A "Hall of Mirrors" Universe ?
From the "believe it or not" department... and adding new meaning to
the "World Cup" of soccer (as we Yanks like to call that hands-free,
12-sided-ball game).
There is nothing scientific nor which has been proved to date, in all of
cosmology and physics, to show that the Universe is extremely (or
infinitely) large, nor even that it is a set old-age (13-15 billion
years) nor even that it is expanding at all ! Nothing, zero, nada, nil!
All we have for proof, as 2006 ends, is based on logical (human logic)
inference (if not sound-and-fury from self-appointed experts)
All of the above physical properties of the universe, including
so-called "red-shift" are conjectures based on the premise (very
understandable human logic) that what we see when we look into the vast
reaches of space with a telescope (or from Hubble images) is the single
*object itself.*
Don't "duh" that part. It does seem logical at first to us humanoids, to
assume this as a 'given', but in fact, it probably is NOT true... and
most of what we see in telescopes is probably not the single object itself !
For instance, when we see a galaxy far removed and supposedly very
old... instead of that being all there is to the story, what we see in
that one instance may be but a *reflection* (one of many) of far fewer
objects, each of which reflection is repeated many times throughout
space, all showing differing red-shits and perspective of the same
object, and varying according to the relative placement of the "virtual"
mirror - which is gravitational curvature (and a 12-sided gravitational
curvature "to boot").
Specifically, the very same object can be repeatedly seen, out in space,
twelve times or much more but it is still a single entity.
At least that is an emerging viewpoint (going back decades). This
"alien" understanding (supra-human perspective) is gathering support -
and more recently and has been bolstered by new analysis of CMB:
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/18/9/3
IOW when we look out and see a galaxy whose red-shift indicates that it
is 10 billion light years removed - and in only one part of space ...
well, that could be both true and false.
In fact the same object may appear in twelve or twelve thousand
different disguises, and one or more of those views may be blue-shifted !
This should not be misread to give solace to the anti-science spiel of
so-called biblical creationism, as any object seen will still end up
being very old (billions of years), not young (in the few thousand year
range which right-wing zealots have try to portray as biblical, when
instead such ancient text is merely allegorical).
In fact the universe in this understanding need NOT be expanding at all
- since our large "local group" of galaxies which is equivalent to
thousands of Milky-Ways, is blue-shifted to us, and this local group may
well be "all there is" except for secondary reflections - at least in
this alien understanding of reality...
...and what is more - the idea of a single "big-bang" will be totally
nullified. The universe will be smaller, older, static or nearly static
(pulsating) and not infinite in size ! and most surprising - without an
exact starting point like a single big bang.
The Poincaré dodecahedral space mentioned in the article can be
described as the interior of a 'sphere' made from 12 slightly curved
pentagons. "However, there is one big difference between this shape and
a football [soccer ball] because when one goes out from a pentagonal
face, one immediately comes back inside the ball from the opposite face
after a 36 degree rotation."
"Such a multiply connected space can therefore generate multiple images
of the same object, such as a planet or a photon. Other such
well-proportioned, spherical spaces that fit the WMAP data are the
tetrahedron and the octahedron."
I find this emerging viewpoint of reality, as alien as it first may
seem, to be very satisfying intellectually, after one becomes accustomed
to the implications. Do others share that appreciation - or is the level
of proof for this just too tenuous?
Jones
