Expert: Jayendra Upadhye - 4/1/2006

Question
Is the concept of North or South purely from a human subjective perspective? Is there anything that is particularly north or south, up or down in the solar system?

Answer
Hi John,
First of all I am sorry for the delay in answering your question...for some reason my pc was simply NOT posting the answer and i had to store it as a file on my disk!
That was yesterday..

So posting it today...

No this north south east west is all relative stuff.
North and south to us is fixed by saying "if wast is to my left and east to my rigt, i am facing north!" etc..
Likewise east and west are decided by the earth's spin.

In space ..one could likewise decide (since no sun could be considered as a particular anchoring point), that if the galaxy is seen turning clockwise (say) when looking down along its axis from one of two possible locations, then THAT is Galactic north, the other Galacyic south!

For all we know, with respect to the galactic north/south (as defined above), "we" may be tilted at quite a jaunty angle!

Meaning a similarly defined solar north /south could be quite randomly oriented w.r.t the galactic north/south.

RANDOMNESS plays a very important part in making the universe anisotropic ("same" uniformly chaotic in all directions).

Indeed the cosmic background radiation is itself quite uniform all over, except slight perturbations, that in the end led to the current lumpiness (stars ..galaxies and voids) due to amplification by gravity over long epochs.

hope that suffices.
Jayen