First, some history of...

The Cosmos
and
The Three Stories We Have Used
For the last two thousand years to Explain It All

Stories were needed to explain the mystery and awe inspired by simply looking up and pondering what we are seeing in the sky above, the most obvious things being the Sun which appears quite regularly every day unless it's completely overcast and cloudy, the Moon which appears more or less every night not quite as regularly as the Sun, having a monthly (almost) cycle of shapes and finally on a clear night there was the spectacular background pattern of millions of stars that slowly moved around over the year announcing the seasons. Almost every culture had stories about what all this meant which often formed the basis of their religion.

But by 2000 years ago the big question was to explain the five moving stars that looked just like any other star except being a little brighter and each one slowly moved around in a unique odd path. They had names that went back to antiquity. The five moving stars were called Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Ptolemy explained this by having an Earth that was fixed and motionless at the center of the universe, surrounded by a series of concentric, rotating spheres that carried the Moon, the Sun, the five moving stars each on a separate sphere and with a distant sphere that carried the millions of background stars.
It soon became apparent that it was somewhat more complicated than that and the concentric shells with the five moving stars were replaced with rotations around some kind of an axis which in theory could be reduced to combinations of invisible gears and wheels. This was the best explanation anybody had. To cover the inaccuracies that slowly accumulated over centuries, new gears and wheels were continually added to increase the complexity of this system which lasted for almost 1400 years until...

Copernicus says the Earth moves, that it revolves daily on its own axis and yearly around the Sun. The Sun is at the center of the universe. The five stars became planets which were all in the same plane like a big disk. Earth was the third planet out. All this was still inside the same large shell of fixed stars. This system was good for another 400 years, only having to adjust the circles to actually be ellipses and adding more planets to make the disk bigger.

Then in the 1920's, with Edwin Hubble's discovery of our own galaxy and of other galaxies at much greater distances, and finally his discovery of the red shift of those galaxies, the story of the structure of our universe was completely revised. The easiest explanation of the red shift was simple extrapolation backwards which produced the big bang and the expanding universe.

The new universe is essentially a big expanding ball with a radius 12 to 15 billion light-years but it is a ball and a universe that is said to have no center.

However, this model had some problems. It was first assumed that this expanding universe was part of a continuing cycle of expansion and collapse but it was soon found that there was not enough mass to ever cause it to stop expanding and begin contracting. The red shift indicated that the distant galaxies were accelerating which requires the application of a force. Somewhat like Ptolemy's system, the expanding universe model has had to add, not more gears and wheels but unseen and somewhat imaginary concepts such as dark matter and invisible forces called dark energy.

Now, just as centuries ago the invention of the telescope revealed new information to Copernicus and Galileo that changed the conception of our solar system, the invention of the computer and recently developed compilation of large databases containing the actual three dimensional locations of millions of known galaxies has revealed a new structure for the universe. Careful analysis of data that has been around for decades reveals patterns in the distribution and location of the galaxies that indicate there is another option.

This new structure uses all of the observations used to construct the big bang model but adds these newly found patterns in the distribution of galaxies. These observations can be seen by anyone with a computer and are available in several commercially available 3D mapping programs of the universe.

The Fourth Story

The Closed, Reflective Universe

These databases show that there are definite patterns in the distribution of the galaxies indicating a whole new construction for our universe that is not expanding at all. These patterns of galaxy groups begin within our nearby neighbor galaxies and continue outward in the far distant ones.

This new information reveals that we live in a very large mirrored room or cave, with almost perfectly reflecting curved walls. The universe is a closed space, possibly an elliptical or egg-shaped cavity, possibly a cave with an opening.

We are about one million light-years from the nearest wall where we see Andromeda (M31), the first reflection, the mirror image of our own Milky Way Galaxy as it looked several million years ago, actually closer to 2.5 million years ago which is the apparent distance between us and our reflection.

Andromeda is often referred to by astronomers as the "twin" of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Now we can see it actually is us. Until recently there were no 3D databases, such as the Tully 3D map of galaxies which allow us to make a more sophisticated analysis.

