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In physical cosmology, the Copernican principle, named after Nicolaus Copernicus, states that the Earth is not in a central, specially favored position. More recently, the principle has been generalized to the relativistic concept that humans are not privileged observers of the universe. In this sense, it is equivalent to the mediocrity principle, with important implications for the philosophy of science.

Since the 1990s the term has been used (interchangeably with "the Copernicus method") for J. Richard Gott's Bayesian-inference-based prediction of duration of ongoing events, a generalized version of the Doomsday argument.

Recent observations such as "the axis of evil", a signal embedded in the anisotropy of the CMB which is aligned to the ecliptic and the equinoxes, challenge the Copernican Principle.

Origin and implications

Michael Rowan-Robinson emphasizes the importance of the Copernican principle: "It is evident that in the post-Copernican era of human history, no well-informed and rational person can imagine that the Earth occupies a unique position in the universe."

Hermann Bondi named the principle after Copernicus in the mid-20th century, although the principle itself dates back to the 16th-17th century paradigm shift away from the Ptolemaic system, which placed Earth at the center of the Universe. Copernicus demonstrated the motion of the planets can be explained without the assumption that Earth is centrally located and stationary. He argued that the apparent retrograde motion of the planets is an illusion caused by Earth's movement around the Sun, which the Copernican model placed at the centre of the Universe. Copernicus himself was mainly motivated by technical dissatisfaction with the earlier system and not by support for any mediocrity principle. In fact, although the Copernican heliocentric model is often described as "demoting" Earth from its central role it had in the Ptolemaic geocentric model, neither Copernicus nor other 15th- and 16th-century scientists and philosophers viewed it as such.

In cosmology, if one assumes the Copernican principle and observes that the universe appears isotropic from our vantage-point on Earth, then one can infer that the Universe is generally homogeneous (at any given time) and is also isotropic about any given point. These two conditions comprise the cosmological principle.

In practice, astronomers observe that the Universe has heterogeneous structures up to the scale of galactic superclusters, filaments and great voids, but becomes more and more homogeneous and isotropic when observed on larger and larger scales, with little detectable structure on scales of more than about 200 million parsecs. However, on scales comparable to the radius of the observable universe, we see systematic changes with distance from the Earth. For instance, galaxies contain more young stars and are less clustered, and quasars appear more numerous. While this might suggest that the Earth is at the center of the Universe, the Copernican principle requires us to interpret it as evidence for the evolution of the Universe with time: this distant light has taken most of the age of the Universe to reach and shows us the Universe when it was young. The most distant light of all, cosmic microwave background radiation, is isotropic to at least one part in a thousand.

Modern mathematical cosmology is based on the assumption that the Cosmological principle is almost, but not exactly, true on the largest scales. The Copernican principle represents the irreducible philosophical assumption needed to justify this, when combined with the observations.

Bondi and Thomas Gold used the Copernican principle to argue for the perfect cosmological principle which maintains that the universe is also homogeneous in time, and is the basis for the steady-state cosmology. However, this strongly conflicts with the evidence for cosmological evolution mentioned earlier: the Universe has progressed from extremely different conditions at the Big Bang, and will continue to progress toward extremely different conditions, particularly under the rising influence of dark energy, apparently toward the Big Freeze or Big Rip.

Confirmation or Demise?

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation signature presents a direct large-scale view of universe that can be used to identify whether our position or movement has any particular significance. There has been much publicity about analysis of results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and Planck mission that show both expected and unexpected anisotropies in the CMB.

In particular, some anomalies have been reported to be aligned with the ecliptic which would be a clear violation of the Copernican Principle. This has been dubbed the Axis of Evil due to the dire implications for current models of the cosmos. Later studies have refuted the alignments as statistical anomalies or local phenomena.

Modern tests

From the PhysicsWorld.org news article "New tests of the Copernican Principle proposed,"

Robert Caldwell from Dartmouth College and Albert Stebbins from Fermi National Laboratory in the US explain how the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation spectrum — an all pervasive sea of microwave radiation originating just 380 000 years after the Big Bang — could be used to test whether the Copernican Principle stands.

In a separate paper, Jean-Philippe Uzan from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in France along with Chris Clarkson and George Ellis from the University of Cape Town in South Africa suggest another way to test the Copernican Principle. Their scheme involves measuring the red-shift of galaxies — the shift in wavelength of light to longer wavelengths due to a speedup — very precisely over time to see if there are changes. The team argues that this red-shift data can be combined with measurements of the distance of the galaxies to infer if the universe is spatially homogeneous — which is a tenet of the Copernican Principle.

See also

• Anthropic principle
• Copernican heliocentrism
• Doomsday argument
• Geocentric model
• Hubble Bubble (astronomy)
• List of unsolved problems in physics
• Mediocrity principle
• Modified Newtonian dynamics
• Quantum gravity
• Rare Earth hypothesis

References

1. H. Bondi (1952). Cosmology. Cambridge University Press. p. 13.
2. J. A. Peacock (1998). Cosmological Physics. Cambridge University Press. p. 66..
3. Michael Rowan-Robinson. Cosmology (3rd ed.). Clarendon Press, Oxford. p. 62..
4. Thomas Kuhn. The Copernican Revolution. Harvard University Press..
5. George Musser (2001). "Copernican Counterrevolution". Scientific American. 284 (3): 24. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0301-24a.
6. Dennis Danielson (2009). "The Bones of Copernicus". American Scientist. 97 (1): 50–57. doi:10.1511/2009.76.50.
7. Anthony Challinor (2012). "CMB anisotropy science: A review". arXiv:1210.6008 . {{cite arXiv}}: Unknown parameter |version= ignored (help)
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13. "New tests of the Copernican Principle proposed", PhysicsWorld.org
14. Caldwell, R. R. and Stebbins, A. (2008). "A Test of the Copernican Principle". Physical Review Letters. 100 (19): 191302. arXiv:0711.3459. Bibcode:2008PhRvL.100s1302C. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.191302. PMID 18518434.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
15. Uzan, Jean-Philippe; Clarkson, Chris; and Ellis, George F. R. (2008). "Time Drift of Cosmological Redshifts as a Test of the Copernican Principle". Physical Review Letters. 100 (19): 191303. arXiv:0801.0068. Bibcode:2008PhRvL.100s1303U. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.191303. PMID 18518435.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

External links

• Spiked-online Article
• Slate: How will the Universe End?

• Physical cosmology
• Philosophy of science
• Principles