https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230970-700-cosmic-coincidences-everything-points-in-one-direction/

"COSMOLOGISTS called it the axis of evil. Spotted in 2005 in the cosmic microwave background, the all-pervading afterglow of the big bang, the axis was a peculiar alignment of features where we would have expected nothing but randomness.

The name was justifiably melodramatic, given that it threatened our established view of the universe. At the heart of that picture is the cosmological principle, which says that the universe appears the same on the largest scales no matter where you happen to be looking. This is what you’d expect in the aftermath of an explosion like our big bang, with all the constituents winding up mixed together in a randomised, homogeneous soup. The reality, it seemed, wasn’t like that – and despite steadily improving measurements, the axis has stubbornly refused to vanish.

“This would be not just an axis of evil, but an axis of everything“"

End quote

If the Axis of Everything
is anything,
this changes Everything

You think you're sitting still right now.
But in reality, you're moving 600km/s South, towards Aquarius, Away from Leo, along with the rest of us, including the entire Milky Way galaxy and the 1,000 closest galaxies to her, in the universe, towards the Great Attractor.
That's 1.34 million mph, 1/500th the speed of light.

About the same chance of the plane of our solar system aligning with the "Axis of Everything", the Rainbow Dipole

"This dipole was the result of our Galaxy moving at 600 km/sec with respect to the CMB radiation, and it is now known that this reflects the motion of the Local Group of galaxies towards the Great Attractor."

https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/c/Cosmic+Microwave+Background+Dipole



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2024 05:02PM by schrodingerscat.

Oooooommmmm. . .

Oooooommmmm. . .

. . .

--Rig Veda, Book I, Verse 164

Is it a coincidence?

Very possibly.

After all, the Rig Veda tells us that the universe is held in place by a cosmic banyan tree (on a golden mountain called "meru" reaching from earth to the North Star, where Varuna resides) whose air roots are tied to each and every celestial body.

But you knew that, didn't you.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/06/2024 03:48PM by Lot's Wife.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Oooooommmmm. . .
>
> Oooooommmmm. . .
>
> . . .
>
> --Rig Veda, Book I, Verse 164


Have you read the Rig Veda? Asking because I’m looking for a good translation as well as a concordance, if one exists, and commentary.

Yes. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it since it's arcane beyond belief and does not represent the psychological and religious beauty that one sees in later Indian "religions."

The Atharvaveda documents the fusion of the Harappan/Indus River Valley culture with the first wave of Indo-Iranians around 1600 BCE. It tells you, for instance, how the horse is supposed to copulate with the queen before you kill the surrogate king at the new year celebration.

The Rig Veda, which documents the rituals of the second wave of Indo-Iranians and their compromises with the first wave, is more humane but equally obtuse. On the one hand, it describes the horse and water buffalo sacrifices while, on the other, arguing against the routine practice of feeding your firstborn to crocodiles in the hope of getting more babies in the future.

So unless you're passionate about the relationship between Indra and Vac, I'd recommend the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, etc. It took centuries for the mixture of Harappan ideas and practices and Indic philosophy to produce the beautiful, and largely doctrine-free, systems of thought that are so refreshing today.

Sold!

Do you have any favorite translations?

ETA You might like “The Saint of Bright Doors” by Vajra Chandrasekera.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/06/2024 05:56PM by Beth.

Of which? RV or Athavarveda or the Gita and Upanishads?

The one you think I should read first after I master this cricket nonsense.

There are many different versions, but the places to start are

1) Stephen Mitchell's BG. He takes liberties to simplify some of the convoluted parts, producing a result that is 95% correct and much clearer to modern readers.

2) The Penguin volume of Upanishads. That edition is fifty or so years old, but it is perfectly adequate and the selection (you probably don't want to read the full 1,000+ Upanishads) is very good.

Thank you so much!

An additional question. Your choice should depend in part on which format is more appealing, for the books are radically different.

The Gita is an epic, part of the Mahabharata, that reads like the Odyssey or the Journey to the West or perhaps Beowulf. It's the tale of Krishna leading Arjuna in a war (probably based on the ancient war of the RV culture against its enemies in the Indus and Ganges valleys) that metaphorically discusses the nature of life and death. The images and the poetry are stunning.

The Upanishads are much shorter pieces, a few pages each, that are really aids to meditation. Imagery, ultimate reality, the means to achieve inner peace.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/06/2024 06:13PM by Lot's Wife.

I’m down with epics.

Adding more because I am riled up.