The far wall is about six to eight million light-years away in the general direction of the Virgo Cluster. There could be fewer than a hundred real galaxies, all the rest are reflected images of those real ones that are enclosed in that mirrored, fixed space of the universe.

For more about the nature of the walls, click here.

Continuing outward...

The next reflection of our group of galaxies is in the direction of M81, a group of galaxies that looks like our group. This complex group of reflections is then mirrored over and over again to produce the walls of galaxy clusters that appear out at great distances.

This new universe is fixed in size and is several thousand times smaller than the old expanding one proposed decades ago.

The evidence, patterns in the locations of both nearby and distant clusters of galaxies, can be observed in commercially available databases as well as other maps of the universe.

Where to begin...

One problem with astronomy today is that we have way more information than any one person can possibly assimilate and we are collecting even more at a prodigious rate. There needs to be some way to pick out the vital facts and to condense the vital pieces of information. Here we begin by picking one reference book (the Encyclopedia Britannica™ 2000 edition) and one visual image (the National Geographic Map of the Universe © 2000) and build more complex technology from there.

Over the past several hundred years England has emerged as the leader of the field, the guardian of the sky and of time itself. Going back as far as Isaac Newton, they had a class of people with the time, money and interest to build the biggest and best telescopes. In 1879 Englishman Simon Newcomb completed the first extensive catalog of the skies which was used for the next 80 years.

Also during that time the Encyclopedia Britannica™ became the primary source of the latest theories and the history of cosmology. They have much more information about the cosmos than any other encyclopedia.

The Local Group

The Local Group is a collection of galaxies that is made up of our own Milky Way Galaxy and about fifteen of its nearby neighbor galaxies. Then there is a big gap and there is Andromeda with a similar group of neighboring galaxies. This group of galaxies was the first to be observed and was well documented almost a century ago. As the resolution of telescopes improved and more distant points of light were seen to be galaxies, the focus of astonomy continued to expand outward to greater distances. There was no need to continue to look around in our local neighborhood of galaxies since we had already seen that.

The observation that half of the Local Group is the mirror image of the other half, that only half of the galaxies are actually real and the half with Andromeda is the mirror image of ourselves, is the beginning of constructing a whole new universe.

Astronomers have noticed that there might be something unusual in our near vicinity as contained in this quote from the Encyclopædia Britannica™ 2000 edition...
"The Local Group contains seven reasonably prominent galaxies and perhaps another two dozen less conspicuous members. The dominant pair in the group is the Milky Way and Andromeda, both giant spirals of Hubble type Sb and luminosity class II.
The size of the Local Group is therefore larger only by about 50 percent than the 2 million light-years separating the Milky Way system and the Andromeda galaxy, and the centre of mass lies roughly halfway between these two giants."

Then there is evidence you can see for yourself in the National Geographic Universe Reference Map, view 3, The Local Group. The Map of the Universe is available from the National Geographic Society go to that link and search for Universe Map. It should come up with Item # 02011C for $14.99.

However, there is a link to essentially the same map available on Wikipedia at this link and look for the Local Group map. However, the National Geographic map is bigger and much easier to see.

These maps haven't changed for decades. The universe doesn't change, only the details are filled in, the resolution gets better.

The angle of observation for these maps is not ideal for seeing the pattern but there are definitely two groups of objects arranged such that one group is more or less the mirror image of the other group.

A better viewpoint made from a 3D plot of the Local Group is shown here as well as an approximate list of corresponding objects for the two sides of the Local Group. These plots and the list of corresponding objects are just a preliminary first step. What is needed now is a 3D plot of the Local Group with an axis having the Milky Way at one end and Andromeda on the other end that could be rotated around different selectable axes to show the true symmetry.

To see all this in glorious rotating color, the Nearby Galaxies Catalog, by R. Brent Tully, first published in 1988, contains the three dimensional locations of the nearest 68,000 galaxies. Some of that database is now available within the Starry Night Pro™ Astronomy program available for sale on the web at www.starrynight.com

Instructions for the Starry Night™ program are here. From within this program you can see two similar rotating systems of galaxies, separated by several million light-years.

