An Older, Larger Universe

Josh Fink writes "Space.com has a very interesting article as part their weekly mystery Monday series about a new calculation that shows that the Universe is actually much older than than the 14.3 billion years old that was established in 2003. From the article, "...the universe is instead about 15.8 billion years old and about 180 billion light-years wide." The calculations were based off of a recalculation of the Hubble Constant which dictates how fast the universe is expanding, and they found it is actually 15% slower than previously thought. The findings will be printed in an upcoming edition of Astrophysical Journal."

Comments

What is...

[Anonymous Coward]

1.5 billion year between friends? She's still under 18.0 billion, so be careful! :/

Re:What is...

[Anonymous Coward]

14.3 billion years is her showbiz age.

Re:What is...

[BarfBits]

That's 10.5 billion in Dog Years!

Re:What is...

[StikyPad]

Sort of how my nephew always reminds me that he's much older than five... he's five and a half!

Re:What is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of how my nephew always reminds me that he's much older than five... he's five and a half!

That's the same as saying there is no difference between a 50 years old and a 55 years old. Or a 75 years old and a 82.5 years old. That's the diffrence between life and death.

Much older?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because 15.8 is soooo much more than 14.3.

Re:Much older?

[Spad]

1.5 billion more, in fact.

Re:Much older?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not as cool Rabbi Yitzchak of Acca's (1250 CE) caculation of 15,340,505,767 years for the universe. There is a dispute if he meant earth years or synodic years. If that caculation is synodic years it will end about 14.8 billion earth.

Re:Much older?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you kindly show his calculations and evidence?

Yea, but what's outside

[bblazer]

Those are some huge numbers. What gets me going though is what is outside of those 180 billion light years of width? What happens when you hit the border? Is there a passport checkpoint?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Skynet]

Aliens playing marbles with other universes.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Rude Turnip]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think at the end of 180 billion light years you've just wrapped around to the other side, in a similar manner to travelling around the world. If there was a "border," whatever is outside that border is also part of the known universe.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[neoform]

Don't you watch futurama? Once you get to the edge of the universe there's a lookout point where you can look at the other universe.. (yes, there's only 2 universes)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[tsa]

How can it be 180 billion light years wide and just 15.8 billion years old? If the Big Bang theory AND Einsteins theory that nothing can go faster than light are both correct, the universe can only be 15.8 * 2 = 31.6 billion light years wide. I am a lowly nanotechnologist, and for them everything bigger than a mm is HUGE, so the size of the universe is incomprehensible beyond imagination to me. Can anyone with more knowledge about the universe elaborate on this?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Skynet]

The expansion of space isn't governed by the speed of light.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing would happen if you tried to go "outside" of the universe; it's simply that no matter has yet. Of course, as we speak bits of matter are passing the 180 gly line (or whatever the real value is), but that just means the universe is expanding. Incidentally, the number of light years of the universe's size can be more than its age in years because of relativistic effects due to the acceleration of its expansion.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[CosmeticLobotamy]

From the link in the article:
Need a visual? Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."

Which is one of the many reasons I consider any science that hasn't gone into producing a working television at least 95% bullshit.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[D-Cypell]

What happens when you hit the border? Is there a passport checkpoint?

It is probably biometrics now but who cares when there is so much to do in this universe. Infact, anyone who wants to leave this universe is clearly unpatriotic anyway.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, we could be inside the event horizon embedded in a still larger universe, or within the shell of an enormous "dark energy star."

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

What gets me going though is what is outside of those 180 billion light years of width?

duh, the sides of the bottle.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[TheRealBurKaZoiD]

Is there a passport checkpoint?

No, but I hear there is a pretty decent restaurant at the end of the universe. Just make sure you tip the robot parking your car.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[brian0918]

"What happens when you hit the border?"

There is no border. That's like asking "What's north of the North Pole?" The question is nonsensical.

Imagine the Universe as being the 1-dimensional surface of a ball. It makes no sense to talk about the "border" on the surface of a ball--there is no border. If you go in any direction on the surface, you'll never hit an edge; you'll just keep going around and around in circles.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[UbuntuDupe]

Well, that's exaggeration, but whenever I hear "the universe is expanding, like we thought 2 and 4 times ago, not contracting, like we thought last time and 3 times ago" or "well, the universe is 10 billion, not 8 billion light years wide", that to me comes across as a sort of modern version of "1000, not merely 800 angels can dance on the head of a pin".

If the data are that ambiguous, why talk to mass media?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[DavidShor]

Space can expand "faster" than the speed of light. besides, relitivity says that nothing with mass can move at the speed of light, nothing about faster or slower. Imagine a moving sidewalk, the speedlimit only applies to your speed with respect to the sidewalk, not the side walk itself.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[rockchops]

"The galaxy is in Orion's belt"

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[admdrew]

I believe Stephen Hawking has answered this question by asking "What's north of the North Pole?" which helped a lot for my own understanding.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[JustWatching]

There's no such thing as SPACE, that could be flying fast or slow. There's only energy or mass, which are limited to the speed of light. For me, the question remains unanswered.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[NeuroAcid]

So then there are things that travel faster then light?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Promodeus]

It depends on the shape of the universe... If you think of an Omega constant less or equal than 1, it's either flat or convex, in wich case the frontier diverges... if, on the other hand, it's more than one, you could have your spheric universe. Another missconception, AFAIK, is withe the "outside of it". The universe, by definition, is existence itself, in the form of time-space. There can't be an outside because there is no existence there, not even the absence of matter... Yeap, this is the place when phisics turn philosophers...

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[FooBarWidget]

I think that it is not governed by the speed of light because space expansion is not travel.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[tsa]

My question exactly. I can see the headlines: Einstein Was Wrong! :-)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Jugalator]

This Wikipedia (untrustworthy, waah waah ;-)) article covers both yours "greater than speed of light" and the up-modded grandparent's "universe border" question: Metric expansion of space. If you really dislike Wikipedia, I guess there are something similar elsewhere, probably even better too. :-)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean 2-dimensional

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[DavidShor]

Well, then good. The big bang theory states that SPACE is expanding. that there are two stationary points A and B whose distance is increasing with time, even if A and B have zero velocity.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[tsa]

Need a visual? Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."

Wow that's a load of b**ls**t! I skimmed the article but now I know why I didn't read it :-)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

Information can't travel faster than the speed of light, but space can expand faster than light. Nothing is actually moving, it's just that the space between two objects is getting larger. It would be as if you drew an extra line on a cartesian-coordinate system between two lines, as opposed to shifting a line to the right. I believe this is called inflationary theory, but i could be thinking of something else.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

How about illegal aliens?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

My question exactly. I can see the headlines: Einstein Was Wrong! :-)
 
Not to dick on Einstein, the man was doubtlessly much much more intelligent than myself and probably everyone else here on /. but don't be surprised if, when time has passed a bit more, Einstein looks merely insightful and not the genius we see him as today.
 
A lot of fantastic minds have made great advancements (in their own time) only to be proven "kinda right" as our knowledge of the universe progresses. Newton was a God among men in his time, today his "understanding" of things falls somewhere between utterly mistaken to elementry.
 
Einstein's theories will hold some truth but we already know that there is much much more going on that Einstein had no real way of grasping. In time most of his theories will likely fail the real test and he will be seen as a brilliant man who just didn't have enough data to understand the really big picture properly. Who knows what he would come up with if he were alive today with the knowledge we have of the universe compared to what he had in his day.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Tomfrh]

"What happens when you hit the border?"

It's milk, going on for ever and ever.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[aplusjimages]

So an expanding universe is expanding into neither space or existance?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[gardenermike]

It's like pac-man. You just come in the other side. (And the funny thing is... that is probably true. The universe is curved, so if you travel the age of the universe in a single direction... you end up where you started.)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mcmonkey]

"What's north of the North Pole?"

The Norther Pole?

And wouldn't the 1-dimensional surface of a ball be a circle?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[4D6963]

Explanation here.

Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."

But I suggest you to read the whole page (no, I'm not new here, thanks for not asking)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Promodeus]

Exactly. It's creating it as it goes... Mindboggling, isn't it? Now that's it but just on theory... other theories that I'm not so familiar with (and at an absolute amateurish level) speculate about expansion over some other spatial coordinates that the 3D we know of. Imagine acid over a polystirene cone, eating it at a symetric rate (or perhaps not so much)... Our universe would be just this surface expanding, and it expands its borders over another spatial dimention unthinkable to the flat universe dudes (us).

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[4D6963]

What gets me going though is what is outside of those 180 billion light years of width? What happens when you hit the border?

How could you hit the border since you would need to go faster than light to hit it? (right?)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[FireHawk77028]

The whole "speed of light thing" is rather confusing. As you approach the speed of light the distance between two points becomes shorter from the perspective of the object making the trip. So if you went to a distant planet at near the speed of light, and it was say 50 light years away, depending on how close to the speed of light you traveled, you may only experience a 20 year trip. Mean while, everyone back here would have aged 50 some years. If you were going 99.99999999999% the speed of light, you would only experience something like a 10 minute trip. the 50 light years, would collapse to about 10 miles as you approached the speed of light. (These values are not calculated, but they show the concept) When they went to the moon they weren't going very close to the speed of light at all... however they used two clocks as an experiment. Both were set at the same time before launch, when they returned from the moon the clock that traveled was a couple minutes behind the other. The astronauts experienced less time than we did. So it is quite literally true that the faster you travel the shorter the trip.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[LordOfTheNoobs]

And I'm getting just a little tired of those alternate universe Slashdot readers always lording their cowboy hats around. Let's go.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Alarash]

What gets me going though is what is outside of those 180 billion light years of width? What happens when you hit the border?

You meet Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Zenaku]

Until the episode "The Farnsworth Parabox" when there are infinitely many. I always thought this was amusingly similar to Star Trek, in that they have the "Mirror Universe" AND infinitely many parallel universes.

In Futurama I like to interpret this as infinitely many parallel universes, but only one that you can SEE from here. :)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

In a word, inflation. Look it up.

Oh alright, I'll elaborate a little. Basically, the idea is when the universe was Very Young(TM), she went through a period where she expanded faster than light, and many many orders of magnitude faster than classical Big Bang theory would predict. The details are a bit hairy, but inflation theory is about as sound as any other concerning the first microseconds of the universe.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[rucs_hack]

Nothing can travel faster then the speed of light, universal expansion isn't the same thing as light speed.

The universe is expanding away from us in all directions. Well, it's expanding at every point.

So it is possible for a photon of light which started it's life at the opposite end of the universe when the universe was much smaller then it is now, to have not yet reached us, and indeed for it to never reach us, because of the universes expansion. No matter how far it travels, we will always be out of reach, and accelerating. Note I am ignoring the concept of the big crunch here, as it's an unproven concept.

However we are not travelling faster then the speed of light, even though we stay out of reach, what's happening is that the universe in which the speed of light is a constant is itself increasing in size. Thus the distance this imaginary photon must cover to reach us keeps getting larger.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[GumboNorth]

Nothing funnier than someone proudly nailing the light-speed-limit sign onto their argument, and then promptly multiplying by two, sending opposite ends of their notion of the universe moving apart at twice the speed of light (31.6 bln ly in 15.8 bln years).

The short sixteen-word answer: It's not the movement of objects in the universe, but the expansion of the universe itself.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Scarblac]

What gets me going though is what is outside of those 180 billion light years of width?

There is no outside.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mrxak]

I recently read an explaination of this and that's roughly the gist of it. I didn't understand it completely, but from what I understand (and I'd love it if some astrophysicist would come along with a detailed explaination) the matter in the universe is moving away from other matter at greater the speed of light over very large distances, not because of the matter's velocity, but because space is stretching out between the matter. So, there's simply more space now than there was before, spread out all over the place, and this doesn't actually break any rules governing light speed and relativity. Again, I'd be nice if somebody who understands this better could post.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[wanerious]

Wow that's a load of b**ls**t! I skimmed the article but now I know why I didn't read it :-)

So what's wrong with the original statement? Seems all right to me. Events that happened when the universe was 1 million years old are indeed at (about) a redshift of 1000, and the redshift is just telling us the expansion of the scale factor (size) of the universe, so any distance back then has expanded by the same factor of 1000.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[NeuroAcid]

This is what I initially thought of as well, that the universe was simply stretching out. Then the whole faster then light thing makes sense. But is there any proof that the universe is strectching itself and not simply just getting larger without having to stretch.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Shimmer]

You are so full of it. The universe isn't expanding into virgin space.

Asking what's outside the universe is most likely a nonsensical question. Like asking what's underneath the earth holding it up, now that we know the earth is a planet. (N.B. "It's turtle's all the way down").

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mrxak]

I'd respond with "Magnetic North or True North?"

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Vidar Leathershod]

This, while a "funny" post, is also quite insightful. The problem with any of these figures is that we are really pulling them out of our nether regions. Given the supposed size and complexity of our universe (which doesn't seem to be getting any smaller or more simple), we will likely never know the actual age or size of the universe. If you were able to travel at insanely fast speeds, or use some form of long-distance teleportation, and you reached the "edge" of the universe, what would lie beyond? Empty space? How do we know the universe is not of infinite dimensional characteristics? We don't have nearly enough data to even justify a measurement.

Of course, by declaring the figures to be new and improved, some hooligan gets a microdot of attention for a while, so I guess that's what we are really looking for. We need to feel important, and like we're accomplishing something. Meanwhile, TV technology could be moving forward to something beyond digital, into the realm of beautiful analog freedom. I jest somewhat, but there is something to be said for the results of focused energy (in the form of thought). We improve our digital processes so that they become more effective than the current analog standards. However, we often do so at the expense of advances in other areas (analog, rottedlog, and ants-on-a-log technologies).

The age of the universe is all fine and dandy to want to know about, but really, would it break anybody's heart if it were 6,000 years and 3 days old? What about if it were only 10 million years old? 5 billion? Just as I think many Christians waste their time worrying about what someone else thinks about the age of the earth, many scientists do the same. Considering that most of us will likely be dead within 130 years, anything 6,000 years and older is a long time. And all of the above measurements are probably incorrect. Trying to pin it down with such limited amounts of data is pointless.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Gospodin]

Here's an example of "moving faster than light" that you can do at home. Take a laser pointer and a ball and point the laser directly towards the center of the ball. You get a point of light on the surface. Now rotate the laser pointer until the beam is just tangent to the ball, so that point slides along the ball's surface and then jumps off of it. If you rotate at a constant velocity, you can prove using calculus that the velocity of the point of light on the ball's surface goes to infinity as the beam becomes tangent.

How is this possible? Simply because the point of light is not a physical object. So there is no relativity violation here.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[convertxiii]

Your right...Give it another few years and I promise you another 3 billion years will be tacked on with more guesstimate bullsh*t.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[zepher-109]

"Yeap, this is the place when phisics turn philosophers..." Physics and Philosophy are not mutually exclusive, it's only becuase of closedminded individuals that that idea has arisen. If you look at your own comment (and the TOE/UFT holygrail search) you would see that by saying "the universe is all of existence" then that would mean that nothing within the universe is mutually exclusive, and that everything is connected to everything. Which bring me back to my original point, Physics and Philosophy are not mutually exclusive.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

So the speed of light is not the fastest one can travel ?

Let us all travel with the speed of space !

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[eggoeater]

You're confusing Newtonian physics and relativity.
Using Newtonian physics, it's easy to prove all kinds of goofy stuff.
You can "prove" using calculus that if you lean a ladder against a wall, and pull the bottom of the ladder out at a CONSTANT velocity, the top of the ladder will move down the wall at a speed that is accelerating (after the ladder passes 45 degrees).
The instant before the top of the ladder hits the floor, it has infinite velocity.

The problem, of course, is that this is not a newtonian universe. Our best theory at the moment says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, including light. Light IS physical, (i.e. photons), it just doesn't have any mass. Light cannot go faster than the speed of light.
That's kinda where the name "speed of light" came from.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[tsa]

I said I knew nothing about the matter. I can't get my head around the fact that apparently space, which is just nothingness, can expand!

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[lostvyking]

Keep in mind, the speed of light is not really constant. The speed of light is constant for a stationary body, i.e. the speed of light will always appear to be 186,292 miles per second to the casual observer. Time is the stray factor here. The faster one's velocity, the more time slows down. This means 186,292 miles / 1 second becomes 186,292 miles /.999999.... second and the greater the velocity the closer that .999999.... gets to zero. This is why a ship traveling at what appears to be the speed of light for it, can travel for one year, yet when it returns to where it started, a much greater amount of time has passed.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[LindseyJ]

... you can do at home... you can prove using calculus...

That sounded like something out of Mr. Wizard until you mentioned calc :)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[LordPixie]

But is there any proof that the universe is strectching itself and not simply just getting larger without having to stretch.

From what I recall of my jaunts into physics, the evidence for this is 'redshift'. That is basically just the Doppler Effect occuring in EM/light Waves. Since every point in space is moving away from each other, the EM waves get stretched out a bit. Thus, giving all light longer wavelength. (ie: More 'red')

If you're having a hard time visualizing this, imagine our 3 dimensional universe as the surface of a balloon. (2D, obviously) Now, blow more air into the balloon. Now the surface area of the balloon is larger than it was. Where did the extra 'space' on that 2D surface come from? Basically, everywhere. Now, if you took a step on that ballon as it was expanding, your feet would be further apart than on usual solid gound. Once you put your foot down at a normal stride's distance, the ground between your feet would have expanded, giving you a longer step. The same concept works for waves.


--LordPixie

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[asc99c]

This is because space itself is expanding - it is not an object within space moving outward. To use the standard analogy of a smiley face drawn on a baloon, as you inflate the baloon, the distance between the eyes increases, although the eyes are not 'moving'.

This does mean that our vantage point in the universe has a horizon, determined by the distance light can have travelled since the beginning of time. If it is 15.8 billion years old and due to expansion 180 billion light years wide, we can not see to the other side since light from there has not had time to travel the distance. This horizon does cause numerous problems with the standard big-bang theory for which inflationary theory is the current best resolution.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Don853]

Are you saying that you would view Newton as "merely insightful" rather than a "genius"? History will remember Einstein as the genius he was.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Skynet]

Awww hell nah.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[M1FCJ]

The observable universe is as old as you can observe - currently around 14 billion years ,give or take a billion. The size of the universe is independent of the size of the observable universe but is a function of the curvature of the universe - the big bang did not originate at where the sun or our galaxy is and evenly expanded.

The most simplest explanation is: Before the big bang, there was no space-time. The universe expanded into space-time and the space-time is expanding since then. Also just after the big-bang, the universe had an inflation where the inflation speed was much more than the speed of light. This smooths all of wrinkles of the the universe, hence the observable universe is homogeneous (everywhere laws of physics are the same).

The inflation theory is quite something - first time I read about it I didn't believe it but the evidence is pretty strong. On the other hand, mandkind don't know what was the governing principle. Same with the current increasing expansion of the universe, no one knows why (yet) but it expands faster and faster.

This was quite simplistic, probably also contain factual errors introduced with oversimplification. Wikipedia will have much more information and lots of links to more articles.

Also popular astronomy magazines (Sky&Telescope, Astronomy Now etc.) tend to have reasonably good cosmology articles once in a while.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

I think my head asploded

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Gulthek]

Don't confuse the visible universe with the 'actual' universe.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

Space: It seems to go on and on forever...but then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

source?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Promodeus]

On the contrary, they're really close together... the rift seems to appear in the last couple of centuries, with the scientific method and the cult to science. Don't forget that one of the first cosmological models came from Aristoteles, and the idea of the atom can be traced to greek times as well. Now, the irone seems to be that, when you try to explain, or even just understand phisics of outside your own frame of work, your universe, you can't expect to do it via experiment's, that, being done in this "reality", could not explain or prove things outside of it. Couriously enough, some theories I've read speculate that the weird behavoir of subatomic particles could be explained by it's interactions with particles in other planes... Atheists like myself try to find some hope of the afterlife in this... ;)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[aminorex]

c is the limit of the velocity to which one can accellerate, relative to a given mass, because accellerating to c requires infinite energy. of course, this is c as observed by someone at your starting point. as observed from your own accellerated frame of reference, you can achieve arbitrarily high velocity, but then time dilation effects kick in so that if you return to your starting point, the amount of time that passed is the same as it would be if you never accellerated beyond c.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[gomoX]

It's not flying. It's expanding.

Let's use a 2-dimensional metaphor I read on Sci. American a while ago. Grab a rubber ballon. Blow some air into it. The surface of this balloon is now your 2-dimensional universe. It has some properties that we couldn't really tell about our universe - i.e, it's closed in the sense that you can go around it and end up un the same place.

Now you use a pen to draw 2 points in the surface of the balloon. There's a particular distance between them over the surface of the "universe". Now, you blow more air inside the balloon. Tada - universe expansion. Every point is moving apart from the others and this mimics pretty well the behaviour of the universe we live in.

It's not a traditional concept. Space can stretch. Time can dilate. Viva la relativity :)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[aminorex]

> The instant before the top of the ladder hits the floor, it has infinite velocity.

It has infinite velocity for an infinitesimal period of time. They multiply out nicely,
and no one's head gets hurt. It's hardly a flaw in the calculus, just a quotidian
application of cauchy sequences.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[dpilot]

Some time read, "The Day The Universe Changed," by James Burke. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316117048/002-07 01003-8544823?v=glance&n=283155 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_ Changed

Just because Einstein turned Newtonian physics on its ear doesn't make Newton any less of a genius. Whenever Einstein is superceded, it won't make him less of a genious, either. It just means that someone else has stood on his shoulders, like he stood on Newton's, and has seen even further.

Newton and Einstein both "changed the Universe" because they changed how we view it and how we relate to it. Or the example Burke uses is Galileo, and how he shifted the center of the Universe from the Earth to the Sun. (I know you could argue that it was really Copernicus, and that neither was really correct.)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[aminorex]

If there is a region outside your light cone, and if all relations are mediated by interactions at c. For an example of the latter, consider primordial quantum entanglements.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[brian0918]

Forgive me for being off by one lousy dimension; I had just woken up when I wrote that reply. Besides, in string theory there's already plenty of dimensions to go around. :)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

wouldn't it be 15.8^2 not * which would mean it could potentially be 249.64 billion light years wide, also as pointed out below the speed of light doesnt not govern the expansion of space. Hope this helps.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mshmgi]

Innocent question here...

How does "expansion" differ from "movement"? It seems that if a balloon is expanding, the surfaces of that balloon are actually moving - as are the contents of the balloon. I'm just don't "grok" the difference.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[jZnat]

With all those 9's, you could have just said you were going 299792457 m/s (1 m/s less than c).

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[jridley]

Space isn't nothingness. Space is space and is flexible (gravity/mass flexes it) and creatable (at universe boundaries). We have no concept for nothingness other than to wave our hands and say "outside the universe".

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mother. Because when she sits around the universe, she really sits around the universe.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[pz]

I do hope some cosmologist answers this better than I will, but this conundrum was addressed in part by a then-radical idea proposed by MIT professor Alan Guth (he lectured my freshman physics class, in part) who suggested that for a brief period right after the Big Bang, the universe expanded at much faster than the speed of light. This theory is called The Inflationary Universe, and although no one seems to understand why it might be the case, it's one of the few theories that explains things like why the universe is so big, why it's so very nearly flat, and why it isn't all exactly the same temperature and density.

