Creation Corner
Copernican universe falsified
The Copernican universe is perfectly symmetrical, isotropic, homogeneous, and acentric. It is also fiction, as new data show.
What is the Copernican universe?
The Copernican universe is a universe that looks exactly the same no matter where you might stand within it. You can stand in our galaxy (named the Milky Way, a redundant name), or the great galaxy in Andromeda, or any other large object. You should see every other object in the universe exactly as far away from you as you would see them from any other place. That is the Copernican assumption, or the Copernican “principle.”
The Copernican universe takes its name from Nicholas Copernicus. He first proposed that the sun, and not the earth, was the local center of gravity for the earth and all the planets. Before him, people believed, as did Aristotle and Claudius Ptolemy, that everything revolved around the earth. Copernicus said that all other objects, including earth, revolved around the sun.
In the last century, astronomers put Copernicus’ name on a new idea. They held that not only was the earth not the center of the universe, but neither earth nor sun nor even our home galaxy had any special place in the universe.
What makes the Copernican universe look as it does?
A universe that obeys the Copernican “principle” has no center. Furthermore, every region in the universe looks the same, and is just as dense, as any other part. A universe like this is the only perfectly symmetrical object known to man.
Any other geometric object might be symmetrical around a point (or center), a line (or axis), or a plane. The Copernican universe has no preference for any of these concepts. For that reason, any perspective is the same as any other perspective, no matter where you stand.
This is the central assumption of the Big Bang. Edwin Hubble made that assumption. Hubble insisted that the earth must not have a special place in the universe. (And he had no reason to suppose that, other than that he did not want the earth to have a special place.) Every conventional cosmologist has copied him.
But now, an astrophysicist has seen something that proves Hubble, and all his imitators, wrong.
How is the universe non-Copernican?
A typical spiral galaxy. The Copernican universe should have equal numbers of clockwise and counterclockwise spirals. The real universe does not. Photo: NASA/ESA
Quite simply, the universe began with a positive spin. Michael J. Longo, at the University of Michigan, reviewed the catalog entries of about 15,000 spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The SDSS takes the name of the primary telescope for the survey, the Sloan Telescope in New Mexico. Longo and his team found more counterclockwise spirals than clockwise spirals, by 7 percent. The chances of this happening for no reason are 0.00079, or 1 in 1266. Longo also said, in his abstract, that two other scientists had found something similar in the southern sky.
Mongo sees only one way to explain this: The universe began with a spin, and the large objects in it have inherited that spin. Those objects would at least prefer to spin as the universe spun when it began.
Mongo further believes that the universe still has that spin. He also calculated that the universe has an axis of spin. He further figured out that this axis likes along the spin axis of our galaxy.
What does this mean?
For one thing, it means that the Copernican universe is a fiction. The Copernican universe should not have an axis. The real universe does. And furthermore, the axis of the universe is the same as the axis of the galaxy in which we live.
A universe that is not only expanding but spinning will be very difficult to explain. A spinning object has a line to spin around. A boundless object can still spin around a line and have no center. But a bounded and spinning object must have a center.
The object at the center would spin with the universe, and have an axis along the axis of the universe. Our own Milky Way qualifies. Every cosmology that places our galaxy at the center of the universe now has more support.
Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.
-
Civilization4 days agoFederal government taking shape for next year
-
Civilization2 days agoKennedy to become Health Secretary
-
Constitution3 days agoMatt Gaetz getting the Trump treatment
-
Constitution4 days agoLinda Goudsmit on Dissent Television: ‘Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is’
-
Executive2 days agoIt’s Trump’s Transition and He Calls the Shots
-
Civilization3 days agoDisruptive force at the Pentagon
-
Executive4 days agoTrumping the Electric Vehicle Mandate
-
Civilization4 days agoIs There Such a Thing as the Jewish Vote?
Terry’s ignorant statement.
“The Copernican universe is perfectly symmetrical, isotropic, homogeneous, and acentric. It is also fiction, as new data show.”
False, Terry goes on to lie about what a copernican universe is, but here is what it REALLY is:
Copernicus showed that the planets all orbited a central sun – this is demonstrably the case, it’s referred to as the heliocentric system.
We KNOW this is the case. we can measure it, we HAVE measured it. we SEE this to be the case, it is no longer a point of contention as it was in the late 1400’s, early 1500’s.
What terry is lying about is the assumptions by Copernicus – he NEVER assumed it was “perfectly symmetrical” OR isotropic OR homogenous. In fact, NOT being so was pivotal to his conclusions, since he was able to show that distances to stars could be measured using the parallax effect.
Moreover, The things that terry DOES lie about – the then has the gall to say “also fiction, as new data show”….
True, but these “new data” have been around since BEFORE the time of edwin hubble. Terry, in case you don’t know, edwin hubble was able to PROVE that the universe was neither isotropic with his distance measurements to receding galaxies.
What Terry is confused about are the fundamental COSMOLOGICAL assumptions – the cosmological principal. In this case, they DO assume the universe is homogenous, isotropic and symmetrical, but these are KNOWN to be false on the small scales – small being anything less than a few tens of millions of parsecs or so (a parsec is about 3 lightyears, it’s a unit in more common use in scientific literature). What Longo was suggesting is that this cosmological principal is not valid – of course, parity in the universe has nothing at all to do with a god.
————————
Terry’s ignorance:
“You can stand in our galaxy (named the Milky Way, a redundant name)”.
