If one follows (I have a little) the papers of Neil Cornish et al. - which seem to be those most often quoted in popular reports - one gets the impression the motivation was to prove that the universe was
not so small as to allow the 'cosmic hall of mirrors" effect attending the donut and soccer ball universes.
It's as if someone said, "Hey you know what, the universe might be small, smaller than the light horizon." Then someone else says "Cool! That would mean we could see around it to the back of our heads." And someone else "Whoa, space is nearly flat so it could be like a soccer ball... someone pass the donuts." Then the scientists are like "Great, I suppose we'll have to debunk this lot next." And they have to a large degree.
I wonder if this quote catches the tone:
Quote:
"Has this search ruled out the possibility that we live in
a finite universe? No, it has only ruled out a broad class of
finite universe models smaller than a characteristic size.
By extending the search to all possible orientations, we
will be able to exclude all topologies out to 24 Gpc."
Neil Cornish
|
I might be reading too much into this but I think it's revealing that he chose to use the phrase 'we will be able to exclude all topologies out to..." rather than, say "We expect to/want to/hope to find topologies larger than 24 Gpc", at a time when they still have 4 Gpc to go before they reach the boundary of the observeable universe.
Just my take on it though.