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.'"
They forgot to take into account the time they did the experiment and the time they published the results.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
'Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong.'"
You NEVER tell a woman she looks older!!!
Go placidly amid the noise and waste,
and remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep.
Rotate your tires.
Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself
and heed well their advice, even though they be turkeys.
Know what to kiss... and when.
Consider that two wrongs never make a right... but that three do.
Wherever possible, put people on hold.
Be comforted that in the face of all erridity and disallusionment,
and despite the changing fortunes of time,
there is always a big future in computer maintainance.
Remember the Pueblo.
Strive at all times to bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate.
Know yourself. If you need help, call the FBI.
Exercise caution in your daily affairs,
especially with those persons closest to you...
that lemon on your left, for instance.
Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most souls
would scarcely get your feet wet.
Fall not in love, therefore; it will stick to your face.
Gracefully surrender the things of youth,
birds, clean air, tuna, Taiwan,
and let not the sands of time get in your lunch.
Hire people with hooks.
For a good time call 606-4311. Ask for Ken.
Take heart amid the deepening gloom
that your dog is finally getting enough cheese,
and reflect that whatever misfortune may be your lot,
it could only be worse in Milwaukee.
You are a fluke of the Universe.
You have no right to be here,
and weather you can hear it or not,
the Universe is laughing behind your back.
Therefore, make peace with your god,
whatever you conceive him to be:
hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin.
With all its hopes, dreams, promises, and urban renewal,
the world continues to deteriorate.
Give up
Music by Christopher Guest
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There was a universe before I was born?
Well, I'm glad that's settled. Now let's see if they can figure out my mother-in-law's age.
"After about a microsecond, it had cooled enough for protons and neutrons to form. Three minutes later (yes, just three minutes) it had cooled enough for protons and neutrons to stick together."
Is it a literal microsecond or a figurative one? You always have to question measurements of time in creation stories. Did they really mean a minute? Maybe that minute was 4 years long...
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.
This would make a good bar bet - which is flatter, the universe, or Kansas?
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Do the math, the earth really is 6,000 god years x 2288333 1/3 human yr/god yr = 13.73 billion human years old!
It all fits, the answers were already right before your eyes in the good book. Who needs a scientician or "NASA" to tell us this when we already know it?!
My work here is dung.
Contrary to what the average slashbot living in their parents' basement thinks, there *is* hard scientific evidence that the Earth is only 6000 years old.
For example...
I wonder how many atheists will just pooh-pooh this evidence instead of actually trying to retort it.
what was there 13.74 billion years ago? There could not have been nothing, something had to exist. You cant be making something out of nothing at all... except love of course (rimshot).
Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong.
I wish we could get to the point where we don't give these people credibility via recognition. People don't feel the need to mention the Flat Earth Theory whenever the subject of the round earth comes up.
I know the Evolution Deniers / Young Earthers are more vocal than the Flat Earthers these days, so it's probably not possible. I think legislative insanity should be fought vehemently. But doing this everyday mocking just plants the idea in people's minds that there is some debate, both with equally valid viewpoints.
One of the best ways to combat crazyness is to ignore it. We have very few Nazis in the United States because they are ignored as lunatics. Europe has a lot of them because they are banned. School shootings are caused by the media publicity of past school shootings. Holocaust denial is done because it gets attention. And similarly, evolution denial is fueled because of the controversy. Some people just want to believe the opposite of the mainstream.
The best way to put evolution denial and young earth insanity in the grave is to ignore it, unless it raises its head and tries for force its views down the throats of children.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
There isn't a single piece of hard evidence in that article. It is all conjecture and assumption based on misunderstandings of actual science. There isn't enough substance in that article to even be called pseudo-science.
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...
Creationist science is like a cargo cult...They buy guys who have letters after their names, they use all the terminology, and put on lab coats...and still don't understand why no one takes their "science" seriously.
And it's the same old argument from ignorance: "No one has proven with 100% certainty how this happened, therefore it must have been God." Of course you can insert anything in where "God" is and the argument will be equally fallacious. I'd be nice if they'd throw out a valid argument every now and again.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"Spacetime is flat to within a 2% error margin."
