Thursday, November 8, 2007

The Discovery That Dare Not Speak Its Name Has been Made

Steven Hawking, arguably the world’s greatest living astrophysicist, called it “the discovery of the millennium, if not all time.” Hawking was referring to the anisotropies of the Universe. Anisotropies are variations or inhomogeneities in a structure. The anisotropies referred to here are the temperature variations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation distributed across the Universe. These temperature variations were left behind by the original creation event: they are the after glow of The Big Bang from which the Universe emerged. These variations are tiny, amounting to only about 1/40,000 of a degree Celsius, but they are enormously consequential. It is from these minute variations that the current Universe developed its large scale structure of Galaxy Clusters and Super Clusters. This structure is also essential for the Universe to be able to support life.

This of course is all quite interesting, but a shocking new set of findings has emerged from the study of the CMB. It has been discovered that the CMB, which pervades the entire Universe, is aligned to The Solar System. This means that, the original creation event, which produced all of space, time, matter, and energy, was precisely fine tuned so that it is aligned with the location and direction of motion of Solar System in which we live.

This discovery has been so disturbing to some scientists that it has been most inappropriately labeled “The Axis of Evil.” Since this discovery was first made in 2003, many scientists have been trying to disprove it. Researchers have been studying the CMB since 1965 when it was first found to exist. Through the years, more sensitive instruments have been developed which have allowed ever more accurate maps of the CMB to be drawn. The best known of these were the 1992 COBE and the 2003 WMAP satellite-based probes. The initial shock came when one alignment was discovered, but as work has progressed, instead of going away, at least three more of these “Cosmic Alignments” between the CMB and the Solar System have been uncovered.

The first discovery was that the original Creation Event was divided into two hemispheres, called a Dipole, with one warm lobe and one cool lobe. What researchers were shocked to find was that the plane of the Solar System sits at the exact division point, right in the middle of these two lobes. This means that the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun exactly divides these two hemispheres. It was further discovered that the direction of the Sun’s motion around the center of our Galaxy is also closely aligned with this plane.

Within each of the lobes of the dipole there are other cool and warm areas that have been located. There are a quadrupole (four lobes) and an octopole (eight lobes). To the researchers amazement, it has also been discovered that these mulitpoles are also planar and additionally are perpendicular to the Earth’s path around the sun. The likelihood of any of these alignments arising by chance is less than 1 in 1000.


Why This Is Important

One of the Primary Axioms of Materialist Philosophy is the Copernican Principle, sometimes known as the Mediocrity Principle. Simply stated, it is the opinion that humans are not privileged as observers or in anyway. Therefore, there should be nothing special about where we live in the Universe, about our Galaxy, Solar System, or Planet. The Copernican Principle was offered as a counter to the widely asserted medieval beliefs that the Earth was at the center of the Universe, that man was in an exalted place, and that God’s existence was proved by these facts. Medieval scholars did not actually believe anything like this, but that is another story.

The discovery that the CMB is cosmically aligned to the Earth should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It points to the fact that the Earth is at a special place in the Universe and that God wants it to be known. In the source listed below, it is interesting to observe how the writers try to dance around this implication (the elephant in the room) without actually coming out and directly admitting the clear implication of these discoveries. We read for example, “The solar system seems to line up with the largest cosmic features. Is this mere coincidence or a sign post to deeper insight?” “Careful analysis have confirmed these alignments exist. But we don’t know weather they are bizarre coincidences or if something more fundamental is at work.”

As similar “coincidences” from every field of science are piling to the sky for all to see, the only ones who will not see are those who refuse to see.

Source: “Why is the Solar System Cosmically Aligned?”, by Dragan Huterer, Astronomy, Dec. 2007, pp. 38-43.

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