One of the splendid things about the Mahabharata and the earlier Rig Veda is the imagery. (For context, I am someone who thinks the mythology and imagery of the Old Testament is fascinating.). Some of those ancient Indian epics reach far into modern culture, even popular culture, either directly or because they touch upon universal human preoccupations.

Two pop examples.

1) Rig Veda, water buffalo sacrifice. The people gather before a god (actually, a human being representing the god). There is music, body painting with mud and red substances, increasing intense dancing with sexual overtones, and then a priest, who approaches the tethered water buffalo and slams down a sword severing the animals neck as it crumbles to the ground, a sacrifice to the god, its bright red blood spreading and symbolically fertilizing the Mother Goddess which is the earth. Then the priest himself is sacrificed, for he too is part of the cycle of god's birth and death.

Intentionally or not, that is a very good description of the final scene in Apocalypse Now, when the water buffalo is slaughtered just as a painted Marlow (Martin Sheen) assassinates the man-god Kurtz (Brando). I would not be surprised if the writers of that movie were familiar with the water buffalo ritual as it might have been practiced in Indo-China centuries earlier.

2) True nerds have all seen Ridley Scott's Prometheus. In it the alien/god drinks a substance that kills his body, which dissolves and spreads with the water around the earth spawning life. Something similar occurs in the Rig Veda. The creator God, Prajapati, lies down with his limbs extended and then severed into pieces from which the various forms the universe emerge. Ultimately he returns to life after the sacrifice of his firstborn son, initiating the cycle a second time.

It seems to me a bigger stretch to infer that Prometheus's writers knew of the ancient Indian myth, but perhaps they did. And the imagery is similar whether or not there is an substantive connection.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/06/2024 06:53PM by Lot's Wife.

Could be God's butt crack. He's very old.

"Cosmologist Jonah Miller at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, is intrigued but sceptical of its significance. “Studying the axis of evil is certainly worthwhile. However, I don’t believe it represents a major gap in our understanding of early-universe cosmology.” He thinks the axis is just an example of what happens when you look at random data: familiar patterns will emerge by sheer chance, signifying nothing."

>But in reality, you're moving 600km/s South, towards Aquarius, Away from Leo, along with the rest of us, including the entire Milky Way galaxy and the 1,000 closest galaxies to her, in the universe, towards the Great Attractor.
That's 1.34 million mph, 1/500th the speed of light.

In the words of an astrophysicist:

"Dark energy and the present expansion of the Universe is not only stronger than the attractive pull of the local supercluster, it's not even a contest. The peculiar velocity, or the departure from the Hubble expansion, is only about 20% of what it would need to be to bind us to this large structure. In fact, the structure itself isn't even bound; this supercluster is only an apparent structure, and as the Universe evolves, Laniakea itself will dissociate.

So the full answer to your question, Bob, is that we are being pulled towards Laniakea, towards the "Great Attractor," but the force we're being pulled with is woefully insufficient to cause us to fall in. All it can cause is for the supercluster to accelerate away from us at a somewhat lower rate than average, and to remain within our reach for a few billion years longer than an equidistant galaxy on the opposite side of the sky. Laniakea is real and massive, but it's also temporary, and it's not massive enough to hold itself together or to eventually pull us in. The fate of our local group is a lonely one after all."


https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/07/23/ask-ethan-will-the-great-attractor-defeat-dark-energy/?sh=616bc32c7b77

Wow. Let me get this straight.

If you're on a train moving away from Chicago at 100 mph and then a strong wind comes from the front and reduces your speed to 90 mph, you're still moving away from Chicago?

Who would have thought?!

Poster [|] gave the relevant information that El Gato had conveniently left out of his post, because it didn't match his narrative that the Great Attractor is this immense force that is sucking thousands of galaxies in. In fact, we are actually moving away from the Great Attractor.

I'd like to make a few other observations.

First, the Great Attractor is Great in the same sense that WWI was referred to as the Great War. The people who named it the Great War didn't realize that a much bigger war was about to happen only a couple decades later. Similarly, the Great Attractor is great only in the sense that it is the first supercluster attractor that we found. We now know of others.

Second, El Gato keeps saying that the Milky Way is moving toward the Great Attractor at 600 km/sec. He helpfully converts that to 1.3 million mph, that being a much bigger, and therefor more impressive number.

600 km/sec is not nothing, but it is not that fast either. The Milky Way is slowly rotating, and our solar system along with it. We are rotating at 230 km/sec about the center of the Milky Way. Due to Hubble expansion, almost all of the observable universe is moving away from us at speeds that dwarf 600 km/sec. At the fringes of the observable universe, galaxies are moving away from us at near the speed of light. Beyond the edge of the observable universe, the galaxies are moving away from us at faster than the speed of light, which is why they are not observable. BTW, yes, galaxies can't move faster than the speed of light, but space itself can expand faster than the speed of light. Long story.