No, space is flat to within 2% (on cosmological scales, according to WMAP Year 5). Spacetime is curved, as per general relativity.
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.
The universe was born on February 29 - so it's really just a bit over 3 billion years old.
#DeleteChrome
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
The answer will change again. I can positively guarantee that they will never know how old it is.
Moreover, as out ion-beam reflection tests determined, it rests on 6 elephants, not 5 as we previously thought. :) /AD
And you call that evidence.... we should make better schools.
Evidence? You want scary read this St Louis Post Dispatch story. Thirty people who had been arrested on drug charges were released after the arresting officer was shot and killed. Apparently the only "evidence" was the cop's word.
"Well" you say, "that's just one redneck state?" Well, I live next door to that state, here in Illinois they fired two detectives for perjury, planting evidence, and other bogus stunts - after the two were caught. The detectives weren't charged with their obviously criminal actions, and one man who had been arrested on charges of being a dope dealer, then released when it was clear the charges were bogus, is suing.
It's too bad that the law doesn't have the same definition for "evidence" as scientists. It's pretty easy to see how this "creationist" garbage gets started.
BTW, no where in the Bible does it say how old the universe (or the earth) is or how God went about making life. Like the two stories about dopers, they're just taking some asshat's word for it.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Sorry. I can't argue with your belief.
.. opening up like that tells me you are not interested in a level headed discussion. and that your actual goal is to have "many atheists just pooh-pooh this evidence"
I don't have time to address ever issue (since I need to leave for work in about 5 minutes) So I will just respond to a single bullet point, and add a little food for thought at the end.
11. we have living fossils all around us. not exactly an embarassment. People just assumed some animals were extinct when they actually were not. How old do you think evolutionists think a cockroach is? it's pretty common yet they believe it is millions of years old.
If the Earth is relatively young, then I would argue that when God made the Earth he made it look much older than it really is. Just like on a model train set you have hills and grass and canyons and buildings which you just built, but are made to look like they have been there for a long time.
So do we follow the process of erosion linearly and assume God just put the universe together that way. Or are all of our models worthless, and we need to just ask God for all the answers because we have no other way of determining non-contiguous functions? I will note, God doesn't answer scientific questions too often. At least not in a way that is consistently reproducible.
ps - "slashbot living in their parents' basement thinks"
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If you start with a firm belief, you don't actually need any proof at all. But whenever you get anything that seems to support your belief, you will seize upon it.
In this case, the web site seizes upon a few animals that were thought to be extinct and were later found NOT to be extinct. Aside from ignoring the thousands of still-thought-to-be-extinct fossils, it's not even an argument worth winning; natural selection does not require extinction - though it does help explain it when it does occur. But extinction can occur even without natural selection, and natural selection does not try to claim otherwise. For instance, if a new species of bird were to arise on a dormant volcanic island, and then the volcano were to become active and wipe out the habitat, this would cause an extinction without needing to invoke natural selection.
Most theories involving the mass dinosaur extinction do not involve natural selection (aside from the small subset that became modern birds), so claiming that a dinosaur still exists is even more puzzling.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
- 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
Isn't God supposed to be infinitely more intelligent and powerful than we are?
If that's the case, why is he trying to trick us? What the hell would that prove? That he's smarter than we are? It's already pretty much a given if he can make all this. What does he gain by fucking with us? So he can sit back and say, "Ho ho simpletons! Those dinosaur fossils and red shifting really got you good, didn't they?"
It would be like me kicking a puppy for not knowing Calculus. "Ok Spot, what's the first derivative of sin(x)? Wrong!" *boot*
I cannot believe that the creator of the universe would be that fabulous of a bastard. And if he is, I want no part of Him.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
That wiki page says that it expired in Canada in 1985, which has life+50 year copyright terms. But this figure does not jibe with the date the author died. The page goes on to claim that in countries that have a life+70 year, it will expire in 2008, while in the US it will expire in 2030. Something is off.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I remember when you were just knee high to a grasshopper. Now look at you, so big and 'universal'
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
You know, the interesting thing is that the Bible doesn't say that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
In fact, the majority of Jews - from whom the scripture came - do not believe it is 6,000 years old.
