Slashdot Mirror
The Universe Is 13.73 Billion Years Old
CaptainCarrot writes "Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer has summarized for his readers the new results released by NASA from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has been surveying the 3K microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang. Some of the most interesting results: The age of the universe is now known to unprecedented accuracy: 13.73 billion years old, +/- 120 million. Spacetime is flat to within a 2% error margin. And ordinary matter and energy account for only 4.62% of the universe's total. Plait's comment on the age result: 'Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong.'"
It is simultaneously 13.73 billion years and 6000 years old, depending on your frame of reference. As we know, time dilation means that a spaceship flying for a year at a high enough speed could return to Earth only to find that the crew's families have been dead for a thousand years due to local time passing at different rates for objects moving at different speeds. For this reason, a photon moves at the speed of light no matter how fast you are moving relative to that photon. Similarly, from our frame of reference inside the Universe, 13.73 billion years have elapsed. From another frame of reference, it is 6000 years old and not a minute more. Both measurements are perfectly valid and correct.
I know a number of Catholics and other christians, a number of Jews, and a handful of Buddhists who would all reject your attempted "evidence" for a number of reasons.
The base reason, though, why you're entirely wrong, is twofold:
Number one, you're assuming that science is unchangeable and that what came first is inevitably more accurate. While this may be acceptable for scripture, it's exactly opposite to what's acceptable for science.
Why is this?
Because science is based on the assumption that while it may be the most useful explanation for the way things work at the moment, it may possibly be disproved with better equipment and techniques at some time in the future. Hence, this 'revisionism' that your link claims is somehow a bad thing is, instead, just the way science works.
Secondly, each of the explanations for the apparent "young age" given is incomplete. The age of Niagara falls, for instance, does not take into account geological uplift, vulcanism, deposition of sediments, or any other of the ways in which erosion is countered. The assertion that the sun is "getting smaller" has been measured; Heimholz' calculations were based on incomplete information and on an incorrect assumption that the sun was burning according to the standard oxygen-fuel model--being as nuclear fusion had not yet been discovered.
You do not have to be an atheist to practice good science. Many, many men and women of faith have no problem with scientific thought and principles, because they understand that science is not a -threat- to their beliefs, but rather a -celebration- of them. If your faith is so fragile that anything which does not read exactly according to your preconceived notion, your personal interpretation, of what the bible says is counted as a threat, then the problem lies not with science, but with you.
And I'm not posting as an Anonymous Coward because, unlike you, I can stand behind my words.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Anyway, you can't prove anything in science, so I don't know what kind of a "proof" you're looking for. You can merely show that the data are highly consistent with one set of assumptions, and inconsistent with another. But it's always possible that there are a third set of assumptions with which the data are also consistent. Possible, however, does not mean plausible; as more kinds of data accumulate, it grows harder to construct alternate theories that are consistent with a growing body of evidence. Which is the point of science. I can infer some interesting characteristics about gravity by splashing paint on my wall and studying the results from across the room, but I don't really have enough data to overcome a host of other contributing factors... The WMAP data set is quite a lot of data, actually, and "a host of other contributing factors" are studied in this analysis.
In particular, see Section 5.2.4 and Figure 19 of this paper for the assumptions made and factors considered in this conclusion.
2^64 seconds = 584,542,046,090 years, so about another 570,792,046,090 years.
---FourChannel---
The religious argument is that God has always existed and will always exist and therefore does not need a creator and does not raise the question of what came before..
While unprovable, it is at least consistent.
Check out wikipedia and the incredible things WMAP has done. We learned a HUGE amount about the universe with this satellite. We now know the average temperature of the universe (2.7K). We now know Omega. We now know whether the universe is curved or flat. We now know the dispersion of microwaves from the big bang. We now have a much better picture of the acceleration of the expanding universe. In essence, WMAP cleared up a HUGE number of questions from the 1980's and 1990's regarding the cosmos.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Evidence??
Okay, just of the intellectual exercise:
1. Even the church doesn't believe the 6000 year old figure. This is evidence that it's true?
2. There is extensive evidence that the land surface rises and falls. We can measure it with GPS (both rising and sinking). There are marine fossils at the tops of mountains. There are pictures of it happening: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/762047.stm
3. Creationists seem to be the only ones to use figures like 6 feet / year. The highest I found from non-creationist sources is 3.8 feet / year. According to Lyell's figures for the length of the gorge, that makes the FALLS 9,000 years old, assuming erosion has been at a constant rate (why would it be?). That can put a (rough) minimum on the age of the planet, I suppose, but it has nothing whatsoever to say about the maximum age. Maybe if ALL gorges showed evidence of being that age we might get suspicious. But they don't.
4. Large (and small) scale structures, as well as the spacing of the planets, is quite adequately explained with physics. As for dark matter, that seems a much simpler hypothesis than an omnipotent, universe creating super being. We have observed long period comets that most certainly could have survived for more than a few thousand years in their present orbits. Most comets (even the ones we can see!) are not short period like Halley's.
5. Helmholtz didn't even know what powered the sun. Hint: it's not a lump of coal. The mass of the sun does decrease over time, but only imperceptibly. This is a very silly point.
6. Gee, someone made up a number for dust falling on the Earth, guessed a similar number for the moon (why? the moon is smaller!), and it turned out to be wrong. Actual observations showed that it was wrong. That's how science works.
7. Kelvin didn't know much about radiation. The internal heat of the planet is nicely explained by radiation. There are other types of radioactive decay other than alpha radiation that do not produce helium. What is the justification for the statement that helium does not escape from the atmosphere? There's quite good evidence that it does escape, along with (and faster than) most other atmospheric components.
8. I don't know much about the dead sea, but some of the salt does end up on dry land, in large domes and other salt features, as the sea has been shrinking for the last twenty thousand years (and still is today). Salt is also deposited underwater, so a simple multiplication of the volume of water by the average dissolved salt content would be inaccurate. There are also known to be extensive salt deposits under the bed of the lake. Springs at the bottom might also mean a filtering process similar to the one that occurs in the ocean at deep sea vents. Apparently the creationists don't like the numbers they get even by simple division, so they invoke the vents to divide the number again by "about half."
9. Are you kidding? We have historical records of population growth that show that its definitely not purely exponential at 2.4 children per family. You can pull that off today only because of modern health care and the comparably high level of wealth that the majority of people enjoy. Population growth exploded with the agricultural revolution. It didn't grow anywhere near as fast before that. This is a matter of record.
10. This point shows a very bad minunderstanding of radioactive decay and dating techniques, which do not form the majority of evidence for a planet older than 6000 years anyway. Supernovas change decay rates? Very, VERY slightly, and only electron capture decay. Supernova data overall SUPPORTS the constancy of radioactive decay rates.
11. How are "living fossils" either an embarrassment, or evidence of a young Earth? These animals were believed to be extinct but were found in small numbers or in very out of the way locations (like the bottom of the ocean. So? If you f
"Flat" here refers to the curvature of space. In the absence of a cosmological constant, and assuming homogeneity and isotropy, this implies that the universe is balanced on the edge between eternal expansion and recollapse. (Not an equilibrium size, but an eternal expansion that asymptotically slows to a rate of zero.) However, dark energy (at least in the simplest model) implies that a flat universe is no longer "balanced on edge", and in fact its expansion will accelerate eternally.