Age of the Universe and the Relativity of Time

[Dondi]

I was reading Dr. Gerald Schroeder's book "The Science of God" and came across where he discusses the relativity of time, for which the factors affecting time are gravity and velocity. He gave an illustration that if there was a planet that was 350,000 times the gravity of Earth, then 3 minutes spent on that planet would equal 2 years here on earth. I haven't studied the validity of this, I'm just taking the illustration for granted. But for the moment suppose that conjecture is true.

So I was thinking about the moment of the Big Bang, the compression of gravity must have been so great that time must have been compressed also. When the Big Bang occurred, and the matter ejected out of the anomily, then time was ejected also. And if time was ejected, wouldn't that effect how we could determine the age of the universe?

Considering that scientists project the Big Bang back some 10-20 billions years ago, they base this on the current expansion of the universe. But if time expanded at the same rate of the universe at the time of the big bang, then that means time has slowed down since then. So do scientists take this into account? If they don't then the age of the universe would be younger that what scientists calculate, wouldn't it?

 

[ArnautDaniel]

Indeed, time is not an absolute measure. "Time" is something locally constructed by the observer. Different observers construct different "times".

The long and short of this is that there are hypothetical observers for whom the universe has only been around for one minute.

For an observer in a reference frame like the Earth, the universe looks like it is 10's of billions of years old.

The unfortunate problem is that creationists project the Earth as being 1000's of years old from the frame of a reference of someone standing on the Earth, whereas scientists view it as billions of years old from that perspective.

 

[Dondi]

Indeed. Schroeder believes that from God's perspective, there were only Six literal 24 hour days, but from man's perspective (if one would view the creation process on earth), those six days amounted to a total of some 15 billion+ years. After going through some calculations Schroeder divides the Age of the Universe into epoch eras as follows:

The calculations come out to be as follows:

• The first of the Biblical days lasted 24 hours, viewed from the "beginning of time perspective." But the duration from our perspective was 8 billion years.
• The second day, from the Bible's perspective lasted 24 hours. From our perspective it lasted half of the previous day, 4 billion years.
• The third day also lasted half of the previous day, 2 billion years.
• The fourth day - one billion years.
• The fifth day - one-half billion years.
• The sixth day - one-quarter billion years.

When you add up the Six Days, you get the age of the universe at 15 and 3/4 billion years. The same as modern cosmology. Is it by chance?

Source: http://www.geraldschroeder.com/age.html

Once he gets to the creation of Adam, then the normal 24 hour period coincides with man's perspective starting about about 5758 years ago, give or take a few years(the article was written in 2000).

I'm interesting in exploring the plausibility of Schroeder's theory.

 

[[serious]]

yeah, but how many days has it been since the creation? 365*6000=2.2 million days. That would make today REALLY short. Also, as far as working out to the right number, something tells me they started with the scientific estimate and worked back to the 8 billion which they started halving. Lacking some definite reason to peg that first day at a specific length and the rate of time decay, this isn't even a coincidence.

 

[Brennan]

The early universe expanded very rapidly in a phenomenon known as 'inflation' it quickly became similar to how we perceive it today.

When you add up the Six Days, you get the age of the universe at 15 and 3/4 billion years. The same as modern cosmology. Is it by chance?

How did Schroeder come by the figure of 8 billion years for the duration of his 'first day'?

 

[LewisWildermuth]

I dislike this kind of argument because for it to be true one must define God as a physical object of mass x moving at speed y as opposed to the motion of the Earth.

 

[ArnautDaniel]

I dislike this kind of argument because for it to be true one must define God as a physical object of mass x moving at speed y as opposed to the motion of the Earth.

I understand where you are coming from here.

I think the point of this sort of discussion is to illuminate that the common sense "absolute" picture of time is wrong, and that we have to move away from our conventional ways of looking at time.

 

[LewisWildermuth]

I understand where you are coming from here.

I think the point of this sort of discussion is to illuminate that the common sense "absolute" picture of time is wrong, and that we have to move away from our conventional ways of looking at time.

Why move away from our understanding of time? I don’t think it is possible for humans to imagine how God sees time. We are too stuck in the world of cause and effect to even pretend to understand a being that is not bound by that.

