[William Tell]

AndyJackson said: "These half-lives are quite accurately known and not in question."

This makes my head hurt.

Doesn't General Relativity predict that any clock in a gravitational field will run slow? Thus, any clock in the vicinity of the big bang will run slow?

How's anything going to get done if it takes forever for a clock to tick? To an observer external to this nearly infinite gravitational field, isn't it going to appear that nothing happens for a very long time?

When it is stated that the universe is, say, twenty billion years old, just whose clock are they using? Are there any Freeper cosmologists who can summarize twenty billion years for me?

[AndyJackson]

The formation of the solar system came long long after the big bang. The presence of heavy elements shows that we are a later generation development - condensed out of the remnants of earlier supernovae explosions.

The gravitational forces in our solar system are very week, and therefore general relativistic corrections are parts in a million or much less than that. They can be measured only with the most precise and stable atomic clocks.

[AndyJackson]

When it is stated that the universe is, say, twenty billion years old, just whose clock are they using?

Here you ask a very good and very deep question. It is "our" clock transformed into a fictive clock that is extrapolated at its present ticking rate back in time to when the big bang had to have occurred past upon the measured separation rates of galaxies. It assumes that "our clock" would have remained in a weak gravitational field the entire time. What it means to extrapolate into the high gravitational fiedl at the time the big bang occurred is a hard philosophical question.

[tpanther]

It makes your head hurt because you’re using it.

Great questions.

You see, you just have to be a little more patient and wait a few billion years and then you too would understand how these liberal clocks work.