{"id":212,"date":"2003-10-13T21:47:17","date_gmt":"2003-10-14T01:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/soccer_hooligan"},"modified":"2003-10-13T21:47:17","modified_gmt":"2003-10-14T01:47:17","slug":"soccer_hooligan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2003\/10\/soccer_hooligan.html","title":{"rendered":"Soccer Hooligan"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was a sophomore in college, I read a fascinating book<\/a> about the large-scale distribution of galactic clusters<\/a>. One might expect galactic clusters to be scattered randomly, but they aren’t. Instead, galactic clusters seem to be distributed along the surface of nearly empty “bubbles” that tens of megaparsecs in diameter. In fact, if you map the structure of the visible universe using galactic clusters, at the largest scales it looks a lot like… bubbly, frothy beer! Pretty neat. And similarly, at the most extreme end of the small scale<\/a>, physicists theorize that spacetime breaks down into “quantum foam”, a seething chaotic morass of fluctuating loops and bubbles. Bubbles… foam… like beer!<\/em> At all length scales, the universe seems to be trying to tell us something…<\/p>\n

I’m sad to report that this is what passed for deep insight when I was 20.<\/p>\n

Now according to a recent article in Nature<\/a>, the universe could be finite and shaped like a soccer ball<\/a>. Or more properly, a dodecahedron. If we couple that with the observation that some of our universe’s more interesting carbon molecules are also<\/em> shaped like soccer balls<\/a>, we are led to a rather disturbing conclusion. God clearly<\/em> likes beer. God might<\/em> like soccer. The question theologians have pondered for centuries lingers in the air… could God be a soccer hooligan?<\/em><\/p>\n

Fortunately for all of us who are not soccer hooligans,[1<\/a>]<\/sup> Jacques doesn’t think much of the Soccer Ball proposal<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Most likely, this is just foreground junk, and once the foreground subtraction is done better, these two datapoints will cease to stand out, and the apparent lack of isotropy at large angular scales will go away.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The data from the WMAP probe<\/a> is still very preliminary, so it seems reasonable not to get excited over this yet. But of course I don’t need Jacques with all his fancy math to tell me that Soccer Ball hypothesis is in trouble. Just look at the hyperactive response on Slashdot<\/a>. I can’t imagine that Luminet, Weeks, and colleagues could look at the raving fanboy response on Slashdot and not realize that the whole thing is doomed, doomed. At least we can be grateful that the Slashdot weenies don’t read Jacques on a regular basis. Otherwise one of them might read his post<\/a> and discover that another possibly valid topology for the universe is an icosahedron<\/strong>. Lord only knows the tidal wave of dorky speculation<\/a> that<\/em> little idea would unleash.<\/p>\n

<\/a>1. Oh all right, so it’s really “football hooligans.” Excuuuuse me.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now according to a recent article in Nature, the universe could be finite and shaped like a soccer ball. Or more properly, a dodecahedron. If we couple that with the observation that some of our universe’s more interesting carbon molecules are also<\/em> shaped like soccer balls, we are led to a rather disturbing conclusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}