I came across this video about how a graduate student took a survey of the sky and determined that the universe is smooth or uniform, not clustered or fractal, at very large scales.
I found it on an astronomy site as the first hit that come up when I typed into google "how did we get the really big picture of the universe". I watched it but didn't understand it too well except that I was really confused by what she said at the end since I'd been expecting her to say the universe was clustered. The third hit was from ScienceDaily.com and I read it with interest. It's very interesting and I wonder if I'm the only one that disagrees with their conclusion.
Apparently, for the standard model to be valid right now as a basis for predicting material movements, we must assume that matter becomes smooth on the very large levels. If matter doesn't become smooth and instead continues to be clustered, then there will have to be some major rewriting of the laws of physics.
Is this image clustered or uniform? Here's the sciencedaily article about it Big Picture of the Universe Confirmed
I found it on an astronomy site as the first hit that come up when I typed into google "how did we get the really big picture of the universe". I watched it but didn't understand it too well except that I was really confused by what she said at the end since I'd been expecting her to say the universe was clustered. The third hit was from ScienceDaily.com and I read it with interest. It's very interesting and I wonder if I'm the only one that disagrees with their conclusion.
Apparently, for the standard model to be valid right now as a basis for predicting material movements, we must assume that matter becomes smooth on the very large levels. If matter doesn't become smooth and instead continues to be clustered, then there will have to be some major rewriting of the laws of physics.
Is this image clustered or uniform? Here's the sciencedaily article about it Big Picture of the Universe Confirmed