But this process of academic "honoring" went in a different direction than you might suspect, because Gödel used the example of a rotating universe to show that general relativity was incomplete.

And Gödel used his rotating universe to show that general relativity allowed for time travel into the past, which should be forbidden.

The fact that relativity did not automatically make time travel impossible signaled to Gödel that Einstein's theory was incomplete.

Astronomers have applied this test to surveys of distant galaxies and even to the cosmic microwave background, which is the light left over from when the cosmos was only 380,000 years old.

But all those contrivances rely on some sort of exotic physics that breaks our understanding of how the universe works, like matter with negative mass.

But Gödel's rotating universe is simply a matter of observational test, not a fundamental break with known physics.