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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.'"
Non sense. Who was measuring time and which reference frame was he using?
If he was moving close to the speed of ligth with respect to those protons and neutrons it could take several million years for neutrons and protons to form. And that scenario is very likely since at the beggining there was a big bang, with matter being thrown in opposite directions.
The assertions in the article are derived from the following postulate:
If the universe were open, the brightest microwave background fluctuations (or "spots") would be about half a degree across. If the universe were flat, the spots would be about 1 degree across. While if the universe were closed, the brightest spots would be about 1.5 degrees across.
I've heard these sweeping statements before, can anyone point out a reasonably accessible proof that overcomes basic statistical counterarguments? Basic common sense here - 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...
Before WMAP, the other two age indicators gave contadictory ages of the universe. The Hubble expansion constant suggested a young age 10 B.Y., though there was a wide error range depending on the distance measure.
Low-metal stars in globular clusters are thought to be the universe's oldest and from nuclear-synthesis physics thought to be 15 B.Y. The disagreement among the two clocks was so bad for a while, some astronomers thought the big-bang hypothesis was flawed.
The third and most recent clock - spatial power spectrum of the background microwave radiation- gives a percise age within the error range of the other two ages. Further observations of the other two clocks seem to be converging to this one. Astromenrs are now happy, kissing and making up.
- Not scientific evidence. It's historical.
- Geologic evidence, including radiological dating and tectonic theory, put the age of the Earth at billions of years. Take a geology class.
- The age of the falls at Niagara may be 6000 years, but that says nothing about the age of the Earth.
- There is good evidence that what we see in the Universe did start in a hot, dense state billions of years ago. Take some astronomy classes.
- Actually, the sun was much cooler billions of years ago, as main sequence stars get hotter as they age.
- There is good evidence that the moon formed in a collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized planet billions of years ago.
I'm not going to go on. The page simply lists any evidence at all for possibly suggesting that the Earth is only thousands of years old, no matter how flimsy. It's all debunked easily by our modern scientific understanding.What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
lots of serious astronomy went on when mankind still hadn't figured out that the solar system was heliocentric. so you can still do science while you still have an anthropocentric bias to your research. however, we got over the idea the earth was the center of everything
although we are still getting over the idea of mankind being the center of the biological world. some of us (not on slashdot, i am speaking in a broader sense of all of mankind) still grapple with evolution as contentious
but even still in cosmology, anthropocentrism colors our percetions as mortal biological creatures: we have a beginning, a middle, and an end. and we imprint this in our abrahamic religions. and we imprint this in our cosmological awareness of the universe. but must the universe have a beginning, middle and end?
i am going to sound like a crackpot here to some people, but scientific convention has been overthrown before, and i am sure it will be again: the big bang smells bad to me. i am certain its evidence is being misinterpreted. much as misinterpreting the evidence of seeing the sun rise and set means the sun is going around the earth. you can say i am showing a bias of my own here. and yes, i am: anthropocentric ideas are wrong in describing how the universe actually is, that's my bias. and i hope that bit of intellectual honesty on my part will allow some of you to admit to the anthropocentric stink about the big bang theory
the universe is endless, in time and space. there, i said it. i of course have no proof of this. but i can conjecture that time dilation effects as we backtrack towards the big bang means that there never really is a beginning. or that the big bang, as huge is it, is still a local effect, not the sum total of the universe, that there is still something going on out there beyond the microwave background radiation, perhaps other big bangs. that we see all around us hubble's outward momentum, but it is still a local effect, that somewhere out there, beyond the cosmic backgorund radiation, some being is looking around him and worrying about a cosmic crunch. that his hubble constant is reversed. like waves on the ocean on a massive scale: wave tip here, trough there
to me, the big bang has the stink of abrahamic religious myth all over it. i think the big bang will be found to be merely another vestige of our trek from superstition to real science, like the phlogiston theory or lamarckian evolution. taken very seriously in their times, as silly as they seem now. so i think it will be with the big bang theory someday too, that it's obvious abrahamic influence will be more accutely seen in later generations
i may be pilloried and voted as a troll by the defenders of the status quo here for saying this, but i will still say it: the big bang will be disproven. the universe is endless in time and space
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
According to the Biblical calendar, the 6000 years (actually 5768 years) is NOT counted from the beginning of the creation of the universe -- it's counted from the creation of the human soul (ie, "Adam"), which happens at the very tail-end of the creation account. That's the point at which an Earth-based accounting of time becomes sensible. The creation story is not meant to be a literal account of anything, and in fact the Talmud explicitly states that it was written in such a way as to intentionally conceal information. I have no idea why anyone would dispute the findings of science when they seem to conflict with a literal reading of the Bible which was NOT INTENDED, when the metaphorical/metaphysical description is EXPLICITLY referred to in the earliest commentaries.
Big Bang cosmology fits in nicely with theism. And as an evangelical, I agree with your view that "day" refers to a long period of time in that context.
I would also say that the Big Bang theory was resisted by atheists who saw its theistic implications.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Wait.. the earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old itself... so the entire universe is only ~3 times older than the earth itself?
Consider a Looney Tunes animated film as a metaphor for the universe. Such a film is 2-dimensional, its "time" (measured in frames) is totally unlike the time in the outside world, the physics is mostly consistent but unlike real-world physics, etc. Bugs Bunny wants to know: what happened before the opening credits, and who drew the animator? (It must have been an even more complicated animator!)
The answer is completely outside his understanding. The animator is vastly more complex than a cartoon character, and he wasn't drawn at all. Nothing happened before the opening credits: the animator's world is outside the film, and the nature of time there is completely different.
Similarly, questions like "what happened before the creation of the universe" and "who created God" are not really meaningful.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I teach ancient Greek. Everything that author claims is founded solely on internal evidence from four texts using words in unusual contexts.
About the only claims there that are consistent with non-biblical usage are (1) that pisteuo means "to rely on, trust in", which does not support the general argument; and (2) when he cites someone else to assert that "faith" can usefully be thought of as "framed in terms of an ancient client-patron relationship". There is no necessary connection with proof or evidence, and pistis means pretty much exactly what the crazier fundamentalists think it does. (One of the few things they do get right.)
"Similarly, questions like "what happened before the creation of the universe" and "who created God" are not really meaningful."
I disagree entirely. It is very useful, both intellectually and psychologically, to ask questions that have no answers. We have to deal with that all our lives. The origin of the universe is only one of a multitude of unanswerable questions we have to reconcile ourselves with during a lifetime. Death, misfortune, what another person is really feeling, who is my dad.. oops.
I actually believe it's the other way around - we ask about the nature of the universe *because* we are wired up already to deal with an unpredictable reality of unanswerable questions. We have to be, because we started off having to ask questions in the first place to survive. They just became more complicated as time went on, but we ask them for the same reasons - to feel like we have a grasp on things.