James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise

Yes, I was arbitrarily defining the side that rotates clockwise as "top" and the other side as "bottom".

?? he's saying "it's fine" if it's defined as "clockwise" arbitrarily.

> And yes, I'm familiar with Dawkins' famous retort when someone asked how magnets repel things.

I'm not. I was unable to substantiate that anyone named Dawkins, Richard or otherwise, made or is popularly associated with a comment about magnets. What was the retort?

No, I don't think you have this right. There was no physical theory claimed, just a very surprising observation (though of course it turns out to be bogus). If it were true it would require an incredible explanation, but that's not at all the same as just proposing an outlandish theory with no motivation.

If you take the approach you describe, I think you'd have incorrectly dismissed the observation that distant continents look as if they could fit together like jigsaw pieces, as it implied the impossible theory of continental drift. Isn't that just the same sort of outlandish, clearly ridiculous observation as "there's an asymmetry in the way galaxies rotate"? Except of course that one observation is correct, and the other isn't. You can falsify it just by checking the observation, rather than dismissing it out of hand as impossible.

Edit to add: maybe a better comparison would be to the violation of parity conservation in the weak force, as proposed by Yang and Lee, although I just learned from wikipedia that the actual experiment was performed by Wu. If you think that isn't a valid analogy, I'd be really interested to learn why.

Sundials are really really cool, and the shadow sweeps in the clockwise direction at mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere, but

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial#In_the_Southern_Hemisp...

So "clockwise" is because the Earth's axis of rotation about itself is not too far from perpendicular to its orbital plane of rotation around the sun, and because the Earth rotates counter-clockwise from the perspective of someone hovering above the planet's north pole. This is the right-hand rule.

Earth's axis of rotation (and orbital plane) is fairly well aligned with most of the round bodies in the solar system, except notably for oddball tilted Uranus and anti-aligned Venus (and the pretty different orbital planes of the minor planets like Pluto and Eris).

The sun's north pole (following the right-hand rule) and south pole do not point to anywhere particular in the galaxy, and its axis of rotation is highly tilted with respect to the axis through the central bulge of the Milky Way. A nice diagram that seems to have originated from the European Southern Observatory: https://www.physicsforums.com/attachments/motion-of-earth-an...>

Most disc-like structures we've found tend to be randomly oriented compared to each respective host galaxy's polar axis.

For spiral galaxy rotations we have much better data from mostly edge-on views because we can measure the doppler shifts of molecular clouds at their margins; the advancing side will be less red-shifted than the trailing side. Spectral lines also broaden with the magnitude of rotation. AFAIK there is nothing at all unexpected about the distribution of trailing vs leading edges on our sky; the mystery is in the magnitude of the rotation of these outer gas clouds compared to things like their galaxy's apparent optical brightness or other markers of mass.

Also fun is that for elliptical galaxies, these gas clouds don't rotate around the equatorial bulge of those that have them. They instead tend to move mostly radially deeper and shallower within their host galaxy.

So if galaxies don't choose the rotation of their internal components like star systems or radio-loud objects like pulsars and relativistic-jet-equipped black holes, why (accepting for the sake of this argument that this garbage paper is correct about there being a bias in face-on spiral galaxies) would a distant galaxy affect us more than our own?