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Study Finds Universe Is 100 Million Years Older Than Previously Thought
skade88 writes "Reuters is reporting that scientists now say the universe is 100 million years older than previously thought after they took a closer look at leftover radiation from the Big Bang. This puts the age of the Universe at 13.8 billion years. The new findings are the direct results from analyzing data provided by the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft. The spacecraft is providing the most detailed look to date at the remnant microwave radiation that permeates the universe. 'It's as if we've gone from a standard television to a high-definition television. New and important details have become crystal clear,' Paul Hertz, NASA's director of astrophysics, told reporters on a conference call."
Lying about its age like that.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It should be 40 million years older with a margin of error of 50 million years. Ars article much more in depth if you want to know more.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/03/first-planck-results-the-universe-is-still-weird-and-interesting/
"On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami."
Do you understand how the calculation is done?
Or do you just project yourself onto the cosmologists? You'd cheat someone if you could with a fraudulent sale, so they must be that way too.
If you actually care, the statement is much more precise than "this is the age of the universe." The statement is, given the constraints of the 6-parameter Lambda-CDM model, which is the simplest cosmological model that fits the vast majority of the data, the age of the universe is known to this precision. If you allow extensions to Lambda-CDM (including "phantom energy" (w not -1), primordial helium diverging from BBN, running of the scalar spectral index, etc.), you introduce new uncertainties. For any given model, these uncertainties can be calculated in a Bayesian sense.
Or do you want to buy a bridge?
That's actually the really good news from all of this. The news articles are all highlighting the difference in numbers, when the real news is that this basically confirms that we were right all along. sure the numbers are slightly different for age of the universe, rate of expansion, and amount of matter, but all of the numbers are close to what we already knew. This is confirmation that our models are right, and more detailed data to refine things further.
This is the way science works, and it's really good news!
The Bible isn't interpreted. It was compiled.
I'm Message Approval Man, and I approve this message.
More modern cosmological views tend to assume that there wasn't actually a singularity. There's a singularity in our current mathematical models of it --- but that's a problem with the models not having the right parts to describe the very early universe, not an indication that the universe was singular or even asymptotically approaching singular from positive time. The general "mental image" of the early universe as described by modern cosmologists like Stephen Hawking involves a transition from a region where the time dimension is no longer "special" in having a "forward-moving" direction --- in this part of the universe (which forms a smooth non-singular boundary edge to our flowing-time universe), the question "what came before?" no longer makes any sense, because there is no time direction for "before."
That should provide you with even more noodle shredding than an asymptotically infinite universe :)
The good news is we now know the age of the universe. The bad news is that the warranty just expired.
even PAT ROBERTSON thinks the whole 6000 years thing is a bunch of crap... youd think the militant anti-theism folks would give it a break.
Look, I know that people will probably try to lynch me when I say this, but Bishop Ussher wasn't inspired by the Lord when he said that it all took 6,000 years. It just didn't. You go back in time, you've got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things and you've got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas.
They're out there. So, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don't try and cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That's not the Bible. If you fight science you're going to lose your children, and I believe in telling it the way it was.-Pat Robertson
http://www.examiner.com/article/evangelist-pat-robertson-no-longer-preaching-creationism
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/29/pat-robertson-challenges-creationism/
Christianity is the youngest religion on the block and certainly not the largest.
I'll give you that it's not the largest, but where did you get this notion that it's the youngest religion? Christianity began in the mid first-century AD (or CE, if you prefer). Meanwhile, the largest religon (Islam) didn't get started until Muhammed in 610. So your "youngest religion on the block" argument is off by over half a millenia. And that's just talking about the "mainstream" religions, to say nothing of some of the more modern belief systems.
I have heard the same bullshit claims about alteration, re-translation and rewrites over and over again. I am really bored and tired of it.
Uhhhh... You're blind? The only reason I study the Bible at all is to find amusing ways to get proselytizers to leave me alone. Even with just the most casual, basic comparative study of one version against any other, it's extremely and painfully obvious that one translation says one thing, and another translation says something else. This is especially evident if you compare versions in different languages, and I've read bits of the Bible in Spanish, French, Latin and ancient Greek, along with several different English translations. You don't have to look hard at all. Let's just take my favorite example off the top of my head, Exodus 22:18:
Do not allow a sorceress to live.
Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
maleficos non patieris vivere
A la hechicera no dejarás que viva.
No dejarás con vida a la hechicera.
Tu ne laisseras point vivre la magicienne.
Tu ne laisseras point vivre la sorcière.
[Greek removed by Slashdot]
The word in bold is variously translated into modern languages as something like witch, sorceress, etc. and it's almost always in the feminine in translations. The word [Greek removed by Slashdot] is obscure and hard to translate definitively, but "animal" is a common translation, and the word is neuter in gender. Maleficos in Latin is masculine, and means something like "doers of evil" etymologically, and is translated as things like "evil, wicked, accursed ones." Greek and Latin are as far back as I can go, but there's nothing in either language to suggest the original author intended this to apply only to female wicked people, and yet that is how it has ended up in every modern language I can read. It even ended up that way in Latin eventually, changing gender to feminine in Malleus maleficarum.
So, to summarize, the only bullshit is believing that none of the countless people who have dipped their fingers into the Biblical pie over the centuries have ever let their personal views or the times they were living in color what they did with the text. Sure they have.