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New evidence for a rotating cosmos

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In an email addressed to CRSnet, et. al, Dr Humphreys wrote the following on April 29, 1997:

[Reprinted here with his permission]

Dear CRSnet people and other recipients:

New evidence suggests that the universe is rotating! This weighs against Big-bang cosmologies, but it strongly supports creationist cosmologies. There is also evidence that the evolutionist establishment doesn't want you to know about the new evidence --- see last paragraph.

Since I'm not currently receiving mail from CRSnet, I don't know if you're already aware of this news. It is so significant that you are bound to hear echoes of it sooner or later, so here is a preliminary alert about it.

The April 21, 1997 issue of *Physical Review Letters* (on the web, search for "American Institute of Physics") has an article (pp. 3043-3046) by physicists Borge Nodland and John Ralston titled, "Indication of anisotropy in electromagnetic propagation over cosmological distances." It is a well-done article reporting a systematic angle difference, beta, between the polarization of radio waves from distant galaxies and the long axis of the elliptical optical images from those galaxies.

The observed angle beta appears to depend on the distance r of each galaxy from us (as determined by redshift factor z), a distance scale factor lambda, and on the direction angle gamma of each galaxy:

beta = 1/2 (r/lambda) cos(gamma)

The direction for which beta is greatest (ie., where gamma is zero) is toward the constellation Sextans. The authors compute beta *after* they subtract out the twisting due to cosmic magnetic fields in intergalactic plasma (the Faraday effect), which they can identify by looking at different wavelengths of the radio waves. Thus the effect they are seeing probably has nothing to do with large-scale magnetic fields in the cosmos.

The scale factor lambda is such that the maximum value of beta is about 10 degrees for each billion light-years of distance from us. The effect shows up most clearly for z's greater than 0.3 (l71 galaxies). The observed betas become negative when gamma gets larger than 90 degrees, just as the equation above suggests. The trends are pronounced enough to quench any reasonable dispute about statistics.

This new paper confirms an earlier report by P. Birch [*Nature* Vol. 298, 29 July 1982, pp. 451], whose data was not quite as clear, since Birch did not try to separate out the effect of distance and some other variables. Birch's suggestion that the whole universe is rotating caused a minor splash in the newspapers at that time. Later authors [Panov and Sbytov, Sov. Phys. JETP, Vol. 74, No. 3, March 1992, pp. 411-415] claimed that rotation (or "vorticity") in an unbounded Big-bang style universe (Goedel universe) would not cause an effect having a cos(gamma) dependence. However, they did acknowledge the validity of Birch's data set itself, saying, "to this day the [Birch] effect has not been convincingly refuted."

The authors of the new report, Nodland and Ralston, do not suggest rotation as a possible explanation, offering instead the possibility of a new effect whereby the vacuum itself would twist the polarization of radio waves to a degree depending on their direction of travel. They probably avoided rotation as an explanation because of reports like that of Panov and Sbytov.

However, I've been doing back-of-envelope calculations on this effect all week. (Envelope backs are the traditional media whereon all the best physics is done!) It is beginning to look to me as if the simplest explanation is a real rotation of all the mass in a bounded-mass cosmos around a common axis. Panov and Sbytov could not consider such a cosmos, because it violates the Copernican Principle (see my book, *Starlight and Time*, pp. 18-19, 86-89). But with reasonably slow rotation rates, and a mass and size of the order of what I assumed in my book (S&T, p. 105), my reckonings say that we would get the same r cosine dependence and same value for lamda as the observations suggest. In coming months I will check this out carefully to make sure I haven't slipped a decimal somewhere.

Big-bang theorists resist rotation around a common axis because it implies a center of mass, and thus a boundary on the mass of the cosmos. While this is not foreign to the popular MISconception of the Big-bang theory, it is anathema to the experts, who know the Big bang assumes there is no center or boundary for the mass in the cosmos. See my book if that information is new to you.

On the other hand, rotation is an expected feature of the cosmos I proposed (S&T, pp. 32-34, 36, 75-76, 123-124. That is why on pages 127-128 of my book I cited Birch's observations and "vestiges of rotation in the cosmos" as among the possible evidence to be expected for my theory. Also, the theory of orbiting galaxies proposed by Robert Gentry and later elaborated by J. K. West [*Creation Research Society Quarterly* Vol. 31, No. 2, Sept. 1994, pp. 78-88] might be modified to give a cosmos with net angular momentum; thus it could have a similar effect as my theory. So the recent evidence seems to support creationist theories and to hurt evolutionist ones.

Interestingly, it looks like someone high up in the evolutionist establishment may have reached the same conclusion. In contrast to what happened with Birch, the news about Nodland and Ralston's discovery did not trickle down to the newspaper level, not here at least. However, this morning the Associated Press quickly promulgated an unpublished criticism (one that, from the sketchy report, seems ill-founded) of the Nodland-Ralston paper. This difference in the speed of newspaper propagation for the two reports suggests to me that evolutionists are now quite sensitive to the negative implications of cosmic rotation for their cosmology. They want to suppress evidence for rotation and to hype evidence against it. That is what prompted me to get the word out to you.

In Christ our Creator,

Russ Humphreys

Published: 14 February 2006