Do You Feel Great or Small?

 Stan Sholar June 2004

 

Sometimes I transport myself to a superior place in thought, looking back at what I am, where I am, my problems, my concerns, and my purpose.  If I'm sufficiently removed from the humdrum of being here, I can see my existence as having characteristics of being both great and small.  Against the backdrop of a cosmos that is unfathomably large, I can feel quite small.  However, in a universe fabricated by the Creator, I know that He had me in His plans and that I am not a random materialistic speck, a product of happenstance accumulations of events under no plan nor control.  If His love is infinite, I can appreciate that there is enough for everyone including me, and the sparrow, regardless of my infinitesimal occupation of His universe.  In these circumstances I feel great. 

 

I would like to share some insight into currently evolving understanding of the nature of the universe, scientific investigations going on right now, and what they seem to mean.  It is an incredible story and yet one that very few have likely heard.  Although current discussions of this subject are couched in the esoteric language of cosmologists, rife with scientific jargon, I am going to explain this in simple terms, for indeed, the essence is very understandable by anyone.  I know, I know, I may have left a lot of you behind in previous such discussions, that started out to be for the grandkids, and wound up in unintelligible scientific jargon.  Give me this one more chance.

 

I found that "breaking the bonds of surly earth" as the poem goes, is inspiring, allowing you to look down upon a sea of houses and cars that seem less and less significant as altitude increases and earthly things are replaced by clouds.  Although the poem ends with "touching the face of God," this is hardly reachable in the flight of a Cessna 150.  Yvonne took flying lessons in a 150 from a rather famous aviatrix in Santa Monica, Betty Miller.  She was a member of the all female 99's and flew in the very competitive powder puff derbies.  I once went on a ride in the back seat of a larger trainer behind Yvonne and Betty, just to experience being in the air with such an experienced pilot, and get in a bit of retaliatory back seat 'driving'.  I was really surprised when after we leveled off and were heading east out of Santa Monica's Clover Field, home of all the early Douglas planes, over the San Diego freeway, Betty looked down in serious contemplation.  She called attention to the fact that there were many people down there, as we looked at the sea of houses moving underneath, who had problems just as large or larger than ours.  Even with her thousands of hours in a cockpit, she still had this presence of attitude about looking down on the sea of humanity we call home.  Several years later, when we were out in the middle of nowhere on Kwajalein, we had a reunion with Betty when she and husband Chuck flew a twin Cessna, with engines in front and rear, all the way to the Philippines for a delivery, but stopping on Kwajalein, where her sister was part of the Douglas Aircraft family on island.  No light plane had ever before landed on Kwajalein to my knowledge until we started a flying club a year later.  The little Cessna was jam packed with extra bladder tanks to make the long legs, including Midway Island to Kwajalein.  Betty had a lot of time to marvel some more at the huge earth and its problems, while traveling so slowly over the vast expanses.  It was quite an unusual sight to see this tiny craft appear over the Kwaj runway, with familiar faces on board.

 

Another aspect of viewing the earth is certainly one shared by our astronauts on the moon.  I worked with Pete Conrad in Huntington Beach for McDonnell Douglas, and for a short time after retiring for his Space Company before he was tragically killed on his motorcycle.  We would lunch in the company dining room with talk about the programs of the day.  It was easy to sometimes lose sight of the fact that you were dining with someone who had walked on the moon.  Pete was pretty low key about most of that but had a way of bringing us back to earth, or to the moon, with a remark.  Once while discussing income taxes, the topic was the IRS question that anyone on Kwajalein is familiar with, "Have you earned any income outside the United States?"  Pete spoke up and said he had to answer that one year with, "Yes, on the moon."  We've all seen the photos of the big blue marble taken by Pete and others from the moon, that show to an even greater extent how our day to day problems must be small compared to the solar system.

 

This train of thought goes on beyond the space of the earth and its moon, to the solar system.  We know that our Sun is just a star, a single bright object in the sky, against the backdrop of uncountable others.  We observe that our "star" is one of billions in a relatively compact collection, of a flat disc shape, known as a galaxy.  Our particular galaxy has been dubbed the Milky Way for we are a part of it and see it edge on, as a streak of light across the sky.  Our galaxy is one with spiral arms, and the position of our earth and sun, amidst its billions of stars, is one of no apparent prominence, being sort of out on the limb of one of the arms.  Science today has amassed many facts that indicate our position in the galaxy, not just our distance from the sun, is on the contrary very special with regard to all of the chemistry and physics that make life supportable on our planet, the so called anthropic principle.  However, the tale to be told here goes on to a much larger scale.

 

Our galaxy is huge.  Even though it looks like a thin pancake, it has thickness.  To travel through it in the short direction, in other words, just to pierce through the pancake, takes 10 million years at the speed of light.  Such a distance is impossible for me to actually comprehend, and it is not the largest measure by any means.  For reference purposes, it takes light about 8 minutes to reach us from the sun, 90 million miles away.  Imagine 10 million years at that speed. 

