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<DIV>Hi.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Do you remember my big bagel theory of the cosmos, the one I came up with
in 1959 when I was working at a cancer research lab?</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Back in 1997, it led me to predict a form of negative gravity. The
following year the acceleration of the cosmos was discovered and was explained
by negative gravity--dark energy. Then the Big Bagel theory allowed me to
explain dark energy--negative gravity--in a unique way--as the gravitational
attraction between a standard-matter universe on the bagel's topside and an
anti-matter universe on the bagel's underside.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Now there's more that seems to support the big bagel theory--that the
universe seems directional, not randomly scattered, that the cosmos needs far
more matter than it's got to explain its behavior (the big bagel theory says
that two universes are on opposite sides of the same bagel--so there's twice as
much stuff as we can see), etc.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Does the information in the article below seem to support the big
bagel? And how does Modified Newtonian Dynamics fit into this
picture? Howard</DIV>
<DIV>___________</DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT
face="Times New Roman">Retrieved <SPAN style="mso-no-proof: yes">July 22,
2005</SPAN>, from the World Wide Web <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18625061.800
<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Marcus Chown <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Marcus Chown is the author of The
Universe Next Door published by Headline (2003) <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Enlarge image Evolution of the big bang
<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Enlarge image Big bang Universe
<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Enlarge image Cracks in the big
bangWHAT if the big bang never happened? Ask cosmologists this and they'll
usually tell you it is a stupid question. The evidence, after all, is written in
the heavens. Take the way galaxies are scattered across the sky, or witness the
fading afterglow of the big bang fireball. Even the way the atoms in your body
have come into being over the eons. They are all smoking guns that point to the
existence 13.7 billion years ago of an ultra-hot, ultra-dense state known as the
big bang. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Or are they? A small band
of researchers is starting to ask the question no one is supposed to ask. Last
week the dissidents met to review the evidence at the first ever Crisis in
Cosmology conference in <st1:place><st1:City>Monção</st1:City>,
<st1:country-region>Portugal</st1:country-region></st1:place>. There they argued
that cosmologists' most cherished theory of the universe fails to explain
certain crucial observations. If they are right, the universe could be a lot
weirder than anyone imagined. But before venturing that idea, say the
dissidents, it is time for some serious investigation into the big bang's
validity and its alternatives. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>"Look at the facts," says Riccardo Scarpa
of the European Southern Observatory in
<st1:place><st1:City>Santiago</st1:City>,
<st1:country-region>Chile</st1:country-region></st1:place>. <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">"The basic big bang model fails to predict
what we observe in the universe in three major ways." The temperature of today's
universe, the expansion of the cosmos, and even the presence of galaxies, have
all had cosmologists scrambling for fixes. "Every time the basic big bang model
has failed to predict what we see, the solution has been to bolt on something
new - inflation, dark matter and dark energy,"</B> Scarpa says. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>For Scarpa and his fellow dissidents, the
tinkering has reached an unacceptable level. All for the sake of saving the
notion that the universe flickered into being as a hot, dense state. "This isn't
science," says Eric Lerner who is president of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in
<st1:place><st1:City>West Orange</st1:City>, <st1:State>New
Jersey</st1:State></st1:place>, and one of the conference organisers. "Big bang
predictions are consistently wrong and are being fixed after the event." So much
so, that today's "standard model" of cosmology has become an ugly mishmash
comprising the basic big bang theory, inflation and a generous helping of dark
matter and dark energy. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>The fact
that the conference went ahead at all is an important step forward, say its
organisers. Last year they wrote an open letter warning that<B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"> failure to fund research into big bang
alternatives was suppressing free debate in the field of cosmology</B> (New
Scientist, 22 May 2004, p 20). <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>The
trouble, says Lerner, who headed the list of more than 30 signatories, is that
<B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">cosmology is bankrolled by just a few
sources, and the committees that control those purse strings are dominated by
supporters of the big bang.</B> Critics of the standard model of cosmology are
not just uncomfortable about the way they feel it has been cobbled together.
