At 07:18 PM 10/9/03, asimovd@aol.com wrote:
I just heard a report on an NPR station -- it was probably BBC news -- in which freelance mathematician Jeff Weeks (who wrote the book "The Shape of Space") was being interviewed after he had announced that the spatial universe is finite. There was not enough time allotted for him to give even a brief layperson's sketch of his reasoning.
But it seemed to have something to do with the fluctuations in the background radiation from the Big Bang having bounded wavelengths.
Does anyone know more about this research? Or where it might be written up?
I saw a similar squib on CNN.com this afternoon. New Scientist (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994250) and the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/08/science/08CND-COSMOS.html) have longer write-ups, but still not much technical detail. (Why do they all describe a dodecahedron as the shape of a soccer ball? Most soccer balls have 32 faces.) A key point made in both articles is that Weeks' hypothesis makes predictions that others claim are not supported by the data. More analysis is in progress. -- Fred W. Helenius <fredh@ix.netcom.com> Integral triangle description predictions continued unnoticed.