 

Now what goes on beyond our galaxy?  As optical techniques improve, man can see further and further into the heavens.  The famous Hubble telescope, placed in orbit rather than on the top of a mountain, has seen far into the darkness of space.  The Hubble Telescope allows us to see billions of galaxies, which average over a billion stars each.  When we try to see further and further, the combination of dimness due to distance, and smaller galaxies, causes us to start missing some, then eventually missing all after we get way out there.

 

Before Hubble, there was evidence of a structure in the distribution of galaxies that became known as the Great Wall.  This is because, out at a distance of about 400 million light years, there is a ball shaped layer of galaxies at much higher density.  Another way of saying this is that there is a partial void of galaxies until you get to that distance, then there are many more in a given volume of space.  This has been an interesting feature if not a puzzle or enigma for cosmologists, most of whom sign up to the big bang theory of the creation of the universe.  I do not find the big bang theory to necessarily be in contradiction to the creation story, since the Creator could fashion things and set them in motion in any manner He chose.  However, as time marches on and there are more accurate measurements to be dealt with, the big bang theory has required considerable patching to try and keep it viable.  One of note is the accelerated expansion phase during the big bang explosion, where matter traveled at speeds much faster than the speed of light for a period of time, in order to get out to where it had to be to progress to what we now observe.  Other patches of the theory include the concept of dark matter, that we can't see, but fills in some holes in the theory because of the needed extra gravity.  There are no known particles with the requisite characteristics.  These details are not necessary for you to understand for the incredible revelation to follow.  The point is that the big bang theory already has serious problems in the judgment of many who are not captive to established academics.

 

About ten years ago, it became known to the community of cosmologists and astronomers, that there was a very pronounced structure to the constitution of the cosmos.  By this I mean that the galaxies are not distributed randomly and more or less uniformly throughout space, but are clumped into regions of high density, interleaved with regions of low density.  The shape of these distributions is what is so alarming, but first I must say a word or two about how we make these measurements.  Hubble, for whom the telescope was named, found that there was a simple relationship between the distance of a galaxy, and how fast it was moving away from us.  In an expanding universe, all the bodies seem to be moving away from each other since the distances separating all bodies are increasing, like points on the surface of a balloon that is being inflated.  If you believe in a closed universe like Einstein's non-Euclidean Riemannian geometry, then things are a bit trickier than if you think of space as being measurable by the simple rectangular Euclidean axes from high school geometry.  Nevertheless, most scientists accept the Hubble constant as being the multiplier that can get you from receding velocity to distance.  The velocity is measured by the amount of the red shift of the light (lower frequency), signifying the motion away from us.  This is an optical version of the lowering of a train's whistle after it has gone past you.  The Hubble constant allows us to estimate the distance to the galaxy.  Now with a measure of the distance of each galaxy from us, what do we see?

 

Here is the punch line.  The galaxies are grouped into nested shells of high density, the Great Wall being the first one at a distance of 400 million light years.  Now surprise number two.  The shells are all nested concentrically and each one going outward is another 400 million light years from the last inner one.  I picture a bunch of different sized basketballs inside one another, with equal space between them.  And finally, the thing I find the most intriguing is the location of the center of these shells.  It is not Earth, but it is very close to Earth from a cosmos standpoint.  In our own Milky Way galaxy, there is a cluster of stars called Virgo.  It is somewhat out near an edge of our galaxy, but definitely part of the Milky Way.  To appreciate what this location means, consider that our galaxy is one of several billion, and that our galaxy contains the region that is the center of these spherical shells of galaxy concentration for the entire visible universe.  Wow.  Let that soak in a moment, then we will get to the epistemology of it all.

 

Actually, we seldom get to a real epistemology in science, for we are always making new measurements and new discoveries that cause current theories to be suspect, and require fixing or replacing.  In a full-blown epistemology, we would be able to answer all the questions regarding how we know something and why it works the way it does.  In an ontology, we may have a description of what is going on, and may even be able to predict future behavior, but we do not know all the reasons why.  The Hubble constant discussed above is an example of an ontology.  If we know the outgoing speed of a galaxy, we can predict, within accuracy limits, how far away it is, but we do not know why, though there are some guesses, mostly based in the big bang theory.  The spatial distributions of galaxies being discussed here takes on the barest beginning of an ontology in that we have a model of how matter is distributed.  No one knows why at the moment, even though these data have been around for over a decade.  Attempts at explanations begin to appear, like for example the Hubble constant is not a constant, but oscillates.  Of course this is just a matter of taking an existing ontic idea and embellishing it with a frill to explain new data, a process that modern physics is fraught with, up to and including string theory, built solely upon mathematical machinations.