Third, El Gato also breathlessly exclaims that 600 km/sec is 1/500th of the speed of light. That is correct, but so what? There are all manner of objects in the universe that are moving faster than that relative to each other.

Just for sh*ts and giggles, let's assume the Great Attractor is not moving away from us, it is stationary in space relative to us, and we are indeed moving toward it at 600 km/sec. [N.B. that that is not true. It is moving away from us]

The current estimate of the distance from us to the Great Attractor is 250 million light years (MLY). That means it takes 250 million years for light to get from here to there. OK. So how long would it take the Milky Way to get there at 600 km/sec?

That's easy. If it takes light 250 million years to get there, and we are traveling at 1/500th of the speed of light, it will take us 500 times longer.

So, 250 million years * 500 = 125,000 million years, or 125 billion years.

Talk about a slow boat to China. Our solar system is only about 4.5 billion years old. The entire universe is only 13.8 billion years old. Yet it is going to take us around ten times the entire current life of the universe to reach the Great Attractor? Not very impressive.

That is kind of misleading, because if we were actually being sucked toward the Great Attractor, we would pick up speed as time went on, so it wouldn't actually take 125 billion years. But it would take tens of billions, enough time that our sun would definitely be dead, along with most of the rest of the Milky Way.

Fourth, let's put some numbers to [|]'s statement that we are not gravitationally bound to the Great Attractor and in fact are moving away from it at a considerably greater speed than 600 km/sec.

Distance of Milky Way to Great Attractor: current estimate is 250 MLY.

Hubble Constant for expansion of universe: 67 km/sec/Megaparsec (Mpc). Note that there is a competing value for the Hubble Constant of 73 km/s/Mpc. Either value is close enough for this exercise. I'm going with the 67 value.

Why are they using Megaparsecs instead of light years? Hell if I know, but a Megaparsec is 3.26 MLY, So the distance from us to the GA is 250 / 3.26 = 76.7 Mpc, round to 77. Close enough

So the theoretical Hubble Expansion rate between the Milky Way and the Great Attractor is simply the Hubble constant times the distance in Megaparsecs, or 67 km/s/Mpc * 77 Mpc = 5,160 km/sec

The actual measured velocity that it is moving away from us is 600 km/s less, or 4,560.

We are never ever ever ever going to get sucked into the Great Attractor. It is moving away from us, and that movement will accelerate over time.

So long, and thanks for all the fish. ;)



Prediction: 6 months from now, El Gato will repost his ominous sounding explanation of the Great Attractor, sucking us in at 600 km/sec, like we are supposed to wet our pants of something. All of the information that [|] and I have posted (more than once, I might add) will be ignored.

Thanks for ruining the image of a Universe being sucked down a drain.

None of which answers the question,
Is it a coincidence that our solar system aligns exactly with the axis of the Dipole CMB?

It will all be answered in the next life.

I didn't say anything at all about the axis of the dipole CMB. I was commenting on the boilerplate misinformation you added about the Great Attractor, which you like to throw out there every few months.

I couldn't read the entire article you linked to in New Scientist without subscribing, so didn't read it all. One scientist in the portion I could read did say that the alignment of the plane of the solar system with the perceived axis of the CMB could indeed be random coincidence. That would be my position too, unless there is some evidence that indicated it was not random.

The article is nearly 8 years old. I'll take the fact that there has not been much if any recent news about this as evidence that there is no new evidence showing that it is other than a random correlation.

The google god did come up with a wikipedia article. Yeah, them again, but they don't try to make me subscribe. Anyway, from the article:

Chief scientist from WMAP, Charles L. Bennett suggested coincidence and human psychology were involved, "I do think there is a bit of a psychological effect, people want to find unusual things."[16]

Data from the Planck Telescope published in 2013 has since found stronger evidence for the anisotropy.[17] "For a long time, part of the community was hoping that this would go away, but it hasn't", says Dominik Schwarz of the University of Bielefeld in Germany.[18]

In 2015, there was no consensus on the nature of this and other observed anomalies[19] and their statistical significance is unclear. For example, a study that includes the Planck mission results shows how masking techniques could introduce errors that when taken into account can render several anomalies, including the axis of evil, not statistically significant.[20] A 2016 study compared isotropic and anisotropic cosmological models against WMAP and Planck data and found no evidence for anisotropy.[21]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil_(cosmology)

". . . no evidence for anisotropy. . ."

