Shape of the Universe Determined To Be Really, Really Flat

StartsWithABang writes: You might imagine all sorts of possibilities for how the Universe could have been shaped: positively curved like a higher-dimensional sphere, negatively curved like a higher-dimensional saddle, folded back on itself like a donut/torus, or spatially flat on the largest scales, like a giant Cartesian grid. Yet only one of these possibilities matches up with our observations, something we can probe simply by using our knowledge of how light travels in both flat and curved space, and measuring the CMB, the source of the most distant light in the Universe. The result? A Universe that's so incredibly flat, it's indistinguishable from perfection. Which means it's probably even flatter than Kansas.

Comments

Re:Kansas isn't even remotely flat

[lgw]

Kansas by all accounts defies spherical topology to achieve the Platonic Ideal of flat. The universe is just a shadow of Kansas seen on a cave wall.

Re:Let's just humour them

[Ol Olsoc]

Everything is just speculation from unimaginative scientists who think they know what happened 14 billion years ago at some random spot that they can't even point their finger in the general direction of.

Good grief, no. Where does this idea of science ultra orthodoxy come from? I haven't worked directly with any cosmologists, but every one says "This is what we think happened. "Know" is a completely different thing, and the only people who "know" how the universe was created use a reference book from the middle east, therefore around 4004 b.c.e.