 

The data that should have rocked the world of science, but got very little press, can be found in the public domain in several places like the popular article by Broadhurst et. al., "Large-Scale Distribution of Galaxies at the Galactic Poles", Nature 343, p. 726, 1990.  There are many technical articles of the past decade on the subject.  Some of the raw data is still being processed for red shift.  One of the more interesting bits of research was performed by the Virgo Consortium where a simulation model of the cosmos was made, and pencil beam type measurements made upon it to see if the very structured results could be obtained.  It was ascertained that there was less than a 2 per cent chance that such structure would appear randomly if there was nothing else going on.  See, N. Yoshida, et al, "Simulations of Deep Pencil-Beam Redshift Surveys", Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc., 13 Mar 2001.

 

The data that is available is called Deep Pencil-Beam Redshift because it is only collected in a very small angle cone (pencil) and goes very deep into space by looking as far as we can see, which relates to the largest redshifted galaxies.  One set of data is collected looking straight out of (perpendicular to) our galactic plane in the so-called North direction.  Another is to the South, one is at 45 degrees to the galactic plane, with a fourth set being of a fan beam shape.

 

There are other features of the Virgo region that are quite curious.  According to Halton Arp, the only six galaxies having blueshifts (meaning we are moving toward them or they are moving toward us) are in the Virgo cluster.  There is a curious half periodicity relative to the Great Wall that extends up to but not beyond it.  The region that we seem to be closing distance with, Perseus-Pisces, is called the "Great Attractor."  There does not seem to be an inordinate amount of mass there, however.

 

There are several reasons why establishment cosmologists may have laid low with regard to these findings.  The materialistic view of creation, focused on the big bang, is seriously obviated by these data.  The alternative theories include the one that is Biblical amounting to a creation of time, space, and matter out of nothing by the Creator.  If we on Earth are the sole apple of His eye, then it might make sense that Earth and the Milky Way have a special place amongst the billions of galaxies of the visible universe.

 

This conclusion is so incredible, I have spent time in the past year trying to challenge the data.  Oftentimes, we find that there is a corruption of measurements that accompanies incomplete scientific knowledge, giving very wrong conclusions.  The Ptolemaic idea of Earth being the center of the universe was embellished to predict planet behavior as having small cycles superimposed upon larger cycles (orbits), in order to explain their apparent motions in the sky as viewed from Earth.  The resulting ontology more or less worked, but the epistemology was lacking.  Along come the next team, lead by Kepler and Newton, to substantiate that the planets, including Earth, revolve around the Sun, and in a fashion that is predictable.  This epistemology met a challenge when Einstein developed his General Relativity, that makes a slight adjustment to what Newton would predict, and one that was corroborated by experiment.  So one must be careful about these distance measurements that are based upon Hubble's Law.  Hubble, though given credit for this relationship, became disenchanted with it himself in later life, not unlike Einstein and some features of his Relativity Theories.  When scientists begin to reach for solutions of the type invoking an S-shape modification to Hubble's straight line, lookout, we are not on firm ground.  I have also considered other ontic explanations like a change in space of speed of light with distance measured from earth or anywhere.  I did not find a suitable way to discount nor explain these data here either. 

 

The most convincing support to me regarding this discovery is that many other types of measurements were used, from different sensors, such as radio, not just optic.  These measurements included surveys of quasars and radio galaxies, Lyman-alpha break galaxies, optical galaxies, and clusters of galaxies.  All of these measurements agree with the conclusion that the matter of the universe is clustered in nested spherical shells, separated by 400 million light years.  The extent of the data is 5 million light years in the North, South and 45 degree directions from our galaxy, exhibiting this behavior for about 12 cycles or spheres.

 

Interesting work on this topic is being done by my friend, Dr. Roger A. Rydin, Professor Emeritus of Nuclear Engineering from the University of Virginia.  He first introduced me to the subject at a symposium in San Luis Obispo over a year ago.  Roger has used his expertise in physics and chemistry to postulate a model where the universe was created by matter-depositing waves, emanating from the center near Earth.  The autocorrelation of the raw pencil beam data was analyzed and fit with a spherical Bessel function to account for the spatial periodicity and damped exponential to account for matter deposition of the universe-generating spherical wave.  Not anymore difficult to fathom than big bang in my opinion.

 

Truth is stranger than fiction.  Now I don't feel so small, especially if I'm at the center of the universe, for all practical purposes.  One might question why the Creator has chosen this era to allow the discovery of such a profound aspect of creation.  Makes one feel great for living not only in this place, but in this time as well.

Stan

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I sent this earlier to some family, who I felt would not be offended by some of my philosophy and theology folded into this interesting piece of recent astronomical discovery that may relate profoundly to the cosmos.  I tried to simplify things as much as possible without losing the essence and apologize for the elementary style.  I was hoping to get some feedback regarding how this tale may be faulted, for if the conclusions are true, it is quite astounding.  However, I think I was too shy about sending it to some who are able to give it the best scrutiny, so if you will just get past the first and last paragraphs, I think you will find an intriguing story.  I was introduced to this topic by a friend, Dr. Roger Rydin, Prof. Emeritus of Nuclear Engineering, U. of Virginia, and can forward his more technical papers if requested, that include spatial autocorrelation function analyses that place statistical measures on the periodicity described below.  http://home.earthlink.net/~rarydin