Actually it’s not – at least, not in the way Terry thinks. Scientific literature will use “Milky way” often. If they do not, they use “The Galaxy”, as opposed to the generic noun “galaxy”. If the word is NOT capitalised, as in Terry’s usage, then the implied assumption is that the author is referring to the GENERAL noun “A galaxy”. Since terry did not capitalise, he MUST use “milky way”, to be specific. Ergo – not redundant. Fail again terry.
————————
Terry’s ignorance:
“The Copernican universe is a universe that looks exactly the same no matter where you might stand within it.”
False, and invalid, since for the last ~100 years, we’ve known that this is not the case.
————————
Terry’s ignorance:
“For one thing, it means that the Copernican universe is a fiction. The Copernican universe should not have an axis”.
And here we see one of the MOST dangerous ramifications of ignorant fools attempting to parse intelligent papers, without properly thinking about it. Cosmology is not the same as messing around with a few levers and pulleys in your backyard. Cosmology deals with SPACE and TIME – terry is one of these twits who love to insist that astronomers say things like “the universe is expanding from a central point” THEY DO NOT. THE UNIVERSE IS NOT EXPANDING FROM A CENTRAL POINT.
When astronomers say this, they are referring to the fact that ALL of space and time is expanding. There is no “centre of expansion”. The reason idiots like terry insist things like this, is because they are totally incapable of understanding the facts at hand.
The same way, terry thinks that the universe is expanding around a fixed point. FAIL TERRY!
The findings by LONGO (get your spelling right, hurlbut), show that there is excess spin in the high-redshift universe, ALL this means is that there is an equipartiion of spin energy – a conservation of angular momentum. THERE IS NO SPIN AROUND A CENTRAL POINT!
This is true for the SAME reason that there is no expansion from a central point. The big bang was nothing more than an incredibly rapid expansion of space – and the actual START of time. If the space had a residual spin, then all that means is the spin energy has to be redistributed throughout the expanding space. The larger the space, the smaller the resicual spin-per unit volume – this is why it’s easy to look into the early universe, when the volume was smaller.
From the paper that terry never bothered to read, let alone understand.
“…This shows that the LL excess is truly a long-range phenomenon..”
Where terry has predictably stumbled is in his total lack of understanding of the words used by the scientists.
“Dipole” – go look it up. it means a physical separation of two possible states. When you project a 3-d distribution of this onto a sphere, you MUST get a line (not a point, as terry seems to think) – a dipole is also observed in the COBE data – guess what terry – our universe is MOVING through space……
Without reading into the article, or learning about cosmology, Terry has assumed that (from the abstract) “The axis of the dipole asymmetry lies at approx. (l,b)=(52°,68.5°), roughly along that of our Galaxy and close to alignments observed in the WMAP cosmic microwave background distributions.” If terry were to actually LOOK at the paper, he’d see the dipole line is oblique, and runs nowhere near the PLANE OF THE GALAXY. i.e. our galaxy is tilted at something like ~45 degrees to the dipole. FAIL terry.
DO YOU GET IT TERRY? STOP BEING SO DAMN IGNORANT!
And you, stop lying.
I feel so much happier now I udnertsand all this. Thanks!
I’ve always found it interesting, and somewhat ironic, that creationists look for any excuse they can to place humanity in the center of the universe. The irony is, that despite their name, HUMANISTS recognize that in the grand scheme of reality, humans are no more than specs upon a spec in a completely unassuming, unimportant place in the universe. Creationists, despite their name, have no true appreciation for the creation, but seek only to raise themselves above all else in nature.
That’s fine, as far as it goes. But, seeing that the evidence leans ever further toward creation as explaining where we, and the world, came from, you have to ask yourself: Is Somebody watching after all?
The only way the evidence does that is if you keep moving the blinkers further and further over your eyes. The *truth* is that more and more evidence is being discovered that shows exactly how nonsensical creationism is. Blinkered, pig-ignorance is one area in which right wingers excel, however.
You have it backwards. Not one person here has ever come to grips with the fundamental issue of this article: namely that the universe turns out to have a spin. A spin that is not only prograde with respect to our galaxy, but also along the same axis. That violates every assumption about isotropy that anyone has ever put forward. The paper author says as much.
Cosmologists generally assume that the universe is finite, expanding, but unbounded. This finding does not in any way challenge that. It strongly suggests that the universe may not be isotropic, but does not imply that it has a centre.
How can a finite universe, once we show it to be spinning on an axis, not have a center? That’s the problem: the universe is spinning. And we now know the axis. And that axis is the same as the axis of our galaxy.
There’s one huge caveat with this theory. Actually, it’s really only a problem for you, Terry, as well as other creationists. You see, if it could be proven that the universe is indeed rotating, it must be rotating with respect to something else.
According to Longo, the universe is rotating with respect to a much larger unobservable space. This means that the entire universe is much, much larger than our observed “universe” is. It could be the first evidence that we are just one universe in a much larger space that may contain many universes.
This would be a problem theologically, as mainstream religion considers humanity to be the reason for all of creation, and to be at the center of all of creation. It is conceivable, although unlikely, that the Earth resides in the exact geometric center of the universe. But even if this is true, it need not lie at the center of all of reality, due to the fact that we reside in just one of many universes. It would also mean that, because it is impossible in theory to detect anything outside of our observable space, we could never be able to empirically test if all of creation had a center or not.
This indeed spells trouble for creationists who want to use this evidence of rotation to further their claims. I however consider the report to be interesting, but it in now way conclusively shows that the universe is rotating, much less has a center near our galaxy.
Gosh, I wish I would have had that ionfrmation earlier!