CMB Anomalies: An Enduring "Wrong Way" Sign to Cosmologists

 It is sometimes said that the cosmic microwave background or CMB dates from the beginning of the universe. But in reality it dates from a time about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, a time called the Epoch of Recombination. 

What are called CMB anomalies are unexpected features in the cosmic background radiation that pervades all of space. The cosmic background radiation is also called the cosmic microwave background or CMB. Using their existing theories about the universe and its beginning, cosmologists (the scientists who study the universe as  whole) expect the cosmic background radiation to have particular qualities.  CMB anomalies are features in the cosmic background radiation that defy such expectations, hinting that cosmologists have got things wrong in some major way. 

My last major post on the topic of CMB anomalies was a 2017 post entitled "Shocking CMB Anomalies Contradict Guth's 'Empirical Success' Claims."  Below is a quote from that post:

"The first satellite to observe in detail the cosmic background radiation was the WMAP satellite launched in 2001. This satellite detected some very strange anomalies in the cosmic background radiation, anomalies that came as a surprise to scientists. One was an anomaly called the cosmic cold spot. Another was an anomaly that is technically known as the hemispherical variance asymmetry. Then there is an anomaly called the quadrupole-octopole alignment. There are nine other anomalies in the cosmic background radiation that are summarized in a table in this scientific paper. The table is below:

The p-values here give us a rough idea of the probability of finding such anomalies if standard ideas of cosmology (including cosmic inflation and dark matter) are correct.....Years after the WMAP satellite was launched, scientists launched another satellite called the Planck satellite. It was predicted that the troubling anomalies in the cosmic background radiation would go away after the more powerful Planck satellite did its work. But that did not happen. The Planck team reported the same anomalies. The table above is from a paper entitled, 'CMB Anomalies After Planck.' ”

A 2010 paper states the following about these anomalies in the cosmic background radiation:

"While not all of these alignments are statistically independent, their combined statistical significance is certainly greater than their individual significances. For example, given their mutual alignments, the conditional probability of the four normals lying so close to the ecliptic, is less than 2%; the combined probability of the four normals being both so aligned with each other and so close to the ecliptic is less than 0.4% × 2% = 0.008%. These are therefore clearly surprising, highly statistically significant anomalies — unexpected in the standard inflationary theory and the accepted cosmological model.

This is a probability of less than 1 in 10,000 under the assumptions of the theory of primordial cosmic inflation and the accepted cosmological model.

The quotes above are mainly from my 2017 post. What has happened in recent years in regard to these CMB anomalies? They seem to have mostly persisted. Recently a cosmologist named Subir Sarkar wrote an article discussing a paper he co-authored about one of these CMB anomalies, called the cosmic dipole anomaly. He wrote this, using CDM to refer to "cold dark matter":

"The cosmic dipole anomaly has thus established itself as a major challenge to the standard cosmological model, even if the astronomical community has chosen to largely ignore it. This may be because there is no easy way to patch up this problem. It requires abandoning not just the Lambda-CDM model but the FLRW description itself, and going back to square one."

Such talk about troubling anomalies and the possible overthrow of a prevailing paradigm reminds me of the theory of scientific revolutions presented by Thomas Kuhn in his much-referenced work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. According to Kuhn, there would arise among some large group of scientists a set of assumptions and belief traditions that Kuhn called a paradigm. But the paradigm might  be challenged by observations that conflicted with it, observations that Kuhn called anomalies. For a long time, conformist and habit-bound  scientists loyal to some prevailing paradigm would just ignore such anomalies, or try to "sweep them under the rug." But eventually the anomalies might become so abundant and so hard-to-ignore that there might occur a scientific revolution in which the old paradigm would be overthrown. The diagram below summarizes such ideas:

The corresponding scientific paper co-authored by Sarkar is a recent work that will be hard for the layman to read. There is one passage that is very noteworthy, the passage below:

"The simple FLRW-based ΛCDM lambda cold cark matter] model has been so successful in fitting data. However one of its ‘simple’ parameters is the Cosmological Constant Λ which, interpreted as the energy density of the quantum vacuum, would require fine-tuning of two unrelated terms to at least 60 decimal places to enable the Universe to exist in its present form. It is clear that simplicity is in the eye of the beholder." 

What does this reference to " fine-tuning of two unrelated terms to at least 60 decimal places" refer to? It refers to a degree of coincidental luck that you would have if you guessed the ten-digit phone numbers of six strangers visiting from very far away, and correctly guessed perfectly all of their phone numbers. My widely-read post here discusses the topic in greater detail. 

The fine-tuning referred to is only one of many examples of very precise fine-tuning revealed by physics and cosmology. Another one is a very precise fine-tuning involving the initial expansion rate of the universe. Cosmologists said the initial expansion rate of the universe must have been fine-tuned to about 50 decimal places, or we would not end up with a universe like the universe we have. They were so horrified by this that they wasted 45 years on a "primordial cosmic inflation" speculation misadventure trying to explain away the fine-tuning, a speculation that has failed to be confirmed, and has flunked observational tests such as the search for primordial b-modes. It is this very "primordial cosmic inflation" speculation regime that is discredited by the CMB anomalies mentioned above, which should not exist if such "primordial cosmic inflation" speculations are correct, as I explain in my 2017 post. 

Then there is the exact equality of the absolute value of the charge on every proton and the absolute value of the charge on every electron, which experiments show match to 20 decimal places. Below is a relevant quote:

"A mere 1 percent offset between the charge of the electron and that of the proton would lead to a catastrophic repulsion....My entire body would dissolve in a massive explosion...The very Earth itself, the planet as a whole, would crack open and fly apart in an annihilating explosion...This is what would happen were the electron's charge to exceed the proton's by 1 percent. The opposite case, in which the proton's charge exceeded the electron's, would lead to the identical situation...How precise must the balance be?...Relatively small things like atoms, people and the like would fly apart if the charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Larger structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." -- Astronomy professor emeritus George Greenstein, "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos," pages 63-64. 

You might think that physicists and cosmologists would be smart enough to put two and two together here. But mostly they act like the "Wheel of Fortune" contestant in the visual below.