Cosmologist find "Axis of Evil"
 

Read all about it here.
More technical reading.
Possible explanation.
More on the shape of the universe.

Here is even a nice picture of what they are talking about:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mill1974/EGA...AP_tempF14.png

Basically the big hoopla is that the Universe is supposed to be perfectly random and you aren't supposed to be able to find pretty pictures if you do your statistical analysis right. Its relatively certain no giant mistakes have been made so it seems likely that the effect is either a problem with the data, throwing any conclusion in doubt, or an unexplained feature that pretty much kills all current cosmological theories. There is also some non-WMAP data that suggests this axis might actually exist. That's right folks cosmologist were so sure they were almost done with figuring out the beginning of the universe and now it might all be thrown out. Sound familiar?

Last I read though, there was problems with the random theory as it doesn't fully explain the formation of the universe. It was a while since I read papers on it and I'm not a cosmologist so I've forgotten all the terms (though I can go look them up) but apparentely the random theory couldn't explain the amount of matter and its uneven distribution in the universe (ie galaxies, ISMs) as it would lead to universal collapse. It had to be mitigated by factors such as the big bang being broken into a period of rapid ballooning type expansion with lots of cooling followed by a slow progression outward and these factors are still pretty odd.
There is some factor related to the matter of the universe and its distribution (possibly the l factor) which under the random theory needs to be perfectely balanced to prevent universal collapse and it hard to see why it should be always balanced. I remember one physicist tried to explain this factor with a variable speed of light theory in that over time light slowed down (I think, possibly the other way). It was interesting to say the least.
I totally need to read up on this stuff again though.

That particular scientist that has the variable light theory happens to be the co-author of the paper the proposed this "Axis of Evil" and the follow up paper I linked. The basic point of it was that everyone had assumed there either shouldn't be patterns or there should be rings showing that the universe was closed. That something completely unexpected was found pretty much forced cosmologist to look again at all the small problems they had with their theories and reconsider just how big they might actually be. Much like how black body radiation and the structure of the atom where supposed to be small problems which ended up rewriting a lot of theories.

Oh and under the assumption of basically any multiple universe theory the whole perfectly balanced requirement is essentially moot. In that, its no longer a matter of being very lucky it came out right and simply a matter of it had to happen and we are here because of that.

Well that would explain it. I've always been particularly fond of his work especially as he been doing stuff like this for quite a while and he convinced me of a lot of the problems with the current theories.

The multiple universe theory always seemed a little bit convienient to me. Especially as it's speculating on things that by our very nature we can't really speculate on.

Oddly enough that's what they used to say about the atom. Its one of the interesting repeating themes in science. Someone comes up with a nice new theory that is completely untestable by current technology and established physics. A few decades later or so a new scientist that really needs to find something to do looks at it to kill time and stumbles on some sort of proof no one thought of before.

I guess the point I'm making, and what this particular event illustrates for me is that, there are some very big open spots in our understanding of our nature and what we are. Enough so that we probably shouldn't be making judgment calls on what is and isn't worth researching based on it.

What I was getting at is that the problem with multiple universes is that they could lie outside an empirical system and thus empirical evidence could never establish their veracity. It would depend on how they were made up and relations between them. Theories I've read usually point towards each universe as a closed system which would imply a mathematical group thus rendering us unable to gain any conception outside of our group.

But I totally agree with your sentiments. I'm currentely working on chemical origin of life stuff right at the very basis of forming the building blocks of atoms. Casual observation would suggest we solved that decades ago.
And this article was totally interesting and one I didn't come across so thanks for that.

Can someone give this to me in captain dummy talk? it sounds really interesting but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it's application.

I find it extremely entertaining trying to read those articles as a biologist, but alas, after I glaze over the big scary statistical equations the text starts to make some sense.

Basically there was this big bang thing a long time ago that created the universe as we have it today. Since it'd be impossible to have a universe of our size if it had expanded at the speed of light since the "beginning", it is postulated that in the early fermimicropiconanoretardoseconds of the universe, it inflated at much much faster than the speed of light. Several years ago I was reading a cosmology book by Brian Greene who described the speed of inflation as something like the size of an atom becoming the size of our galaxy in the slightest fraction of a second.

Well we all supposed the process was completely random, or as I like to visualize it, even. Think of a little ball of matter or some crap as the early universe, that singularity people like to talk about. Well, it was an even little singularity right? If it was and went boom, inflating and such, we should get a pretty even distribution of this Cosmic Background Radiation (heat left from the big bang and so on) throughout the entire universe, even going backwards in time to seconds after the big bang.

This Axis of Evil (what a nice name too, eh?) is contesting that, which throws out the conventional inflation. Of course it's possible the AOE studies have errors, but I thought the way they talked about it in general to be rather scientifically poor in form (it was uhh...a statistical fluke, a 99.999% statistical fluke, yeah! Poppycock my dear Jeffery, tally ho!)

Possible explanations include:

1) observer bias (are we really measuring what we want to be measuring etc)
2) crude (in the grand perspective) instrumentation (these anomalies may disappear with finer measurement)
3) an uneven early universe (that little ball of matter was, say, not a perfect sphere as you might visualize it. Even the smallest quantum effects would be realized on a grand scale considering the magnitude of inflation, neh?),
4) uneven inflation (I dunno why)
5) We have no idea what the hell is going on and thinking we were getting close to understanding the nature of the universe in such a short period is a nice showcase of our naivety.

But consider this the interpretion from the mind of a biologist, since I could be completely off base. But if that's the case, it shouldn't be long before Sith or Barrel come in and correct me somewhere.

So if not 'big bang' then... Lots of little bangs?

I vote for option #5. We are about due for a new reversal in sceintific understanding.