[extropy-chat] ecliptic preferred frame

[The Avantguardian]

--- Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/krauss06/krauss06.2_index.html
> 
> Care to speculate on this weirdness, Robert?
> Lawrence Krauss says:
> 
> <...the impact of the recent cosmic microwave 
> background (CMB) studies on Inflation Theory.... 
> what is intriguing to me is that while everything 
> is consistent with the simplest models, there's 
> one area where there's a puzzle. On the largest 
> scales, when we look out at the universe, there 
> doesn't seem to be enough structure ­ not as much 
> as inflation would predict. Now the question is, is
> that a statistical fluke?
> 
> That is, we live in one universe, so we're a 
> sample of one. With a sample of one, you have 
> what is called a large sample variance. And maybe 
> this just means we're lucky, that we just happen 
> to live in a universe where the number's smaller 
> than you'd predict. But when you look at CMB map, 
> you also see that the structure that is observed, 
> is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the 
> plane of the earth around the sun. Is this 
> Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. 
> We're looking out at the whole universe. There's 
> no way there should be a correlation of structure 
> with our motion of the earth around the sun ­ the 
> plane of the earth around the sun ­ the ecliptic. 
> That would say we are truly the center of the
> universe.
> 
> The new results are either telling us that all of 
> science is wrong and we're the center of the 
> universe, or maybe the data is simply incorrect, 
> or maybe it's telling us there's something weird 
> about the microwave background results and that 
> maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our
> theories on the larger scales.>
> 
> Talk about anthropic! Spooky!

Not to rain on anybody's sense of wonder and awe but I
don't think it is all that spooky at least not from
the stand point of every thing else I know. If you
look at the actual WMAP data located at
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_or.html
Then one can clearly see that this correlation between
the CMB and the ecliptic is largely the result of the
motion of our own galaxy. When our own galaxy is
filtered out, the correlation goes away.

What is so spooky about the conservation of angular
momentum? That the ecliptic of the solar system is
roughly correlated with the rotational plane of the
galaxy in my mind is no more surprising than the
ecliptic of the solar system being correlated with the
rotation of the sun and the planets. It is what I
would expect. Of course there are exceptions like
Uranus with its axis pointed at 90 degrees to the
ecliptic but its the exception and not the rule. I
would expect it was because of some collision with
another planet or something that changed it's angular
momentum vector.

In any case, I think it is safe to say that if there
is correlation between the angular momentum of the
universe and our solar system, is it is far more
probable that the rotation of the solar system is
aligned to the rotation of the universe than the
rotation of the universe being aligned to that of our
solar system. After all one does not by convention
attribute the direction the wind to have been caused
by the direction that the weather vane is pointed.



      
 

Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"God doesn't play dice with the universe." - Albert Einstein

"Einstein, don't tell God what to do." - Neils Bohr

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