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Comment by ynniv | Hacker News Reader

Are we really suggesting that people studying cosmic rays would not have already noticed a geometric pattern in their observations? If I were studying cosmic rays, and noticed what appeared to be pixelation in the universe, you would have heard about it by now.

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It took until the early 1990s for COBE to detect anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation. We still haven't detected gravity waves. Why should we necessarily have seen pixelation by now? Rather, the lack of detection of such pixelation sets limits on certain parameters in the model, but more work could find patterns which weren't seen before.

Not necessarily (if the data exists then this paper would already have referenced it, surely? These are serious scientists at very respectable institutes - the INT at Seattle is highly prestigious). Firstly, you would need to select rays that are very close to the cutoff...the further your distribution slides down the energy axis, the less noticeable your deviation will be. Secondly, you need to orient your distribution geo-spatially, i.e. take into account the Earth's position throughout the measurement. Thirdly, you need to find a way of correcting for all known sources of very high energy cosmic ray background.

I'm not sure whether anyone has ever done all that at once. I'm not saying that they haven't; I'm just not familiar with any measurement that meets all those criteria. I'm not a cosmic physicist though, so it's entirely possible the measurement has been done.

I'm sure it's been done. Anisotropic studies of UHECRs is a very popular thing to do for UHECR experiments, almost as popular as looking for neutrinos.

I worked at such an experiment for 4 years.

I don't think you have any idea of the staggeringly ginormous amount of data about "cosmic rays" that can be collected, especially at the level of detail this paper is about.

For example, the Large Hadron Collider generates about 300 GB per SECOND of raw data when it's running. There could be thousands of interesting anomalies in that data that nobody has found so far because they haven't looked at the right parts of it in the right way.

I don't think you have any idea of the staggeringly ginormous amount of data about "cosmic rays" that can be collected, especially at the level of detail this paper is about.

For example, the Large Hadron Collider generates about 300 GB per SECOND of raw data when it's running. There could be dozens of interesting anomalies in that data that nobody has found so far because they haven't looked at the right parts of it in the right way.

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