Andromeda contains a wealth of information about ourselves, our galaxy and of the Earth itself. In theory we could find our Sun and solar system within Andromeda which would show a continuous moving picture of ourselves as we were several million years ago although there would always be some limit to the resolution we will be able to attain. Locating ourselves in Andromeda could begin by selecting those Cepheids that were first used to calibrate the distance to Andromeda and finding the corresponding Cepheids in our Milky Way. These patterns of Cepheids would make a map that could be used to locate our Sun in Andromeda.

Beyond the Local Group…

After the Local Group there is a huge gap of millions of light-years until another set of similar images appear. Now the images get more complex.

The Encyclopedia Britannica™ says,
"Beyond the Local Group are two nearby groups ... the Sculptor group and the M81 group. Both of these are small clusters of galaxies that are similar in size to the Local Group. They lie at a distance of from 10,000,000 to 15,000,000 light-years... The best studied of these is the M81 group, whose dominant galaxy is the spiral galaxy M81. Much like the Andromeda and Milky Way systems, M81 is of Hubble type Sb and luminosity class II... The M81 group also has a few normal galaxies with classifications similar to those of galaxies in the Local Group, and it was noticed by some astronomers that the linear sizes of the largest H II regions (which are illuminated by many OB stars) in these galaxies had about the same intrinsic sizes as their counterparts in the Local Group."

And beyond that…

At 15 million light-years lies M83, described by David Malin in his book "The Invisible Universe" as "a mirror to the Milky Way".

Encyclopedia Britannica™...
"The Virgo cluster is the (next) closest large cluster and is located at a distance of about 50 Million light-years in the direction of the constellation Virgo. About 200 bright galaxies reside in the Virgo cluster, scattered in various subclusters. Although spirals are more numerous, the four brightest galaxies are giant ellipticals, among them M87." (italics added)

Those four galaxies would be our Milky Way, Andromeda (our first reflection) and an aligned reflection of that system.

That's what the experts have noticed about the four major groups of galaxies that lay closest to us. Let's take that as a starting point...

The Big Five Groups of Objects

The Milky Way, Andromeda (M31), M81, M83 and M87, when plotted in three dimensions all lie in the same plane.

Side View of the Big Five Objects

The fact that they are all in the same plane indicates possibly a surface of revolution, that each of these groups are on the edge of a large oval or maybe closer to an egg shaped enclosure with nothing at the center but that would have an axis. The most direct reflections would appear on a plane through that axis. We can see this is the case by looking at a 3D galaxy database, such as the Tully database. The universe still doesn't really have a center but it does have an axis.

Top View of Plane

Here's how this works.

Expanded Top View with Reflective Walls

The apparent image of M83 is actually made of three reflected segments which unfold to give the observed distance. The arrow pointing away from the Milky Way is the view of ourselves that we see as M83. Since there is more than one solution to each object, except M31, it will take analysis of many objects before the actual shape is determined.

In 1986 Lapparent, Geller and Huchra published maps of the galaxies that showed large scale patterns in the galaxies, a sort of foam-like structure made of galaxies distributed around the edges of bubbles which then loosely linked into walls of those bubbles. The walls formed a crude sort of a stick-man form. The structure made by the above five closest major galaxy clusters is the same size as the repeated bubbles that make up those structures. Those kinds of walls are what you would expect to see inside large reflective, curved surfaces. The patterns are much more complex if the walls have continually changing curvatures. More recent results from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey add another wall still farther out. Both sets of walls can eventually be used to determine the radius of curvature of the universe's surface.

This new information only shifts the mystery to another level. New questions arise and the complexity continues in another direction that requires not telescopes but computer programs.

There is so much information available that it can be a little overwhelming. There are now billions of galaxies known and plotted. Fortunately, computers can do this but programmers are needed to know what to look for. The next wall will be considerably more difficult to locate since there will be no direct reflections, only multiple reflections involving at least two unknown walls.

The technology needed for new discoveries is not readily available in the field of astronomy where the emphasis has been to make telescopes that look farther into the distance and therefore have increasingly smaller fields of view. To see this new universe requires the largest possible field of view, even to be able to look at the universe from outside the universe which is entirely possible in some of our computer based astronomy programs.