They also point to specific observations that they believe cast doubt on
cosmology's standard model. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>“Dark
matter is turning up in places where it shouldn't exist”Take the most distant
galaxies ever spotted, for example. <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">According to the accepted view, when we
observe ultra-distant galaxies we should see them in their youth, full of stars
not long spawned from gas clouds. This is because light from these faraway
galaxies has taken billions of years to reach us, and so the galaxies must
appear as they were shortly after the big bang. But there is a problem. "We
don't see young galaxies," says Lerner. "We see old ones."</B> <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>He cites recent observations of
high-red-shift galaxies from NASA's Spitzer space telescope. A galaxy's red
shift is a measure of how much the universe has expanded since it emitted its
light. As the light travels through an expanding universe, its wavelength gets
stretched, as if the light wave were drawn on a piece of elastic. The increase
in wavelength corresponds to a shift towards the red end of the spectrum. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>The <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Spitzer galaxies have red shifts that
correspond to a time when the universe was between about 600 million and 1
billion years old. Galaxies this young should be full of newborn stars that emit
blue light because they are so hot. The galaxies should not contain many older
stars that are cool and red. "But they do,"</B> says Lerner. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Spitzer is the first telescope able to
detect red stars in faraway galaxies because it is sensitive to infrared light.
This means it can detect red light from stars in high-red-shift galaxies that
has been pushed deep into the infrared during its journey to Earth. <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">"It turns out these galaxies</B> aren't
young at all," says Lerner. "They <B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">have
pretty much the same range of stars as present-day galaxies."</B> <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>And that is bad news for the big bang.
Among the stars in today's galaxies are red giants that have taken billions of
years to burn all their hydrogen and reach this bloated phase. So the Spitzer
observations suggest that some of the stars in ultra-distant galaxies are older
than the galaxies themselves, which plunges the standard model of cosmology into
crisis. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Fog-filled universe Not
surprisingly, cosmologists have panned Lerner's theories. They put the
discrepancy down to large uncertainties in estimating the ages of galaxies. But
Lerner has a reply. He points to other distant objects that appear much older
than they ought to be. <B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">"At high red
shift, we also observe clusters and huge superclusters of galaxies," he says,
arguing that it would have taken far longer than a billion years for galaxies to
clump together to form such giant structures. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>His solution to the puzzle is extreme.
Rather than being caused by the expanding universe, he believes that the red
shift is down to some other mechanism. </B>But at this stage it is only a guess.
<B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">"I admit I don't know what that
mechanism might be," Lerner says, "though I believe it is intrinsic to
light."</B> <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>To test his idea, he
would like to see sensitive experiments on Earth capable of detecting minute
changes in light. One possibility would be to modify the LIGO detector in
<st1:place><st1:City>Hanford</st1:City>,
<st1:State>Washington</st1:State></st1:place> state. LIGO is designed to detect
gravitational waves, the warps in space-time created by events such as neutron
star collisions. To do this it bounces perpendicular beams of laser light
hundreds of times between mirrors 4 kilometres apart, looking for subtle shifts
in the beams' lengths. With a few tweaks, Lerner believes that LIGO could be
modified to measure any intrinsic red-shifting that light might undergo. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>If the experiment ever gets the go-ahead
and Lerner is proved right, the implications would be immense, not least because
the tapestry of cosmology as we know it would unravel. Without an expanding
universe, there would be no need to invoke dark energy to account for the
apparent acceleration of that expansion. Nor would there be any reason to
suppose the big bang was the ultimate beginning. "I can prove that the universe
wasn't born 13.7 billion years ago," says Lerner. "The big bang never happened."