For more information see http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/cosmology/ inflation.html .

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[drxenos]

1) It's not that objects cannot travel faster than the speed of light. They cannot be accelerated faster than the speed of light. 2) The law governs objects traveling in space, not space itself.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[robson]

Exactly. It's creating it as it goes... Mindboggling, isn't it? Now that's it but just on theory... other theories that I'm not so familiar with (and at an absolute amateurish level) speculate about expansion over some other spatial coordinates that the 3D we know of. Imagine acid over a polystirene cone, eating it at a symetric rate (or perhaps not so much)... Our universe would be just this surface expanding, and it expands its borders over another spatial dimention unthinkable to the flat universe dudes (us).

The metaphor I always heard was that if the Universe were 2D, it would be on the surface of a balloon. The balloon expands in 3D in such a way that everything in the Universe is growing apart from everything else, but there's no "edge".

So yeah, within that metaphor our 3D universe is expanding in 4D -- the distance between things is growing larger but it's very difficult for us to visualize the axis along which it's expanding.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mrpeebles]

Genius is about a lot more than coming up with a new answer. It is about defining what the important questions are. The really good answers often become questions themselves. For example, Einstein could never believe quantum mechanics for a variety of reasons that are probably best described as philosophical, or even religious. But his (and others) EPR paper about the paradoxes caused by entangled quantum particles is still crucial for our current understanding of how quantum mechanics is so weird. It just turned out that Einstein's answer to his own question was wrong. But in understanding this aspect of quantum mechanics, we are really just answering Einstein. And of course, we consider quantum mechanics to be so strange because it is so different from the physics of Newton as well. So we are also still answering Newton (and his successors). But in a very real way, which I won't go into here, the language of quantum mechanics is just the language of Newton, with an added part that says "EXCEPT now it's different like this...."

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[eggoeater]

I wasn't implying there was a flaw in Calculus, just in the equation that the calculus is being applied to. It doesn't take into account general relativity(or special relativity in the case of the grandparent).
And it doesn't matter how short of a time span it is, matter (or energy) can't go faster than light. You can (on paper) slow down the constant velocity of the bottom of the ladder to where the speed of the top of the ladder becomes FTL for a significant period of time (i.e. more than a few peco-seconds.)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Kagura]

You've got some gears over there, and I've got a wrench here... so, since the basic of relativity is that everything is relative, you could equally say that it wasn't the astronauts traveling away from the earth, it was the earth traveling away from the astronauts. So why wasn't the earth clock behind the moon clock, instead of vice versa? :)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[drxenos]

Incidentally, the number of light years of the universe's size can be more than its age in years because of relativistic effects due to the acceleration of its expansion.

No, it is because the expansion of the universe can and has growth faster than the speed of light.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[aminorex]

If there is a region outside your light cone, and if all relations are mediated by interactions at less than or equal to c, then there are no relations between the outside region and you. To be in the same universe is to have relations. Thus, such a region is not in the same universe as you, or there are relations mediated by interactions at greater than c. For an example of the latter, consider primordial quantum entanglements.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

To be in the same universe is to have relations.

That's your own personal definition and one I've never heard before.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[WilliamSChips]

Long-haired Carter is unpatriotic

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[SpacePunk]

could be other universes on the other side of that 'border' that we will never see or know about so it might as well be nothing.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[karlandtanya]

Inflation
There's a book, too.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mikael]

There's a sign saying "Beware of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: Trespassers will be demolecularized"

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[canadian_right]

Inflation. For a very short time just after the big-bang the universe expanded faster than the speed of light. This was called inflation.

You can't get outside the universe, as far as we know, so asking what is outside it is meaningless.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[kapp]

If there are other universes on that border then i propose that we build a large three-layered fence and patrol it with hundreds of unmanned drones. of course, that might be really expensive so we'll have to start with 600 miles of fencing and a guy named Bob.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[AuMatar]

I may be totally wrong, but I always viewed it as just... expanding. Infinitely long x,y and z axises. However, the stuff from the big bang only managed to travel so far (it only has so much velocity and been traveling for so long, after all). The space beyond the wavefront of the big bang is nothingness, that goes on forever. So the space exists, but nothing fills it.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Promodeus]

Yeah, the difference with the sphere metaphor is that that one may also work in 3D. If everything was created almost instantly in the big bang, and then was just thrown out due to the kinetic energy of it, is just like the debris of an explosion flaying away in an spherical way, like a blown up balloon, creating some streams of material here, a large void there... Now, if we think of the sphere metaphor as the 3D universe over a 4D sphere whose axis we can't even conceive, we can better visualize the so called wormholes as a secant throu the sphere, joining 2 of this 3D places throu that 4th, unconcivable dimention... Now, I've readed somewhere that scientifics speculate the existence of 11 other spatial dimentions! Talk about trying to coordinate a date on those planes :-/

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[MillionthMonkey]

Space is stretching out between the matter. There are galaxies receding faster than light, but you'll never be able to observe them in any sort of experiment, or measure their speed, so there is no problem. The only reason we know they exist is from inferring their existence, and it's a different kind of existence, one that can never be proven by direct observation and measurement. It's like the singularity of a black hole- you can infer it's in there, but you can't observe anything inside the event horizon in an experiment anyway, so it doesn't upset theory.

When a galaxy is receding almost at the speed of light it will appear with a large redshift. Occasionally astronomers find a galaxy that sets a redshift record, and they get all excited. If the faster-than-light galaxies appeared redshifted, they would cover the sky! The astronomers wouldn't be getting so excited. But those galaxies don't appear at all- they're outside the observable universe. The distance to them is so great that more than 300,000 km of brand new space is being shoehorned in between us and them every second. So we won't even see them redshifted because the photons never even reach us.

The huge-redshift galaxies exist just inside a thin shell around us, about 15 billion light years in radius, that defines the observable universe. The observable universe and the universe sound like the same thing but are not. Most of the universe is outside the observable part- outside the shell. If a galaxy is outside the shell, we'll never see it. If a galaxy is just inside the shell they eventually find it and it might set a new z record depending on its redshift (i.e. how close it is to the inside of the shell). In theory if they found a galaxy that straddled the shell itself it would be redshifted from microwaves down through radio all the way to infinite wavelengths. In reality you'll never see that- the furthest thing you see is the cosmic microwave background, which is still coming from 400000 light years inside the shell. Even closer to the shell, you can "see" the early universe just along the inner surface, and the early universe was more opaque- light coming from there would have to have been emitted shortly after the Big Bang, when scattering was much more efficient, so that light doesn't make it here. FYI IANAA.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[operagost]

OMG teh uni si HUEG LOL!!!!!1111oneoneoneoneone

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

Honest question: Why do planets allways orbit the sun as if they were in a 2D environment? What is causing them to all orbit on one flat plane? It seems odd that at least one or two aren't orbiting in different angles. Does this have anything to do with the shape of our universe?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[daeley]

Honest question: Why do planets allways orbit the sun as if they were in a 2D environment? What is causing them to all orbit on one flat plane? It seems odd that at least one or two aren't orbiting in different angles. Does this have anything to do with the shape of our universe?

http://www.google.com/search?q=orbit%20of%20pluto

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[QMO]

Well, not to answer your question, but I'd like to point out that Pluto at least is not in the same plane as the rest of the planets. (I think) many comets have orbits that also don't lie in the plane.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[GnothiSeauton]

The Universe is actually just an amoeba. It will eventually divide.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[RufusFish]

Depends on who has mod points that day. Einstein. +3 insightful! +2 Funny! (hair)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

No contemporary scientist has ever suggested that the universe is contracting. You seem to be mistaking this with the debate on whether or not the matter in universe will ever eventually collapse back into a singularity in a process reversing the big bang.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Gospodin]

The ladder is not moving at an infinite velocity because the equations that govern the movement of mechanical bodies are not the same as those that apply to beams of light intersecting walls. This is why I gave the example I did instead of the example you did.

The intersection of the beam of light with the wall is not a physical object. It's not even a photon (although your perception of where the beam strikes the wall is guided by photons). This intersection point can indeed move faster than the speed of light.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Mistshadow2k4]

Maybe another universe.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[CRMeatball]

I don't quite follow how the expansion of the universe is not governed by the speed of light. If the Big Bang theory claims that the universe began as a singularity and then exploded, then all matter/energy began at a single point, and expanded outward. In order for this to occur and reach 180 billion lightyears in diameter in only 15.8 billion years, it would have to move at 5.69 times the speed of light. This means either Einstien was wrong, the Big Bang theory is wrong, or we still don't understand either. However, from the time-dialation equation, you cannot move faster than the speed of light, so somehow, I doubt Einstien was wrong. Just as Newton was superceded, Einstien will be too. However, Newton was not wrong, and newtonian mechanics is still considered law where applicable. The same will be true with Einstien. He will only be shown to be wrong when trying to move our paradigm to a more general one. Until proven otherwise, my personal opinion is that we do not understand how the universe was formed and that our current explaination needs to be expanded.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mrpeebles]

In a popular physics lecture I heard once from Krauss (who is quoted in this article), he claimed that in principle it may be possible to bend (or warp, hehe) space-time, in the same manner that Einstein teaches us mass naturally bends it, to effectively travel faster than the speed of light. However, this would take inconceivably large amounts of energies (as in many times the total outputs of stars, as I recall.)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[UbuntuDupe]

Actually, I think my error was that I should have posed it as a debate on whether the *rate* of expansion is increasing or decreasing. Sorry about that. But the point holds -- they're jumping to premature conclusions and shouting about it to get undeserved attention.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Mikya]

My vague understanding of physics is that the expansion of space is governed by the speed of light. The theory is that the speed of light is slowly falling which implies that if you go back in time then the speed of light is faster which would allow the universe to expand at speeds much greater than is possible today. Is any of this actually true? I dunno, I'm not a physicist! :)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Bender0x7D1]

You get to a giant locker door that leads to a train station. (MIB 2)

Alternatively, you could run into a huge stack of turtles or possibly some elephants.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that the planets don't orbit exactly on a flat plane, and their inclinations vary slightly, but is there any known reason why we don't have planets orbiting with a degree of inclination greater than say >30 degress?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[qeveren]

The expansion of spacetime isn't 'velocity', this is where things get kinda confusing. No massy object can accelerate to the speed of light (this would require infinite energy). No massless object can travel at any speed other than the speed of light (eg. light itself).

However, spacetime isn't moving, it's expanding. It's 'making more space'. And the more space that separates two objects, the more space is being created between them over time. If two objects are separated by a large-enough distance, then the amount of space being created between them over time is greater than the distance light can travel in that time. These objects will never be able to see each other, as the light can never travel the whole distance.

The objects themselves aren't 'moving' or 'expanding' with respect to their local spacetime due to this; they're not bound to spacetime in that fashion. As far as the spacetime metric is concerned, these objects are happily obeying the light-speed limit. :)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[CWRUisTakingMyMoney]

Not disagreeing, just elaborating with the theory that I heard (in an astronomy class).

The theory as I understand it is that shortly after the Big Bang, space itself for some reason underwent a sudden, extremely fast acceleration, many many times faster than the speed of light. After a time (I don't recall the numbvers involved), the expansion slowed back down to roughly the speed it is now. IIRC, when the Universe slowed its expansion back down, its radius was millions of times larger than it would have been if it had expanded "at the speed of light," whatever that means exactly. So it makes sense that that radius is still larger than speed-of-light logic may dictate. Crazy thing, space. If only there were some way to take advantage of spacial expansion as some sort of means of transportation, we could go places very fast indeed.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on your position, relative to the ball ...

Ah crap. Relativity....

As you presently exist in a known (at present) 4-dimensional space, imagining a 1-dimensional feature for a 3-dimensional ball, means the observer must be part of that 1-dimension. Thus, if you are in a 1-dimensional space, and wish to see the 1-dimensional space of a 3-dimensional object, it is only possible to observe that 1-dimension if you are part of the circle, as specified by a 1-dimensional space.

So, you can only be a circle, if you are in a 1-dimensional space. I have not tried this, nor would I wish to, as 2 dimensions is enough for me. Wait, 4 is enough for me.

/posted A.C with good reason.... aw crap.... Reason.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea is that the planets are formed in a disc (a proto planetary disc). The disc itself forms from a cloud of dust and gas. They usually have some rotation. When the cloud collapses conservation of angular momentum spins up the collapsing cloud (think of skaters doing a pirouette, they start rotating faster), young stars rotate a lot faster than the cloud from which they formed. The shape of a cloud tends to a disk because of conservation of momentum and friction. The matter can move down to the disk by radiating away some of its potential energy through friction processes. The matter cannot move closer to the axis around which the system rotates because that is not compatible with conservation of momentum. So collapsing clouds don't just collapse into some central object but form a disk. In turn the planets form in the disk, that itself will evaporate when the star ignites its nuclear fusion. Planets formed in the disk are usually solid enough (heavy enough) to not get evaporated. Since the planets formed in the disk, they tend to lie in a plane. The planets store a lot of angular momentum.Orbits of planets can get perturbed by interactions among the planets or encounters with nearby stars.

This is roughly what astronomers think nowadays. The thing to remember is conservation of angular momentum. This is a really basic and important law that governs the formation of disks all over the universe (blackholes sucking in matter also form disks). Conservation of angular momentum is also why the moon moves away from earth (compensating for the slowing down of earths rotation around its own axis --- by moving the moon out the earth-moon system conserves angular momentum).

Sorry for the slightly rambling explanation, I'm sure wikipedia has more if your interested.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[aardvarkjoe]

I know that the planets don't orbit exactly on a flat plane, and their inclinations vary slightly, but is there any known reason why we don't have planets orbiting with a degree of inclination greater than say >30 degress?

My understanding is that it is due to the manner in which the solar system was formed. A cloud of gas and dust contracted under the force of gravity to form a rotating disk, and then the matter in that disk collected together to form the Sun and the planets. Since they were all formed out of matter contained in the disk, their orbits are all within the plane of that disk (conservation of momentum and alll that jazz.)

Or, of course, maybe God made it that way because it makes the maps easier to draw.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Fulcrum of Evil]

the rift seems to appear in the last couple of centuries, with the scientific method and the cult to science.

Yeah, damn that repeatable and verifiable prediction requirement. Seriously, Physics is science: once you stop being able to make predictions, it's philosophy.

when you try to explain, or even just understand phisics of outside your own frame of work, your universe, you can't expect to do it via experiment's, that, being done in this "reality", could not explain or prove things outside of it.

Well, duh - if you can't do experiments or verify predictions, it's not science. What are really trying to say? Also, fix your spelling. It's embarrasing to discuss Physics and misspell the word.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

Space and time are curved. There is no such thing as straight. If there was no water on earth and you started walking north, eventually you would reach the south pole.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Fulcrum of Evil]

There are galaxies receding faster than light, but you'll never be able to observe them in any sort of experiment, or measure their speed, so there is no problem.

Nah, they just look like they're coming right at you.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Fulcrum of Evil]

If you threw two rocks in opposite directions at 1/2c each, wouldn't their relative velocity be about 3/4c?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Fweeky]

"What happens when you hit the border?"

Your process throws a SEGV and terminates as you attempt to write outside the bounds of the simulation.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Promodeus]

Sorry for the spelling.... I thought it was almost obvious that english is not my native language. I wasn't trying to demerit the role of modern science... Of course the scientific method is one of the great achievements of science, perhaps creating science itself, as we now think of it, differencing it from religion or philosophy. Was I was trying to say was that science, and specially experimental science, by definition works and proves or discards things on this plane, with this physics, this logic... What if, in another plane, the shortest way between two points it's infinitum, or the speed of light is the "0 energy level" of particles, or even matter and time doesn't exist... how would yo expect to prove or discard those planes existance when you can't even access them, nor being influenced by them... Oh! then comes the power of speculation, imagination, even fantasy... the realm of both charlatans and philosophers, unicorns and hyperspace. That's what I meant... that where the science cannot continue, it's unable to go further down the road because there simply IS no road, you can theorise, philosophise what lies beyond.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Hitman_Frost]

Um... how could you have a circle and claim it's a one-dimensional shape? A circle is a 2-D shape. A line is 1-D, as it exhibits only length.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Alexandra Erenhart]

I always thought that the 4th dimension was time... but I'm a newbie at astronomy. It's a branch of science that has always interested and amazed me. I wonder if those other 11 dimensions you mention are time, space or another cathegory we don't even imagine.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Duodecimal]

Planets may have been orbiting in those planes, but anything that out of whack eventually becomes perturbed enough to fall into the sun or get ejected from the solar system (or close enough to it not to matter).
It's the same reason moons (or satellites, rather) orbit in the same direction and plane that planets orbit their star. Any satellite that doesn't is unstable and will eventually be thrown clear or decay. Or, rarely, wobble just right enough to get into a stable orbit.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Andrew Kismet]

The fourth dimension could easily be physical. There's definitely a dimension we percieve as time. But just as we don't implicitly define what directions dimensions one, two and three are pointing, we don't say that time is always the fourth dimenion. It's just a cleaner explanation that way.
Oh, and if you're curious as to an "alternate" theory, there's some mindblowing stuff here: http://www.tenthdimension.com/flash2.php (Warning, contains Flash for you paranoids)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[bigpat]

It depends on the shape of the universe... If you think of an Omega constant less or equal than 1, it's either flat or convex, in wich case the frontier diverges... if, on the other hand, it's more than one, you could have your spheric universe. Another missconception, AFAIK, is withe the "outside of it". The universe, by definition, is existence itself, in the form of time-space. There can't be an outside because there is no existence there, not even the absence of matter... Yeap, this is the place when phisics turn philosophers...

It is sometimes frustrating to hear people talk about the end of science and that its seems we are just around the corner from knowing all there is to know. I think from now on I will point out that we aren't even sure if the Universe itself is curved, flat or divergent. The obvious analogy is to a time when Christopher Columbus hadn't set sail for the new world and many people still believed that the world was flat. Probably an even more realistic picture is that we are at a point in Humanity's understanding of the Universe equivalent to when people learned to build canoes and paddle not far from shore.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Duodecimal]

Wrong -- nothing does travel faster than the speed of light. What do you think empty space is made of?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[s4ck]

Nah...

you got it all wrong. as the old lady said : "it's turtles all the way down, man."

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[bowmanje]

But the earth clock IS behind the moon clock. It just that the sign is reversed, so it is -XX.XX seconds behind. WOOT, I just invented negative time travel, someone give me a grant.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[oopsdude]

No, right before you hit the border you'll find the universal scrollbar.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Alexandra Erenhart]

Wow pretty clever and well explained. Thanks for the link, I enjoyed it!

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[colmore]

It's a semantic question. Neither you, any scientific instrument, nor any signal whatsoever can travel fast enough to reach the (expanding border) might as well be a crystal sphere keeping the waters of creation out.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Wyrd01]

And wouldn't the 1-dimensional surface of a ball be a circle?

A circle requires 2 dimensions to exist (depending on the medium perhaps*).

A 1-dimensional surface of a ball, or of anything for that matter, is simply a line.

* - String theory posits that the smallest building blocks that all matter is made from are 1-dimensional loops of vibrating string. A 1-dimensional loop doesn't make a whole lot of sense, unless you consider that maybe the spatial dimension it exists in is folded into itself.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[kyliaar]

In my opinion, cosmology is very limited as a science, from the standpoint of physics. It is trying to take something as large and relatively unobserved/unobservable as the entirety of the universe and fit observation into data points that can be put into equations that can be used to extrapolate out what hasn't been observed yet. This has lead to some pretty wild and interesting theories, such as the analogy of every point in space expanding away from every other point, dark matter, dark energy, etc., etc.

This is a bit of the blind men studying the elephant analogy. 5 different blind men feel different parts of an elephant; its tusk, its leg, its snout, its ear, etc; and with this limited amount of data surmise that the elephant in its entirety is like what it was able to observe. Physicists are doing just about the same thing but are still trying to have all thier math work so come up with these unobservable factors so that their math continues to make sense.

As a side note, I think this amounts to something akin to what an aethiest would deride someone with a religious faith in an all powerful creator for, albiet in an almost opposite direction.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[kalirion]

Wonder if that was a South Park joke.... Well in case it wasn't, those galaxies don't look like anything to us because light from them has never and will never reach our portion of the Universe.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Fulcrum of Evil]

What if, in another plane, the shortest way between two points it's infinitum, or the speed of light is the "0 energy level" of particles, or even matter and time doesn't exist

Taht doesn't mean anything.

how would yo expect to prove or discard those planes existance when you can't even access them, nor being influenced by them

Occam's Razor - since they don't ever affect me, they may as well exist, so I will ignore that possibility.

That's what I meant... that where the science cannot continue, it's unable to go further down the road because there simply IS no road, you can theorise, philosophise what lies beyond.

Yeah, well you need to use fewer words, and more paragraphs.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Well in case it wasn't, those galaxies don't look like anything to us because light from them has never and will never reach our portion of the Universe.

And why is that? I expect it will happen, it'll just do so in reverse order. Are you suggesting that space is formed faster than C (even considering relativistic effects), so that photons are forever stranded?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[cowboy76Spain]

No, there is a panoramic view of the cowboy universe.

For those that didn't see it, it's a Futurama reference.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[UseTheSource]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think at the end of 180 billion light years you've just wrapped around to the other side, in a similar manner to travelling around the world. If there was a "border," whatever is outside that border is also part of the known universe.

You're wrong.

At the end of that 180 billion light years, you'll find- a restaurant. :P

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Musc]

I think there is a flaw in your example.
Mathematically, the intersection of the ray leaving your laser pointer intersecting with the ball may be moving infinitely
fast, agreed.
However, when you are moving the laser pointer around, the light beam is not a straight line, due to the fact that
the photons are moving only at the speed of light, and not infinitely.
That is, when you move the laser pointer, the spot on the wall laggs behind slightly at a delay related to the speed of light
and the distance from the laser pointer to the wall.

Now consider moving the laser pointer such that the spot moves over the edge of the ball and onto the wall.
Mathematically the spot ought to jump instantly from the ball to the wall, meaning that the spot moves infinitely fast.
In reality, the photons that previously only had to travel so far as the ball, now travel so far as the wall, which takes
some time, meaning that the transition is slowed due to lightspeed and is not infinite.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mdwh2]

So yeah, within that metaphor our 3D universe is expanding in 4D -- the distance between things is growing larger but it's very difficult for us to visualize the axis along which it's expanding.

The balloon analogy is a good one, but note that (as far as I know) the Universe does not require a 4th dimension to be expanding into. Mathematically, a surface/space can be curved, without needing a higher dimension to be "curving in".

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's pretty much right.

Inflation is now widely accepted by cosmologists. Very soon after the big bang, space expanded at a large multiple of the speed of light, then the expansion slowed down. This accounts for several problems involving the "horizon" wherein parts of the universe are not currently causally connected, in that photons emitted over there as GP put it "[have] never and will never" reach us.

No particle known to us outruns a photon. Spatial expansion, however, is widely accepted by cosmologists, such that distances between particles can expand at speeds in excess of the speed of light, and certainly at speeds approaching the speed of light. The large-fraction-of-c expansion explains the Hubble red shift.

Here's an analogy. Race a bunch of cockroaches and find a pair that always tie when running the same straight line along a sheet of plastic. Call these "photons" travelling through "vacuum".

