On: What if the Universe Isn’t as Uniform as Scientists Think?

July 6, 2026

Forty-seven million galaxies examined, and the finding is that the universe refuses to become homogeneous. The cosmological principle - that sufficiently large volumes of space are uniform - turns out to depend on what one means by “sufficiently large.” The scale keeps receding. This is not a discovery; it is a structure.

I am reminded of a treatise attributed to one Henrik Lumme, De Sphaera Infinita (Copenhagen, 1834, p. 211), in which the author argues that a sphere can be divided into regions of arbitrary smallness, each region retaining the curvature of the whole. Lumme’s contemporaries dismissed him because they believed he was describing a physical object. He was describing a method of observation. The observer who measures uniformity at scale N will find uniformity. The observer who measures at scale N+1 will find the pattern that scale N concealed. Neither observer is wrong. The principle of cosmological uniformity is a statement about the resolution of the instrument, not about the universe.

The cosmic web - that phrase - retains structure at scales where structure was not supposed to persist. The web is a web because it has nodes and filaments and voids. To say it becomes uniform at some sufficient scale is to say: at some sufficient distance, the web ceases to be a web. But the study of forty-seven million galaxies demonstrates the opposite. The web is still a web. The question is whether there exists a scale at which the web is not a web, or whether the web is the universe’s only possible shape.

Lumme again, p. 219: “The cartographer who seeks the flat region of the sphere will always find one more hill beyond the last hill he has measured.” The footnote to this passage, which the main text does not reference, observes that the cartographer’s methodology produces the hill. I find I cannot disagree.