Cosmological Homogeneity/Isotropy and Reality

Those who do not learn from the past are destined to repeat their mistakes.

Not that many decades ago astronomers surveyed the night sky and saw a roughly homogeneous and isotropic distribution of stars, so they concluded that the best cosmological model would be one that has a homogeneous and isotropic distribution of stars.

However, in the 1920s they experienced the shock of an inconvenient truth: the stars are gathered into vast “island universes” they eventually named galaxies. So now they tell us that the galaxies are distributed in a way that is statistically homogeneous and isotropic. There are just two problems with their model, which they covet because it simplifies the mathematics (as pointed out by de Vaucouleurs in Science back in the 1970s).

1. The highly fractal Cosmic Web does not look remotely homogeneous unless you are looking through milk bottle glasses. Yes, it is statistically homogeneous, but look at all the structure they are ignoring when they make such simplified models.

2. More importantly, the observable universe may only be an infinitessimal drop in what may be a far vaster ocean that is the whole Universe. Just as it was discovered that stars are gathered into gigantic galaxies, so galaxies might on a nearly unimaginable scale be gathered into even larger entities we might call metagalaxies. In this case our statistically isotropic observable universe will be tiny part of a radically inhomogeneous and anisotropic distribution on a higher scale.

So these new “proofs” of cosmological homogeneity and isotropy must be taken with a grain of salt and a little humility about the limits of our knowledge. There are other models that offer a quite different understanding of our observable universe and beyond. These should not be ignored in favor of mathematical simplicity.

Robert L. Oldershaw

http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw

Discrete Scale Relativity/Fractal Cosmology