NOT JUST GEOCENTRIC, HOMOCENTRIC:

Oh, for the Simple Days of the Big Bang (GEORGE JOHNSON, 10/08/06, NY Times)

FOURTEEN years ago, when a Berkeley astronomer named George F. Smoot declared that he and his satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, had detected the astrophysical equivalent of the fingerprints of God, his euphoria was easy to understand. [...]

The creation story supported by the data from the COBE satellite had seemed almost tantalizingly complete. Dr. Smoot’s smudges themselves weren’t sticky enough to gather particles into globs the size of the Milky Way or the Virgo supercluster. But if you spiked the Big Bang with an invisible additive called dark matter — a clumping factor — and hot-rodded the theory with a brief, early burst of rapid expansion called cosmological inflation, you could get the tiny irregularities in the background radiation to sprawl into something like today’s sky.

If only it had been that simple. Six years after COBE, another Berkeley scientist, Saul Perlmutter, found something that almost no one had expected. By now, it was assumed, the universe should have settled down, expanding at a steady pace or even slowing, braked by its own gravity. Instead it appeared to be in overdrive, not ballooning as violently as it had in the inflationary era but expanding at a faster and faster rate. Something seemed to be pushing on the accelerator — what has come to be called dark energy, a mysterious kind of anti-gravity.

Shoehorning the new ingredient into the prevailing framework has created new Nobel-sized problems. Basic physics predicts that if it exists at all, this repulsive force should be extremely large. Instead, the dark energy is infinitesimal and no one has been able to say why.

Except, that is, for followers of a controversial doctrine called the anthropic principle. There is no fundamental reason, they say, why the dark energy is so weak. It is just that if it were much stronger, space would have expanded too rapidly to harbor stars and, ultimately, life. The implication is that there is a multitude of possible universes, each with its own physics. Naturally, we are in one where it is possible for us to exist.

It's easy to see why the Rationalists became deranged, all that work to distance themselves from the Creator and they end up right back at Creation.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 10, 2006 11:35 PM