<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>However, Lerner's claims leave
plenty of awkward questions. Among them is the matter of the cosmic microwave
background. First detected in 1965, the vast majority of cosmologists believe
that this faint, all-pervading soup of microwaves is the dying glow of the big
bang, and proof of the ultimate beginning. According to big bang theory, the hot
radiation that filled space after the birth of the universe has been trapped
inside ever since because it has nowhere else to go. As the universe expanded
over the past 13.7 billion years, the radiation has cooled to today's
temperature of less than 3 kelvin above absolute zero. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>So if there was no big bang, where did
the cosmic microwave background come from? Lerner believes that cosmologists
have got the origin of the microwave glow all wrong. "If you wake up in a tent
and everything around you is white, you don't conclude you've seen the start of
the universe," he says. "You conclude you're in fog." <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Rather than coming from the big bang, <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Lerner believes that the cosmic background
radiation is really starlight that has been absorbed and re-radiated. It is an
old idea that was widely promoted by the late cosmologist and well-known big
bang sceptic Fred Hoyle.</B> He believed that starlight was absorbed by
needle-like grains of iron ejected by supernovae and then radiated as
microwaves. But Hoyle never found any evidence to back up his ideas and many
cosmologists dismissed them. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>“Some
of the stars in distant galaxies appear older than the universe itself”Lerner's
idea is similar, though he thinks that threads of electrically charged gas
called plasma are responsible, rather than iron whiskers. <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Jets of plasma are squirted into
intergalactic space by highly energetic galaxies known as quasars, and Lerner
believes that such plasma filaments continually fragmented until they filled the
universe like fog. This fog then scattered the infrared light radiated by dust
that had in turn absorbed starlight. By doing so, Lerner believes, the infrared
radiation became uniform in all directions, just as the cosmic microwave
background appears to be.</B> <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>All
this is possible, he argues, because standard cosmology theory has overlooked
processes involving plasmas.<B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"> "All
astronomers know that 99.99 per cent of matter in the universe is in the form of
plasma, which is controlled by electromagnetic forces," he says. "Yet all
astronomers insist on believing that gravity is the only important force in the
universe. </B>It is like oceanographers ignoring hydrodynamics." To make
progress, Lerner is calling for theories that include plasma phenomena as well
as gravity, and for more rigorous testing of theory against observations. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Of course, Lerner's ideas are extremely
controversial and few people are convinced, but that doesn't stop other
researchers questioning the standard theory too. They have their own ideas about
what is wrong with it. In Scarpa's case, the mysterious dark matter is at fault.
<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Dark matter has become an essential
ingredient in cosmology's standard model. That's because the big bang on its own
fails to describe how galaxies could have congealed from the matter forged
shortly after the birth of the universe. The problem is that <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">gas and dust made from normal matter were
spread too evenly for galaxies to clump together in just 13.7 billion years.
Cosmologists fix this problem by adding</B> to their brew a vast amount of
invisible <B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">dark matter</B> which provides
the extra tug needed to speed up galaxy formation. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>The same gravitational top-up helps to
explain the rapid motion of outlying stars in galaxies. <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Astronomers have measured stars orbiting
their galactic centres so fast that they ought to fly off into intergalactic
space. But dark matter's extra gravity would explain how the galaxies hold onto
their speeding stars. Similarly, dark matter is needed to explain how clusters
of galaxies can hold on to galaxies that are orbiting the cluster's centre so
fast they ought to be flung away.</B> <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>But dark matter may not be the cure-all
it seems, warns Scarpa. What worries him are inconsistencies with the theory.
"If you believe in dark matter, you discover there is too much of it," he says.
In particular, his observations point to dark matter in places cosmologists say
it shouldn't exist. One place no one expects to see it is <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">in globular clusters, tight knots of stars
that orbit the Milky Way and many other galaxies. Unlike normal matter, the dark
stuff is completely incapable of emitting light or any other form of
electromagnetic radiation. This means a cloud of the stuff cannot radiate away
its internal heat, a process vital for gravitational contraction, so dark matter
cannot easily clump together at scales as small as those of globular
clusters.<o:p></o:p></B></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT
face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN><SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Scarpa's observations tell a different
story, however. He and his colleagues have found evidence that <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">the stars in globular clusters are moving
faster than the gravity of visible matter can explain, just as they do in larger
galaxies.</B> They have studied three globular clusters, including the Milky
Way's biggest, <B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Omega Centauri, which
contains about a million stars.</B> In all three, they find the same wayward
behaviour. So if isn't dark matter, what is going on? <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Scarpa's team believes the answer might
be a breakdown of <st1:City><st1:place>Newton</st1:place></st1:City>'s law of
gravity, which says an object's gravitational tug is inversely proportional to
the square of your distance from it. <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Their observations of globular clusters