Now put some obstacles under the sheet of plastic. These will represent "bumps" in space-time, caused by gravitation from hidden mass. This will slow down the cockroaches, but as long as they run the same straight line through the course, with the same bumps, the two roaches will clock the same time. If you change the shape and size of the obstacles between the run of roach number one and that of roach number two, different times will be posted, even though the tabletop (or floor) distance is identical. Space-time is not static, mass moves around, causing effects like "lensing". However, the photon-roaches always run at the same speed relative to the plastic sheet.

Now run one roach through the course, record its time, then run the second roach through the course, and while doing so, STRETCH the sheet of plastic underneath it, in the direction that it's running. Although the roach is running at its normal roach speed, space is being stretched, so it arrives later.

If you race the roaches in parallel, simultaneously, and stretch the plastic under one roach, it will be outrun by the other, even though the photon-roaches move at a constant speed.

If you look at the roaches head on from the finish line, the roach on the stretching plastic looks like it's running towards you slower than the other roach. Moreover, if you stretch the plastic fast enough, you can even think that the roach on the stretching plastic is running backwards. If you stretch the plastic enough, making it a sort of treadmill, you will never see the roach cross the finish line.

Finally, if you have a line of these photon-roaches running towards you at the same speed, the spacing between them will remain constant, no matter what obstacles you put under the plastic sheet. If you stretch the plastic uniformly, you increase the distance between the roaches, and they will arrive at the finish line at a uniformly lower frequency. This is how the Doppler red shift works: whatever the frequency the roaches are put across the starting line, there is a uniform decrease in arrival frequency, proportional to the length of the course.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[robson]

The balloon analogy is a good one, but note that (as far as I know) the Universe does not require a 4th dimension to be expanding into. Mathematically, a surface/space can be curved, without needing a higher dimension to be "curving in".

Okay, that broke my brain.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost
here is the math

...The formula can also be applied to velocities in opposite directions by simply changing signs of velocity values or by rearranging the formula and solving for v. In other words, If B is moving with velocity u relative to C and A is moving with velocity w relative to C then the velocity of A relative to B is given by,

v = (w - u)/(1 - wu/(c^2))

so A is a rock moving along X axis at 1/2 c, B is a rock moving along -X axis at 1/2c the the velocity of A relative to B is:
(.5c - -.5c)/(1- (.5c*-.5c)/(c^2)) = c/(1+.25) = c/(1.25) = 0.8c
So not quite .75c but very close for a random guess.

source of equation dealing with special relativity velocity
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/S R/velocity.html

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Gospodin]

Yes, that is technically true - the beam of light is not a stright line. However, in this case it happens not to matter (given a couple of assumptions about the speed of rotation and the radius of the ball). The beam of light will actually form a segment of a spiral. But tangency with the ball is still a well-defined term, and as the beam approaches tangency, the point of intersection will still be moving along the ball infinitely fast. This is actually one reason why I chose to use a ball instead of a flat wall (the other reason is that for the example to work with a flat wall, the wall would have to be infinitely long, whereas the ball can be nice and finite).

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[MillionthMonkey]

"Well in case it wasn't, those galaxies don't look like anything to us because light from them has never and will never reach our portion of the Universe."
And why is that? I expect it will happen, it'll just do so in reverse order.

If you're thinking it's "going to take the long way around to us instead", the long way is undoubtedly getting longer too, even faster than the short direct way.

Are you suggesting that space is formed faster than C (even considering relativistic effects),

Yes. Remember this is a long distance phenomenon, not a local one. Einstein's gedankenexperiments don't work like they do with timelike-related events. The guy on the train and the guy at the station run into trouble sending signals and comparing clocks and rulers! They can't meet up at a coffeeshop later to compare notes either. No event A on the train will ever influence any event B at the station because the track expands fast enough for all such events A and B to be spacelike related. Nobody will ever make a direct observation of superluminal motion between the train and the station and in fact the train can only infer that the station exists and vice versa. To directly measure their velocity relative to one another would require superluminal signal propagation. So you never have to worry about observing it.

Plus, look at how useless this phenomenon would be for sending superluminal messages. You simply can't send a message using faster-than-c space expansion- that is what would be forbidden by relativity. There's no way to harness it for that. If you go outside one night and shine a flashlight across the surface of the moon, you can get your beam to move across the moon's surface faster than the speed of light if you swing your arm fast enough. But that's not real motion either. You obviously couldn't send superluminal messages across the moon that way, for example.

so that photons are forever stranded?

Photons never get stranded, silly. They just lose momentum, change color, and continue moving at c in your reference frame. Or they simply never reach YOU in your frame. A photon couldn't care less.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Musc]

Would your example still work, if, instead of a beam of light, we were talking about a rapidfire stream of tiny particles
moving very, very fast?

I would really like to understand your argument, but it is eluding me. No matter how fast the intersection point is mathematically
moving, you still have to wait for the next particle to hit before you see the spot move, and this will never be infinite.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[kaidadragonfly]

I believe that is the basic concept behind warp drive.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mdwh2]

whenever I hear "the universe is expanding, like we thought 2 and 4 times ago, not contracting, like we thought last time and 3 times ago" or "well, the universe is 10 billion, not 8 billion light years wide", that to me comes across as a sort of modern version of "1000, not merely 800 angels can dance on the head of a pin".

It depends on whether it's philosophical conjecture of something which is untestable, or based on observable evidence. The "angels on a pinhead" refers, I believe, to discussions of the former, but the article suggests this is the latter.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mdwh2]

Meanwhile, TV technology could be moving forward to something beyond digital, into the realm of beautiful analog freedom. I jest somewhat, but there is something to be said for the results of focused energy (in the form of thought). We improve our digital processes so that they become more effective than the current analog standards. However, we often do so at the expense of advances in other areas (analog, rottedlog, and ants-on-a-log technologies).

Not at all. Knowledge in one area of science can often help in other areas, and fundamental theories about the way the Universe works are certainly important in advancing our technology, including in the areas you wish for.

I'm sure you're never going to travel at the speed of light or get stuck in a box with a cat either, but let's hope you never need to use GPS, and you can stop using that computer too.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[StikyPad]

Well, it's about 443 sextillion Libraries of Congress wide (using the combined east to west lengths of the two buildings, of course), if that helps.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[TekPolitik]

No massless object can travel at any speed other than the speed of light (eg. light itself)

In related news, Victoria Beckham is expected to become the planet's first inter-stellar traveller.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Vidar Leathershod]

Actually, I don't see how trying to pin down the age of the universe, which is impossible to do with the data we have, can advance us in other areas. I am all for the space program (in fact I would like to see it expanded greatly). I am all for research. What I am constantly disappointed by is what I see as opportunism at the expense of true knowledge. I don't know what kind of funding these people are getting to arrive at this "knowledge", but that funding could be used more efficiently by someone researching in an area where real results can be obtained. Instead, we have another "temporary" fact.

I realize my opinion on that is not popular (which is why my post moderated down as flamebait and overrated after being modded up). But that is a good proof of my point as well. Not only do some want to be able to spew out facts and figures (which may be incorrect), but they will try to drown out the voice of reason in order to maintain that status quo.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[eggoeater]

My point was that you are doing the math according to Newtonian physics, but claim there's no violation of relativity.

The cornerstone of special relativity is light does not go faster than the speed of light.
Anytime you say anything is going FTL, including photons, that's a violation of relativity.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[aminorex]

If you have real relations with another thing, then it's a real thing, in your universe. Vice versa contrariwise.
It's not a definition, but it does seem to follow from the very concept of a universe. How can you fail to have
relations with a real extant, and how can you attain to them with an imaginary? When we say something IS, we mean
that it IS in relation to other things that ARE. When we say something IS NOT, we are making an assertion about
the lack of such real relations.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[trentblase]

Whoah, this one's news to me. Do you have any references for this? Just a keyword for this phenomena would help, as "curved surface not needing a higher dimension" doesn't really work in google :)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[aminorex]

There's no flaw in Newtonian physics demonstrated by your example. lim x-> 0 sin(x)/x = 1.0
Moreover, accellerating the end of the ladder to infinite velocity would require application
of infinite force (presumably pulling the other end of the ladder).

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[aussie_a]

I use to wonder about this as well. And then I realised the most simple explanation. There's nothing. There is no border as we think of borders. Instead the universe as we think of it is actually just the populated region. The universe itself actually goes on forever, it's just that once you reach a certain point there's no energy or matter there. Why is it empty? Because everything began from a seed and the energy and matter that was created from that seed can only travel so far in a specific amount of time.

The real question is, how was that seed created?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[AaronHorrocks]

My thoughts exactly!
As soon as I scanned over the numbers they were spewing out, I thought to my self; "hmmm, That's not possible!"

I don't think anybody proofread that thing. Of course, I suppose it really depends on where you take your measurements. Other than measuring the distance between the two farthest pieces of matter... What else can be considered universe?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mdwh2]

I'm referring to intrinsic curvature (as opposed to extrinsic curvature) - the idea that it's a property of the surface itself, and not how it is bent in a higher dimension. See http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Curvature.html or http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/docs/doyle/mpls/handouts/ node21.html .

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mdwh2]

Actually, I don't see how trying to pin down the age of the universe, which is impossible to do with the data we have, can advance us in other areas.

Well, no one's going to be able to tell you now - otherwise they'd be claiming a nobel prize or something. In general though, it's not obvious at all how discoveries in one area may be useful in another - for example, experiments to prove the aether led us to relativity along with nuclear power and the atomic bomb; research in "useless" pure mathematics gave us public key cryptography. If I were to speculate, the article says their research aims to "one day help with measuring dark energy and other things", and that could be tied into fundamental theories on how the Universe works.

But also, who decides what is important? Personally, even without any other applications, I find knowing answers to the Universe far more interesting than being able to watch the latest Reality TV show in a higher resolution or whatever.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[TMB]

What's interesting isn't the number. What's interesting is:

1. The technique of using detached binaries to measure distances can give accurate measurements for binary stars outside our galaxy. We'd always hoped to be able to do it, since it's a nice way of measuring distances that's independent of most other ways of doing it, but this is the first time it's actually been done. The fact that the number is even within 15% of previous results validates the technique.
2. If this is the correct distance scale and H0 is smaller, that reconciles some of the remaining differences regarding the fundamental parameters of cosmology that still existed between different types of exeriments (eg. those that measure fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, clustering in galaxy redshift surveys, measurements of gravitational lensing) - the preferred value from other experiments has always been slightly smaller than the value that was measured directly. Therefore, it gives us more confidence in the validity of the physics used to describe the universe... which is the same physics we use here on Earth.
3. The fact that this distance is different from distances inferred from Cepheids and RR Lyrae means that there's something we don't understand about the structure and pulsation mechanisms in those stars. It's probably related to opacities of plasmas with different compisitions, something that's directly measurable here on earth and is an active area of research in fusion research (both civilian and military).

I'm not saying that you can directly point to a practical application of using detached binaries to measure the distance to M33. But it is an important part of understanding the universe, and the physics is relevant to things we do on Earth but is in a regime that is much harder to probe on Earth. Of course the number itself isn't the interesting part - saying that astronomers think it is and therefore their research is useless is a strawman.

[TMB]

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[The_Wilschon]

Ok, try this one on for size. A slightly different gedanken, but it still works.

Imagine a massively bright overhead projector, projecting onto a quite large screen which is a piece of sphere. This sphere has its center at the focal point of the projector's lens, and its radius is, say, 10 light years.

Ok, got that? Now a bug flies in front of the beam, quite close to the projector. Never mind that with the kind of luminosity necessary to have a visible beam 10 lyrs away, the bug would likely be incinerated... 10 years later, the signal reaches the screen, and the bug's shadow will slide across the screen at an arbitrary rate, possibly larger than c. Now, since the screen is a piece of a sphere, the distance from the source is constant. We'll assume that the bug's path lay on the surface of a much smaller sphere, also centered at the focal point. So, at any given instant while the bug is flying, exactly 10 years minus the distance of the bug from the focal point later, the bug's shadow will be at the corresponding position on the screen.

For another similar example, think of a pulsar, which has a beam that impacts the earth say once a second. Now, imagine a whole bunch of earths, all at the same distance from the pulsar (that is, the beam will take the same amount of time to travel from one to the next), strung out in a ring so that the beam touches each one in succession before returning to this earth. If we are 10 light years from the pulsar, then the beam spot is travelling 20*pi light years once each second!

Yes, the previous poster's argument was slightly flawed, in that the distance from the light source was increasing, which complicates the calculations incredibly. However, I think that my examples should be simple enough to cleanly demonstrate that "objects", if they are not physical objects, but only perceptual objects, can move faster than light.

For the previous argument, I guess you could imagine an arbitrarily high number of photons in the beam, but for any finite photon density, the time between photons still diverges as the "velocity" approaches infinity... But the spot would definitely appear to move faster than c before the "velocity" reached infinity, so for a high enough photon density, you could get apparent superluminal motion by this method.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Musc]

Ok your examples make sense. They are more complicated than need be, however.
Consider two laser pointers pointed at two different spots. Time them so that first one is on, then the first one goes off
right as the second one goes on. The point of light traveled at an infinite velocity to move from one spot to another in
zero time at all!

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[The_Wilschon]

He specifically said that nothing, including photons, was moving FTL in his example. His example is valid (BTW, IAAPhysicist, at CDF). However, it was perhaps not the most clear, mostly because he tried to demonstrate that a perceptual (ie, not physical) object such as a beamspot or a shadow can move infinitely fast. It is far easier and more clear to show that such a perceptual object can move faster than light if you keep its speed finite. In this post in this thread, I use such an example.

Moreover, in Quantum Mechanics, the collapse of the wavefunction is superluminal. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox. The key is that the collapse does not carry any information, and so it is really just as ephemeral as the bug's shadow or the pulsar's beam in my other post.

Two observers measuring the spin of EPR paradox entangled particles would notice a correlation between their measurements, just as observers on two of the "earths" in my pulsar example would notice a correlation between the times the beam struck their planets. However, in both cases, neither observer is able to affect the other's observations.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to wait until they're sixteen.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[EZLeeAmused]

Admittedly the stuff on the Wolfram Mathworld link was above my head. But I think that it said that a curvature could be detectable without being able to perceive the higher dimension through which it curved. I don't think it actually said that the curvature exists without the higher dimension, i.e. the flatlander on the surface of the balloon could determine that the balloon wasn't a plane surface, but it is still a balloon in 3-space.

This would be analogous to us being able to determine that space-time is curved in proximity to mass, even though we cannot directly perceive what it curves into.

I'm not qualified intellectually or philosophically to question the validity of your statement that curvature can exist without the higher dimension; I'm just saying that the link you provided doesn't actually seem to support that statement explicitly.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

what gets me is that the universe was expanding for 16 billion years at a speed on light, yet managed to stretch to 180 billion light years. How can it stretch 10 times faster than the speed of light?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Coyoteold1]

I suspect that when laymen, and some scientists, attempt to understand what happens to space in the presence or absence of matter, that they misunderstand, or lose track of, the difference between what space is, and how it _appears_ to us under different conditions.

You will notice though, that very often, when the properties of space (or space-time, in those models) are discussed, it will be said that space _appears_ to stretch, or "to the observer, space appears to change."

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[suffe]

Not if you are already situated on the 'close' border of it, i.e. not on earth but on some other planet.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[mdwh2]

It's true that it didn't quite say what I said - but my reasoning is that curvature can be defined and measured without any reference to any higher dimensions. If the properties of a space can be fully defined without any reference to a higher dimension, I would say whether they exist or not seems somewhat philosophical (and untestable).

We tend to think of a curved surface as being embedded in a 3rd dimension - but I'd argue that's how we think of any surface; even with a plane, we can't help thinking of it existing in a 3rd dimension. But if there's no way to move into that 3rd (or 4th) dimension, what meaning is there in saying it "exists"?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[4D6963]

But from the close border, how fast does the universe expand? Doesn't it still expand at the speed of light, even if you're on the edge of the universe?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[suffe]

Hey, don't you let thinking get in the way of what I say! ;)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Mr. Jaggers]

Easy! Fairbanks, Alaska is north of North Pole, Alaska... and a much cooler town, btw. Duhh!!

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[trentblase]

Those references sound like they are saying that some 3d curvatures can be DETECTED by 2d beings, not that a 2d surface can be curved without occupying a 3rd dimension. This may just be semantics in the way you interpret the anomolies introduced by (for instance) flattening a 3d sphere into a 2d plane. In other words, a 2d being inhabiting the surface of a sphere could detect the curvature by attempting to circumambulate a certain triangles (making the turns add up to 180 degrees) but finding that he did not arrive where he expected to. This could be interpreted by the 2d being as his 2d plane being warped, or as existing in a 3d dimension.

If this interpretation has an error, please point it out as my background does not allow me to completely follow the reference provided.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[kbahey]

No, not a passport checkpoint.

Rather a restaurant.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Anonymous Coward]

Space is stretching out between the matter. There are galaxies receding faster than light, but you'll never be able to observe them in any sort of experiment, or measure their speed, so there is no problem.

Either this is balloney or I must ask for a refund of all my physics classes.

Nothing can travel at the speed of ligth, but now you tell me that it is not travelling at that spped, the universe is expanding instead. Well, if that is possible and I can measure it or somehow detect that (not seeing that galaxy would count as detecting it), then it means things can travel at any speed and the spped of light is no limit whatsoever. I just need to stretch the space to travel faster, period. humans do not know how to do that yet, but eventually they will.

On the other hand, if all this space streching is balloney, we are living in a giant black hole created when at the time of the big bang. That's more likely to me.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[euice]

That's definitely not true, we can observe lots of galaxies who appear - according to their red shift - to travel faster than light. Wich, of course, doesn't mean that such galaxy is moving faster than light, not even that it moves at all. That's because the red shift is not because of the galaxies moving away but because of the expansion of space. I'm not an astronomer, but it's something like this: A photon traveling to us increases it's wavelength because of the expanding universe ALL THE WAY to us. So the redshift increases by the distance, and not by the relative speed of the galaxy. (The latter is called Doppler effect)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[MillionthMonkey]

That's definitely not true, we can observe lots of galaxies who appear - according to their red shift - to travel faster than light.

You can get superluminal recession velocities only if you incorrectly consider the sum of all sources of red shift as entirely due to the Doppler component, and you then naively calculate the speed required for this observed "Doppler" red shift.

Cosmological red shift is totally different from Doppler red shift. In the earth's reference frame, the photon receives its Doppler red shift immediately, when it's emitted from the surface of a remote source. It receives its gravitational red shift (usually negligible) a moment later as it climbs out of that source's gravitational field. Then the cosmological red shift builds over billions of years as space expands and the photon wavelength expands with it.

Observed red shift is the sum of the individual Doppler, cosmological, and gravitational red shifts. It isn't all Doppler red shift and it isn't all cosmological red shift either.

15.8 billion years old?

[Alicat1194]

Man...that's dead in dog years!

Re:15.8 billion years old?

[Shrithe]

To be fair, it's dead in people years too.

Redshift in Light Constant?

[eldavojohn]

The Hubble Constant is based on the idea that the redshift of spectrum of light reveals how quickly it is moving away from you. Similar to the Doppler effect with sound.

I am not a physicist but I recall another article that speculated that light may not always have traveled at the same speed. If this is true and we are measuring light that is ~90 billion years old, doesn't this drastically effect the red light shift that is so dependent on the constant of the speed of light?

They didn't go into detail in the article except that it is a new recalculation using a pair of stars instead of a single star. I do not believe this alleviates the problem of possible change in constants regarding light and its redshift, however.

Re:Redshift in Light Constant?

[Tickle Cricket]

You have to understand that in all scientific fields, especially one as new and quickly evolving as Cosmology, there are a LOT of theories. Just because one was picked up by the mainstream media, it doesn't mean it is a widely accepted theory. All that happened here, is they recalculated the Hubble Constant(something that happens fairly frequently) And the theorized age of the universe was changed as a result of that (the age of the universe is the inverse of the hubble constant) This doesn't adress the theory that light has varying speeds, because its not widely accepted. It was merely a theory put forth to try and explain some of the mysteries of the big bang theory.

Re:Redshift in Light Constant?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Doppler shift in cosmological terms is explained as the stretching of space time. Basically the universe scales with a parameter called the scale factor. This also "streches" the wavelength of light -> there's your redshift :)

On top of that there is some speculation that constants of nature may not be that constant, but that is still speculation.

It was because it looked ....

[Anonymous Coward]

so good for its age! Gotta hand it to the old Universe there - it kept itself up!

Expanding, contracting, etc.. really kept it in shape! Helped it age gracefully! This is a lesson kids, eat well, exercise, drink moderately , and you too can look 14 Billion years old when you're 15.8!

Re:It was because it looked ....

[Anonymous Coward]

The universe is still very young. The time we live in is a very special time. Eventually everything will die the heat death and the universe will grow very dark and very cold.

Old

[HugePedlar]

As long as it's still older than 6000 years I'm happy.

Re:Old

[Skynet]

You wouldn't be happy to find out there really is a God? :)

Re:Old

[pe1rxq]

No, looking at the world around me he is either a nowhere near almighty or he is not such a nice guy at all or just doesn't care. In any way its easier to just assume there is no god since there is about as much evidence for a god as there is for invisible pink elephants.

Re:Old

[Kumochisonan]

I for one welcome our invisible pink elephant overlords!

Re:Old

[ral8158]

"God" isn't about evidence. It's about faith. But you don't get anything by taking Christianity down, all you do is look petty. So can we please move on from being as mature as 2nd graders and just accept that everyone has different beliefs?

Re:Old

[CFTM]

Aye, faith and reason need be seperate. Reason is for science, it's how progress occurs...faith is for the development of a human being.

In my mind, they are all mythologies (before I get flamed please go read some Joseph Campbell...you'll see that there is nothing derogatory about my use of the word mythology). We all need to believe in something, and that is a choice and the strength of the choice is rooted in faith...just my two cents though.

Re:Old

[Jamie.Barrows]

"faith and reason need be seperate" Why? I'm not one of those people who say that we should ignore science if it doesn't agree with religion, but that doesn't mean that science can't prove something that you believe through faith. If what you believe is true, then science should be able to back it up. Maybe not now, but possibly in the future with better technology. A lot of the scientific advances made during the renaissance were made by people who had a belief about how the world was organized based on their religion and set about trying to prove it using science. I personally think that is the problem with both camps today. The religious side wants to hobble science because it might contradict their faith. The secular side often discards or ignores certain avenues of science because it might validate something the religious side believes and give credence to other beliefs that may be more irrational. Both sides are censoring science in the name of truth.

Re:Old

[CFTM]

The seperation is required because faith has nothing to do with reason just as reason has nothing to do with faith. Faith taps in to our humanity, our core essence. Reason [for sake of argument by reason I mean science] is founded on emperical observations. There is no emperical evidence for the divine, plenty of ancedotal but no emperical. The age of reason begins with the systematic reorganization of theories of the world to meet emperical standards.

Descartes was terrible for philosophy but wonderful for science, his "scientific method" creates a strict standard for what is required in order to call something "true"; it is not possible to apply that methodology to faith because to date no such evidence has been found. People will then say, but that is why we have faith! Exactly, that is why we have faith and that is why faith and reason need be seperate.

