IT’S citizen science in action. More than 85,000 members of the public have knocked a dent in the cosmic “axis of evil” that threatens to bring down standard cosmology.
In 2005, Kate Land and João Magueijo at Imperial College London noticed an unexpected alignment of hot and cold spots in the cosmic background radiation – the relic radiation of the big bang. The alignment seemed to defy standard cosmology, which predicts that the universe is isotropic and so should look the same in every direction.
The case for this so-called axis of evil grew stronger in 2007, when Michael…
