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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.'"
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With all its hopes, dreams, promises, and urban renewal,
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Give up
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Never been known to fail..."
There was a universe before I was born?
"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.
In the beginning the singularity was void and without (much of anything), then BLIND CHANCE said "Let there be Quanta!" .......And the Hawkings radiation begat energy, and the energy begat matter, yea even unto the event horizon... Hey the only Genesis I know well was made by Sega...
and the morning and the evening of the first femtosecond.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Yeah, but the universe has gotten 7.5 billion years older in the last 30 years, so you have to scale it too.
Most Bible Thumpers have it totally wrong. IF they actually read the bible, they would have found that the earth was NOT actually created in 6 or 7 days. YES YES That is the GENESIS account, BUT, the original hebrew/aramaic translations describe a day as a period or era (really undetermined period of time) Psalms describes that a day with God is as a thousand years (let you look it up for yourself). this does not mean day with God IS a thousand years. It really just means a day is a long long time. hence AS a thousand years and not IS a thousand years. SO it is plausible he created the universe AND still have the big bang theory still be in harmony. Except that Scientists don't want to accept that and Zealot, fundamentalist religionsists do not want to acknoledge this.
Make no mistake, what I am saying here is that an open mind be kept on BOTH sides. It is entirely possible our universe was created by a supreme being. There seems to be too much order in the small and larger details for that to be considered a "random" accident of the universe. On the other hand it coule be random which also seems possible as well. The answer is not conclusivly known for either or, and only human arrogance would presume otherwise. One day we WILL know the absolute truth of it. But at this time there is too much bickering and closed minded ness on both sides to actually try to figure this out.
Hundreds or thousands of years from now our decsendents (assuming we don't blow ourselves up before then) will look at us much the way we look at our ancestors or we will be living life the way the Bible says things will happen. Right now we have "the earth is flat" mentality about all this religion AND science. We know very little about space especially since we have not been out there exploring it. And no being just outside our atmostphere does not count. It gives alot of info, but until we can explore our own Solar System fully, we have very little data to go on other than what we can see with the limits of a telescope.
Aren't we forgetting something before we start the flamefest?
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear universe
Happy
Oh crap the RIAA just appeared at my desk complaining about a copyright infringement.
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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 way I counter the 6,000 year folks is this:
Belief without proof is faith. Belief in the face of overwhelming proof to the contrary is foolishness.
That about sums it up. Even the Catholic Church eventually conceded that Earth was neither flat nor the center of the universe. Faith is not belief without thinking. It is not mindless. It must be tempered by common sense.
Nor does reasoning require a lack of faith. There was a quote, but I can't remember it precisely and I can't find the attribution, so I'll just paraphrase it as best I can remember... something like "I can know how the sun gives us light, but that makes it no less magical." The belief that God created all does not in any way negate the desire to understand that creation, to understand how it was created, to understand the structure of the universe. Belief does not require accepting as literal truth words that were written to be understood by relatively primitive people millennia ago....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Saying there is too much order in the universe for it to be random chance is like a puddle remarking at how well a pot hole conforms to its shape.
"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.
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.
Two problems, dear arminw,
Firstly, evolution is no belief, but a theory. A very well-rounded and largely complete theory that explains how we came to be. It is possible, despite the evidence in its favor, that evolution is wrong. That possibility is currently thought to be vanishingly small, due to the preponderance of evidence favoring evolution.
Secondly, "faith" cannot be correct, and it also cannot be wrong. Your faith, whatever it must be, is irrational. Pretending to be rational about faith is infantile and ridiculous. There is no proof of anything in any holy book that isn't in common with history texts, and in fact there is a great deal of evidence opposing these books. Pretending to look at the evidence and deciding that "ghost man inna sky did it!" is an immature thought process that by the year 2008 we should ALL have progressed far beyond.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio