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Mmmmm...Cosmic dougnut!
The New York Times ^ | 3/11/03 | DENNIS OVERBYE

Posted on 03/11/2003 9:11:30 AM PST by gomaaa

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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.

1 posted on 03/11/2003 9:11:31 AM PST by gomaaa
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To: gomaaa
And yes, I know I spelled "doughnut" wrong.
2 posted on 03/11/2003 9:13:22 AM PST by gomaaa
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To: gomaaa

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

3 posted on 03/11/2003 9:19:01 AM PST by martin_fierro (FRUCK FANCE!)
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To: gomaaa
And yes, I know I spelled "doughnut" wrong.

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

Thanks for the post - bump for reading later.

4 posted on 03/11/2003 9:20:14 AM PST by jigsaw
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To: gomaaa
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...

5 posted on 03/11/2003 9:21:28 AM PST by Oberon (This tagline intentionally left blank.)
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To: Physicist
"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

6 posted on 03/11/2003 9:23:10 AM PST by dirtboy (The Pentagon thinks they can create TIA when they can't even keep track of their own contractors)
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To: gomaaa
Damn, that blows my chocolate eclair theory out of the water.
7 posted on 03/11/2003 9:24:30 AM PST by Wolfie
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To: gomaaa
Fascinating article. I, for one, like the concept of a finite universe.
8 posted on 03/11/2003 9:26:44 AM PST by jjm2111 (Your mileage may vary.)
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To: gomaaa
Well Steven Hawking did say he was going to steal Homer's idea.
9 posted on 03/11/2003 9:28:09 AM PST by amused (Republicans for Sharpton!)
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To: Aric2000; balrog666; Condorman; *crevo_list; donh; general_re; Godel; Gumlegs; Ichneumon; jennyp; ..
"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.

10 posted on 03/11/2003 9:35:37 AM PST by Junior (Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes.)
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To: martin_fierro
That's a fair representation.
11 posted on 03/11/2003 9:44:29 AM PST by Archangelsk (No battle plan survives first contact.)
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To: gomaaa
All this was already theorized by this infamous cosmologist:


12 posted on 03/11/2003 10:03:43 AM PST by Paradox
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To: gomaaa
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
13 posted on 03/11/2003 10:11:31 AM PST by MikeD
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To: gomaaa
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.

14 posted on 03/11/2003 10:15:16 AM PST by Physicist
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To: gomaaa
Does this mean God is a giant cop?
15 posted on 03/11/2003 10:18:46 AM PST by RobertYates
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To: Wolfie
chocolate eclair theory

Holding out for the cored apple hypothesis.

16 posted on 03/11/2003 10:18:48 AM PST by RightWhale (Theorems link concepts: Proofs establish links)
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To: Physicist
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
17 posted on 03/11/2003 10:25:04 AM PST by MikeD (In the year of '39 came a ship in from the blue...)
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To: Physicist
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
18 posted on 03/11/2003 10:37:55 AM PST by MikeD (In the year of '39 came a ship in from the blue...)
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To: Junior
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.

19 posted on 03/11/2003 10:52:54 AM PST by AndrewC
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To: MikeD
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.

20 posted on 03/11/2003 11:02:44 AM PST by Physicist
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