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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
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Claim CE421:

Anisotropies in the cosmic background radiation measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe show an axis. The big bang proposes no special orientations, so an axis discredits the big bang theory, but it is consistent with creationist cosmology.

Source:

Humphreys, Russell, 2003. Light from creation illuminates cosmic axis. Acts and Facts 32(6) (Jun.): 4.

Response:

  1. Humphries referred to the work of Tegmark et al. (2003). Tegmark et al.'s map shows an axis of symmetry for the quadrapole and octopole maps, but the hexadecapole map shows no such axis of symmetry, which could indicate that the axis is an artifact of a systematic bias in the data analysis.

  2. A cosmic axis is compatible with the big bang. If Tegmark et al.'s results are correct, they imply that cosmology is anisotropic (not the same in all directions) on very large length scales. There has been, to date, little evidence gathered about the universe on such scales, but anisotropic cosmologies have been seriously considered. Goedel's rotating universe (Goedel 1949) is one example. Another is a universe with one spatial dimension compacted relative to the other two.

References:

  1. Goedel, Kurt, 1949. An example of a new type of cosmological solutions of Einstein's field equations of gravitation. Reviews of Modern Physics 21(3): 447-450.
  2. Tegmark, M., A. de Oliveira-Costa and A. J. S. Hamilton, 2003. A high resolution foreground cleaned CMB map from WMAP. Physical Review D 68: 123523, http://cul.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302496

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created 2003-6-10, modified 2004-2-14