ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 26, 1997 TAG: 9704280042
SECTION: NATL\INTL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Researchers who developed the new concept continue to defend it, saying it is correct.
Scientists don't know which end is up anymore.
Just a few days after a pair of physicists claimed to have found an ``up'' and a ``down'' to the universe, their colleagues may have found an analytical flaw that could restore some degree of chaos to the cosmos.
Monday's issue of Physical Review Letters contained a paper by Borge Nodland of the University of Rochester and John Ralston of the University of Kansas, who reported a subtle pattern in the radio waves coming from distant galaxies. Radio signals coming from one direction - the constellation Sextans - appeared ever so slightly different from the ones originating 90 degrees away in the sky.
``That indicates that not all directions are equal,'' Nodland said in an interview last week.
If that's true, then physicists have a lot of explaining to do. Their basic laws rely on the assumption that the universe looks more or less the same no matter which direction you're facing.
Such a find would have profound implications, requiring the existence of hitherto unknown particles, changes in the laws of electromagnetism or some other unsavory physical explanation.
To the rescue come Daniel Eisenstein and Emory Bunn, two of many researchers who have challenged their colleagues' bold assumption.
Bunn, a professor at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and Eisenstein, a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., charge that Nodland and Ralston made one incorrect assumption in their analysis.
Nodland and Ralston looked at polarized radio waves, which oscillate in only one direction. That direction at the moment when the light starts its journey from one of those distant galaxies is very important to the subsequent analysis. And Eisenstein and Bunn claim Nodland and Ralston didn't correctly take this into account.
When you correct for that error, the evidence of directionality in the universe diminishes and probably disappears completely, Eisenstein and Bunn said.
Ralston insisted that he and Nodland did indeed account for the polarization direction correctly. And besides, he argued, such a mistake would only intensify the directional signal they detected.
``It's not something we missed,'' Ralston said. ``These guys seem to have drawn a very rash deduction.''
LENGTH: Medium: 55 linesby CNB