Nor do the 2 billion Catholics in the world.
Nor do the nearly 1 billion (maybe more) Muslims in the world.
Yet they all believe in the books of Moses.
The belief that the Earth was formed in 4,004 B.C. is held only by a small, minority sect of protestants who insist on interpreting the Bible literally. Problem is, that a literal interpretation of the Bible doesn't support this theory - there are gaps in the genealogies which make arriving at an exact date impossible. In fact, you can't even get a ballpark figure using literal interpretation, because the books weren't written as an historical or scientific reference. So things get left out that you would need to know to determine even the approximate dates.
Suppose, for an instant, that you are God, telling Moses how you created the world:
God: In one femtosecond, I created all the matter in the Universe.
Moses: What's a femto-second? How many days is that?
God: It's a, wait, oh, nevermind... Let me rephrase that: I spoke and created the Universe on the first day...
It's not false, but it's not precise either. However, it is as precise as could be written down at the time, because the concept of a femto-second wouldn't become widely known for another 40 centuries.
No matter what the topic, you can find people who will read their particular biases into anything. You can find the same behavior among the Da Vinci code believers who think somehow that, in spite of the book being fiction, the Catholic Church is "hiding the real truth". Kind of like the 9/11 and JFK conspiracy theorists.
I'm not sure why people like to trot out the 6,000 year old theory every time someone mentions the age of the Universe. Perhaps it is because they're seeking an opportunity to tar the faiths of the world with the brush of ignorance. Perhaps their ignorance of religion allows them to believe that all believers think this way. Regardless, it is getting a little old, and quite frankly, pedantic.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Except that Scientists don't want to accept that and Zealot, fundamentalist religionsists do not want to acknoledge this.
I don't think there are many scientists who would have a problem with God creating the universe, so long as the God explaination is in accordance with observable evidence. Hence, not 6000 years ago.
Now many scientists would also say that the God explaination doesn't add any value - as in "who created God". But don't read too much into that.
Scientists aren't opposed to God, en masse, but they *are* opposed to ignorant zealots who don't understand the principles of evidence, and spew their crap on society through political action groups. But that's a larger issue than just intelligent design and young-earthers. There's also global-warming deniers too.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
From a letter Einstein wrote in English, dated 24 March 1954. It is included in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, published by Princeton University Press.
Einstein was actually an outspoken atheist.
So which of Earth's many religions is the correct one with respect to the creation of the universe?
That would be The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
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.
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plants and dinosaurs, but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't creationists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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.
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?
Oh boy I can see it now, the universe is 17.79 billion years and should go thru puberty soon. Bad mood swings, voice changes, hair growing on funny places like Saturns rings, the M31 and M5 galaxies are both getting bigger,.....and those funny sensations.
..........FULL STOP.
The article says that the data suggests (within a 2% margin of error) that space is flat and that that conclusion is based on the energy density of the universe. But if the universe goes through another period of inflation - where space itself expands - then won't the energy density of the universe effectively drop potentially putting it into the set of values where space must have negative curvature? And if it is at/near critical density now then wouldn't it have been > critical density before the last period of inflation?
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
The WMAP survey gives a *very* accurate estimate of the moment whn the universe cooled enough to become transparant (called "recombination" even thought "initial combination" would be far more apt). 4 sigificant digits is amazing.
This measurement says nothing about what came before recombination. It just says that recombination was 13.73 billion years ago, give or take 10 million years. Much of the rest of physics and cosmology says that the univers was about 240,000-310,000 years old when recombination occurred. Even if that 240-310K estimate is way off, you're still left with 13.73 billion years ago, give or take 10 million years.
Make sense?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That's what they said about the earth 400 years ago...
Just you wait, a few more centuries and everyone will realize the true shape is a spherically inverted multifaceted poly-dimensional plexoid of random size. Mark my word, you'll see.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Why couldn't it be 13.37 Billion years old? Almost a message from a greater power, I'd say...
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)