Slashdot Mirror
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."'"
It says the universe is precisely 13.75 billion years old, not 13.5 billion years old.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
I'm sure that people who have studied cosmology, both theoretical and observational, in extreme depth, for a period of upwards of 20 years, are going to be devestated that "Proudrooster" and "decora" on Slashdot have shattered their entire field with a few brief sentences. Such a waste of man-hours! I'm sure the two of you will be quick to provide us with alternative models of cosmology and interpret them properly for the layman, causing no ambiguities in those who don't fully comprehend the fruits of your genius.
Seriously, "a headline grab"? This is the ninth data release of a massive project that's been going for more than twenty years since it was first planned in detail, it's been studied by hundreds of extremely well qualified physicists, astronomers and engineers, and is providing data for all of us in the field to use to test models which we construct, from which we extract observable parameters, and test against observation... and you think it's a fucking headline grab? You think it's arrogant? The mind fucking boggles.
Personally, I like to view the expansion of the universe as simply a reduction in the Planck length/time relative to C. This would create the perception of a force pushing everything apart (light taking increasingly long, in terms of Planck units, to travel from one point to another). Ultimately, it's just a different perspective on the same thing, but I like it because it doesn't require the conception of some sort of mysterious "dark energy" -- just an explanation of why the Planck length would slowly shift.
And I find that, too, rather simple to envision, in a number of ways. For example, one that I've been thinking about recently is that if you view the universe in terms of information processing, the distance-limited interactions like the strong force decline in frequency as the universe ages. So if there's a fixed "processing power" of the whole universe but a decreasing number of "calculations" per "unit" time, then the number of steps per "unit" time increases, which could be expressed in any number of ways toward the universe's physical constants.
Virgin birth, water into wine; it's like Harry Potter, but it causes genocide and bad folk music.