Appreciation shared if for no other reason but to challenge a review of the status quo. There are no absolutes (except change) and givens have always been postulates (not sure why they stopped being regarded as such). Accepting anything as unassailable is the hallmark of a lazy mind and a pariah of bad things to come.
This 'multiplicity-effect-hypothesis' could also be an attempt to frame the vastness of our fishbowl in more of a bite size piece however.... 8^) Thanks Jones... most though provoking. Your never cease to amaze me. -john -----Original Message----- From: Jones Beene [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2006 10:21 AM To: vortex Subject: [Vo]: 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
