By apsmith, Section News Posted on Wed Oct 08, 2003 at 10:04:45 AM PST
In a Nature article this week, cosmologists Jeffrey Weeks, J.-P. Luminet and colleagues propose that correlations in the microwave background suggest an overall "dodecahedral" (3-dimensional 5-fold rotational symmetries) topology for the universe, in particular the form of a Poincaré dodecahedral space. Or as
John Whitfield comments in Nature, and as also reported in the New York Times, the shape of a soccer ball, with opposite faces joined together, so that going out one side of the soccer ball you would come in the other. Only this soccer ball is about 60 billion light years across.
An infinite universe presents us with a number of perplexing problems - a recent Scientific American discussion covered many of them - effectively an infinite universe is equivalent to having many parallel universes, and having infinetely many copies of yourself out there doing slightly different things. But, on the other hand, a finite universe seems rather confining. Which makes the most sense? At least 60 billion light years is rather generous!
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