Moreover, the secular side of things has no use for faith. It does not deal with those questions nor should it; the vocabulary of science can not withstand the requirements of faith. Maybe one day, as we evolve, we'll find a happy median but that day will not happen any time soon.

I'd love to hear your perspective...

Re:Old

[ZiakII]

there is about as much evidence for a god as there is for invisible pink elephants.

there is about as much evidence for a god as there is for flying spegethi monsters

There fixed your quote!

Re:Old

[dpilot]

No, I would be unhappy to find out that God is as limited as the Bible-thumpers would have him be.
That we were created with brains and minds to think and comprehend the Universe, and then that Universe was created 6,000 years ago, but with an apparent age of billions of years, simply to fool the sharpest of those minds.
That 'extreme intervention' over '6 days' was needed to create the Universe, as opposed to a starting moment some 15.8 billion years ago, that God isn't the quintessential physicist.
That God is as limited and small as the writers of the Bible depict. (and being men themselves, were.)

Re:Old

[mulhollandj]

What is science? It is an attempt to explain natural phenomenon. Is it always correct? I would say that it is almost never correct in modeling nature but it is good enough at that point. Better models are continually developed. Some of this stuff doesn't even include a hypothesis and testing so it is really just philosophy and not even science. Does it contradict religion? Depends on your religion. Correct science never contradicts correct religious truths. Can we tell when science is correct? Not really because we are all too stupid. Can we tell when relgious truths are correct? Yes we can. We can ask communicate with God and ask him to tell us. Whether we chose to actually find out and then live those truths is up to us.

Re:Old

[andphi]

I haven't studied Joseph Campbell yet (My wife wouldn't let me read Hero With a Thousand Faces while she was still using it to write her thesis, and now that's she's done and graduated, I'm bogged down in ZMM), but I once took a class on Modern Fantasy, taught by my University's resident Lewis/MacDonald scholar. IIRC, the prof repeatedly remarked that Tolkien once said approximately the same thing. Tolkien apparently described his own belief system, Christianity, as a mythology that happened to come true. Where exactly he said this I can't say, however.

Re:Old

[CFTM]

You're assuming the consequent, your argument is not valid...sorry.

Your statement requires the existence of God to be correct; you can not prove to me emperically that God exists. You have faith that God exists, and I applaud you for that; I lack your faith. Do not confuse faith for emperical evidence. God has never communicated with me, you may say he has and I choose to ignore God and you might be correct but you have no evidence to support your claim only your faith.

Faith != Reason

Re:Old

[Jamie.Barrows]

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough when I said they were not separate. I agree with your basic point of view. Some things like the existence or absence of God will never be proven by science. And you're right in saying that they are separate in terms of methodology used to decide on truth, but I don't agree that they can't compliment each other. I believe in God. The god I believe in is not the mystical aloof and incomprehensible God that was used to keep people in line during the middle ages. The God I believe in is the rational orderly God that the protestant reformers believed in. If you believe that an orderly rational God created the universe, then it follows that the universe is also an orderly rational place. if that is the case, then humans, possessing reason and intelect, can discover and utilize the orderly rules and processes by which the universe functions. The belief that the universe is an orderly rational place is the concept that propelled western science ahead of most of the rest of the world. If you read some of the writings of the scientists of that time, like Newton, you will see a recurring theme thought their work, that the natural world was understandable because God created it to follow orderly and rational rules. The difference between the scientists of that time, like Newton, and the ones of this time, is that neither side was afraid of what science would prove. As I said before, scientists on the secular side today don't want to prove anything that might validate a claim by the religious side. And scientists on the religious side don't want to prove anything that might invalidate a religious belief. Of course, who am I kidding? There were scientists and religious leaders then who did the same thing that people are doing today. There are probably scientists today on both sides that aren't afraid to prove some of the points of the other side if it is the truth. Sadly, those scientists aren't the most vocal. The most vocal are the blatantly anti-religious and the blatantly anti-secular scientists. So both sides come off looking biased and irrational.

Re:Old

[yourmaker]

people that think the earth is 6000 years old....are idiots. "God" or not people are closed minded

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

You have faith that God exists, and I applaud you for that; I lack your faith

Why tiptoe around the issue? As an atheist myself, I'm tired of having to give special priviledge to people for having "faith" - I'm sorry, but it makes as much sense as applauding an adult who still believes in Santa Claus. I don't applaud anyone who has such unfounded delsions of a super special giant best friend in the sky - I pity them, as I would pity anyone who is suffering from a developmental disorder.

Re:Old

[mrpeebles]

Certainly we can consider faith and reason separately. But the West has a long tradition of wanting desperately to relate them to each other. I think that Christianity can even be seen as the child of that union- attempting to fuse the Hebrew tradition of faith in the word of Prophets with the Greek tradition of reason and mathematics. I think that to pursue Truth, we need both reason and faith. For example, why do we spend so much time and money on science? I personally think it is because it leads to new technology, but also because we think it's going to get us close to Truth. But whatever the reason, it has to say something about our core essence. To make it more personal- when a scientist is peer-reviewing a paper, and evaluating it for correctness, this has little to do with faith. But this is only part of the decision to publish a scientific paper. The other is whether the result is significant enough to publish. And this decision has to involve both faith and reason. Remember that science is as much a statement about what is interesting to study as it is a statement on how to study what is interesting.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

I pity you for being a hateful bigot.

It's like a pity party up in here.

(I am also an atheist. However, I differ from you in at least one respect: I am not an asshole)

Re:Old

[Jamie.Barrows]

You have your beliefs and I have mine. I respect your belief. I believe your position to be wrong, but I completely respect your right to have that belief, and I don't belittle you or put you down for it. I don't pity you or accuse you of having a disorder or being delusional simply because your belief contradicts mine. I can't prove that God exists, but you can't prove he doesn't. You think my position is wrong. Fine, I respect that. Why can't you respect me and my beliefs the same way I respect you and your beliefs? Respect doesn't require you to compromise your beliefs or agree with me any more than it requires me to compromise mine.

Re:Old

[radtea]

Aye, faith and reason need be seperate. Reason is for science, it's how progress occurs...faith is for the development of a human being.

Faith and reason are both ways of justifying claims about the way the world actually is.

Reason is a process of justifying claims about world. Consider the claim, "There is no evidence that the God of the Bible exists in the perfectly ordinary meaning of 'exists' that everyone who is not a lawyer or pedant understands." A rational individual will tend to believe this claim because there is empirical evidence for it, and theoretical problems with the alternative--the God of the Bible is not even self-consistent, which is generally considered desireable in things that exist.

Faith is also a means of justifying claims about the world. It consists of stating, "I believe this because it seems right to me" and sometimes, "If you disagree with me things will go badly for you." People who use reason to justify their beliefs specifically eshew the latter form because it does not constitute evidence, and so to use it is to explicitly abandon the use of reason.

The two cannot be kept separate because they are both ways of justifying claims about the world, and any claim that is meaningful can be justified (or refuted) via a rational processes (note that "rational" does not mean "deductive" or "axiomatic"--experimental scientists use reason too!)

So anyone who wants to keep reason and faith separate has fundamentally misunderstood one or both of them. They cannot be kept separate because reason at least is a universal tool, so there are no rational grounds for restricting its application only to claims that the faithful are comfortable applying it to.

Re:Old

[CFTM]

To those interested in this debate, Salon has a very interesting interview that goes contrary to many of the posts in this thread that I have posted. Certainly worth a read...

Re:Old

[Citizen of Earth]

The Flying Spahetti Monster isn't about evidence. It's about faith. But you don't get anything by taking FSMism down, all you do is look petty. So can we please move on from being as mature as 2nd graders and just accept that everyone has different beliefs?

Re:Old

[Citizen of Earth]

The religious side wants to hobble science because it might contradict their faith.

The religous side needs to cut a hasty retreat back to the Planck interval after the Big Bang and hang a "God did it!" sign on it. Any other course of action will result in faith repeatedly having its ass handed to it by science.

The secular side often discards or ignores certain avenues of science because it might validate something the religious side believes and give credence to other beliefs that may be more irrational. Both sides are censoring science in the name of truth.

This is utterly false. Science and scientists seek to find the rational truth. There would be no holding back a scientist who could produce any rational proof about any metaphysical issue. He would quickly run out of shelf space as he racked up awards and boatloads of cash. He might even get a few babes!

Re:Old

[Citizen of Earth]

I pity them, as I would pity anyone who is suffering from a developmental disorder.

Come now, they're not 'tardos; they're schizophrenics. (Well, some of them are both.) Schizophrenia: "Any of a group of psychotic disorders usually characterized by withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations, and accompanied in varying degrees by other emotional, behavioral, or intellectual disturbances." [reference.com] You should instead pity them as nut bars.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, if there really is a god then the fucker deserves to die for what he has put us through.

180 billion light-years wide

[xirtap]

How did they figure that out and what's outside of that?

Re:180 billion light-years wide

[Anonymous Coward]

How did they figure that out

They used a string.

and what's outside of that?

Dragons

Re:180 billion light-years wide

[Gunfighter]

How did they figure that out

Triangulation?

Re:180 billion light-years wide

[shafty023]

I can't exactly recall what the exact shape of the universe is but its such that if you walk to the edge of the universe, you'd be staring at your back. It's self contained. The universe is in itself, the word that describes everything in space. There is nothing outside of the universe as the universe is everything. Well thats how my friends who graduated with a Bachelor's in Physics and Aeronautical Engineering explained it to me. I trust them

Re:180 billion light-years wide

[LnxAddct]

You can figure this out using a number of methods, usually involving red shift and triangulation. As far as what is outside of it, that is akin to asking what is north of the north pole (paraphrased from S. Hawking). Not what is above the north pole, but what is north of it? If you keep walking north until you hit the north pole and then walk past it, you have to turn around again to go north, because you've suddenly started going south. Think of the Universe as a multidimensional sphere. You can keep going in any direction forever and just keep "walking in circles".
Regards,
Steve

Re:180 billion light-years wide

[4D6963]

I trust them

Don't ;-). From this article :

Among their conclusions is that it is less likely that there is some crazy cosmic "hall of mirrors" that would cause one object to be visible in two locations. And they've ruled out the idea that we could peer deep into space and time and see our own planet in its youth.

"Several years ago we showed that any finite universe in which light had time to 'wrap around' since the Big Bang would have the same pattern of cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuations around pairs of circles," Cornish explained. They looked for the most likely patterns that would be evident in a CMB map generated by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

They didn't find those patterns.

"if you walk to the edge of the universe", well, if I got it right, you would have to walk faster than the speed of light in the first place.

Re:180 billion light-years wide

[Anonymous Coward]

How can a universe that is less than 16 billion years old be 180 billion light years wide when we know that no object can travel faster that the light? At most if two objects started moving apart at the speed of light at thhe time of the Big Bang, those objects should be less than 32 billions lights years apart.
Any one with a scientific explanation of this discrepancy?

Re:180 billion light-years wide

[quantum bit]

Except that the sphere keeps getting bigger; faster than you can walk around it...

Re:180 billion light-years wide

[LnxAddct]

Well that too :)

Gotta check your numbers

[sco08y]

This is how we lose Mars landers, after all...

Re:Gotta check your numbers

[Rude Turnip]

I thought a Decepticon stepped on it right before the transmission stopped.

Waist

[GMontag]

Wow, I thought my waist was actually getting smaller through increased activity and better diet.

Now I discover that it was just relative to an accounting error?

Bummer!

Re:Waist

[Dannon]

Not only that, but that weight you've lost may just be due to changes in gravity.

On the up-side, your relative-to-the-univese age us just a little but younger, now.

Hmm

[Klaidas]

If they know how wide it is, then what's on the corner of it? How does it end?

Re:Hmm

[jbssm]

The universe is round.

It's like walking in the surface of the earth, it never ends you can go on and on because it's a sphere.

In the universe the 3 major spatial dimensions (modern physics starts to predict more but they are much smaller than an atom), are folded like in a 4D sphere so you also (and the light itself) go around and around ...

It's not like the universe is inside a box and you can get off at the end of the universe and jump to the box.

Re:Hmm

[Klaidas]

But even if it is, there should still be something near it.
Earth is round, but there's moon next to it
Earth belogs to the Solar system too
So the universe itself should be near something too (another universe?) Or is it endless? If so, hwo can that be possible?

Re:Hmm

[ScentCone]

But even if it is, there should still be something near it. Earth is round, but there's moon next to it Earth belogs to the Solar system too So the universe itself should be near something too (another universe?) Or is it endless? If so, hwo can that be possible?

It's a little tricky making the mental jump to the extra dimension, but the old balloon analogy works pretty well. From the point of view of a 2-D person on the surface of a balloon, the surface is infinite, but eventually repeats itself. You don't run into the "edge" no matter where or how far you go. In your example of the earth being "next to" the moon, that's like saying there is one dot on the balloon next to another, smaller dot on the balloon. Yes, there is a distance between them, but if you go far enough from either of them you'll still wind up back where you started again.

Of course, with the larger universe, things are expanding (like an inflating balloon), so setting out from the dot on the surface of the balloon, your "straight path" around the universe would be pushed and pulled by distortions in space-time (from gravity) and the stretching effect of accelerating expansion. It doesn't really matter, though, since you could never travel any faster than light, and thus never make the whole trip anyway.

Hope my clumsy use of that analogy has helped.

Re:Hmm

[doshell]

The grandparent poster (for simplicity) used the old analogy with the 2D surface of a 3D sphere embedded in 3D space. The problem with this is that the Universe is itself three-dimensional (*), so it is impossible to liken it with the surface of a sphere.

What you have to imagine -- and it's not a matter of visualization but rather one of abstract thought -- is the 4-dimensional analog of a 3D sphere, the so-called hypersphere. If our Universe were the (3-dimensional) "surface" of this sphere, it would appear to us as if it's "curled in on itself", but still we wouldn't be able to "walk outside" (either into the interior or the exterior of the sphere) because our ability to move is limited to the first three dimensions only -- just like an ant in the 2D surface of a 3D inflated balloon.

It helps to think in lower dimensions, too. If the Universe were 1-dimensional it could be the circumference of a 2D circle. What is beyond the circumference? Nothing. You can't extend your movement past the 1-dimensional curve you're confined to.

(*) note that I'm accounting for spatial dimensions only. Also, modern theories account for the existence of extra spatial dimensions. However, these are too "thin" to be detected macroscopically, and can be safely ignored in this discussion.

That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[ip_freely_2000]

If the universe is 15.8 billion years old, then shouldn't the universe be 31.6 billion light years across? Has the speed of light changed at some point?

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[AP2k]

Didn't you get the memo?

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[Astrorunner]

That was exactly what I was thinking.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[shawn(at)fsu]

I took some cosmology in college but I don't remeber much and theories are very fluid and prone to change, but I seem to remeber learning somthing about acclerated expansion in time shortly after the big bang. I also remeber a professor making the distiction between an object not being able to travel fater than the speed of light but nothing prevents the space in between to objects can increase faster than the speed of light.

IANAP, so take it with many grains of salt.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[evilandi]

Has the speed of light changed at some point?

Here's the memo - summary: Yes. The speed of light in a vaccuum has changed as the universe grew up.

If the universe is 15.8 billion years old, then shouldn't the universe be 31.6 billion light years across?

As well as a constant C, you are also assuming that the universe grew evenly in every direction. I don't know whether that is true.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[cnettel]

Nope. Compare with the old "dough" analogy, with the yeast causing expansion in every part of the dough at each point in time -- no specific signal is transferred to tell the universe to expand. It's an inherent property in spacetime. On the other hand gravity and the other fundamental forces are actively "transmitting" information, limited at the speed of light, to try to keep things together at an energy minimum. You're expanded by some atto-meter or whatever per second, but the electrostatic forces tie you together again.

Or: no movement takes place, the "rest" state of spacetime is expansion.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[WombatControl]

SPACE.com has an explanation for why those numbers aren't what one would think:

The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Light reaching us from the earliest known galaxies has been travelling, therefore, for more than 13 billion years. So one might assume that the radius of the universe is 13.7 billion light-years and that the whole shebang is double that, or 27.4 billion light-years wide.

But the universe has been expanding ever since the beginning of time, when theorists believe it all sprang forth from an infinitely dense point in a Big Bang.

"All the distance covered by the light in the early universe gets increased by the expansion of the universe," explains Neil Cornish, an astrophysicist at Montana State University. "Think of it like compound interest."

Need a visual? Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."

All the pieces add up to 78 billion-light-years. The light has not traveled that far, but "the starting point of a photon reaching us today after travelling for 13.7 billion years is now 78 billion light-years away," Cornish said. That would be the radius of the universe, and twice that -- 156 billion light-years -- is the diameter. That's based on a view going 90 percent of the way back in time, so it might be slightly larger.

Basically, a light-year is a lot longer than it was back in the time when the universe was young. You can travel faster than the speed of light if space-time is distorted. You just can't travel faster than light in "normal" space.

(And no, I'm not a physicist, nor did I sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night. YMMV (literally, in this case!))

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[Anonymous Coward]

during the first 10^(-30) second of the big bang, there was "inflation", in which the universe grew by a factor of 10^50, much faster than the speed of light. But apparently that's ok because it's expanding in 'nothingness'. Not sure how to explain it better, but that's what I read in the excellent book "Parallel Worlds" by Michio Kaku. But then, theses theories are subject to change ;)

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[Anonymous Coward]

The speed of light through space has no bearing on how fast space expands. c (Enstein's Constant) only applies to to things that have a non-zero mass-energy (remember that mass and energy are the same thing in the end since: e=mc^2)

The speed of light in a vacuum is still c as far as we can measure it.

The speed at which space is expanding started out many, many times faster than c and has slowed down since that time. Folk around here call this intial expansion of space the "big bang" for convenience ;-).

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[brian0918]

"If the universe is 15.8 billion years old, then shouldn't the universe be 31.6 billion light years across? Has the speed of light changed at some point?"

Just because objects can't move away from eachother faster than the speed of light doesn't mean that the space between objects can expand faster than the speed of light. During the inflationary period, the Universe was expanding at an exponential rate. From Wikipedia:

"Most scientists estimate the duration of the inflationary epoch as 10^-32 of a second. During this time, the size of the universe increased by a factor of 10^50 from an initial size of 10^-26 meters in diameter (a hundred billion times smaller than a proton) to approximately one hundred million light years (10^24 m) in diameter."

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[Anonymous Coward]

fortunately, i just read a book about this (valenkin many worlds in one), and this poster has it right. to put it in simpler terms, the speed of light may be constant, but during a period of inflation the expansion of spacetime itself is in no way constrained by that fact. spacetime expands expponentially faster than the speed of light.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because objects can't move away from each other faster than the speed of light doesn't mean that the space between objects can't expand faster than the speed of light.

Even correcting for your typo, surely that's still a contradiction. If the space between the objects is expanding faster than the speed of light, then the objects are moving away from each other faster than the speed of light.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[4D6963]

That should answer your question. Notice that this is explained without using a non-constant speed of light, unlike what some other poster replied to you.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[mclaincausey]

The initial expansion was MUCH faster than the speed of light. c is the limit that governs speed in a vacuum. But by definition the early (first 400,000 years) expansion (or inflation) of the universe was expanding into NOTHINGNESS, not vacuum. For a period of time the universe expanded at many times the speed of light.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[mclaincausey]

Geez, should have previewed that. The universe was not only expanding into nothingness for the first 400,000 years, it still is expanding into nothingness. What I meant to say was that the inflation during which radical expansion well beyond c took place only occurred for 400,000 years, and now we are expanding at much less, though I think still increasing, speed.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[Young Master Ploppy]

If the space between the objects is expanding faster than the speed of light, then the objects are moving away from each other faster than the speed of light. Nope. Think of the old "dots drawn on a balloon" analogy. If you have a balloon, and draw some dots on it, then blow it up - the dots get further apart, but they're not moving across the balloon surface - the surface itself is expanding. Space-time is just like the balloon surface, but in more dimensions.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[roman_mir]

Ok, here is how this should be explained:

Imagine that you are having sex (shouldn't be that hard, oops, excuse me pun)
but you are a safe boy, so you have a latex condom on ye.

Well, after all that excitement and rubbing, you are finally ready for a big bang. Imagine you didn't have sex (even by yourself) for quite sometime now, this mean prepare yourself for an explosion.

Now, you know how semen is made of all that liquid stuff and those little wiggly fellaws?

Well now, there is a whole fountain of all of that filling up the condom, see? (good idea too, unless you want those Unreal Tournament nights turn themselves into Diaper Change nights.) The condom starts expanding, see? Ye should know that all those little wiggly fellas, they can only move so fast, much slower than that jet streaming into the latex casing.

So there you go. The condom is the boundary of what we understand as space/time continuum, the semen is the vacuum of our space, that defines the space and the ciliated male gametes are your basic building blocks of everything, photons, electrons, what have ye.

See now how the condom expands faster than those fellas in the semen can swim? That's the explanation for ye. Hope it helped.

He, to think of it, who was the bastard that ejaculated this universe out?

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[crazed gremlin]

If two objects moved away from each other at half the speed of light, the space in between them would be increasing at the speed of light, correct?

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[brian0918]

I think it's more correct to say that the space between the objects expands such that it appears that the objects are moving away from eachother at half the speed of light. You can't really say that "space is expanding at speed X", because determining motion requires that you have objects whose motion you can measure with respect to one another, which isn't the case with a vacuum.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[Chrononium]

Ya know, the big bang really has to do with this problem of a universe in which the distances between things has been changing. But imagine, for a moment, that gravity keeps things nice and causal. That time is bundled up in places with matter (and therefore gravity, kinda like how electric fields get concentrated in dielectrics), but otherwise is free to diminish (since if there are a finite number of "things", not necessary matter, responsible for time, then they would likely be preserved). That is to say that the way we measure distance is intimately tied into time, since we measure moving things with "known" speeds. If we assume that light travels at some constant (either just now, or since the beginning), then the evidence of the big bang suggests that the universe is expanding. If time is simply dilating, then the speed of light is not constant far from other bits of mass (ignoring the obvious objection that E=mc^2 and what is light but energy), but if we assume the speed of light to be constant, then it also appears as though the universe expands into nothingness.

Why the weird (and likely incorrect) alternate theory? I don't think science is allowed to say that any measurement's implications are true by definition. That is, the idea that the universe expands into nothingness (simply by definition of the universe) doesn't seem justified at all. The very definition of the universe prevents scientists from ever knowing if this interpretation is correct. Based off the mostly healthy skepticism of science towards other pieces of evidence and other human enterprises, I find it surprising for them to produce a hypothesis which is impossible to test.

I understand the desire to explain the mystery of the evidence before us, but to create a question whose answer is epistemologically impossible seems to be worse than the mystery itself. Nothingness is the very opposite of knowledge, of evidence. All that we know is that the perceived distances are getting bigger. Is that because space expands, the speed of light is variable, or that time is more complex than previously imagined? I dunno ... there's not much to d=r*t and it's one of these variables (I know, a big, oversimplification of cosmology).

Since this is so weird (and likely offtopic) already, I'll just make a note to myself:
3 options:
(1) d(t) = r*t
(2) d = r(t)*t
(3) d = r*t(d)

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[crazed gremlin]

"I think it's more correct to say that the space between the objects expands such that it appears that the objects are moving away from eachother at half the speed of light. You can't really say that "space is expanding at speed X", because determining motion requires that you have objects whose motion you can measure with respect to one another, which isn't the case with a vacuum." How come when I say that I get a 1 and when you say it you get a 5? I'm confused.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[spun]

It's not expanding into anything. It defines space and time, outside the universe there is no space or time. The universe isn't some bubble suspended in some larger structure. Even if it is, that wouldn't matter. You claim that the speed of light in "nothingness" is different than in a vacuum. That is completely untestable and utterly beside the point.