Click here for a very approximate shape of the universe as seen in the Starry Night™ program with a viewpoint located several million light-years outside the actual universe.

The technology needed for further progress is currently split between the sources of astronomy data such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Starry Night™ astronomy program which uses the Tully Database of galaxies and companies such as Catia™, Unigraphics™ and other commercial 3D rendering programs that incorporate ray-tracing technology, and even companies such as Pixar and Dreamworks that use ray-tracing to depict mirrored surfaces in the production of animated movies. It will be the marriage of these technologies that will allow us to determine the real history of our galaxy, to see ourselves as we looked all the way back to the beginning.

The Red Shift

In the early 1990s William Tifft and John Cocke found that red shifts are quantized, that they were digitized into discrete values. That discovery was largely ignored or denied and then buried since no one knew what to make of it. If each reflection off a wall caused a small frequency shift or loss then the red shift becomes a measurement of the number of reflections and of the distance back in time of the image we are seeing now.

And about Dark Matter...

There have been major problems with the expanding universe proposal right from its beginning. Most of the matter needed to make it work is missing.
From the Encyclopedia Britannica™, "the mass-to-light ratio... exceeds by an order of magnitude what can be reasonably ascribed to the known stellar populations. A similar situation exists for every rich cluster that has been examined in detail. This dark matter problem for rich clusters was known to the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky as early as 1933."
We have been looking for the missing 90% of the matter in the universe ever since.

No dark matter is needed in the closed, reflective model. All the matter is right here, relatively nearby, where we can see it and there is a whole new story to tell.

Additional evidence...

In the late 1990s John P. Ralston and Borge Nodland found that there was an axis to the universe that was indicated by the direction of polarized light. Light becomes polarized when reflected off of a surface. A closed, reflective universe has an axis. An expanding, spherical universe doesn't.

There are galaxy clusters, often referred to as the largest known structures in the universe which are about six to eight million light-years in diameter.They are repeated over and over to make foamy walls that extend out to the edges of the observed universe. Those galaxy clusters are the size of the real universe. Those images are the real reflective, closed universe being repeated over and over out to as far as we can see.

Then there is the fact that we are seeing galaxies out there at a distance of 12 billion light-years that are newly forming. In a closed, reflective universe that is just what you would expect to see, more distant images being of younger galaxies, ourselves and our neighbors at an earlier age, giving a nicely illustrated history of the universe.

There are indications that the nearest wall (in the direction of Andromeda) is convex. That would make Andromeda appear bigger and would mean there is a reversal of curvature, essentially a lump on the closest side of the universe which might explain some of the vast regions of empty space that have been observed.

This new model for the structure of the universe allows for a much simpler explanation of the nature of the electromagnetic spectrum. Questions that arose with the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, (does the ether rotate around with the Earth or does the ether exist at all?) can now be answered more clearly. Simply stated... the ether exists. In modern physics, Einstein's general theory of relativity is taken to mean that gravity is a geometric property of space and time in which the curvature of space-time, the warp in the fabric of space, is caused by the presence of matter. This warp in space would move with the matter that caused the warp. It would also be dragged around with it as it rotated. The ether is the fabric of space that is stretched between rigid, reflective walls. The ether is the medium that transmits all the forms of radiation we detect in the electromagnetic spectrum as waves. There is no need for a particle-wave duality. Matter is made of particles and waves are in the ether.

The red shift is a natural energy loss process in the ether. For sound waves the most obvious method of energy dissipation is a decrease in amplitude, to become quieter with distance, caused by viscous energy loss in the air. There might also be a loss of frequency but the viscous losses are so great that the waves die out before we are able to measure any frequency shift.

Thanks to David Moser, without whose vast knowledge of astronomy this whole thing would never have happened, to R. Brent Tully for all the work he did on his database of galaxies, National Geographic™ for their Map of the Universe, the Encyclopædia Britannica™, David Malin for his awesome and beautiful pictures in "The Invisible Universe" and to Bob Linn for making the 3D models in SolidWorks™.

Richard Moser, thermodynamicist, B.S.E.M, M.S.A.E.

Revised June 9, 2011

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