suggest that </B><st1:City><st1:place><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND: yellow; mso-highlight: yellow"><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Newton</B></SPAN></st1:place></st1:City><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND: yellow; mso-highlight: yellow">'s inverse square law holds
true only above some critical acceleration</SPAN>. Below this threshold
strength, gravity appears to dissipate more slowly than
</B><st1:City><st1:place><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Newton</B></st1:place></st1:City><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"> predicts. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Exactly the same effect has been spotted
in spiral galaxies and galaxy-rich clusters.</B> It was identified more than <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">20 years ago by Mordehai Milgrom at the
Weizmann Institute in </B><st1:place><st1:City><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Rehovot</B></st1:City><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">, </B><st1:country-region><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Israel</B></st1:country-region></st1:place><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">, who proposed a theory known as <SPAN
style="BACKGROUND: yellow; mso-highlight: yellow">modified Newtonian dynamics
(MOND) </SPAN>to explain it.</B> Scarpa points out that the critical
acceleration of 10-10 metres per second per second that was identified for
galaxies appears to hold for globular clusters too. And his work has led him to
the same conclusion as Milgrom: "There is no need for dark matter in the
universe," says Scarpa. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>It is a
bold claim to make. And not surprisingly, MOND has had plenty of critics over
the years. <B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">One of cosmologists' biggest
gripes is that MOND is not compatible with Einstein's theory of relativity, so
it is not valid for objects travelling close to the speed of light or in very
strong gravitational fields. In practice, this means MOND has been powerless to
make predictions about pulsars, black holes and, most importantly, the big bang.
But this has now been fixed by Jacob Bekenstein at the
</B><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Hebrew</B></st1:PlaceName><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"> </B><st1:PlaceType><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">University</B></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"> of </B><st1:City><st1:place><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Jerusalem</B></st1:place></st1:City><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"> in </B><st1:country-region><st1:place><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Israel</B></st1:place></st1:country-region><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Bekenstein's relativistic version of the
theory already appears to be bearing fruit. In May a team led by Constantinos
Skordis of the </B><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">University</B></st1:PlaceType><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"> of </B><st1:PlaceName><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Oxford</B></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"> showed that <SPAN
style="BACKGROUND: yellow; mso-highlight: yellow">relativistic MOND can make
cosmological predictions</SPAN>.</B> The researchers have reproduced both the
observed properties of the cosmic microwave background and the distribution of
galaxies throughout the universe (www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0505519). <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Gravity in crisis Scarpa believes that <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">MOND</B> is a crucial body blow for the big
bang. "It <B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">means that the law of gravity
from which we derive the big bang is wrong,</B>" he says. He insists that
cosmologists are interpreting astronomical observations using the wrong
framework. And he urges them to go back to the drawing board and derive a
cosmological model based on MOND. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>For now, his plea seems to be falling
mostly on deaf ears. Yet there is more evidence that there could be something
wrong with the standard model of cosmology. And it is evidence that many
cosmologists are finding harder to dismiss because it comes from the jewel in
the crown of cosmology instruments, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.
"It could be telling us something fundamental about our universe, maybe even
that the simplest big bang model is wrong," says João Magueijo of Imperial
College London. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Since its launch in
2001, WMAP has been quietly taking the temperature of the universe from its
vantage point 1.5 million kilometres out in space. The probe measures the way
the temperature of the cosmic microwave background varies across the sky. <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Cosmologists believe that the tiny
variations from one place to another are an imprint of the state of the universe
about 300,000 years after the big bang, when matter began to clump together
under gravity.</B> Hotter patches correspond to denser regions, and cooler
patches reflect less dense areas. <B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">These
density variations began life as quantum fluctuations in the vacuum in the first
split second of the universe's existence, and were subsequently amplified by a
brief period of phenomenally fast expansion called inflation. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Because the quantum fluctuations popped
up at random, the hot and cold spots we see in one part of the sky should look
much like those in any other part. And because the cosmic background radiation
is a feature of the universe as a whole rather than any single object in it,
none of the hot or cold regions should be aligned with structures in our corner
of the cosmos. Yet this is exactly what some researchers are claiming from the
WMAP results.</B> <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Earlier this
year, Magueijo and his <st1:place><st1:PlaceName>Imperial</st1:PlaceName>
<st1:PlaceType>College</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> colleague Kate Land reported
that they had found a bizarre alignment in the cosmic microwave background. At
first glance, the pattern of hot and cold spots appeared random, as expected.