Things can not go faster than light. Space can very easily go faster than light. Spacetime is expanding faster than light. It isn't that things are exploding out from the big bang faster than the speed of light like so much cosmic shrapnel. Space itself is expanding faster than light.

Whether or not there is something "outside" the universe is a moot point. If it truely is outside the universe, there is no way it can ever act on things inside the universe, and we will never know.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[Anonymous Coward]

The initial expansion was MUCH faster than the speed of light. c is the limit that governs speed in a vacuum. But by definition the early (first 400,000 years) expansion (or inflation) of the universe was expanding into NOTHINGNESS, not vacuum

Could you please explain NOTHINGNESS to me? How can you expand into nothing if you(a carbon based water bag)can't travel into nothing. I've got nothing but time so explain away. (and plenty of empty space in my head that needs somthing expanded into it)

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[WilliamSChips]

He, to think of it, who was the bastard that ejaculated this universe out?

I believe His name is Yahweh or something.

Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.

[suffe]

Funny how the meaning stays more or less the same if you replace "the universe" with "the usa". =)

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

If the universe is 15.8 billion years old and 180 billion light-years wide, wouldn't that mean that the outermost parts of the universe travel or have travelled around 5x faster than the speed of light?

Re:Question

[Mindwarp]

Not quite. It means that space-time was expanding faster than the speed of light for a while. Within space-time nothing was travelling faster than the speed of light.

180B years wide but only 15B years old?

[192939495969798999]

So if it's 180B light-years wide, but 15B years old, does that mean that on average, if it started as a singularity, it has expanded at 10x the speed of light since the beginning of time?(tm) Do I get the Nobel prize in physics now?

Re:180B years wide but only 15B years old?

[vertinox]

So if it's 180B light-years wide, but 15B years old, does that mean that on average, if it started as a singularity, it has expanded at 10x the speed of light since the beginning of time?(tm) Do I get the Nobel prize in physics now?

Speed of light is constant, but time itself is not. Time is relative to where you are in the universe and how fast you are traveling. As in the ratio to light years to actual years is kind of iffy depending on how far and how fast you travel.

You know... Travel at the speed of light for 5 years and come back to find a couple thousand have passed on your home planet.

Of course I could be horribly wrong about this because I'm no astrophysicist.

Re:180B years wide but only 15B years old?

[bromoseltzer]

Read up on inflation theory, which says the universe did have a very sudden expansion (inflation) very early on.

If the universe is 180 gigayears across, but 15 gy old, that just means that many parts of the universe cannot "see" each other.

Re:180B years wide but only 15B years old?

[Siberwulf]

So my question is, how can we claim to see the edges of the universe? If the universe is only 15B years old, that means that from the furthest points of space, light would only have had a chance travel those 15B years.

With a broad and hypothetical assumption that the milky way and solar system is in the absolute "center" of the Universe, light from all edges of the universe could not reach us for ((180B / 2) - 15B) or 75B years.

Am I just being retarded here? Is this already known? If so, how?

Re:180B years wide but only 15B years old?

[madcow_bg]

So my question is, how can we claim to see the edges of the universe? If the universe is only 15B years old, that means that from the furthest points of space, light would only have had a chance travel those 15B years.
If the Universe started from a singularity, we are and will be seeing the whole universe from the beginning. For example, the most distant galaxies we see from the beginning of time, but:
1) They are veery far
2) The light is so dim an red-shifted that we cannot see them.
So, essentially, we "see" them all the time, but we actually cannot see them.

Am I just being retarded here? Is this already known? If so, how?
It is far from being known. Nobody understands the Universe, not yet. But some like you DO try.

Re:180B years wide but only 15B years old?

[Siberwulf]

If they are so far away, like over 15B ly away, how do we see them? Red shift is still light. Light can't go faster than the speed of light. Even if it is red shifted, it still travels at the same rate, right?

Ok, now I'm not an expert in astronomy...

[Opportunist]

...so what changes with this revelation? Did this change anything? Give us new insight? Did it support or crush any theories?

I mean, it's nice by itself and all, but I'd be highly interested whether that has any implications other than changing the universe from being old to being older than we thought.

Re:Ok, now I'm not an expert in astronomy...

[Alfred, Lord Tennyso]

The early history of the universe is complicated. It had an early "inflationary period" in which things moved a lot faster than light. (That's why it's more than 30 billion light years across, to answer the question a lot of people have asked in this thread already.)

Understanding the way the rules of the universe have changed over time is crucial to understanding what happened at the big bang. And, perhaps more importantly, what happened to make the early universe "clumpy", rather than smooth, which is what gave rise to galaxies, planets, and you.

Relatively small changes in the values like "how old is the universe" have a tendency to scrap some theories about how that happened and reinforce others. It's not like this changes what you're going to have for lunch today, but an awful lot of physicists are skipping lunch entirely trying to figure out what this means.

Re:Ok, now I'm not an expert in astronomy...

[wanerious]

What is potentially troubling with this, and why I am skeptical of the implications for the Hubble constant, is that the age of the Universe had been narrowed down with a decimal point to 13.7 billion years, which means that the uncertainty in that number is +-100 million years or so. This is completely outside of the error bars. And the previous number had been honed in upon by not just the WMAP microwave background probe, but by many independent observations of Type Ia supernovae. It seems more likely to me that there is a systematic effect affecting the brightness of this binary star system observed in another galaxy than a confounding problem with WMAP or Type Ia. Also, it's a little odd to me to make Hubble constant inferences from a galaxy in our Local Group --- a galaxy that, together with Andromeda, is gravitationally bound to us (moving towards us) and doesn't obey the Hubble flow.

Re:Ok, now I'm not an expert in astronomy...

[Opportunist]

Ok, so the Hubble constant is possibly wrong. Ok. What are the implications?

I can see that if the gravitational constant was wrong, a LOT of our knowledge concerning physics and astrophysics had to be rewritten and rethought. But what does THIS mean for "us"? I'm not even questioning the effects this should have for "everyday life", but does it mean anything but "Well, looks like the universe is older than we thought"?

Expand faster than light?

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

How can it be 180 billion light years wide and be 14.3 billion years old?

If it expands at the speed of light shouldn't it be 14.3 billion light years wide? Or 24.6 if they're not measuring from the point at which the big bang occured?

Or is it measuring the (estimated) circumference of the universe?

Re:Expand faster than light?

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

Ehm, replace 14.3 with 15.8 and 24.6 with 31.6. Always something you screw up when posting.

Re:Expand faster than light?

[astrogirl2900]

This is a common question. Spacetime is allowed to expand faster than light. It is all that moves through spacetime that is bound by the speed of light.

Re:Expand faster than light?

[Ideasware]

Very odd post above. 1) The article says the new number is 15.8B LY, not 14.3. 2) If anyone can explain the logic of why the width would be 24.6 "if they're not measuring from the point at which the big bang occured", I'd like to know what it is. But it's not correct, anyway.. 3) The width would be expected to be http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?numb er=167

Wow its changed again

[Crashmarik]

Cosmologists have to be the weathermen of astronomy. Every five to ten years they come up with their definitive measurements of the (age,shape,nature, ending,begining pick one or more) universe. Once they have settled into an attractive basin they defend the viewpoint religously and then in five to ten years it happens all over again. If you catch a cosmologist between shifts they act as if the current viewpoint is the be all and end all.

Re:Wow its changed again

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

If cosmologists were weathermen then the estimates for the age of the universe would vary between 1 week and 100 billion years.

Re:Wow its changed again

[pe1rxq]

It is just how science works....
1. Gather measurements
2. Set up hypothesis that explain measurements
3. Do more measurements
4. Find measurement that doesn't fit with hypothesis.
5. Find mistake in previously mentioned measurement or set up new hypothesis that also explains new measurements.
6. goto 3.

Take religion as a contrast:
1. Come up with a nice book/scripture/bedtimestory
2. Defend it at all cost no mather how absurd it looks/sounds and how much evidence contradicts it.

Re:Wow its changed again

[Andy Gardner]

Actualy cosmologist's come up with a new theory or revise an old one. The media just misreports it as the gospel and the general public follow suit...

Re:Wow its changed again

[Crashmarik]

I noticed you altered the method to fit the agenda. 3. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments. Problem with cosmology is you can't do the experiment. Birth of the universe is a one time event. Death of the universe is a one time event which concievably may not be predetermined in nature. Either way, the only way to test a hypothesis is through second order or higher effects. Because the birth of the universe probably happened a very very long time ago we have no idea what evidence we are missing. For instance, Assume the big bang theory is correct, but instead of us existing at the current time period we exist when the universe is 45 billion years old. The cosmic background radiation is one ninth the strength it is now. The radiation is for all intents undectable. Your'e going to have a real hard time making the case for the big bang. Who knows what we are missing because its x billion years too late. With Astronomy, you can at least see stars explode, neutron stars form, and planets in the process of accretion.

Re:Wow its changed again

[alexgieg]

You surely never heard about, much less read, Saint Augustine and/or Saint Thomas Aquinas, nor the whole bunch of religious sages in between both. Or, to take an Eastern approach, the work of people like Nagarjuna or Shankaracarya. Otherwise you'd know that religions (actual ones, not this thing Americans usually take as such) follow the first pattern, not the second.

Example: do you know how you write a summa? (Summa is the name of the scientific literary genre developed in the Middle Age.) This is how:

1) Define the subject you'll be talking about, and put it the the form of a question;

2) Collect all (and I mean ALL) that has been said on that subject, and list them, one by one;

3) After writing down the list, add your own solution to the problem;

4) Answer each one of the items your list in step 3, proving your solution is better that each one of those.

Example:

Question: Is X a kind of Y?

First section: What has already been said.

A and B say yes, because of this and this and this.

C and D say no, because of this and that and such.

E says the question is imprecise, because of that and that.

F and G say...

Second section: The author's opinion.

In contrast, I answer that... And, based on this, I reply to A, B, C, D, E, F and G thus:

Third section: Replies to previous thinkers.

A and B are correct in saying yes, but not for the reason they used. Actually...

C and D are partially correct in the reasoning they used to say no, but...

In regards to E saying that the question is imprecise, I've elaborated this as an independent question, see page 'n'.

F and G's reasoning forgets that X...

By the way, I know of no atheist willing to do such a thing when attacking religion. It's easier, it seems, to act based on prejudices than to seek good information and answer it point by point. When will we see a "Summa Against God"? Never, I bet.

Re:Wow its changed again

[Anonymous Coward]

Please read "The Age Of Reason" for a thorough, precise, still-unrefuted-after-200-years, complete demolition of all religions bar atheism, deism and agonsticism.

The lie and plague that is second-hand revealed religion has done enough damage.

Re:Wow its changed again

[4of11]

Science does not require experiments. Never has. Sure if it's possible to do an experiment, then that's the best way of gathering data. But if an experiment is impossible, observations are still sufficient to create a scientific theory.

For example, we are almost certain that the Sun is driven by a huge fusion reaction. We haven't created a star in an experimental setting to figure this out, but the weight of massive amounts of observational data, as well as theories of Physics well grounded in mathematics and experimentation, allows us to create a good scientific theory, one that is highly unlikely to be significantly challenged.

Since we cannot study the beginnings of the Universe in an experimental setting, we use observational data (such as cosmic background radiation, and Dopplar shifted stars), along with well grounded theories of Physics, to come up with a good theory. As the age of the Universe is a much more difficult question than that of the mechanism of the Sun, this theory is not going to be as close to the truth. But it is still the best answer given current knowledge. But that's all science ever is -- no scientist would claim to have found the true explanation for anything.

I suppose you have a more sound way of determining the age of the Universe?

Re:Wow its changed again

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easier, it seems, to act based on prejudices than to seek good information and answer it point by point.

Yeah, it says so in the Bible, so it must be true. Go crawl back under your bridge, troll.

Re:Wow its changed again

[elGrippe]

Take religion as a contrast:
1. Come up with a nice book/scripture/bedtimestory
2. Defend it at all cost no mather how absurd it looks/sounds and how much evidence contradicts it.


3. Profit!

Re:Wow its changed again

[aDSF762]

What's absurd is how people who don't believe in religion think that it's stupid because some jackass is ranting and raveing about flying red dragons and armageddon it just explain of things as they are it's our job to read though the lines and not be like those jackasses.

Re:Wow its changed again

[Crashmarik]

To turn your own example back on you. With the sun we have been able to directly observe the output products of the giant fusion reaction. We are able to do direct checks on the phenomena and most importantly the solar observations and the theories underlying them have sparked new results in other fields ranging from chemistry to physics. (see discovery of elements in solar spectra, and solar nutrino flux as examples). Further the explanation of how the sun shines has been converging since lord kelvins time and has been pretty much fixed since the carbon cycle.

Cosmology rarely if ever seems to generate advances in other fields and it has about as much convergence or actual progress as philosophy or religion in general. The current best argument for the big bang is that everything in the universe seems to be separating and that there is a uniform radiance in every direction you look. I'm no cosmologist but I can think of lots of explanations consistent with both.

Re:Wow its changed again

[yndrd1984]

I know of no atheist willing to do such a thing when attacking religion.

They do it all the time.

It's easier, it seems, to act based on prejudices than to seek good information and answer it point by point.

Every side of every confilict involving large groups does this on occation. Don't let one jerk overwhelm a dozen good arguments just because they're on the same side.

When will we see a "Summa Against God"? Never, I bet.

Here's TWO! Why I Am Not A Christian and The Age Of Reason are both philosophical classics. The Secular Web's Library has plenty of other examples of atheists mulling over the ideas presented by theists. And that's just what I know of off the top of my head.

Otherwise you'd know that religions (actual ones, not this thing Americans usually take as such) follow the first pattern, not the second.

No, they don't. Religions are built on intuitions and feelings, things that are by their nature subjective. Science is just a way of avoiding the mental shortcuts (gut feelings, intuition, emotion) that might often be useful and good in their own way, but prevent us from using rational thought effectively.

If religion worked as you say it does, then after this much time there would be at least a few things that were beyond contestation. But religion hasn't even proved that the things it talks about (god, souls, reincarnation, supernatural things in general) exist. If biology was in the same state, there would be some people that have strong, reasonable arguments that suggest that living things don't exist!

Re:Wow its changed again

[yndrd1984]

To add to your evidence:
And the wavelength of that radiation is exactly what the Big Bang theory predicted.
And the ratio between light elements is what you'd expect after a Big Bang.
And the way galaxies are distributed fits well with the theory.

As for progress, dark energy wasn't even suggested until better measurements were taken in the '90s.

And the whole "dark energy" idea, developed because of cosmology, has had a major impact on physics, so I think it's had an impact on other fields.

Re:Wow its changed again

[Crashmarik]

And dark energy is probably wrong the same way wimps machos photinos and the whole slew of darkmatter has been. It aint science to say we have measurements we can't explain so lets invent something we cant test that explains them. P.S. for the dark energy being suggested in the 90's I always liked it better when it was callled the cosmological constant.

Re:Wow its changed again

[yndrd1984]

But it is science to say we have measurements we can't explain so lets invent something we can test that explains them. As far as I know, all of these hypothesies can be tested, so they are scientific.

P.S. - The cosmological constant was origionally formed to make a static universe, not one that is expanding at an accelerating rate. Now, modified to fit new observations, it is treated as a possible form of dark energy (quintessence being the other) - it's not just another name for the same thing.

Re:Wow its changed again

[alexgieg]

Here's TWO! Why I Am Not A Christian [drew.edu] and The Age Of Reason [thomaspaine.org] are both philosophical classics. The Secular Web's Library [infidels.org] has plenty of other examples of atheists mulling over the ideas presented by theists. And that's just what I know of off the top of my head.

No, they aren't. The first choose a very small subset of conclusions of arguments, then refuted those conclusions based on axioms from a different philosophical framework. This isn't a summa by any means. An actual summa would first deal with these philosophical axioms themselves and only after having cleared things in this domain would proceed to analyse problems of a higher order. The scope of subjects the author try dealing with would require a multi-volume book to be fairly dealth with. As he doesn't do that, the character of the text as a rethorical work, not a philosophical one, becomes clear.

Paine's work goes a little further (I enjoyed a lot this book when I read it some years ago), but also fails in dealing with the whole set of previous works done on these fields. Most of what Paine talks about are arguments that christian philosophers had they themselves devised and refuted centuries earlier. For example, Saint Augustine had gone much further than him on the question of the validity of sacred texts. He not only said that there was no reason for one to accept what's in the Bible (not only the supernatural parts, but even the plain historical ones), but that even if God himself appeared in front of him saying that each word in the book is literally true, that he still would have no reason whatsoever to believe it. Paine's skepticism seems much like a kids' joke when compared to Augustine's skepticism. The actual difference between them is that Paine goes only half-way both in his skepticism as well as in the development of his work. You could cut out Augustine's own skeptic texts from his works, put Paine's text in its place, and Augustine would still complement them by deepening his criticism and by developing a solution out of it.

Why didn't Paine answer to the augustinian solution, prefering to reuse arguments that where refuted in the IV century? Because the didn't care to know better. This is the same behaviour I've found in all the documents I've read in infidels.org over the years: argue agains the weak argument so that you don't have to argue against the strong one. But this is for a very solid reason: the few atheists I know that gave themselves the trouble of deepening their studies ended up giving up their atheism. Once you cross a certain delimiting level you're no longer an "infidel" and your text isn't eligible to the archive anymore. ;)

If religion worked as you say it does, then after this much time there would be at least a few things that were beyond contestation. But religion hasn't even proved that the things it talks about (god, souls, reincarnation, supernatural things in general) exist. If biology was in the same state, there would be some people that have strong, reasonable arguments that suggest that living things don't exist!

Believe it or not, there're such arguments. German Idealism comes to mind, and no amount of lab research is strong enough to refute its reasoning. You need other tools. Without them, try as best as you can to wave a Nature article in front of Kant to see what happens! The most ironic of all this? Kant is the father of present-day scientific methodology. Popper's falseabilism is little more than applied kantism...

Speed of Light

[Phuqem]

So, can someone tell me, if the universe is 15.8 billion years old and 180 billion light years wide, that means from the center to the edge is roughly 90 billion light years? And if that's the case wouldn't it of had to expand at 6 light years per year to achieve that width? Wouldn't that rate of expansion exceed the speed of light? Someone tell me what I'm missing here.....

Re:Speed of Light

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe light sped faster in the days of yore, and it's slowed down some since then.

Re:Speed of Light

[astrogirl2900]

Your are missing the fact that spacetime is allowed to expand as fast as it wants... Only things that move through spacetime are bound by the speed of light.

Re:Speed of Light

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no center or edge of the universe. See this FAQ.

Poor Douglas

[TheRaven64]

In 1996, the Hubble Constant was estimated as being 42. At the time, Douglas Adams was quoted as saying that it does crop up surprisingly often.

Sadly, according to TFA and Wikipedia, it is now believed to be about 71. These seem so far apart that I wonder if the same units were used for both estimates.

Answer Me This

[TexVex]

the universe is instead about 15.8 billion years old and about 180 billion light-years wide

Wouldn't that mean that the universe has been expanding at several times c since the big bang? How does the universe come to be 180 billion light-years across in only 15.8 billion years, if nothing travels faster than light?

Re:Answer Me This

[Klaidas]

Well, if we (people on Earth) can't do or explain something (like travelling at the speed of light), we usually call that "the super duper ultimate thing that can't be faster/bigger/better".
And now, the naming system's got a problem.
So, in conclusion, travelling faster than light might be (possibly is) possible.

Re:Answer Me This

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

if nothing travels faster than light?

You answered your own question. Nothing can expand faster than the speed of light. In particular, the space between galaxies can expand faster than the speed of light. The expansion of the universe isn't about a bunch of galaxies flying apart from each other from an initial explosion like shrapnel from a bomb. It's a about the expansion of space itself, and that is something entirely different.

Re:Answer Me This

[spun]

Thank you, that explanation is better than the dozen or so above it. Space itself is expanding. People can't picture space expanding very well, they picture the big bang as an explosion in space, with galaxies and such spewing forth into the empty void.

Picture a balloon. The surface represents our space-time. Draw some dots on it, representing our stars and galaxies. Now blow it up. Even though the dots aren't moving in relation to their local space-time, they appear to move in relation to each other. Light is constrained to move through space-time at a certain speed, but space-time itself is under no such limitation.

Re:Answer Me This

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if we (people on Earth) can't do or explain something (like travelling at the speed of light), we usually call that "the super duper ultimate thing that can't be faster/bigger/better".

Or religious "evidence."

Re:Answer Me This

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I just recently took part in a discussion about this topic at a blog.

One thing to note is that "space expands" sounds a bit meaningless. But the discussion following that blog entry discusses the testable differences between two objects moving apart and two objects where the space between them is expanding. There is a meaningful difference between these two scenarios.

Re:Answer Me This

[Anonymous Coward]

If the oldest light in the universe is 16 billion years, then the age of the universe is *at least* 16 billion years, since it took time for gravity to coalesce and form these stars that we're seeing. After all, we don't see the big bang itself in the sky. It's disappeared.

That also means that these objects may have moved up to 16 billion light-years away since then, meaning that the universe is roughly 64 billion light-years across.

So how in hell do we measure 45 billion light-years away, for a 180b wide universe, when our light is 1/3 this age?

As for expanding space, is that idea, in fact, testable? Empty space has energy, particles and antiparticles pop out all the time. This energy is being stretched?? Gravity is being stretched? FTL travel is possible because you can move 99% the speed of light and the stretching of the universe puts you over the top? I'm sorry, stretching wrecks a lot of things.

I'm more willing to believe that the big bang was 116 billion light-years across (180 minus 64), than the idea that it expanded at 3x the speed of light. And the fact that it's still accelerating, that just makes it worse.

-mshurpik (post limit)

Re:Answer Me This

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

As for expanding space, is that idea, in fact, testable?

Yes, the link I gave earlier discusses this issue. It might not be easy to test but it's not some wacky new idea - it just drops straight out of standard textbook general relativity.

Empty space has energy, particles and antiparticles pop out all the time.

Don't take all that stuff about particles and antiparticles popping out of empty space too literally. That's crude English language being used as a substitute for a well defined formal theory. That theory predicts that if you stick an unaccelerated particle detector in a vacuum it will detect zero particles. So a vacuum is, for all intents and purposes, exactly what you expect from a vacuum.

FTL travel is possible because you can move 99% the speed of light and the stretching of the universe puts you over the top?

The distance between two objects can increase at faster than the speed of light. But nobody has figured out how to exploit such an effect to build an FTL drive. The closest thing is here.

Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this affect the age of the internet?

Re:Internet?

[thegnu]

Only insofar as Al Gore invented the universe. :-)

Re:Internet?

[quigonn]

"During my service in the United States congress I took the initiative in creating the Universe."
OMG, Al Gore is God!

Re:Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

God help us all. Oh, wait...

Cluebat, please?

[Dammital]

IANAC (cosmologist) and my last physics class was over 30 years ago, so bear with me.

