Is the universe really uniform?
News story originally written on April 28, 1997
One of the most commonly accepted theories about the universe is that it started
by something called the Big Bang. The Big Bang is a theory that
the universe used to be condensed into a single point. Then something happened
that made the Universe explode. Over several million years, the Universe
has expanded into what it is today...something so huge that it boggles the human
mind!
The Big Bang is based on the assumption that the Universe is expanding
out equally in all directions. This assumption has led to the idea that the
speed of light is a constant.
Two American physicists have just released a paper that may prove that the Big
Bang theory is wrong. Dr. Borge Nodland of the University of Rochester and Dr.
John Ralston of the University of Kansas claim that the universe's expansion is
not constant. If this is true, then the speed of light may not be constant.
Ralston and Nodland came up with this idea by looking at radio wave observations
from 160 distant galaxies all across the universe. Radio waves are a type of
light that we can't see with the human eye. All galaxies give off these kind of
waves. They found that the radio waves rotate as they move through space. This
new corkscrew rotation seems to suggest that light speed is not a constant.
These findings may be wrong. It is possible that Nodland and
Ralston made errors in their calculations or that this newly
seen phenomenon is an optical illusion. However, if they are right, scientists
will have to look at the universe in a whole new light.
Read more about the universe
Read more about the Big Bang
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