But when they looked more closely, they found something unexpected. It is as if
you were listening to an anarchic orchestra playing some random cacophony, and
yet when you picked out the violins, trombones and clarinets separately, you
discovered that they are playing the same tune. <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Like an orchestral movement, the WMAP
results can be analysed as a blend of patterns of different spatial
frequencies.</B> When Magueijo and Land looked at the hot and cold spots this
way, they noticed a striking similarity between the individual patterns. <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Rather than being spattered randomly across
the sky, the spots in each pattern seemed to line up along the same
direction.</B> With a good eye for a newspaper headline, Magueijo dubbed this
alignment the axis of evil. "If it is true, this is an astonishing discovery,"
he says. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>“Without an expanding
universe, the big bang was not the ultimate beginning”That's because the result
flies in the face of big bang theory, which rules out any such special or
preferred direction. So could the weird effect be down to something more
mundane, such as a problem with the WMAP satellite? Charles Bennett, who leads
the WMAP mission at NASA's <st1:place><st1:PlaceName>Goddard</st1:PlaceName>
<st1:PlaceName>Space</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceName>Flight</st1:PlaceName>
<st1:PlaceType>Center</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> in
<st1:place><st1:City>Greenbelt</st1:City>,
<st1:State>Maryland</st1:State></st1:place>, discounts that possibility. "I have
no reason to think that any anomaly is an artefact of the instrument," he says.
<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Another suggestion is that heat
given off by the Milky Way's dusty disk has not been properly subtracted from
the WMAP signals and mimics the axis of evil. "Certainly there are some sloppy
papers where insufficient attention has been paid to the signals from the Milky
Way," warns Bennett. Others point out that the conclusions are based on only one
year's worth of WMAP signals. And researchers are eagerly awaiting the next
batch, rumoured to be released in September. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Yet Magueijo and Land are convinced that
the alignment in the patterns does exist. "The big question is: what could have
caused it," asks Magueijo. <B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">One
possibility, he says, is that the universe is shaped like a slab, with space
extending to infinity in two dimensions but spanning only about 20 billion light
years in the third dimension.<SPAN
style="BACKGROUND: yellow; mso-highlight: yellow"> Or the universe might be
shaped like a bagel.</SPAN></B> <B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">Another
way to create a preferred direction would be to have a rotating universe,
because this singles out the axis of rotation as different from all other
directions.</B> <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Bennett admits he
is excited by the possibility that WMAP has stumbled on something so important
and fundamental about the universe. His hunch, though, is that the alignment is
a fluke. "However, it's always possible the universe is trying to tell us
something," he says. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Clearly, <B
style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">such a universe would flout a fundamental
assumption of all big bang models: that the universe is the same in all places
and in all directions. "People made these assumptions because, without them, it
was impossible to simplify Einstein's equations enough to solve them for the
universe," says Magueijo.</B> And if those assumptions are wrong, it could be
curtains for the standard model of cosmology. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>That may not be a bad thing, according to
Magueijo. "The standard model is ugly and embarrassing," he says. "I hope it
will soon come to breaking point." But whatever replaced it would of course have
to predict all the things the standard model predicts. "This would be very hard
indeed," concedes Magueijo. <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Meanwhile the axis of evil is peculiar
enough that Bennett and his colleague Gary Hinshaw have obtained money from NASA
to carry out a five-year exhaustive examination of the WMAP signals. That should
exclude the possibilities of the instrumental error and contamination once and
for all. "The alignment is probably just a fluke but I really feel compelled to
investigate it," he says. "Who knows what we will find." <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Lerner and his fellow sceptics are in
little doubt: "What we may find is a universe that is very different than the
increasingly bizarre one of the big bang theory." <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>From issue 2506 of New Scientist
magazine, <st1:date Month="7" Day="2" Year="2005">02 July 2005</st1:date>, page
30 <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN></FONT></P></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="10">----------<BR>Howard Bloom<BR>Author of The Lucifer Principle: A
Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution
of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century<BR>Recent Visiting
Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty
Member, The Graduate
Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>Founder:
International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution
Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango
Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the
Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political
Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human
Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive
editor -- New Paradigm book series.<BR>For information on The International
Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from
<BR>The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History,
see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The
Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see
www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>