Author Topic: Axis of Evil (Read 1104 times)

klasG4e · « **on:** January 18, 2017, 09:32:06 AM »

Just received the following in an email promoting the movie, The Principle:

As we reported last month, careful examination of the data first presented to the filmgoing public two years ago by "The Principle" has now resulted in the frank admission, in the literature itself, that either:

1. The Copernican cosmological Principle is wrong, and hence all of standard cosmology will have to be re-conceptualized, or

2. Every cosmological observation over the last twenty years at least is contaminated by an unknown systematic error.

See the entire, comprehensive article here:

We told you that the Axis of Evil, if confirmed, would represent a falsification of the Copernican cosmological Principle, and would require the abandonment of the present standard cosmology which structures and defines our most basic ideas of who and what we are in the universe.

klasG4e · « **Reply #1 on:** February 20, 2017, 06:16:26 AM »

http://www.theprinciplemovie.com/yet-another-shocker-galaxy-types-arranged-around-earth/

klasG4e · « **Reply #2 on:** February 21, 2017, 10:59:33 AM »

I would venture to say that the interest this subject holds for most people is inversely proportional to the ultimate significance it has for mankind's world view. When most men commonly believed in a matter of fact way that the Earth was immovable and placed at the center of the universe, there was much greater respect for the entire inerrancy of Sacred Scripture, and the Catholic Church as the guardian of same. There was also a much greater belief in absolute truths and much less belief in moral relativism. If man was at the center of the universe then there was a somebody with a capital S who put him there!

Neil Obstat · « **Reply #3 on:** April 30, 2018, 06:23:48 PM »

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I ran across the following on Wikipedia, which I thought could help for readers to get a better grasp of what's been going on in the back halls of academia regarding cosmological discussions. It was under the heading "Physical Cosmology" and subtitle "Areas of Study."
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I thought it might be useful to copy it here because over time, as you know, articles on Wikipedia change, since anyone can edit them.
On CathInfo, what is written here doesn't get changed -- at least, not at the present time.
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If you haven't seen "The Principle Movie" yet, you ought to consider reading this stuff and perhaps more on the linked Wiki pages before you watch the movie, or, if you've already seen it and got lost in the middle somewhere, it would help you to read this stuff before you try to watch the movie again.
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Dark energy[edit]
Main article: Dark energy
If the universe is flat, there must be an additional component making up 73% (in addition to the 23% dark matter and 4% baryons) of the energy density of the universe. This is called dark energy. In order not to interfere with Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background, it must not cluster in haloes like baryons and dark matter. There is strong observational evidence for dark energy, as the total energy density of the universe is known through constraints on the flatness of the universe, but the amount of clustering matter is tightly measured, and is much less than this. The case for dark energy was strengthened in 1999, when measurements demonstrated that the expansion of the universe has begun to gradually accelerate.^[59]

Apart from its density and its clustering properties, nothing is known about dark energy. Quantum field theory predicts a cosmological constant (CC) much like dark energy, but 120 orders of magnitude larger than that observed.^[60] Steven Weinberg and a number of string theorists (see string landscape) have invoked the 'weak anthropic principle': i.e. the reason that physicists observe a universe with such a small cosmological constant is that no physicists (or any life) could exist in a universe with a larger cosmological constant.

[See below for more entries on weak anthropic principle and larger cosmological constant]

Many cosmologists find this an unsatisfying explanation: perhaps because while the weak anthropic principle is self-evident (given that living observers exist, there must be at least one universe with a cosmological constant which allows for life to exist) it does not attempt to explain the context of that universe.^[61] For example, the weak anthropic principle alone does not distinguish between:

Only one universe will ever exist and there is some underlying principle that constrains the CC to the value we observe.
Only one universe will ever exist and although there is no underlying principle fixing the CC, we got lucky.
Lots of universes exist (simultaneously or serially) with a range of CC values, and of course ours is one of the life-supporting ones.

Other possible explanations for dark energy include quintessence^[62] or a modification of gravity on the largest scales.^[63] The effect on cosmology of the dark energy that these models describe is given by the dark energy's equation of state, which varies depending upon the theory. The nature of dark energy is one of the most challenging problems in cosmology.

A better understanding of dark energy is likely to solve the problem of the ultimate fate of the universe. In the current cosmological epoch, the accelerated expansion due to dark energy is preventing structures larger than superclusters from forming. It is not known whether the acceleration will continue indefinitely, perhaps even increasing until a big rip, or whether it will eventually reverse, lead to a big freeze, or follow some other scenario.^[64]
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Footnotes for this excerpt are as follows:

59. Perlmutter, Saul; Turner, Michael S.; White, Martin (July 26, 1999). "Constraining Dark Energy with Type Ia Supernovae and Large-Scale Structure". Physical Review Letters. 83 (4): 670–673. arXiv:astro-ph/9901052 . Bibcode:1999PhRvL..83..670P. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.83.670.
60. Jump up^ Adler, Ronald J.; Casey, Brendan; Jacob, Ovid C. (July 1995). "Vacuum catastrophe: An elementary exposition of the cosmological constant problem". American Journal of Physics. 63 (7): 620–626. Bibcode:1995AmJPh..63..620A. doi:10.1119/1.17850.
61. Jump up^ Siegfried, Tom (August 11, 2006). "A 'Landscape' Too Far?". Science. 313 ( 57888 ): 750–753. doi:10.1126/science.313.5788.750. Retrieved 2018-04-11.
62. Jump up^ Sahni, Varun (July 2002). "The cosmological constant problem and quintessence". Classical and Quantum Gravity. 19 (13): 3435–3448. arXiv:astro-ph/0202076 . Bibcode:2002CQGra..19.3435S. doi:10.1088/0264-9381/19/13/304.
63. Jump up^ Nojiri, S.; Odintsov, S. D. (February 2007). "Introduction to Modified Gravity and Gravitational Alternative for Dark Energy". International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics. 04 (01). arXiv:hep-th/0601213 . doi:10.1142/S0219887807001928.
64. Jump up^ Fernández-Jambrina, L. (September 2014). "Grand rip and grand bang/crunch cosmological singularities". Physical Review D. 90 (6). arXiv:1408.6997 . Bibcode:2014PhRvD..90f4014F. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.90.064014. 064014.

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Here is a copy of the first part of their article on the Cosmological Constant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant
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Sketch of the timeline of the Universe in the ΛCDM model. The accelerated expansion in the last third of the timeline represents the dark-energy dominated era.

Estimated ratios of dark matter and dark energy (which may be the cosmological constant^{[clarification needed]}) in the universe. According to current theories of physics, dark energy now dominates as the largest source of energy of the universe, in contrast to earlier epochs when it was insignificant.

In cosmology, the cosmological constant (usually denoted by the Greek capital letter lambda: Λ) is the value of the energy density of the vacuum of space. It was originally introduced by Albert Einstein in 1917^[1] as an addition to his theory of general relativity to "hold back gravity" and achieve a static universe, which was the accepted view at the time. Einstein abandoned the concept after Hubble's 1929 discovery that all galaxies outside the Local Group (the group that contains the Milky Way Galaxy) are moving away from each other, implying an overall expanding universe. From 1929 until the early 1990s, most cosmology researchers assumed the cosmological constant to be zero.

Since the 1990s, several developments in observational cosmology, especially the discovery of the accelerating universe from distant supernovae in 1998 (in addition to independent evidence from the cosmic microwave background and large galaxy redshift surveys), have shown that around 68% of the mass–energy density of the universe can be attributed to dark energy.^[2] While dark energy is poorly understood at a fundamental level, the main required properties of dark energy are that it functions as a type of anti-gravity, it dilutes much more slowly than matter as the universe expands, and it clusters much more weakly than matter, or perhaps not at all. The cosmological constant is the simplest possible form of dark energy since it is constant in both space and time, and this leads to the current standard model of cosmology known as the Lambda-CDM model, which provides a good fit to many cosmological observations.
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[Lambda-CDM model --- (CDM = "cold dark matter") --- frequently considered the standard model of Big Bang cosmology.]
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Anthropic principle[edit]
One possible explanation for the small but non-zero value was noted by Steven Weinberg in 1987 following the anthropic principle.^[26] Weinberg explains that if the vacuum energy took different values in different domains of the universe, then observers would necessarily measure values similar to that which is observed: the formation of life-supporting structures would be suppressed in domains where the vacuum energy is much larger. Specifically, if the vacuum energy is negative and its absolute value is substantially larger than it appears to be in the observed universe (say, a factor of 10 larger), holding all other variables (e.g. matter density) constant, that would mean that the universe is closed; furthermore, its lifetime would be shorter than the age of our universe, possibly too short for intelligent life to form. On the other hand, a universe with a large positive cosmological constant would expand too fast, preventing galaxy formation. According to Weinberg, domains where the vacuum energy is compatible with life would be comparatively rare. Using this argument, Weinberg predicted that the cosmological constant would have a value of less than a hundred times the currently accepted value.^[27] In 1992, Weinberg refined this prediction of the cosmological constant to 5 to 10 times the matter density.^[28]
This argument depends on a lack of a variation of the distribution (spatial or otherwise) in the vacuum energy density, as would be expected if dark energy were the cosmological constant. There is no evidence that the vacuum energy does vary, but it may be the case if, for example, the vacuum energy is (even in part) the potential of a scalar field such as the residual inflaton (also see quintessence). Another theoretical approach that deals with the issue is that of multiverse theories, which predict a large number of "parallel" universes with different laws of physics and/or values of fundamental constants. Again, the anthropic principle states that we can only live in one of the universes that is compatible with some form of intelligent life. Critics claim that these theories, when used as an explanation for fine-tuning, commit the inverse gambler's fallacy.
In 1995, Weinberg's argument was refined by Alexander Vilenkin to predict a value for the cosmological constant that was only ten times the matter density,^[29] i.e. about three times the current value since determined.