From TFA:

"...the universe is instead about 15.8 billion years old and about 180 billion light-years wide."

If I just think in terms of poor old antiquated Euclidean 3-space, and accept that C is as fast as you can go, then doesn't that make the universe's size about 150 billion LY at birth?

That doesn't square much with the idea of a point-source Big Bang. Or is there some space warp voodoo going on here that I'm missing?

Re:Cluebat, please?

[spun]

Things in spacetime may not exceed the speed of light. Spacetime itself is under no such constraints. The big bang wasn't a bunch of junk exploding onto some primordial empty stage like so much bomb shrapnel. The stage was created at the same time as the junk. The stage is getting bigger, carrying the junk along with it.

15B years, 180B light-years... RTFA (here)

[scovetta]

(from: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_mond ay_040524.html)

This article generated quite a few e-mails from readers who were perplexed or flat out could not believe the universe was just 13.7 billion years old yet 158 billion light-years wide. That suggests the speed of light has been exceeded, they argue. So SPACE.com asked Neil Cornish to explain further. Here is his response:

"The problem is that funny things happen in general relativity which appear to violate special relativity (nothing traveling faster than the speed of light and all that).

"Let's go back to Hubble's observation that distant galaxies appear to be moving away from us, and the more distant the galaxy, the faster it appears to move away. The constant of proportionality in that relationship is known as Hubble's constant.

"One seemingly paradoxical consequence of Hubble's observation is that galaxies sufficiently far away will be receding from us at a velocity faster than the speed of light. This distance is called the Hubble radius, and is commonly referred to as the horizon in analogy with a black hole horizon.

"In terms of special relativity, Hubble's law appears to be a paradox. But in general relativity we interpret the apparent recession as being due to space expanding (the old raisins in a rising fruit loaf analogy). The galaxies themselves are not moving through space (at least not very much), but the space itself is growing so they appear to be moving apart. There is nothing in special or general relativity to prevent this apparent velocity from exceeding the speed of light. No faster-than-light signals can be sent via this mechanism, and it does not lead to any paradoxes.

"Indeed, the WMAP data [on cosmic microwave background radiation] contain strong evidence that the very early universe underwent a period of accelerated expansion in which the distance been two points increased so quickly that light could not outrace the expansion so there was a true horizon -- in precise analogy with a black hole horizon. Indeed, the fluctuations we see in the CMB are thought to be generated by a process that is closely analogous to Hawking radiation from black holes.

"Even more amazing is the picture that emerges when you combine the WMAP data with [supernova] observations, which imply that the universe has started inflating again. If this is true, we have started to move away from the distant galaxies at a rate that is increasing, and in the future we will not be able to see as many galaxies as they will appear to be moving away from us faster than the speed of light (due to the expansion of space), so their light will not be able to reach us."

Re:15B years, 180B light-years... RTFA (here)

[192939495969798999]

If we are receding away from a galaxy at a velocity faster than light, doesn't that mean that light emitted "today" from that galaxy can never reach us unless we slow down, or if the "speed of light" speeds up?

Re:15B years, 180B light-years... RTFA (here)

[SquareVoid]

If whats above is true, then wouldn't it be possible (given enough time) to see the birth of galaxies and stars, only in reverse?

Re:15B years, 180B light-years... RTFA (here)

[Wargames]

Thus No-thing (ie. space) IS faster than the speed of light.

That question is meaningless

[BlackCobra43]

Just like "What came before there was time". Without a frame of reference, words like "beyond" or "before" become meaningless. You might as well ask what lies "beyond" the point you see on a cartesian plane.

Re:That question is meaningless

[M1FCJ]

Hey, the nutters have the answer: Before time, there was God.

OK, the question answered, there is no reason to have any more research and expenditure to this thing you call "science". Everything you need to know is in this Bible/Quran/Torah. :)

Re:That question is meaningless

[jZnat]

If God has always been, then the only way for that to happen is for there to have been a beginning of the universe where He was the universe. I'd say He still is the universe (God == light and energy), but that's just my belief.

Re:That question is meaningless

[Apocalypse111]

Your answer is accurate, but the reasoning goes beyond mere referential clumsiness on our parts. Think of the concept of spacetime, ie. space = time (yes, its more complex than that, but stay with me for a moment). Before the Big Bang, there was no space, thus, no time. Therefore, there was nothing before, since there was no before.

15% Slower

[Anne_Nonymous]

> the universe is...about 180 billion light-years wide...and 15% slower

Yeah well, I'm a little wider and a bit slower each year too.

Re:15% Slower

[jounihat]

"Yeah well, I'm a little wider and a bit slower each year too." So from now on, if anyone happens to ask, you can safely blame the universe.

Erdos joke

[rothlmar]

The prolific mathematician Paul Erdos, towards the end of his life, used to say that he was about four billion years old. He explained: when he was a boy, the known of the age of the universe was about five billion years, but by the time he was older, the age of the universe was had grown to nine billion. Tack on another billion and change for all of us...

Re:Erdos joke

[Anonymous Coward]

i guess that pretty muxh explains why he was a mathematician, not a comedian.

Re:why?

[Klaidas]

Because people want to know where the heck are they localed and what's around their planet?

old debate

[peter303]

Up until five years ago there was a factor of two discrepancy- the Hubble constant using supernova candles gave a young age; globular cluster star ages appeared about 20 billion. The high resolution microwave background variance measurement agreed with the Hubble number, so that is currently the best hypothesis.

only a 10% story

[bromoseltzer]

15.8 is not "much older" than 14.3 billion years. It's only about 10% older. This is just a tweak. For a long time, astronomers disagreed about the Hubble age by a factor of two or more, and probably some still do.

Re:only a 10% story

[4D6963]

15.8 is not "much older" than 14.3 billion years. It's only about 10% older.

Can someone tell me where the submitter pulled out this 14.3 billion number from? FTFA : "Scientists now estimate the universe to be about 13.7 billion years old (a figure that has seemed firm since 2003, based on measurements of radiation leftover from the Big Bang)"

Now that's 15% older, which is consistant with the 15% change in the Hubble constant estimate.

Re:only a 10% story

[Johnny5000]

15.8 is not "much older" than 14.3 billion years. It's only about 10% older. This is just a tweak. For a long time, astronomers disagreed about the Hubble age by a factor of two or more, and probably some still do.

Lets say you've been six feet tall for your entire adult life.
Then you get measured at the doctor's office one year and he tells you you're 6'7".

It's just a tweak though, you're only 10% taller.

Hubble Constant?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Universe in mirror is larger than it appears"?

The real age of the Universe discovered!

[dzfoo]

AP 08/07/2006, Jordan - In related news, a new scroll has been uncovered in the Dead Sea that categorically insists that God most definitely did *NOT* rest on the seventh day, and perhaps worked on the Creation at least half-way through the next week. The Universe is now believed to be 9 1/2 days old; a full 3 days older than originally thought.

        -dZ.

Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[JesperJ]

I wonder if computers of the future can calculate the correct answer, by looking at the present now and the future then, and thereby go even farther back than the present now, recursively.

Besides, I can't stop wonder if computers of the future will be powerful enough to predict the future further on, as a part of the chaos theory; Every little particle must be taken into consideration - not to mention the forces between them. It's interesting that every single event is an explicit direct consequence of the Big Bang.

Even that I'm writing this comment is a direct consequence of the Big Bang that theoretically could have been predicted...

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[smoor]

I think maybe you missed the point of chaos theory. Chaos theory shows that not everything can be predicted. Thus, the universe provides the ultimate loophole for free will.

The deterministic universe idea was shattered by chaos theory. Computers can use chaos theory to simulate chaotic events and determine probabilities, but not predict events.

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[JesperJ]

I indeed think that "free will" is just an illusion. Every action that one man makes is based on several estimations and cognitive thoughts, based on events experienced before in life and of course the person's personality. The brain's thoughts can be predicted as well as everything else, if the information of what ever it and it's body is made of and what the brain experienced earlier in life is known. Not to mention the one practically problem that we do not have enough power of calculation. There is nothing random in animals (including humans) decisions.

But maybe you're right about Chaos Theory, I actually didn't know that this kind of thinking wasn't a part of it. :)

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was this guy named Heisenberg that had this Uncertainty principle that basicly stated that no one can ever measure position and momentum of a singlar object with absolute certainty.

from wikipedia:

It is this interpretation that Einstein was questioning when he said "I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe." Bohr, who was one of the authors of the Copenhagen interpretation responded, "Einstein, don't tell God what to do." Niels Bohr himself acknowledged that quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle were counter-intuitive when he stated, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word." The basic debate between Einstein and Bohr (including Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) was that Einstein was in essence saying: "Of course, we can know where something is; we can know the position of a moving particle if we know every possible detail, and thereby by extension, we can predict where it will go." Bohr and Heisenberg were saying the opposite: "There is no way to know where a moving particle is ever even given every possible detail, and thereby by extension, we can never predict where it will go."

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[quokkapox]

Even that I'm writing this comment is a direct consequence of the Big Bang that theoretically could have been predicted...

Clearly this comment is a direct consequence of the Big Bong.

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[Tumalu]

Chaos Theory doesn't preclude the universe from being deterministic (Quantum Theory maybe, but not Chaos Theory). But without all of the initial states of the particles, and a complete understanding of how they interact, predicting long-term outcomes with any sort of certainty is out of the question. Chaos Theory doesn't mean that the universe is random, just that predicting a future macroscopic state requires consideration of even microscopic particles.

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[torako]

When I studied dynamic systems in an undergrad class the prof said that somebody using the phrase "chaos theory" is a clear indicator that whoever uses it has no idea what he's talking about. Nonlinear systems are found in all fields of physics, there is no such thing as a chaos theory.

Sorry, off-topic, but there are just way too many arm chair physicists around here..

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[ithicine]

The answer is no. To represent the properties of every single particle in the universe, you would need to store a measurement for each of those properties. If we consider the universe to be particle based, we would actually need every single one of them to achieve the data density required for the memory. So, to simulate the universe, we need to build either an exact duplicate (impossible!) or something isomorphic to the system as a whole, destroying the universe that we're trying to simulate in the process.

Of course, we could always just consider the actual universe to be our simulation, take our measurements from that, and make predictions based on simplified or incomplete models. Oddly enough, this is what we already do in science.

Sort of reminds me an old question, "Is it life imitating art, or art imitating life?"

Then again, who's to say that some wildly different way of interpreting the universe wouldn't make it possible? What if the particles we measure and observe are merely the manifestation of emergent properties based on rules we aren't armed to comprehend? Then it's all up for grabs, but I'd like to see someone "jump out of the system" and describe the indescribable. Read Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter and check out everything about level crossing to see what I mean here.

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[JesperJ]

Sorry, off-topic, but there are just way too many arm chair physicists around here..

I never called myself a physicist. :-) Besides, I only use the term "Chaos Theory" to indicate a theory containing all particles/waves in the space and the forces of nature between them.

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[Chris Burke]

The brain's thoughts can be predicted as well as everything else, if the information of what ever it and it's body is made of and what the brain experienced earlier in life is known... There is nothing random in animals (including humans) decisions.

Choas Theory is about systems that are sensitively dependent on initial conditions, to use the specific phrase that was used when I learned about it. These chaotic systems may follow rigorous non-random rules, but this does not mean that you can look at the current state and predict what the next state will be, because to do so requires literally (really literally) infinite precision. Look at something like the Mandelbrot Set. It uses a very simple iterative equation, nothing random about it, yet the output of the equation is sensitively dependent on the inputs, such the border is infinitely convoluted. You can identify whether a specific point is in the set, but you can't say whether any of the points in the range +/- your last significant digit are.

Assuming the brain is similarly controlled by such chaotic processes, and I don't think this is unreasonable, then it is impossible to actually measure the state of the brain with enough precision to be able to predict its next state, because you would need infinite precision. Does this make it free will? That's a philosophical discussion; I believe in free will, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that an actual predictive simulation of the brain would, at best, be probabilistic and much like our weather predictions would diverge rapidly.

Now there is an interesting twist on this, which is some evidence that our universe is actually discreet and not continuous. This would mean that there actually is a level of precision which is sufficient, because unlike in the real numbers, you could have two points which have no possible points between them. This would mean that it is principle possible to have perfect simulations of the weather, the brain, etc.

However even in this case, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle means that it would still be impossible to measure all of the state in the brain or any other object with that precision, as you would necessarily change its state by measuring it. So you couldn't form a perfectly predictive model of a real human brain; however you could create a perfect model of a hypothetical brain with assumed initial state. That would be highly useful for a variety of purposes, but determining proceduraly (instead of probabilistically) what someone will do in the distant future isn't one of them.


But maybe you're right about Chaos Theory, I actually didn't know that this kind of thinking wasn't a part of it. :)

Chaos Theory shows that many things which appear random are not, they are just "chaotic" and produce wildly divergent results based on the tiniest difference in inputs. However it also justifies thinking about such things as though they are random, since you can never know the inputs with enough detail to know the output, so it may as well be random as far as we are concerned. The most obvious practical application of which has been producing better random number generators.

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you are grossly misusing the term "Chaos Theory"

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[Chris Burke]

actually i was living under the impression that chaotic is a system whos outcome can't be predicted by a lower complexity order system, using analysis tools inherent to this lower complexity class observer system (using linear math etc).

Close. A chaotic system is one which you cannot analytically predict the outcome of using the chaotic system itself, because it produces outputs which diverge hugely based on infintesimal changes in inputs. This means that even knowning the exact math used by the chaotic system, you wouldn't be able to predict the result because you would need infinite precision in your measurements to make sure the output of your calculations matched the output of the real system.

The classic real-world example of a chaotic system is the weather. We do use lower complexity systems to try to predict the weather, but that's because we don't know the real equations. Chaos Theory says that even if we knew the exact actual equations that governed weather patterns, we still couldn't predict the weather precisely because we could never measure the relevent state with enough precision. We would still have to use probabilistic models -- "for 30% of inputs within our error range, we get rain, for 65% we get sun, and for 5%, tornadoes. Have a nice weekend!"

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[LumenPlacidum]

Well said, sir. I'm not really sure how applicable Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is to this, but everything you say about Chaos is on the money.

Re:Maybe Chaos Theory will give us the answer?

[Chris Burke]

Neither am I, that was just my speculation on how Heisenberg would interact with a discreet universe and the impact on chaos theory, regarding the question: in a discreet universe, could you measure accurately enough to get predictible outcomes from chaotic systems? Heisenberg and quantum mechanics are definitely not an area I know much about, so I'm just guessing.

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

If the speed of light is a limiting factor how can something that is 18 billion years old be 180 billion light years across?

I have it on good authority...

[CrazedWalrus]

...that there's a popular restaurant there.

Re:I have it on good authority...

[hcob$]

I believe it actually was around a Frogstar planet. It's just that it will have been created at the end of TIME for the universe.

Misleading, sensational article

[StupendousMan]

This whole article is misleading. The new research has very little to do with our knowledge of the size and age of the universe.

(And, yes, I am an astronomer).

Stanek and company have used measurements of one eclipsing binary system to determine the distance to M33. This is a good way to measure distances, as it avoids the perils of even a short "ladder" of methods. They find a distance modulus of 24.92 +/- 0.12 mag to the binary. You can read their paper on astro-ph at

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph?papernum=0606279

Go to Table 7 of their paper, in which they compare their distance to previous measurements. There are 12 previous values, measured by several techniques (only 2 of the papers use Cepheids). The range of those previous values is 24.32 +/- 0.45 to 24.86 +0.07/-0.11. Their new distance is inconsistent, at the 1-sigma level, with 6 of the 12 others; thus, it is consistent with 6 of the 12 others.

Yes, it's true that the HST Key Project distance to M33, computed using Cepheids, is smaller than the new distance by an amount well outside the quoted uncertainties. But that's not a big deal, by itself. M33 is only one of a number of galaxies which serves to calibrate secondary distance indicators, which may in turn be used to find the Hubble constant. A small change in the distance to M33, even if true, would not make any major change to H-nought.

Recall that M33 is close enough to us that its radial velocity is NOT caused by the expansion of the universe, but instead by the gravitational forces of the galaxies in the Local Group. The press release's statement

The team's results suggested that the stars were about 3 million light-years from Earth--or about half-a-million light-years farther than would be expected using the commonly accepted Hubble constant value.

is absolute nonsense. One cannot USE the Hubble constant and radial velocity of M33 to calculate its distance. The radial velocity of M33 is -179 km/sec, so "using" the Hubble costant to determine its distance would yield a negative distance. Phht.

This is a very nice, and very very worthwhile scientific project -- I have followed the DIRECT team's efforts for years, and encourage them to keep going! -- but the press release tries too hard to make it into some sort of breakthrough with profound immediate results.

Sigh.

Re:Misleading, sensational article

[Prof.Phreak]

Technically, the universe could be 5 minutes old, created by a being who thought it would be amusing to have everyone think it was billions of years old (or that anything existed more than 5 minutes ago).

Re:Misleading, sensational article

[Fujisawa Sensei]

By that same reasoning the universe has yet to be created and this is all just a memory.

Re:Misleading, sensational article

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

The radial velocity of M33 is -179 km/sec, so "using" the Hubble costant to determine its distance would yield a negative distance

That just means that it is behind us! They must have the telescope the wrong way around.

The Hubble Constant and the age of the universe

[tjwhaynes]

I love it when I see reports like this. Stating that the age of the universe is 15.8 billion years old gives the impression that this is accurate to around 1 percent or better. The error bars on this sort of figure are probably closer to +/- 2 billion years or more, implying that the 99% percentile answer is something in the range 12 - 20 billion years. Most of the "measurements" over the last 20 years fit into that range. There is a tendency for the more recent publications to fall into the 14 - 16 billion year mark and that may simply be a reflection that that is the "accepted" answer.

I actually used to work on a team measuring the Hubble Constant using Radio Telescope data ten years ago - actually the same group who came up with 42 km s-1 Mpc-1 value which caused all the Douglas Adams H2G2 references (that was shortly before I joined). There was a lot of controversy over the value of the Constant back then and it is still a hot topic. Back then, the Hubble Constant was thought to have values anywhere from 30 km s-1 Mpc-1 up to 120 km s-1 Mpc-1 . The smaller the value of the Hubble Constant, the older the Universe is. Having a smaller value was desirable because it meant that the Universe was old enough to account for the oldest objects observed (about 16 billion years old). Think about that.

One of the points that struck me then was that the value of the Hubble Constant measured tended to be higher when measured using "more local" techniques and tended to be lower as techniques using more distant measurements were used. The Radio Telescope information gave us measurements based on object around or beyond a redshift of 1 (or, to put it another way, these clusters of galaxies observered were about half the age of the universe when the light left them).

Anyway, we'll be seeing more measurements of the Hubble Constant for many more years. Just remember the error bars!

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:The Hubble Constant and the age of the universe

[habig]

Stating that the age of the universe is 15.8 billion years old gives the impression that this is accurate to around 1 percent or better. The error bars on this sort of figure are probably closer to +/- 2 billion years or more, implying that the 99% percentile answer is something in the range 12 - 20 billion years.

No, the startling thing about recent cosmological work is that we do know this number to ~percent. The flagship for this new "precision cosmology" are the WMAP results. The number is weighing in at 13.7+/-0.2 billion years. Take a look at the tables of cosmological parameters in this paper and the carefully calculated error bars.

This particular press release's sweeping claims do overreach, as nicely summarized by Michael Richmond in a post above. M33 isn't at a cosmological distance, the observations being done by this project help to understand the lower rungs of the distance ladder, from which you can figure out distances to far-off galaxies and try to calculate numbers to independently compare to the microwave background fits. These results are one of many such distance calibrations, and have to be factored in statistically with the others. On the whole, several other means of figuring out cosmological parameters (such as the Age of the Universe) agree with the WMAP results within errors. You only get TFA's 15% increase if that is the only measurement you use to calibrate distances, throwing out all the rest.

Thank you

[Silver Sloth]

I haven't got Mod points at the moment, so all I can offer is a heartfelt thanks for stopping the endless posts by people who can't be bothered to RTFM.

Dark Matter requirements..

[Archon_de_Gaul]

So would this larger, older Universe affect the need for the particular volume of Dark Matter we've been searching? If this value is accepted, do we need less Dark Matter to explain the current state of universal expansion and possible contraction? What does this do for the various theories, a-la 'steady state', et. al?

Width != Radius

[vain gloria]

So if it's 180B light-years wide, but 15B years old, does that mean that on average, if it started as a singularity, it has expanded at 10x the speed of light since the beginning of time?(tm) Do I get the Nobel prize in physics now?

Only if you can show how the Big Bang in your model occurred on the "left-hand" side of the universe and ejaculated all matter 180B light-years to the "right". Call me a traditionalist, but I prefer the concept of the universe expanding 90B light-years in all directions from a single, central point.

Re:Width != Radius

[Fishstick]

Ok, but still, 90 billion ly in 15 billion years implies that for some period, matter travelled at speeds greatly in excess of spd of light?

I was about to post the very same dumb question (thought not nearly as funny). Matter in the expanding universe is currently moving at incredible speed in every direction, away from the point of the big bang, but on average much slower than c (not a cosmologist, but watched Sagan)?

I can't wrap my head around that. My puny mamalian brain is having a hard time fathoming how large the universe was right after the "instant" of the big bang. Is the universe slowing down and cooling, headed for an eventual collapse and another bang (just another in an infinite series)?

forget it, easier to just beleive that some supreme being called the universe into being when he sneezed or something. ;-)

Re:Width != Radius

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me a traditionalist, but I prefer the concept of the universe expanding 90B light-years in all directions from a single, central point.

Except that there was (and still is is) nothing outside of that central point, not even concept of direction. So the central point obviously could not have expanded "in all directions", it just bigame larger. That's how I understand it anyway..

It still seems too small

[91degrees]

That's not nearly enough time for the planet to form, for life to be created, and for intelligent life to have evolved. Based on the ludicrous low probabiltiy of that, I'd estimate that the universe is in fact 750 billion years old at the very least (Plus or minus 50 billion years).

Re:It still seems too small

[joss]

Given the slightly less than rigorous calculations going into your estimate
the +/- 50 billion seems a little on the low side.

Re:It still seems too small

[91degrees]

There's is a margin for error of +/- 680 billion in the margin for error.

For Sale.....

[IHC Navistar]

For Sale: 1 Universe

15.8 billion years old. Excellent cond.! 1 owner. 180 billion light-years on original engine/trans. Heat, A/C, power seats, power windows, dual coffee holders. Runs strong, but 15% slower. Minor body damage/bondo work in sector ZZ PLURAL-Z ALPHA. $1500.00 obo but also willing to part out. Ask for Zaphod.

In other words

[brian0918]

In other words, rather than there being objects moving away from eachother faster than 3*10^8 meters per second, it was as if the definition of a "meter" was changing.

Typo

[brian0918]

That should read: "Just because objects can't move away from eachother faster than the speed of light doesn't mean that the space between objects can't expand faster than the speed of light."

Re:why?

[rbarreira]

And why did Einstein study relativity? After all, it's just a bunch of stupid numbers. Guess what, turns out they found applications for it after it was invented... GPS is an example.

wouldn't get too excited yet

[Phrizz]

from the journal article,
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0606279
a glance at the intro reveals that they have analyzed *one* eclipsing binary star system in M33 and derived a distance that was greater than that obtained by Hubble. Until this measurement is repeated on other stars in M33, preferably by different groups, this remains a suggestive but in no way definitive measurement.

space.com and the submitter are a little too enthusiastic...

