[extropy-chat] ecliptic preferred frame

[Damien Broderick]

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!

Damien Broderick