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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.'"
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.
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.
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.