'Chicago' knew all along...

[digitaldc]

Does anybody really know what time it is?

I don't.

Does anybody really care?

Its not the size of the boat...

[ExE122]

I don't want to get flamed by saying people are asking dumb questions, but everyone just needs to stop relying on simple arithmetic when dealing with the size of space... The concepts involved are far more complicated than that.

One thing people don't seem to be grasping is that with the Big Bang model, the size of the universe isn't measured by the distance between two particles floating on the "edge". It is actually a measure of the width of the "fabric" of the known universe, space-time. Its difficult to grasp this since it is not something easily perceived.

The real reason for the size of the universe being so much larger is that the laws governing the size of space-time are not the same as the laws of spacial relativaty, and therefore are not constrained to the upper bound of the speed of light.

The best analogy that I've heard is the ant on the balloon example. The idea is that you picture an ant sitting on a balloon with a bread crumb an inch away. If you were to blow up the balloon to twice its size, the bread crumb wouldn't necessarily move to a distance of two inches from the ant.

In this example, we are the ants and we are watching the galaxies, represented by the bread crumb, moving away from us. However, the fabric of existence is expanding at a much larger rate.

The "what's beyond the edge" question is essentially a pointless question when dealing with space-time. There is no "edge" because nothing can possibly exist outside of the realm of spacetime.

And if that concept doesn't satisfy the question, then a simple-minded answer would be that an "edge" can never be reached as space-time is always expanding faster than any particle could possibly hope to keep up with it.

--
"A man is asked if he is wise or not. He replies that he is otherwise" ~Mao Zedong

Re:Its not the size of the boat...

[Klaidas]

The "what's beyond the edge" question is essentially a pointless question when dealing with space-time. There is no "edge" because nothing can possibly exist outside of the realm of spacetime.

But if the universe is expanding, that mean there is some empty space for it to do that. So, there's always some empty space as it continues to expand. So, the universe should be a part of some bigger thing, shouldn't it?

Re:Its not the size of the boat...

[khallow]

No. This is part of the point the grandparent was making. The universe need not be embedded in a larger space. Distance and as a result any changes to distance (eg, expansion and contraction) is a property of space. Mass and energy flows change the shape of space. General relativity doesn't require that you stick the space in something bigger. That's one of the attractions of the theory.

Re:Its not the size of the boat...

[madcow_bg]

I don't want to get flamed by saying people are asking dumb questions

That is faaar from a dumb question. You are just a human and AFAIK there is no agreement between the scientists about the beginning of the Universe. If I recall correctly it is widely believed by more than 1 500 000 000 people that the Universe began about 5600 years ago, so why should we listen to you? Show us some calculations, or links to them...

, but everyone just needs to stop relying on simple arithmetic when dealing with the size of space... The concepts involved are far more complicated than that.

Sure. It is an interesting question nevertheless.

One thing people don't seem to be grasping is that with the Big Bang model, the size of the universe isn't measured by the distance between two particles floating on the "edge". It is actually a measure of the width of the "fabric" of the known universe, space-time. Its difficult to grasp this since it is not something easily perceived.

Size IS the distance between two particles floating on the edge. Measure, width and space-time are mathematical consepts that are used to describe stuff, nothing more. It is not something you percieve, either you try understand and use, or you don't. You can make analogies to understand it, but in the end it is a mathematical idea that seems to show how stuff works, not what stuff is.

The real reason for the size of the universe being so much larger is that the laws governing the size of space-time are not the same as the laws of spacial relativaty, and therefore are not constrained to the upper bound of the speed of light.

SpEcial relativity is a theory, the laws you refer are more like principles. Nothing in the universe can travel faster than the light and that is the end of the whole story. If you accept Big Bang and you believe that there is an ultimate speed, then you believe that the Universe is not larger than the time that has passed x light speed x 2. If you think that the speed of light varied, then ok, you will integrate the function of speed over time. Moreover, the time can be different for different observers, so you might need to change the time to a variable. Even then the universe is still bound to the speed of light. That is what we know for now. The laws are the same! If they are not, we don't know anything.

The best analogy that I've heard is the ant on the balloon example. The idea is that you picture an ant sitting on a balloon with a bread crumb an inch away. If you were to blow up the balloon to twice its size, the bread crumb wouldn't necessarily move to a distance of two inches from the ant.

In this example, we are the ants and we are watching the galaxies, represented by the bread crumb, moving away from us. However, the fabric of existence is expanding at a much larger rate.

This analogy shows how difficult is to think of a good one. The analogy shows how it should look from the outside, except there is no outside. The baloon example shows that there is no "center" of the universe, not what you're proposing that it expands in a magical way noone has seen. Well, maybe it is doing just that - if you apply Einstein's cosmological constant lambda, but that is still just hypothesis.

The "what's beyond the edge" question is essentially a pointless question when dealing with space-time. There is no "edge" because nothing can possibly exist outside of the realm of spacetime.

First, you define "exist" as in "it exists in space-time". Then, you say nothing exists outside. Well, duh. That is the whole point of the Universe - that everything is IN it.

If you have a particle that is faster than the speed of light, then essentially it is not in our universe, because we could not feel its presence - it should not emit a gravitational field, because the time between two peaks of the wave should be a little more than infinity, it must in some way travel backwards in time, well ... with the theory of relativit

Re:Its not the size of the boat...

[wormbin]

A year old issue of Scientific American had a really good article which is a kind of Big Bang for Dummies.

The article is online and you can read it here: "Misconceptions about the Big Bang"

The 180B light years is a MINIMUM size

[wisebabo]

I believe that the 180B light years is just a MINIMUM, that is the universe could actually be much much larger. The 180B lyrs. would the minimum size that would be allowable under our current measurements (for example the cosmic background radiation) that dictate how much the universe grew as a result of "inflation". It it were smaller than that, we would start to see "reflections" of ourselves as the light in the universe would have gone all the way around like in a hall of mirrors (and we could see the earth of a long time ago!).

To illustrate how big the universe could be there was, I think, an interesting article (set of articles?) in Scientific American that described the various ways in which we would could have a "parallel (viewable) universe" to our own. One was the idea that the whole universe was so huge that if you went far enough you could find an exact same configuration of all of the particles that we can see in our own viewable (~30B lyr wide) universe.

Of course this would mean that the actual universe would be so unbelievably gigantic that 180B lyr. would be an unimaginably tiny speck within it!

Re:The 180B light years is a MINIMUM size

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course this would mean that the actual universe would be so unbelievably gigantic that 180B lyr. would be an unimaginably tiny speck within it!

Thanks, I think my head just exploded.

for those who want to read more...

[qcomp]

The preprint of ApJ article is on the ArXive, entitled The First DIRECT Distance Determination to a Detached Eclipsing Binary in M33 .

I guess this shows that numbers like the age of the universe should always be quoted with the current error bars. As far as I understand the new value is still within the uncertainty of currently accepted estimate. To have reduced the error from "a factor of 2" to below 15% within the last decade or so seems pretty good to me.

Any women in the field?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a lowly nanotechnologist, and for them everything bigger than a mm is HUGE

Hey, a nanotechnologist is what I should be dating! No more "is it in yet?" comments!

Simplified Answers To Questions

[stormi]

First, the Universe can move faster than the speed of light, and it is speculated that it did just that at a certain point during its expansion. This does not break physics because the light is all containd inside of the universe, it's not as if something is moving alongside of light, yet faster. I haven't worked out any math but this is probably what is messing up everyone's math when they say wait, the universe can't be that wide!

Secondly, there is no edge of the universe. We are simultaneously at the middle, the edge, and everywhere in between if you believe the current theories.

Third, you cannot leave the universe, because there is nothing beyond it yet. There is no space or time beyond that point, because reality or whatever you want to imagine it as, has not moved to that point in space time as of yet.

a theory dusted from the closet again....

[neoviky]

Infinite Universe Theory -An Alternative to the Big Bang Theory. By Vikram Arora. Vikram.arora@usa.com The Universe never ceases to fascinate me. I still see it with a child like wonder and a wide open mind. The Theories regarding this mighty universe are not perfect, including my own. Please look at this new theory and consider it for a few minutes without prejudice. The Infinite Universe Theory states: The Universe is infinite, both in terms of space and time. i.e., it has been here since infinity; it goes on in all directions endlessly. The trouble is we people think infinity is a really big number... like 32. Infinity cannot really be properly imagined, let alone calculated. It is beyond the grasp of our minds. The Universe goes on and on in all directions and dimensions. This infinite universe theory starts to make more sense when you compare the two. The idea of something truly infinite both in terms of space and time still seems science fiction. The Big Bang Theory states that the universe is expanding continuously. So at some point of time long ago this process started with a big bang. as the galaxies seem to be moving further away from each other, this seems logical. So this Theory is widely believed. But the part which is still a bit fuzzy is before the Big Bang. what did we have then? No Matter, space and time? if that is the case, then what was there to turn the Big Bang On? The creation of Matter, Time and Space at once with a Bang , seems too much too easily. If nothing was before it, what made it happen? who lighted the fuse? Our eagerness to draw a line at some point of time and make it a beginning of the universe is making us oversee many holes in the Theory. Having a certain determinant is very convenient for calculations, but the state the universe is right now, the Big Bang Theory does not deliver the goods. Let me make myself clear on this. The universe has always existed. There is no start and no finish. No lines can be drawn to the start like 15 billion years or 30 billion years as we do. There is no age of this universe. The properties of this infinite wonder are very different from that of a star or a galaxy. These bodies follow a life-cycle where as there is no such thing for the universe. We make the mistake of treating the universe as a thing that was born some time ago and is going to collapse after a while(The Big Crunch). Simple Bodies like planets, stars, black holes follow a certain life-cycle. But I would doubt that a body with features like seemingly infinite space, light, time, dark matter, and all the matter that makes it up... would follow a life-cycle. The other dimension- space is more of the same. infinite space wasn't meant to be within the grasp of our minds. That is the reason we cannot imagine and therefore cannot believe that something goes on and on endlessly. but this theory is in some ways more sensible than the theory that this space ends somewhere. This also explains why is the universe so uniform on the largest length scales. When we look up at this vast space... it seems infinite. But we still believe that there is an end to the vastness and it stops somewhere. When we look through the optical devices; we encounter old galaxies. As more and more superior devices come, we can look still more further, and still see more old galaxies in the farthest corners(as they seem) of the universe. This process can go on and on. We are looking at infinity. We won't see a "No Space After 2 Light Years" sign anywhere no matter how much farther we look. The Universe being timeless. If you think about it... light travels very slow. The information of a given area of space is not updated if looked from a far away space. In that sense, we have a very old set of information of the state of the universe...and it gets older the further we look. So great is the difference that time itself becomes meaningless. Even if a star we see from earth is only 10 light years away, we obviously see an old version of it. So how can we date such a thing as the Universe

Re:a theory dusted from the closet again....

[Anonymous Coward]

Paragraphs are wonderful things. They contain the thesis, and each subsequent one can be used to present information to support the thesis. The careful use of paragraphs reflects a well-ordered mind, and may entice the reader to continue reading what has been written. I suggest your future writing incorporate this useful feature.

Re:a theory dusted from the closet again....

[mdm001]

I totally agree with this post. How could there be an end of the universe? Mustn't something always lie beyond the edge? How could there be a start to it? I think what the theories are explaining only what we can now observe. Maybe there was a big bang, but this big bang did not mark the beginning of universe only the beginning of what we can observe so far. Our theories are all based on mathematics. Mathematics is something that was created by man to quantify things. I don't think the universe is quantifiable. And due to the last two statements, we will never be able to agree a mathematical formula with the universe. It just is, was and will be. When we try to apply math, it will always break down at some point. Math will be a tool that will enable us to predict (with some uncertainty at all times) events that will happen, but will never give us a complete understanding of the universe. The universe is beyond math because math was made up by us. Who would foolishly try to explain everything by math? Do we try to explain life with math too? All of the conflicting theories are silly to me. I think we've lost what Einstein and others were doing by trying to quantify the universe. Einstein's theory was never meant to explain the entire universe, only a portion (large or small?) of the events that happen within the universe. Additionally, it is still a theory, and has never been proven by the scientific method to remove all doubt. Why don't we apply these great minds of cosmology to problems that can be solved here on earth? World hunger, energy, etc.....

The other 148.4 billion light years...

[FellowConspirator]

What then is the prevailing theory as to the disconnect between the 180 billion light year size and the 15.8 billion year age. If the universe was born out of a massive explosion 15.8 billion years ago, it would have had that long to spread out at the speed of light in every direction. So, then, you'd have a sphere with a radius of 15.8 billion light years that defines the maximum size of the universe.

So, the universe is 148.4 billion light years bigger than it ought to be (if the universe expanded from a singularity at the speed of light). So, do we believe the universe is expanding at much faster than the speed of light? Was space-time warped by the explosion? And if so, how can any guess made on spectral/telemetry data be considered meaningful?

Such a big proof that you can go faster than light

[vincecate]

"...the universe is instead about 15.8 billion years old and about 180 billion light-years wide."

So the radius is 90 billion light-years and average expansion speed is 90/15.8 or 5.7 times the speed of light. So most of the matter in the universe is proving that it is possible to go faster than the speed of light. With such a big proof it is amazing people don't notice it.

180 billion light years in 15 billion years?

[MMC Monster]

This may be an ignorant question, but unless the speed of light has changed or massive parts of the universe have moved faster than the speed of light, how can a universe that's 15 billion years old be larger than 30 billion light years wide?

Assumptions are Bigger Than Margins of Error

[carpeweb]

My brain hurts.

So far, all the answers to all the questions seem to be making the same implicit assumptions:

1. Hubble's Constant is constant
2. The current size of the universe is known

I'm sure there are many equally important assumptions, but these two seem to form the basis for using the inverse of H-nought (dang, I'm British, now!) to calculate the age of the universe.

If Hubble's Constant is actually Carpe Web's Variable (dang, I'm important, now!), then we'd have to know all the values of CW-i (index of Carpe Web's Variable over time, formerly thought to be Hubble's Constant) and then take one mother of an integral to calculate the age of the universe. Well, if we were smart enough to know all the values of CW-i over 6,000 years -- oops, I mean 15.8 billion years -- then maybe the integral wouldn't be too difficult.

But, we'd still need to know the current size of the universe to calculate the age. What if there's a little bit more beyond what we can currently "see"? What if there's some schmutz on the lens of the Hubble telescope? What if the invisible pink elephants only look invisible but are actually blocking our "view" of the real edge of the current universe (or maybe the edge of the universe 15.8 billion years ago, which is when the light from it started on its path to us)?

Anyway, my brain hurts, but either of the assumptions seems to swamp the margins of error mentioned in this thread.

Official Slogan?

[Drathos]

The Hubble Constant - Fluctuating since 1929

Re:Such a big proof that you can go faster than li

[iggymanz]

no, it's merely a proof that most of the universe is unobservable

What i find special

[Chris whatever]

IS what is there after you reach the 15.8 billion peremeter? emptiness? the limit od someone else's imagination? a giant hole that puts you back to the other end of the universe?

I mean can anyone think about no end at all? How can you explain no limits at all because if they are then that means there is somthing else after that limits, there can be no end so when and where does it stops?

ARRRGGHHH MIND MELT!!!

Re:What i find special

[RKBA]

An ant walking on a sphere could walk forever and never reach the "end."

Re:What i find special

[An ominous Cow art]

And if the sphere is expanding quickly enough, the ant would never be able to come back to its starting point by walking in a "straight" line.

Re:What i find special

[Chris whatever]

Good one but outside the sphere there is something, the concept of endless void just doesn't work for me or is hard to grasp.

Let's take your ant and put it inside the sphere, noe that ant walks forever in a circle but there is still something outside the sphere.

What i want to know is if were on a same kind of path,,,,what's outside that path and how long is that path?

IS THERE AN END TO THE UNIVERSE

ARRGGGHHH SECOND MIND MELT OF THE DAY

about 180 billion light-years wide

[JustNiz]

>> the universe is ... about 180 billion light-years wide.

I always understood that the universe was thought to be infinite. Does this mean the universe has been proven to have an edge?

I know these may be dumb questions but I just can't get my head around them...

Whats beyond the edge? What happens if you go beyond the edge? do you wrap around to the other side of the universe like an old computer game?
Do you extend the universe (i.e. push the edge away) just by existing near it so you can never actually cross it?

Re:about 180 billion light-years wide

[Lord Crc]

I always understood that the universe was thought to be infinite. Does this mean the universe has been proven to have an edge?

Afaik, that's the size of the observable universe. Last thing I read was that the universe was very very flat, so either it's infinite (perfectly flat) or it's so huge that our "local patch" seems flat.

Re:about 180 billion light-years wide

[Anonymous Coward]

180 billion light years would be the local horizon, and just like the horizon here on Earth, you can head towards it but never actually reach it (and it's even worse for the Universe as space is expanding too...)

The Universe has no "edge" as such (if it's geometry is spherical it's finite but unbounded much like a sphere, if it's flat or hyperbolic, it's infinite and unbounded), though cosmological models can have edges of sorts (past and future singularities or infinities), but those are not the sort of edges that most people would think of as actual edges.

I'm like the Universe

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a lot like the universe... I've expanded with age- but not at a constant rate.

How do they calculate this as "more accurate"?

[raalynthslair]

They claim this is more accurate by using data that they say is even older than they originally thought... Let's see.. "The team's results suggested that the stars were about 3 million light-years from Earth--or about half-a-million light-years farther than would be expected using the commonly accepted Hubble constant value." (from the article)... So there's a half million MORE years of time before that light even gets to us, and somehow that makes their data more accurate TODAY - it's 1/2 Million years OLDER data... that's more accurate... Even IF it winds up being "proven" true (and scientists still argue about the speed of light as constant and whether graivational forces can effect light (which we KNOW you CAN "bend" a light beam with energy and graviational forces - been proven in the labs) - thus it's speed) it doesn't prove anything about the age of the galaxy or width of it. We don't know if anything's slowed that light down (we do know as intensity tapers off the light beam loses energy and thus "slows" down - again, raging debate in science over this; as it's proven and disproven back and forth more times than a yo-yo bouncing up and down to/from a kid's hand). "The researchers reached their surprising conclusion after using a new method they invented to calculate intergalactic distances, one that they say is more precise and requires fewer steps than standard techniques." So they didn't like the old way, it didn't say what they wanted it to - and it couldn't be used to help them... And the whole "Dark Energy" thing seems shaky at best. "Astronomers have known since the 1920s that the universe is expanding. In 1998 they were astounded to learn that it is expanding at an ever-increasing pace. The universe is accelerating, in other words. Nobody has a clue what's up, so smart minds invoke a thing dubbed dark energy to explain why gravity appears to have turned into a repulsive force. They say this dark energy makes up 73 to 75 percent of the mass-energy budget of the cosmos. 'It's the equivalent of us not knowing what water is,' as Livio puts it, 'even though it covers 70 percent of the Earth.' " Key words here... "Nobody has a clue what's up, so the 'smart minds' (my emphasis) invoked (aka: created) a thing dubbed dark energy..." So let's see... We think the galaxy is getting wider and wider faster and faster every day... We don't know why or how... So we'll just say that this force is causing it and to keep it sounding scientifically sound and reasonable give it a good name like "dark energy"... And THIS is what these other guys made a new method of calculation to measure distance of stars from Earth so they could account for and measure? Why bother trying to measure something that scientists readily admit to just creating because they didn't understand what was going on?

more detail

[gsn]

There are several posts that mention that the universe can expand faster than light. They are right but let me see if I can expand on it some.

If you have taken a fair bit of math skip this and and go here http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/notes/ to Chapter 8 in particular.

We want the universe on the largest of scales to look isotropic and be homogeneous spatially. The first means it looks the same in all directions about some point, and the second meaning that its physical properties are the same everywhere. If the universe is isotropic about one point and it is homogeous it follows that it is isotropic about every point. Straight away there is no priveleged center and it is meaningless to talk about the center of the Big Bang or some such. Insert standard dots on a balloon or raisn bread rising explanation here but neither is perfect.

We can look at galaxies and can see spectral lines and can measure their shifts and recognize that they must be moving with respect to us, and are typically moving away from us so the univsere is expanding. So the universe must look the same from every point in space but it is not static and can look different at different times. Because we want to maintain homogeneity and isotropy through time and because we believe there are no privleged directions or points in space we want this expansion to be solely a function of time. This function of time is what is called the scale factor and it is the fundamental quantity that determines what present distances in the universe are and how fast they are changing. There is no speed of light anywhere around the scale factor, and there isn't going to be.

With all this we can write down the model for the universe, and its called the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker metric after the smart people who came up with it. Thats fancy talk for a single line that tells you how to compute the "distance" between two events each occuring at their own space and time coordinates. Its equation 8.7 in the article. If you believe we live in a flat universe which you should because theres lots of good experimental evidence for it from studying the cosmic microwave background, even that simplifies a fair bit to something that can look like ds^2 = dt^2-a^2(t)(dx^2+dy^2+dz^2).

The second section in brackets to the right of the scale factor is the way you'd compute the distance between two events in 3d space, just the sum of the squares of their differences in position, and the dt^2 is the bit that adds on time. In any local region of the universe a(t) is constant and can be taken to be one and then you have a return to happy special relativity where the speed of light is constant to all inertial observers. Take a(t) to zero and you see the singularity in the equations which we call the Big Bang. This is where the model and the equations break down and thats all we can truly say about it. The universe (hopefully) does not break down, only our model to describe it does.

This metric, which we can write happily as a diagonal matrix even can be plugged into Einsteins equations and give you yet more equations like the Friedmann equation and the acceleration equation (Carroll 8.35 and 8.36), and you can derive Hubbles law and discusses all the interesting forms of matter you can have in it including what happens in Einstein's equation has a cosmological constant term. You'll notice theres still no speed of light. Stuff in the universe cannot move faster than the speed of light according to some local observer. However, the universe is sort of the fabric on which all the stuff is and that fabric can stretch faster than the speed of light. We do see object moving faster than light. See near end for an example, more information and no serious equations http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/doppler.htm

Thats become somewhat important following the studies of distant supernovae from '98 and we now know that the univer

How can this be right?

[Anon-Admin]

We know from phisics that time is not a constent. Our measurment of time is, but time it self is not a constent nore does it have to move in a given direction. So how can we measure the age of an object, if we do not know the rate at which time has passed for that object? I know this sounds odd, but lets assume that here on earth time is moving at 1x and in M33 time is moving at 2x, thus the calculation would be off by a factor of 2.

Damn

[Anonymous Coward]

I was looking for a kinder, gentler one....

15.8B years old but 180B light-years wide ... ?

[jonykaos]

I'm no physicist so excuse my ignorance if I'm missing something but how can the universe be 180B light-years wide if its only 15.8B years old? Assuming the the big-bang expanded spherically and the fact that it started 15.8B years old that would make the diameter at most 31.6B light-years wide ...

Light emitted from matter ejected from the big-bang hasn't had 180B years to travel.

Re:15.8B years old but 180B light-years wide ... ?

