alt Hacker NewsYou wanna hear my evidence-free cosmic structure theory? Of course you do.
If you shine a laser through a mass of soap bubbles it will unsurprisingly split into lots of smaller beams due to a mix of refraction and reflection. I have long held the suspicion that there's an isomorphism between gravitational and surface tension structures, that the multiplicity and distance of galaxies may be somewhat illusory, and that many of them are translated/rotated reflections of nearer ones. Laugh now, perhaps gasp in wonder later.
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> I have long held the suspicion that there's an isomorphism between gravitational and surface tension structures...
Sounds like domain walls.
I don't laugh but it is an interesting idea. Most of the theoretical physics starts that way and then gradually verifying such assumptions with great care and experimentation over multiple generations of scientists.
You would see many more distorted galaxies if this kind of effect would contribute a lot of illusory galaxies
What you're describing sounds like the curvature or topology of space would be non-flat. AFAIK this hasn't been completely ruled out, but so far every piece of evidence suggests the universe is flat over vast distances.
Intuitively I'd say if there was curvature or topological irregularities at the furthest distances we can observe, there wouldn't be a consistent redshift observed on far objects because some of them would be coming towards us instead of pulling away.
Sounds both like quantum foam and not at all at the same time
What you're describing is gravitational lensing. It can make one galaxy appear to be several in different places or shapes. It is, however, well understood.
There was a somewhat similar search for these duplicate galaxies as evidence for a universe with positive curvature. Because in that case if you look deep enough you'll see more images of the same galaxies although they'll be further back in time and possibly shifted in the way you're describing by the cosmic structure. It didn't pan out obviously.