D'oh!

Damn. You made me look it up. And the definition did not help at all.

I had to look it up too. I guess the question is whether there is sufficient anisotropy for such a macro structure to exist.

As I tell my children, "how can you have any pudding if you don't eat your anisotropy?"

I am still trying to make sense of the apparent fact that a person standing at the South Pole is perpendicular to a person standing at the equator and upside down relative to a person standing at Santa's workshop!!

Maybe concerns of this nature help make the Flat Earth theory a popular concept...

Also, how fast would the Earth have to be spinning to keep blood from pooling in our feet?  I betcha that's how fast the Celestial Kingdom is spinning!!

>Also, how fast would the Earth have to be spinning to keep blood from pooling in our feet? I betcha that's how fast the Celestial Kingdom is spinning!!

The rotational speed to keep your blood from pooling would depend on how much tendency there is for your blood to pool. And of course the question is moot for people like Kristi Noel who appear to be bloodless.

18,000 mph or less. 18K is escape velocity, so at the speed, your weight is zero.

The rotational velocity of the earth at the equator is about 1000 mph. The rotational velocity is zero at the poles. Well, not quite zero. you turn in a stationary circle once per day.

In any case, the earth's rotation is used to add velocity to a rocket being launched into orbit. That's why the Kennedy Space Center is in Florida, and France launches their rockets from French Guiana rather than France proper. Closer to the equator. The rocket gets nearly a thousand mph worth of orbital speed for free. That assumes they point the rocket to the east.

Question: there is a space launch facility in Sweden. Why? Turns out there are quite a few instances where they want a satellite to go into a polar or close to polar orbit. It takes a whole bunch of energy (i.e. fuel) to twist an equatorial orbit into a polar orbit. It turns out to be cheaper to launch into a polar orbit in the first place, even if that means giving up the rotational boost near the equator.

Final tidbit: you can actually measure the difference the rotational boost gives, even at human, bathroom scale accuracy. If a jet is flying east at the equator, and does a u-turn and flies west, both directions at about 500 mph, a 200 pound person would weigh about a pound less in the east direction of the flight. That person would still have the exact same mass, so their clothes would not fit any better. ;)

What I'm reading in that last paragraph is that it's possible to eat a pound of food and not show a gain in weight!!!!

True, but your clothes will still fit less well. And eventually the plane has to land, and the weight returns. Physics has no sense of accomodation or humor.

A dog trying to scratch his ear in zero gravity would be funny.

French Guiana is the spaceport closest to the equator, and a rocket is rotating at 460 m/sec just by sitting on the ground there. French Guiana is where the European Space Agency launches their rockets too.

I looked that up just for El Gato. ;)

You have probably heard of the equatorial bulge caused by the earth's rotation. The radius of the earth is about 4,000 miles, and it is 13 miles longer at the equator than at the poles. That's about a 70,000 foot bulge, which is actually quite a lot, when you consider that the combined gravity of the sun and the moon only adds roughly another 3 feet to the bulge in tidal bulge. The centrifugal bulge is enormous, but it is also constant. We notice the tides because they come and go every few hours.

Anyway, fun fact: Minneapolis is about 10,000 feet closer to the center of the earth than New Orleans. That means (brace yourself, this is a biggie) that the Mississippi River does not flow downhill because of gravity. It flows uphill because of centrifugal force. The river is farther from the center of the earth at New Orleans. [Edit to Add: The world's oceans move uphill even faster than the Mississippi River, which is why it eventually reaches "sea level" in the Gulf of Mexico. The river flowed uphill, but the ocean rose to meet it.]


BTW, if you read somewhere that centrifugal force is not really a force, but a perceptual distortion caused by making your measurements from a rotating frame of reference, that is true, but centrifugal force feels like a force when you are pushed to the side of a car making a turn, looks like a force, and all the equations that deal with real forces can be made to work with this centrifugal force illusion, so for ordinary life experience (after all, we are pretty much stuck on a rotating frame of reference, the earth) it's OK to think of centrifugal force as real.

Bemis codicil:
Think of centrifugal force like free will. Even if it is a complete illusion, we can think of it as real, and everything works as we expect. :))



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/06/2024 06:47PM by Brother Of Jerry.

"BTW, if you read somewhere that centrifugal force is not really a force, but a perceptual distortion caused by making your measurements from a rotating frame of reference, that is true,"

COMMENT: No its not! The *effects* of centrifugal "forces" are part of physical reality, and as such must be explained, notwithstanding the fact that they are only *felt* by someone in a rotating frame of reference. How such "fictitious" or as sometimes called "pseudo" forces are characterized within physics does not mitigate nor deny the reality of the corresponding physical effects as observable with respect to rotating objects and as experienced by rotating human observers.

