Universe = soccer ball

[bjorkstrand]

The universe is in the shape of a soccer ball.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV2DYuX7 ... re=related

universe = a dodecahedron

Jim

 

[bjorkstrand]

Here's a link to the science paper.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0006

Jim

 

[ramparts]

The Universe shaped like a dodecahedron? I agree Plato got a lot of things right but he's not really meant to be listened to as a scientific expert (in the Timaeus, Timaeus claims that the dodecahedron is the shape of the cosmos)

Very interesting though. The point of this paper is that this model satisfies some observational constraints from cosmic microwave background data, though any cosmological model has a ton of very different tests to satisfy. The current model, LambdaCDM, with a flat universe, a cosmological constant, and cold dark matter, has passed pretty much all these tests with flying colors. No other one has. I'm not sure if this model has received such other tests - I've never seen papers about it before - but prior experience tells me it's likely to run into issues Cool idea though.

Also, I'm pretty sure a soccer ball is a sphere with grooves, not really a dodecahedron.

 

[centsworth_II]

I'm partial to the soap bubble multiverse model.

 

[SpeedFreek]

The current model, LambdaCDM, with a flat universe, a cosmological constant, and cold dark matter, has passed pretty much all these tests with flying colors. No other one has. I'm not sure if this model has received such other tests - I've never seen papers about it before - but prior experience tells me it's likely to run into issues Cool idea though.

There have been many papers about it, since the early WMAP data seemed to show the signature of the poincare dodecahedral space, notably the one below:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0604616
Extending the WMAP Bound on the Size of the Universe

"Clues to the shape of our Universe can be found by searching the CMB for matching circles of temperature patterns. A full sky search of the CMB, mapped extremely accurately by NASA's WMAP satellite, returned no detection of such matching circles and placed a lower bound on the size of the Universe at 24 Gpc. This lower bound can be extended by optimally filtering the WMAP power spectrum. More stringent bounds can be placed on specific candidate topologies by using a a combination statistic. We use optimal filtering and the combination statistic to rule out the infamous "soccer ball universe'' model."

The new paper in the OP references the above work, and points out what the authors feel is wrong with the methods used to rule out the poincare dodecahedral space.