Can a Local Pancake Defeat the Axis of Evil?
In the past few years, astronomers and physicists have finally nailed down some of the basics of the universe. They have figured out its age, at about 14 billion years; they have determined how it started, apparently coming out of a speck of empty space, in a ridiculously brief age of exponential growth called inflation; and they have calculated with great confidence that they don’t have a clue what 95 percent of the universe is made of. That is real progress: at least, now scientists know exactly how much they don’t know.Much of the new age of precision cosmology is founded on the shots of the baby universe that came from a NASA orbiting microwave telescope called WMAP, whose 2003 results were hailed breakthrough of the year by Science magazine. But two problems with the standard cosmology emerged later, in 2004 (see also New Scientist, 11 December 2004). I didn’t pay too much attention to these claims until I read an article in the August issue of Scientific American by Glenn Starkma
