Spinning Universe

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Preface: Written in February 2011

In the mid 1990s, after a decade and a half of scrutiny and study of the teachings in astronomy, I came to the conclusion that spin exhibited by all planets, stars and galaxies is a fundamental property of matter. Given its universal presence, it came to me as a surprise that in cosmological teaching it was treated as being completely inconsequential. I found elegant beauty in tying it in with other fundamental properties of matter and wrote down my thoughts. This culminated in a paper, which I captioned "Spinning universe, a hypothesis". I then sent this paper to editors of Science and Nature Journals. I was fully aware that my paper might be met with scorn or be simply ignored. I had no illusions about the paper being accepted for publication in either journal, and the main purpose of sending it to them was to claim priority. In fact, I did send a copy of my paper addressed to myself and when each returned, I kept each unopened, for future use as my proof of priority. The Science Journal editor replied suggesting that my paper was more appropriate for a specialty astronomy journal. The response from the Editor of Nature Journal was less diplomatic; he even hinted that I not even consider sending it back at a later date with revisions. The article was then sent to Tom van Flandern's "Metaphysical Journal" for consideration. He found the idea of the whole universe spinning unfathomable (of course he imagined the whole vast universe, with the large and small congregations of seen matter, as well as the unseen matter and the void of empty space that dominate the universe as participating in this spin. However, only the matter, both seen and unseen participate in this spinning, according to my idea). He thus declined to publish.

I came to the realization that perhaps spinning of the universe as a whole was too much for any body to swallow. Perhaps the mistake was not stressing that it was the matter in the universe rather than the whole universe that was spinning. I also realized that for most scholars a scaled down version, confining it to our solar system and fortified with more focused data might be more palatable and digestible. Thus, I researched NASA's website for data about the solar system. To my surprise, I found enough data to back up my contention, in NASA's fact sheets on our solar system. I then proceeded to write an article entitled "Assigning a role for spin (rotation) in the make up and function of matter in the universe". On September 6, 2006 I sent this article to Dr. David R. Williams c/o NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, with the hope of getting his endorsement and advice on which journal I might send this paper to, again with a copy to myself. He declined to endorse it but he did provide a fairly detailed explanation. I will attach that email to this section, right after this introduction. First he asserted that "a scientific paper should not talk about a "purpose" of some observed phenomenon, the phenomenon should be explicable and a result of other known physical laws, but does not necessarily have a purpose". He went on to state that conventional explanations in current cosmology adequately deal with all the observed phenomena that I used to formulate my hypothesis. After this experience I did not attempt to send the paper to any Journal. I do have a response to Dr. Williams' initial comment. When Isaac Newton realized the commonly observed phenomenon of apples falling towards the earth, he promptly proposed that the apples fell because of an attractive force exerted by the earth on the apples. He then went on to assign a purpose for this gravitational pull in planetary motion. There are as many such examples as there are phenomena in the universe!

Recently a friend of mine emailed to me a press release from a TV News channel about a group proposing that Einstein's space-time warping effect of gravity moves the satellites along, making them orbit. The scientists explained it with the example of earth being immersed in honey and the rotation of the earth carrying bodies around it by the 'swirling effect'. While this study correctly observes the phenomenon of satellites being dragged around by the gravity from the mother body, the spin of the mother body itself was not given the dominant role in it or to extrapolate from this finding to suggest that spin was a fundamental property. However, this study came too close for comfort to my hypothesis and, in order that I do not lose ownership of the proposal, I decided to proceed with publishing on the internet my articles dealing with this property of matter. I hope the readers will take the time to read them and come to their own conclusions. I am confident that if one reads them without biases, the reader will come to the same conclusions as me.

P.K. Raghuprasad

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