The CMB and the 'Axis of Evil' - evidence of God?

[Alex K]

Look, I don't understand any of that,

It's not rocket science, rob! (literally... it really isn't, no rockets involved)

But let me lecturify:in order to mathematically describe the distribution and structure of the small temperature fluctuations we see in the cosmic microwave background




in a systematic and useful way, people rewrite it as a sum of so-called spherical harmonic functions which you may know as orbitals from the hydrogen atom (same maths, different physics). They are labelled by (among others) a number l. For larger and larger l, the functions describe smaller and smaller features:



The l=0 function is the "monopole" - it simply describes the constant average temperature of the CMB.
The l=1 functions are called "dipole" which describe the simplest deviation from constant you can have, where it is hotter on one side and cooler on the other,
the l=2 are called quadrupole which describe yet smaller features, the l=3 are called octopole and so on.

If you include functions of larger and larger l, you can describe the CMB picture above to arbitrary high accuracy.

You notice that there can be three independent dipole functions (m=-1 not shown here) which differ in the direction in which the fluctuation points. There are even more quadru and octopole functions which again more or less correspond to different orientations of the fluctuations in space.

When one says that, say, the quadrupole of the CMB looks like it is aligned with the solar system, that simply means that the l=2 spherical function we need to best describe the CMB is the one whose features seem aligned with the axis of the solar system.

That's astonishing because in standard cosmology there is no known mechanism how and why the fluctuations in the CMB, which stem from very far away regions on the edge of the observable universe, should have anything to do with the orientation of the little gas cloud that formed our solar system. Ergo, God.
On the other hand, these so-called "low dipoles" correspond to the largest features in the sky, the most prominent being the milky way itself. If some leftovers of the milky way radiation, which they try to painstakingly remove, creep into the final CMB picture, this can nudge the orientation of these dipole functions in a direction which looks aligned with the milky way, for example.