Andy Partridge and XTC sang, “All the world is football shaped, just for me to kick in space.”
Try a few orders of magnitude larger. How about the universe? (See also a report from Nature)
This is wonderful stuff. And you should read Janna Levin’s How the Universe Got Its Spots for the details.
Suppose the Universe is finite. What’s that mean:
- If you start out in one direction, you’ll return to your starting point. Although this might take awhile.
- Thus, if you point a flashlight away from you, some billions of years later, you’ll see the light emitted returning.
- There was a big flash of light from the start of the Universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, which is an image of the Universe some 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
- That light ought to be evenly distributed around us.
- So, if you measure the microwave background as accurately as you can, then you ought to be able to infer something about the ’shape’ of the universe from your snapshot.
- If the universe is finite, then you’d see something like interference patterns in the snapshot.
The WMAP spacecraft took that snapshot.
A group of mathematicians and cosmologists looking at the WMAP data argue that they indicate a finite universe whose shape is that of a spherical dodecahedron, aka, a soccer ball.
If that’s the case, I hope our universe isn’t the game ball in some metaverse’s Cup Final.
