BOSS: The Universe's Most Precise Measurement

Cazekiel writes "Observing the primordial sound waves created 30,000 years after the Big Bang, physicists on the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey have determined our universe's most precise measurements: 13.5 billion years old. The article detailing the study reports: '"We've made precision measurements of the large-scale structure of the universe five to seven billion years ago — the best measure yet of the size of anything outside the Milky Way," says David Schlegel of the Physics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, BOSS's principal investigator. "We're pushing out to the distances when dark energy turned on, where we can start to do experiments to find out what's causing accelerating expansion."'"

Comments

Unknown lamer: please re-read article

[Ralph Spoilsport]

It says the universe is precisely 13.75 billion years old, not 13.5 billion years old.

Re:there's no such thing as a simultenaity

[Anonymous Coward]

No it isn't, you're making a common mistake that people who pretend they know about physics make. Put it this way: leave the physics to the people who know anything about it and go back to masturbating over furry porn.

Cosmology is based on the Robertson-Walker metric. The Robertson-Walker metric contains an unambiguous time coordinate. Put an observer in that metric and, yes, they will observe a different time -- but if they're not to violate the symmetries of the metric, the differences will be at a perturbative level, which is to say unimportant. When they say "the universe is 13.7bn years old" they don't mean to say "the time measured along every worldline would give 13.7bn years", because to say such would be nonsense. What they mean that "the time measured in a frame comoving with the metric is 13.7bn years and to an approximation good up to redshifts of approximately z=1 and quite possibly significantly less this is an estimate that holds for all observers who haven't gone dallying with black holes".

Seriously, learn what the fuck you're talking about before you make yourself look stupid.