In an article published in last Monday’s issue of Physical Review Letters, physicists from universities in New York and Kansas reported findings that could indicate the discovery of a property of the universe impossible to explain or predict using known physics.

Professor Borge Nodland of the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., and Professor John P. Ralston of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan. reported finding evidence of “a systematic rotation of the plane of polarization of electromagnetic radiation over cosmological distances,” unrelated to known rotations explained by conventional theory used today.

“Unless the effect is due to systematic bias in the data, it seems impossible to reconcile it with conventional physics,” according to the article.

Nodland and Ralston examined experimental data on polarized electromagnetic radiation emitted by distant radio galaxies.

They found a rotation remaining after the extraction of “Faraday rotation,” the conventional rotation associated with the propagation of electromagnetic radiation through a region containing some amount of electrically charged particles and a magnetic field.

This effect was found to be correlated with the angular positions and distances to the sources, according to the article.

They also reported finding that the variation in the amount of this residual rotation throughout the space they surveyed resembles the shape of a magnetic dipole.

That shape, if it indeed reflects a real physical phenomena, indicates the existence of a preferred direction in space, which “one might associate — with an intrinsic ‘spin axis’ of an anisotropic universe,” according to the article. Anisotropy is a property of space in which a given physical parameter’s change is dependent on the direction.

If this correlation is a real physical effect, the article stated, “one must arbitrarily invoke coherence on outrageously vast distances, perhaps organized by electromagnetic or other interactions in the early universe, or contemplate new physics.”

Tom Weber, a theoretical physicist and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, said, “This sounds like the G”del universe, which is a model which has rotation built-in.”

“If it is spinning, the first question, of course, is with respect to what?” Weber said.

Alex Firestone, high energy physicist and physics professor, said, “It’s a startling result. If correct, it’s extremely important. It would change our understanding of the universe at a very fundamental level.”

Firestone said, “Obviously, it needs verification. It’s a statistical result, and statistical results are always suspicious.”

Firestone compared the claim to the discovery in the ’60s of what’s known as charge-parity violation, which showed that the universe is not left-hand/right-hand symmetric.

That discovery, Firestone said, was a primary motivating factor in the development of what is known as the “Standard Model,” the most encompassing and very much accepted model of the physical universe.

Nordland and Ralston said they plan to study further data, especially from the southern sky.

The report concluded, “From a scientific standpoint, we report what we find, given the data that exists. We find that the data contain a correlation indicating cosmological anisotropy in electromagnetic propagation.”