Robin Hanson wrote:
Did you look at the pictures I pointed you to? Seems pretty open and shut
to me, but I'm sure people are still capable of "intense debate" about it.
Yes I did.
I also spoke with prof. Pietronero (and others).
They said that the 2dFGRS pictures
http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/2dFGRS/
and the Boomerang pictures
http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~boomerang/press_images/index.html
are consistent with the fractal model (but they are still performing a very
accurate analysis).
In a fractal distribution one expects to find persistent scale-invariant
fluctuations around the average behavior, which do not decay with apparent
magnitude. On the other hand, in an homogeneous distribution, on large
enough scales, the relative variance of the counts of galaxies should
decrease exponentially with the apparent magnitude.
Personally I think that observational data provides us with no evidence that
the universe is either homogeneous and isotropic, or monofractal or
multifractal.
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