According to New Scientist, Subir Sarkar, a professor at the University of Oxford, has unearthed evidence that our present understanding of cosmology is flawed. However, not everyone is on board.
"We are in a really unfortunate position," Sarkar told the online scientific source, "in that most of our colleagues don't even want to hear about it."
The cosmological principle, which states that the cosmos seems to be substantially the same no matter where you look, has been present since the 1500s in some form or another. Scientists like Sarkar now believe that the way our Milky Way travels through space may be interfering with our knowledge of the rest of the cosmos.
Our very small number of known galaxies, as well as our inability to determine exactly how far away they are, offers opportunity for speculation, according to Sarkar. When a solitary animal in a huge herd slows down, it appears like the rest of the herd is speeding away from it. In the same manner, it's plausible that the cosmos only appears to grow at a certain rate from Earth.
Sarkar isn't the first person to claim that our existing theories and laws for the universe are flawed. New Scientist stated in 2020 that the cosmos looked to be growing so much faster than we anticipated that it was incompatible with conventional physics concepts. Alexia Lopez of the University of Central Lancashire discovered a massive line of galaxies in 2021 that defied all norms and hypotheses.
Accepting that our present beliefs about the cosmos may be flawed would necessitate a significant reworking of existing theories, which many people are unwilling to accept right now, according to Sarkar. But if there's one thing we can be certain of, it's that our perceptions of the natural world usually turn out to be incorrect in retrospect.