[Graymalkin]

The WMAP mission lent evidence to the theory that early on after the Big Bang there was a period of rapid inflation of the universe. During and right after the big bang our current physical laws didn't exist in their current state because of the fabulous amount of energy. The inflation period of the universe could have very well happened at some velocity above c because there wasn't really an upper limit to c. Because this would have happened before the first galaxies started emitting light it is entirely possible that the upper boundries of the universe are farther away than we can actually see.

Re:15.8B years old but 180B light-years wide ... ?

[drxenos]

Whether or not c has an upper limit doesn't matter. The expansion of the universe is not governed by it.

But my pastor said the universe is 6,000 years old

[teshuvah]

Or is that just the earth? I always get those confused. In any case, it would have been really cool to be Adam and Eve, and get to ride around on jesus horses (what you hellbound godless sinners refer to as "dinosaurs".

I think that...

[jkaiser]

the "insightful" rating should be changed to "merely insightful"

Re:I think that...

[vandan]

I don't have any moderation points, so I'll just congratulate you outright. That's pretty funny :)

x != x??

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not a physicist but I recall another article [slashdot.org] that speculated that light may not always have traveled at the same speed.

I am not a Physicist either, but I can guarantee that light has always traveled at the speed of light.

Re:Acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

the *real* question is what causes the force that is causing the universe expansion to accelerate?

Jack L. Chalker was right!

[Steve Fuller]

I for one welcome our new Universe-creating Overlords.
Anyone find the Well World yet?

Keep Going...

[Paul Slocum]

Everybody knows that thetans have existed for tens of trillions of years.

Accuracy of the Hubble Constant measurements

[tjwhaynes]

No, the startling thing about recent cosmological work is that we do know this number to ~percent. The flagship for this new "precision cosmology" are the WMAP results. The number is weighing in at 13.7+/-0.2 billion years. Take a look at the tables of cosmological parameters in this paper and the carefully calculated error bars.

Chewing through that paper (interesting one by the way) shows that those error bars are based on analysis of the data after processing. Therefore, those error bars on the age of the universe are assuming that the removal of foreground sources and fluctuations due to the Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect have been done absolutely correctly. No attempt (that I can see) has been made to model the errors arising from that procedure. That alone suggests that there are systematic effects which are not accounted for in those results.

I'm extremely sceptical of a lot of error bars on a lot of data. Confusion is a huge topic in radio astronomy (and I don't mean the chaotic, running-around, headless-chicken type of confusion) and I see paper after paper that really doesn't understand it, deal with it or present any full explanation of how errors in confusion analysis would propagate into the answers.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Faith and Reason

[MrCopilot]

Faith and Reason, much discussed as of late. For anyone interested in more information about how scientist and theologian handle the seemingly incompatabilities between the two, Slate provides this fascinating set of discussions @ http://meaningoflife.tv/ Long conversations with scientist, theologians and philosphizers. I reccommend you watch the entire intervies not the snippetts.

Also Check out Bill Moyers show Faith and Reason on your local PBS station or @ http://www.pbs.org/moyers/watch.html

The conversations are long and dry, but the content is golden. On the subject of how old the Universe is, I default to the only known answer Old, Older than any of us.

Who has seen 1 Million of anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

Much less a billion.

I can't imagine it...180 Billion means nothing to me.

I saw 1 million tabs from pop cans once. On the floor in the corner of a High School gym. It was about 6 feet tall and spilled 12 feet or so out from the corner in a big pile.

Everyone could look at it. Point and say...there is 1 million.

Sorry--first link was crummy

[karlandtanya]

Inflation for beginners

answer

[rucs_hack]

expansion can be tricky to understand. OK, lets use your baloon analogy.

You take a balloon that's been partially inflated, and paint loads of evenly spaced dots all over it.

Then you further inflate the baloon. Each dot move away from each other dot at a uniform rate (well, more or less).

Universal expansion can be thought of in a similer fashion. It isn't that the edge of the universe is moving farther out, leaving just more and more space inside, it's that the 'space' between( for simplicities sake, galaxies), is increasing in size, expanding outward in every direction. Thus all the galaxies are moving away from each other in much the same way as the dots on the balloon.

Space is expanding like this everywhere, but in small uneven pockets of gravity such as clusters of galaxies, or inside a galaxy, the expansion is less obvious, because of gravity's effects.

Re:answer

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Space is expanding like this everywhere, but in small uneven pockets of gravity such as clusters of galaxies, or inside a galaxy, the expansion is less obvious, because of gravity's effects.

Note that this completely and totally explains the Oprah Effect, whereby a body continues to grow larger even though it denies gaining any mass. It could also explain the strange growth (but not the subsequent shrinkage) of portions of other bodies, such as the well-known Pamela Anderson Effect.

Re:answer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure the dots on the balloon really explains things to me. I mean, the dots on the balloon expand along with the balloon. Shouldn't Galaxies be flying apart too? I don't know why, but I find it really hard to believe, although I couldn't think of anything that would fit the available data better at the moment.

Did anyone calculate whether the force of gravity in Galaxies is enough to counter the expansion of space inside it? Is that the reason we thought up Dark Matter and Dark Energy?

Re:answer

[faolan_devyn_aodfin]

I prefer the bread anology. The universe is a lot like dough put into an oven to make bread. As the dough heats up in the over aer bubbles inside build up cause the bread to expand into puffy goodness. This makes more since because the bread seen as the universe in the metaphor is not what is expanding. What is expanding is the space inside the bread while the dough itself walls in these tiny aer pockets.

yum... bread.

Re:answer

[rucs_hack]

I assume you mean the gaalaxies themselves flying apart.

It doesn't happen because the gravitational pull of the galaxy holds it together against the expansion of the universe. In the space between the galaxies there is no strong gravitational influence as strong, so the galaxies glide apart as the universe expands.

Superclusters of galaxies are a slightly different case. The combined gravitational effect of the group holds it together. So on a large scale you have superclusters flying away from each other, while the superclusters themselves converge slowly.

If the universe continued expanding you'd end up with grouped superclusters of galaxies, with the space between them and other superclusters infinatelly larger then the current visible universe. That's a depressing end to the universe, and one I'm not at all sure I accept.

Dark matter is not my area of interest. However I beleive it's currently thought to reside inside black holes.

Re:answer

[Intron]

A simpler way to think of it is that space is constant, but all of the matter in the universe is shrinking, including your measuring sticks. I don't know why physicists are reluctant to express it in these terms since it is mathematically equivalent.

Re:answer

[rucs_hack]

where that happening, it is likely that you would need an entirely different universe from which to make the measurement from that would enable you to confirm the hypothesis.

While it could be said to be a mathematical equivilence, I suspect it is not a valid hypothesis, since it cannot be tested.

Fun idea mind....

Re:answer

[Intron]

I am trying to think of a way of differentiating the two, but I can't think of one. Older, larger matter emitted longer wavelengths so it is red shifted to us, for example.

My point is saying that "space is expanding" is no different from saying "matter is shrinking". If it is valid to say one, then it is equally valid to say the other. I suspect the latter is emotionally depressing, so it is not used.

To me it just seems more natural. The universe started with gigantic, densely packed matter. All matter has been shrinking and dissipating ever since leaving holes between.

Re:answer

[rucs_hack]

Would that not cause problems at the level of the very small? Can, for instance, a quark shrink and still be a quark?

If matter were shrinking, that means atoms would have to shrink too, or run out of room.

If, rather, matter remained a constant 'size', then relative to the size of the universe they would be shrinking as the universe expanded, but no reduction of actual size would take place, just relative size

Re:answer

[Intron]

The idea isn't original to me. After I thought of it, I found out others had beat me to it. I think Fred Hoyle proved the equivalence of expanding space vs. shrinking matter. Of course, he was trying to disprove the Big Bang theory at the time.

Matter only runs out of room if you assume that there is some unchanging granularity to space -- which there is in some quantum theories. If you assume that space is continuous, then atoms and quarks can shrink arbitrarily. Alternatively, maybe space is granular, but the granularity is also shrinking! Another possibility is that once the matter falls below the granularity of space, then the universe ceases to exist. Not with a bang, but with a whisper in this case. Picture the end of the Universe as sort of like a CRT being turned off and going dark.

Re:answer

[rucs_hack]

Well I certainly find the idea of shrinking matter hard to get my head around.
I can see the equivilence, but it's definatelly counter intuitive.
Weren't Xeno's paradoxes all about proving that discrete values don't work well as models of the world (universe, whatever).

It certainly is an interesting idea. My work is strictly concerning the Newtonian model of the universe, I don't get to play with such complex idea's outside of discussing them, just big rocks orbitting other bigger rocks, and tiny little metal things sort of pootling about the place.

Re:Acceleration

[rucs_hack]

space kittens....

well, ok, I don't know that one. I suspect Brane theory may hold the answers, but I don't work in that area. I'm strictly a celestial dynamics guy.

Re:why?

[Prof.Phreak]

And why did Einstein study relativity? After all, it's just a bunch of stupid numbers. Guess what, turns out they found applications for it after it was invented... GPS is an example.

What is it about GPS that requires relativity to have been invented?

Just beleive in ID

[tbcpp]

Or...you can simply believe in Intelligent Design, and then not have to worry about coming up with ways of justifying the view of your existence that you already have.

Okay...there goes my positive karma for the day...

But what is beyond the 180 billion light years?

[Cannelloni]

I mean, what should you call the space not yet occupied by star material, the void to which our universe has not expanded? Isn't it possible some of that space is already occupied by an even older universe... or something else?

A paradox for you

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe this is possible. Suppose that the person who is 15 years old decides to father a daughter who is 165 years older than him. How is this possible? Let me use the demostration to help you understand this one better from the new game yet to be released called "Portal". Just shoot few different portals and make this possibility come true for yet-to-be-born father to father a 180 years old woman through these portals!

Now wha am I gonna do?

[hanshotfirst]

Do you know how long it took me to collect 14.3bln(+3, since its 2006 now) Candles and put them on the birthday cake? Where am I gonna come up with 1.5bln more at THIS hour?

mod parent up, not flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it that post was labelled flamebait? Mark it overrated if you think the argument is weak.

Dumb question?

[smitth1276]

If it is 18 billion lightyears old, how can the "width" be greater than 36 billion light years? If the universe is 180 billion ly wide, the matter in the universe would have had to travel outward at 5 times the speed of light.

Re:Dumb question?

[smitth1276]

Nevermind... many others have asked this.

It's kind of amazing what we think we "know"

[cascadingstylesheet]

A bunch of radiation (electromagnetic and particulate) falls on the Earth. We analyze it, and form theories about why it looks the way it does.

We sure as hell can't expermimentally test our theories. Yet most people have rock-solid faith in them, bordering on religious.

Re:It's kind of amazing what we think we "know"

[Fulcrum of Evil]

You'll find that the more people know about this stuff, the less faith they have.

Re:It's kind of amazing what we think we "know"

[Jarnin]

If you knew anything about science, you'd understand that for something to be considered a 'theory' it has to be experimentally tested. If it's not experimentally tested, then it's a hypothsis.

Are we expanding too?

[DougWebb]

Many of the posts have explained that galaxies are moving apart greater than the speed of light, because the space between them is expanding. Ok, got that.

But what's going on with the space inside of us, between our atoms and molecules? If big-S Space is expanding, it must be expanding everywhere, right? Between galaxies, between stars, between planets, between atoms, and right on down to, well, whatever it is down there.

That would mean that we should be getting bigger... not noticably, since everything is expanding together, but stretching nonetheless. Someone brought up the 'ant on a balloon' analogy to explain the expanding universe, but that's not right: the ant isn't embedded in the rubber of the balloon. A truer analogy would be a spot made by a marker on the balloon surface: as the balloon expands, so does the spot. It gets bigger, and fades too, as its constituents (drops of dye) spread apart.

Are we like that? Are the forces binding atoms together getting weaker due to the extra Space that's expanding between them? Is this a measurable effect?

Maybe that's how it will all end: not with a big crunch, or cold death, but with all matter dissolving into sub-atomic dust.

Re:Such a big proof that you can go faster than li

[smitth1276]

If it's proof of anything, its that we don't know what the heck we're talking about, and scientists claim to know crazy things, when in reality they are (dubious) educated guesses. But it's the best we can do for the time being.

misconception of big bang -not a point explosion

[spineboy]

A common misconception of the bing bang is that it was like a fircracker going off at one point. It was rather like a wholeauditorium exploding at once.

A brief summary of Joseph Campbell

[SETIGuy]

I haven't studied Joseph Campbell yet...

Campbell's thesis is essentially that there is only one story in mythology: "Teenage boy finds finds he is of noble/royal/divine/magic blood and is sent by the gods/elders/wizards on a difficult and dangerous quest to defeat bad guys/rescue hot chick/retrieve magic item/destroy magic item/avenge death of his father."

That would be an OK thesis if it had been left there... Unfortunately it is extended to saying that there is something about this story that is ingrained in our psyche or the "collective unconscious" and that all stories should follow this format because this is obviously what we all want. The antithesis to this is that since we're bombarded with stories of this type from a early age and people gravitate to them because of their familiarity.

It is rarely mentioned that these stories were crafted by people under the rule of a chiefain that considered himself of noble/royal/divine blood. Stories of this type were "popular" for a few related reasons. 1) By glofiying the "noble blood" flowing in the veins of the cheiftain the author earns favor and is less likely to find his head decorating a pike outside the cheiftain's den. 2) The stories serve the purpose of the chieftain by creating fear of the "awsome powers" of the nobility and perpetuating the myth of the "divine right" of those of noble blood to rule.

Personally, I rarely enjoy stories that directly follow this formula. I prefer stories where the hero/heroine denies his/her noble heritage in favor of more egalitarian values and the fight is against the nobility rather than perpetuating it. Either that, or tragedies where the hero's noble blood works to cause his downfall. I hope the ancient "formula" is losing popularity among democratic societies. Some examples indicate this might not be the case, however.

Harry Potter is yet another "chosen one". There's still another book left in which he could renounce magic and obedience to the high wizards then shoot Valdemort in the head with a .45, but I doubt that's going to happen. The Star Wars saga ends with the return of the "noble blooded" priesthood class not to mention planets so under the spell of the nobility that they "elect" ultra rich 15 year old girls as rulers. Was Amidala really suited to rule, or was she the Paris Hilton of Naboo? The house in the lake country would seem to indicate the latter...

Re:A brief summary of Joseph Campbell

[andphi]

Thank you.

And yes, the basic thesis does seem to become less plausible when Campbell makes the jump from anthropology to Jungian psychology.

And time goes on...

[kitsunewarlock]

By the time we get a definate answer on the size and age of the universe...heat death will be upon us anyway... Same theory holds true with Duke Nuke'em Forever.

Well color me confused.....

[budword]

Why can't they just admit some things don't make sense, and we wouldn't understand them if they did make sense, and if we ever do understand them, we'll probably be wrong ? I know, rather than say "I don't know", I'll just go on and on about an ant on a balloon with some fucking raisins, and oh yeah, if other things are going away from us so fast that light can't travel fast enough to EVER reach us, don't worry about that whole, NOTHING CAN TRAVEL FASTER THAN LIGHT thingy I go on and on about, because if anything ever does travel FASTER THAN LIGHT, it's going away from us anyway, and we'll never know about it, so we can just pretend it doesn't matter, because we'll never know about it anyway ! ALRIGHTY ? What do you mean you don't understand what the hell I mean ? Well, don't worry about it, it just means I'm smarter than you, it doesn't mean I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. See, there is this ant on a balloon and the raisins AREN'T traveling away from each other faster than the speed of light, it's just that the damn BALLOON is getting bigger, so EVERYTHING REALLY DOES MAKE SENSE !!!! See ? Yeah, well, don't worry about it, it just means I'm smarter than you are. Go eat some fucking raisins.

And don't ask me what's on the other side of the expanding universe. Of course I can't even say that there is nothing there. Because there is nothing even to make nothing from out there. Or it might be that the universe sits on a giant turtle. Oh, What's underneath the turtle ? Don't be silly, it's turtles all the way down. I have just as much evidence for one as for the other. Why can't I say "Well, shit, I don't know ?", because I would have missed my chance to to point out how much smarter I am than people who have sex. ALLRIGHTY !!!!

Universe Time Clock

[redstar427]

They just used UTC time, which everyone knows is "Universe Time Clock".
Much more accurate that the Atomic Time Clock.

@ The Edge of The Universe

[cmplus]

Is a restaurant. Everybody knows that. Sheesh.

Big Crunch

[LowlyWorm]

When I read A Brief History Of Time a few years ago (I understand it is now somewhat dated) I understood that the universe was tittering on the brink of continued expansion and collapsing in a few billion years. The data at that time suggested that the universe would continue to expand. As I recall this expansion was within 1% either way. 15% slower?!? Will there be a Big Crunch?

Breaking the speed of light?

[Brad Mace]

How did it end up 180B light years across in only 16B years? Doesn't this imply that stuff was moving at least (180/2)/16=5.6 times the speed of light? What am I missing?

Re:Breaking the speed of light?

[bowmanje]

The rest of the comments for this article. :D

Patent Alert!

[Dareth]

I believe that algorithm is patented by the Catholic Church.
Any attempt to reproduce or use that algorithm without express consent of the Catholic Church condemns you to an eternity in a fiery hell!

Or at least a few centuries in purgatory.

Are people who went to Catholic school as children scared of penguins?

Re:why?

[rbarreira]

In the time you wrote that reply you could have googled and found the answer for yourself.

If nothing travels faster than light......

[Kodack]

Then how can a universe 15billion years old grow in size to 180billion light years? I mean assuming the big bang is correct then that's 90 billion light years to the center of the universe which is still 75 billion light years farther than light could have traveled in 15 billion years.

Going by those numbers the matter at the edges of the universe traveled there faster than the light from the big bang could have, violating Einsteins theory of general relativity.

To put it another way, if the universe existed in the same singularity and then exploded out ward at the speed of light for 15 billion years then it could be 30 billion lightyears wide. Anything that traveled out from the center farther would have to be travelling faster than the speed of light.

Trolling for cookies

[alienmole]

Technically, the universe could be 5 minutes old, created by a being who thought it would be amusing to have everyone think it was billions of years old

If that's the case, then our job is to figure out what age the being wants us to think it is. Once we get the right answer, maybe she'll give us a cookie.

Re:Trolling for cookies

[archivis]

Here have a cookie.

Size vs age..

[swordfishBob]

Well, if the universe has a size, that means it originated from a white hole, not a big bang. ("Big bang" means it happened everywhere at once, that's why it's called "big").
So, if it has a size, it started small somewhere. All that matter together means very high gravity. Gravity slows time. The first few lumps to blow out could travel for millions or billions of years while the stuff still in the dense centre only experiences a few seconds, if that. It means some parts of the universe can be heaps "older" than other parts, even if they came from the same place.

Okay, so I'm not getting fatter...

[Elegor]

...it's just that all of the atoms in my body are getting further apart due to the natural expansion of the universe.

Sweet.

I think I understand it now

[TexVex]

I think I understand this now -- maybe this explanation will help.

First, let's suppose we can pick out a particular point in space and put a permanent mark on it so we can always find it again. Now, let's mark two points exactly 1 meter apart. If we come back in a year, the distance between those two points will be slightly more than 1 meter, because all space everywhere is expanding. Every point is moving away from every other point.

To use nice small round numbers, let's suppose that one year later, the distance between the two original points is 1.001 meters. So, you now know that space is expanding at 0.1% every year. You can use that to extrapolate larger measurements. Say you had marked two points 1000 meters apart. The distance between those two points a year later would be 1001 meters. The two points were 1000 times farther apart, and they grew 1000 times more distance between them.

Now, let's take it to extremes. Two points 2,000 light-years apart would gain two light-years of distance between them in that first year. That means a photon leaving one point heading directly towards the other point would never make it, because the space between them would be expanding faster than the photon moves.

This would also be a compound-interest function. If a distance of 2000 light-years grew to 2002 light-years in a year, then in two years it would grow to 2004.002.

Because all space is expanding equally in every direction, beyond the 1000 light-year barrier using these example numbers there might as well be no universe. You'll never be able to interact with it. If you were a photon travelling from one point to the other, it would be as if you were just heading in a straight path out into an endless void. If you aren't on a collision path with anything between your origin and destination, you would end up irrelevant to the entire universe -- just a packet of energy lost in the middle of new space coalescing in the middle of nowhere.

I cringe at "off of"

[M0b1u5]

I can't help it. Every time I see it written, or heard it said: "off of", as in:

calculations were based off of a recalculation

I just cringe. To me it says "I'm an idiot".

Coincidentally, it's only Americans who say this ugly twaddle.

Nothing is based off of anything, ever.

Things are "based on".

Bloody hell, how you base something OFF? You base a house OFF a foundation? Shit yeah, I'd love to see you try! Your house is BASED ON its foundation.

Dear Sweet Baby Jebus.

Re:Old - sure is older. 6009 is older than 6000

[Anonymous Coward]

You will be happy to know that the earth is indeed more than 6000 years old!
It is 6009 years old.
But it could even be as old as 6051 years by some calculations.

Shouldn't size be twice the age?

[BlueCoder]

Question for a science geek...

Ok speed and time are relative but shouldn't the size of the universe in light years correspond to double it's age? Just curious.

the age of the universe and its origins

[kayditty]

If the universe were (13.7, 14.3, or 15.8) billion years old, but, at the same time, 180 billion light years wide, then how could it have been created from the big bang (assuming nothing can travel/'transfer information' faster than the speed of light)? I don't pretend to know anything about physics or astrophysics, and I haven't thought about it, so it's an honest, kneejerk question.

Re:No!

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations, moderators, for understanding sarcasm.

Speaking of Quantum Mechanics...

[JesperJ]

First of all, you're absolutely right about your definition of geniuses.

I think that Einstein was soon to be forgotten when quantum mechanics was defined, primarily because of his attitude towards this whole new problem. Niels Bohr said that the particles properties was to be set when you measure it, but Einstein was far more pessimistic towards this answer. He, like myself, wanted to solve the whole problem at once instead of guessing like Schrödinger and Bohr partly did.

I actually think it is sad that modern physics is so hard to understand - quantum theory is against everything which is of my point of view logically plausible, the theory of relativity for instance is way more fascinating than something threatening all the physics that we know (or believe?). Einstein also said that if this Copenhagen interpretation is to be true, he would rather work in a casino than being a physicist. I think that indecates just how much passion this poor old man felt all for classic science along to the end.

What Speed Limit?

[jman.org]

OK, I'm fairly well-read, but don't keep up with physics in detail.

So, please excuse me if this is a really, really stupid observation, but the numbers given in the article don't seem to add up.

If one supposes:
1) The universe began according to the Big Bang Theory.
2) The universe is currently 15.8 billion years old.
3) The universe expands out from the point the Bang occurred.
4) Observable matter in the universe is subject to Einstein's General Theory, specifically the speed of light.

One could conclude that the maximum width of the universe in light years is age x 2, or 31.6 billion light-years wide. Yet the story reported that the universe is now viewed to be 180 billion light-years wide.

Does that mean matter at one time traveled faster than light? If so, for how long?

Or maybe that was just a typo & I'm being picky...

Moo

[Chacham]

The world is actually 3.14 quadrillion years old, so this is just a piece of the pi.

Older Larger Universe

[Dr_Calvin]

Yep, this sounds reasonable.