to me
Posted on 08/30/2007 6:47:29 PM PDT by jbp1
I have studied a sample of 200,000 elliptical galaxies with redshifts <0.20 from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to investigate whether they tend to have their ellipticities aligned along a particular axis. The data show a 13 standard deviation signal for such an alignment. The axis is close to the spiral spin axis found previously and to that of the quadrupole and octopole moments in the WMAP microwave sky survey
(Excerpt) Read more at science.slashdot.org ...
Whew, I had to read that several times.
But, as I understand it (which is tenuously, at best :-), that wouldn't work, because the assumption that space is fixed and matter is moving around in it is now guessed to be wrong. The latest theory I know of is that space itself is expanding, which means that the lines you used to figure out where/when you want to go would be curved.
Also, there's no guarantee that "until where you want to be is where you are" will ever be true - maybe the point I want was never on the time line with where I am.
Then again, if you could go back to the big bang, when everything was close together, then it's a short distance from here to the other side of the galaxy. But living conditions were not quite right.
Anyway, it's time to say good night, Gracie.
;->
Mr. Maxwell, paging Mr. Maxwell.
Now if you has a subcritical mass of plutonium in your time machine, and its mass increased as you approached the speed of light, would it at sometime become supercritical and destroy the time machine?
I can die a happy man now.
SEE ROCK CITY
Well what do we take from this startling revelation?
Could it be that one of the lessons of the universe is that diversity isn’t always optimal after all?
As it applies to eliptical orbits, there seems to be a lot of conformity...
Maybe we should ask the expert.
That is a good one!
Looking at the pdf of the paper linked at slashdot, it seems the author is making a fairly weak claim. He found a direction that maximized the correlation of the elliptical axes with that line of sight, and reports the finding that the correlation is great enough to be extremely unlikely to be due to chance. However, the degree of correlation is small. The average ellipticity is 0.225 and he “bins” the data by the sine of the angle with the assumed preferred axis and finds that the best fit is a line with average ellipticity of 0.220 looking along the axis, and 0.229 looking perpendicular to it.
If the galaxies all had ellipticities of 0.225, and were all aligned with the axis, the average ellipticity would be 0 looking along the axis.
Note also that his worst fit finds 0.003 of the ellipticity accounted for by correlation, as opposed to 0.009 in the best fit.
With a lot of data, the chi-squared method very commonly gives a low “probability of rejecting the null hypothesis” along with a weak correlation, and textbooks warn of this. Note that the method merely asserts that there is SOME source of correlation other than chance, and this could easily be in the data collection process itself.
Are there any scientists remaining at FR, other than Coyoteman?
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Remember, wherever you go thats where you will be!
From the blog...
>>>Another thing to realize is that the Big Bang doesn’t mean that an explosion happened in a single point in empty space, and then everything expanded outward. It’s that space itself was compressed down into a single point, and then expanded.<<<
A single point of what? And how big was this single point? And where the hell did this single point come from? Inquiring minds want to know...
Not many. Most have given up the flute playing.
“Out of 200,000 galaxies I looked at five and the difference in alignment is enough to take a plane from New York to Rome instead of New York to London. The similarities are profound.”
I was just about to say that very thing. Really...
I don’t know anything about this topic but I do wonder about magnetism. I wonder if we are clueless about its significance.
Maybe this is because the astronauts are all drunk
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