Copernican Principle - Modern Tests

Modern Tests

From the PhysicsWorld.org news article "New tests of the Copernican Principle proposed,"

Robert Caldwell from Dartmouth College and Albert Stebbins from Fermi National Laboratory in the US explain how the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation spectrum — an all pervasive sea of microwave radiation originating just 380 000 years after the Big Bang — could be used to test whether the Copernican Principle stands. In a separate paper, Jean-Philippe Uzan from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in France along with Chris Clarkson and George Ellis from the University of Cape Town in South Africa suggest another way to test the Copernican Principle. Their scheme involves measuring the red-shift of galaxies — the shift in wavelength of light to longer wavelengths due to a speedup — very precisely over time to see if there are changes. The team argues that this red-shift data can be combined with measurements of the distance of the galaxies to infer if the universe is spatially homogeneous — which is a tenet of the Copernican Principle.