Assigning different dates over top of the six days is not going to help understanding, just confuse the issue.

 

[ArnautDaniel]

Why move away from our understanding of time? I don’t think it is possible for humans to imagine how God sees time. We are too stuck in the world of cause and effect to even pretend to understand a being that is not bound by that.

Assigning different dates over top of the six days is not going to help understanding, just confuse the issue.

I didn't intend some sort of "god" view of time.

I had in mind a view of time more in line with Einstein's theory.

 

[Krystabelle]

Hmmm... call me a junior, *ehem* but I just can't help taking inetrest... Relativity, Big Bang etc ->MUSIC to my ears. Now I'm not really sure about the time-space / space-time theory, they're related as we know it. and time can be explained by how long it takes for light to cover a particular distance. (and a bonus, since the speed of light remains constant, clocks tick slower in a moving light source, YAY travel to the future, LOL).

I'm sure we've heard of worm-holes and blackholes right? That blakholes are formed by a dead star yadda yadda, sucks in everything that passes it, into a singularity. I think I read somewhere that no physics law can be applied in the singularity, hmm... riiight, the big bang theory is somehow just the reverse process (I think). So we have a singularity, and BAM, we have the stars all scattered 'round. (not forgetting momentum, and how energy is equally distributed)... And that's how Earth was formed?

It's just a theory, who knows? what if we look at it another way?

Alright, been solving a few college math. Who could have guess we can actually calculate the geometry of a cabbage, or the shape of the clouds... Everything has an order, just as God made it. YAY


BTW, pardon me if I made some mistakes... Hey, I'm only a kid fooling round with science...

 

[ArnautDaniel]

Hmmm... call me a junior, *ehem* but I just can't help taking inetrest... Relativity, Big Bang etc ->MUSIC to my ears. Now I'm not really sure about the time-space / space-time theory, they're related as we know it. and time can be explained by how long it takes for light to cover a particular distance. (and a bonus, since the speed of light remains constant, clocks tick slower in a moving light source, YAY travel to the future, LOL).

I'm sure we've heard of worm-holes and blackholes right? That blakholes are formed by a dead star yadda yadda, sucks in everything that passes it, into a singularity. I think I read somewhere that no physics law can be applied in the singularity, hmm... riiight, the big bang theory is somehow just the reverse process (I think). So we have a singularity, and BAM, we have the stars all scattered 'round. (not forgetting momentum, and how energy is equally distributed)... And that's how Earth was formed?

It's just a theory, who knows? what if we look at it another way?

Alright, been solving a few college math. Who could have guess we can actually calculate the geometry of a cabbage, or the shape of the clouds... Everything has an order, just as God made it. YAY


BTW, pardon me if I made some mistakes... Hey, I'm only a kid fooling round with science...

Actually a black hole never technically forms a singularity. Due to time dilation effects it is merely constantly collapsing toward a singularity in the future (which it will never reach from the outsider's perspective).

Moreover black holes "evaporate" due to a radiating process, so they go away eventually, giving them even less chance of making it to singularity.

 

[Krystabelle]

I don't know much about blackholes. Just read through some thesis and facts. a singularity does exist though... (I'm still cracking my head on this). not that I'm saying it's a recycle process where things can reverse, (black-hole-forms-singularity-and-singularity-burst-into-many-peices). the big bang theory does involve a singularity. How did it happen? we don't know. The physics, chemistry and biology regarding creationism.... How puzzling...


Time-dilation, YAY!!!

 

[Krystabelle]

Hmm.. I guess it all depends on the frame of reference of the obeserver. Like the effects of time dilation, a clock in a moving light source ticks slower. SO the faster the movement of one's frame of reference is, the slower his clock and bological clock moves. And as said b4, today would be a very very short time indeed. Genesis just gets more and more complex...

 

[artybloke]

I'n afraid I think this argument is another attempt at special pleading. It's trying to interpret an ancient spiritual text as if it were a modern scientific text. The Genesis account is not written from God's point of view; it was written by an ancient people with an ancient cosmology of no relevance to contemporary science.