So the so-called 'centrifugal force' is manifestly NOT merely a perceptual distortion. After all, as you point out, anyone in a moving car making a turn, or someone riding on the "Graviton" amusement park ride (where they are rotated at high speed and feel their back pressing against the outer wall of the ride) knows this beyond any question. Denying it or claiming that it is merely a distortion or "illusion" is just absurd.
_____________________________________

"but centrifugal force feels like a force when you are pushed to the side of a car making a turn, looks like a force, and all the equations that deal with real forces can be made to work with this centrifugal force illusion, so for ordinary life experience (after all, we are pretty much stuck on a rotating frame of reference, the earth) it's OK to think of centrifugal force as real."

COMMENT: The errors here are legion! Again, the effects of rotating motion are real (as you seem now to admit), and as such must be explained in physics. They are explained not by appeal to classical forces, like gravity, but by appeal to *acceleration*. As per Newton's first law, an object in motion tends to travel in a straight line with constant velocity, absent some force creating acceleration. In a rotating frame, there is constant acceleration directed toward the center or focal point of the rotating system, and not outward. (This inward force is called the centripetal force) So, how then is this outward (centrifugal) force explained? Basically, it is the resistance of the otherwise tendency of straight-line motion of a body (Newton's first law) to the acceleration of the rotating frame. It is that resistance which causes outward effects if the inward force is somehow broken or suspended.

The most seriously flawed part of your explanation, however, is the invocation of an "illusion." Other than through an occasional thought experiment, the science of Physics is not concerned about illusions, which are a matter for psychology. (Check the index of your physics textbook!) In any event, there is no illusion here, the passengers in a turning car, or riders on the Graviton are NOT suffering from any illusions. What they feel are real forces, or effects, explainable by the laws of physics--but just not by Newtonian "forces." So, it is not only O.K. to think of centrifugal forces as real, they *are* real -- in every sense of the word. They just are not "forces" within the theory of classical physics. (I will note further than in modern field theory, all classical forces are replaced by the principle of least action. (Lagrangian mechanics) So, in that sense, all forces are fictitious!

Here is a quote from Richard Feynmann in his Lectures on Physics, under the heading "Pseudo forces."

* * * * *

"Another example of pseudo force is what is often called -'centrifugal force.' An observer in a rotating coordinate system, e.g. in a rotating box, will find mysterious forces, not accounted for by any known origin of force, throwing things outward toward the walls. These forces are due merely to the fact that the observer does not have Newton's coordinate system, which is the simplest coordinate system." [HB: In other words, they happen because of the rotating frame of reference of the observer.]

"One very important feature of pseudo forces is that they are always proportional to the masses; the same is true of gravity. The possibility exists, therefore, that *gravity itself is a pseudo force.* Is it not possible that perhaps gravitation is due simply to the fact that we do not have the right coordinate system? After all, we can always get a force proportional to the mass if we imagine that a body is accelerating. For instance, a man shut up in a box that is standing still on the earth finds himself held to the floor of the box with a certain force that is proportional to his mass. But if there were no earth at all and the box were standing still, the man inside would float in space. [HB: If the gravitational force of the earth were suddenly removed.] On the other hand, if there were no earth at all and something were *pulling* the box along with acceleration g, then the man in the box, analyzing physics, would find a pseudo force which would pull him to the floor, just as gravity does."

"Einstein put forward the famous hypothesis that accelerations give an imitation of gravitation, that the forces of acceleration (the pseudo forces) *cannot be distinguished* from those of gravity; it is not possible to tell how much of a given force is gravity and how much is pseudo force."

* * * * *

HB: In other words, pseudo forces are real, and whether you characterize such effects as due to acceleration (pseudo force), or gravity (classical force) depends upon your characterization of reference frames.
__________________________________

Bemis codicil:
Think of centrifugal force like free will. Even if it is a complete illusion, we can think of it as real, and everything works as we expect. :))

COMMENT: The fact that you tried to equate your misguided account of centrifugal forces as "illusions" with the free will debate is laughable. Such a comparison actually works against you. Just as centrifugal forces describe real physical phenomena manifested in human experience, and thus are not illusions; the experience of free will also describes real phenomena of human experience, and it also is not an illusion.

Nice try! (As they say. :))

By the way, I *do* appreciate your other contributions to this thread, of which I have no quarrel.