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Universe is Flat

Posted by michael on from the elephants-all-the-way-down dept.

D Anderson n'Swaart writes: "BBC News is reporting that a recent experiment called Project Boomerang, conducted with a super-sensitive telescope suspended 40 km above Antarctica, has provided powerful new evidence to support the current trend in scientific thinking that the fabric of space is essentially flat, and not curved as Einstein postulated. The one billion measurements gathered took three weeks to analyse on a Cray T3E supercomputer, and have provided insights on the creation of the universe, and suggest that it will continue to expand indefinitely without collapsing in a Big Crunch."

2 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5
    ... the current trend in scientific thinking that the fabric of space is essentially flat, and not curved as Einstein postulated
    This seems to imply that scientific thinking is that Einstein's theory of gravity (general relativity) is wrong. That is not true.

    Rather, what it means is this: Einstein's theory predicts that spacetime is curved. However, some curved spacetimes can be sliced up into "space" and "time" in such a way that SPACE is flat. Current scientific thinking is that SPACE is flat in this way (or very close to it) -- spacetime is still curved and the curvature obey's Einstein's equation.

    Of course, it is true that Einstein personally favored a closed universe model in which space is hyperspherical and hence curved, so in that respect the above statement is correct. But Einstein's theory admits many other solutions and experiments favor near-flatness.

  2. Other links by windows · · Score: 5

    Other information on this project can be found here, here (Caltech), or here. This link to Princeton University seems to explain the project much better, at least to me.