What is the Age of the Universe?
By Tom Brown
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What is the Age of the Universe? Is there such a thing? No, there is not. What would it mean? If I want to establish “The age” it would obviously imply that it is a number of some known specified amount and is the same everywhere, and how would you measure it?
We have a complete misunderstanding of the concept “Time”. Our experience and intuition don't make much sense of it not in general relativity either.
Existence of such an “absolute” time is absurd in relativity, it would mean at every point in space-time coincides with this clock and this is not true already just experimentally. Relativity simply doesn't work that way. This fact is not at all hard to understand.
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Experiments and measured observations prove that time dilation is a fact and verifies general relativity.
Together such as known great extremes of speed and incredibly immense local mass and as gravity observed of pulsars and black holes and on the other hand tremendous spectacular explosions as supernova observations must result in a very complex and chaotic situation.
These together with an observed increasingly expanding universe must play total havoc on time, so that you cannot have any kind of synchronisation or coordination for a universal time.
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Very basic theoretic and experimentally verified results confirm that simultaneity has to be abandoned in modern physics. Strictly speaking this alone already proves that the universe everywhere cannot be of a “same age”. For a start you must have a central reference point where everything can be measured against and in the theory there cannot be and there is none.
Instead we might claim that each unique point in space-time can in principle be backtracked to the “Big-Bang” itself. That could at least give you a definition.
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Unfortunately much of the current state of astrophysics and cosmology apparently directly or indirectly and often hidden, depend on a synchronisation assumption and thus might even be not of much worth. There must exist large scale radical deviations and discrepancies in space-time.
Commonly accepted existing models are probably not sound in fact most of seems speculation.
Perhaps it is then time to take the whole story the theory into investigation again and just start completely over on the level of physical observations scientific experiments and raw data. It all looks to me personally like a bit of a mess at the moment but I might well be wrong.
However not that this would be of any real practical consequence for anybody. Time is what happens while we are planning other things.
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Comments
And yet some scientists claim
And yet some scientists claim that the Universe is 13.77 billion years old. Of course, it's difficult to prove this definitively for the kinds of reasons outlined in your piece. If the Big Bang was the start of things as measured by background radiation then this would help with some kind of certainty. We may never know...
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Hi Tom,
Hi Tom,
I found this interesting and could follow your argument in spite of maths blindness!
I thought it all started with the big bang but I guess this cannot be quantified in any sure or real way!
hilary
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There are very serious
There are very serious problems for many scientists nowadays with the physical problems of a 'Big Bang' concept.
There are also very many signs of quite a young universe, the vast millenia really being favoured as the only possibility for a statistically and thermodynamically impossible evolution not only of the stars, but also particularly of complex life!
Jesus accepted a sudden creation, with man there from the beginning ['From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.' Mark 10;6]
As you say, Tom, time is relevant to our plans, but will somehow not be relevant in eternity! Rhiannon
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