Posted on 04/24/2002 6:30:34 PM PDT by longshadow
If the Inflationary Cosmology is correct, and thus the geometry of Space is Euclidean (or even if Inflation is wrong, but space is still Euclidean or Hyperbolic), there should be no limit on distance between two points in the Universe. If the Universe is closed, the maximum distance is finite.
Note: this is not the same as the maximum distance we can measure another object from us.
We were discussing the age of the Universe. The methods used to determine the age of the Universe have nothing to do with the methods used to determine that age of the Earth.
And if pigs could fly (hypothetically), they'd make great pets.
Either you have evidence that the methods are erroneous, or you don't.
If you do, post them.
If you don't, why did you bring it up? It makes as much sense as my bring up flying pigs.
I don't.
Maybe it's how you worded it or how I read it, but you made it sound like that it was now pretty much a settled thing because so many of them agreed with each other.
When in fact many things that seemed settled 20 years ago..... today aren't.
New information will show up and everything will change.
I try and keep up with all this but there are still huge unsettled speculations that this is all built on.
So you can read all you want but you'll be much more ignorant when you finish than when you began.
Because you will have a better feeling for how little we really know.
And that's not a bad thing.......just a little humbling.
And your evidence for your assertion is....?
And your evidence that two different INDEPENDENT methods for estimating the age of the Universe are BOTH in error is....?
That is not acceptable. Come up with a better theory.
Burden of proof of YOUR assertion is YOURS.
Post your evidence at your leisure.
How about you, do you think it ends, or goes on forever?
Doesn't look that way. The Big Bang is unacceptable, of course, but why would it look only 13 gigayears old?
Actually, I do. You might take Physicist's and Longshadow's advice. Just because you fail to understand something does not mean that everyone else fails to.
Few, if any, scientists have claimed the universe is contracting. Hubble's measurements have been improved upon, but not refuted.
Maybe not. What if we are inside a gravastar?
Is it 18 giga-lightyears away now, or was it 18 giga-lightyears away when it exploded?
Please cite evidence for "a lot longer than thirteen billion years" from a refereed journal. Any such evidence would certainly be of interest.
This was discussed in the press conference today.
The greater the "repulsive" effect (dark energy?), the older the Universe is, relative to the age that would be acertained by the Hubble parameter alone.
The example given in the press conference was that based only on Hubble expansion observations (no repulsion/accelerating expansion effect), the age of the Universe would be about 9 billion years. When they factored in the repulsive effects on expansion, the result was about 14 billion years, which coincidentaly, is almost exactly the figure that these scientists came up with using the completely independent white dwarf cooling model methodology.
It doesn't look that way. The galaxies seem to be closer together the deeper. If you go much farther, the trend is that the galaxies will all be jammed together solid.
I apologize, I was engaging in a little hyperbole.
Just trying to make the point that an argument from consensus is flawed.
They all come to the same conclusion because they all use the same model.
But there are huge assumptions underlying the current popular model, most of which still have little support.
Thus I'll bide my time and keep a jaundiced eye on the whole endevor.
For instance the use of a globular cluster to arrive at this data point is fraught with difficulties since the age distribution of stars in globular clusters varies significantly from that of our galaxy.
We have no idea how they form.
Or even why they are where they are.
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