Inhomogeneous cosmologies, the Copernican principle and the cosmic microwave background: More on the EGS theorem (Q1398086)

The cosmological principle may be taken to state that the universe is spatially homogeneous. It is a considerably stronger assumption than the Copernican principle which says that the observers are not placed at a special location in the universe. Starting from the ansatz that all the observers in the models view an isotropic cosmic microwave background, the paper under review presents inhomogeneous cosmological models which satisfy the Copernican principle. The authors discuss multi-fluid models and illustrate how more general inhomogeneous models may be derived, both in general relativity and in scalar-tensor theories of gravity. They illustrate that the cosmological principle does not necessarily follow from the Copernican principle and the high isotropy of the cosmic microwave background.