what is the evidence that universe is 13.7B years old?

[Astrid]

I have a question about your post.

We are speaking of the "beginning of our universe - specifically the "Big Bang Theory". My expertise ends at The Big Bang Theory being one of my favorite shows, so forgive me if my question seems silly.

@PeterDona mentioned the law of thermodynamics (I believe a theory based on the second law as long as there is only one energy source).

You saw a flaw in this thought - mentioning trees, salmon swimming upstream.

My question is if this relates. I was initially following a little bit, but I was thinking we were speaking of a closed system.

Are you suggesting that in a closed system - no other energy source, nothing to absorb this energy - that energy will go from chaos to order?

No. Some of the energy in either an open or closed system
may act to temporarily increase order.
I don't think that energy goes from chaos to order.

But in some cases energy may become more concentrated.

These events are readily observed as in examples given

 

[Astrid]

What about photon energy? Since gamma can undergo pair production (yielding matter and anti-matter particles) wouldn't we have to account for all matter, anti-matter, and photon energy?

Anyway...

My point is this energy, to some, is their "god". It had to have existed eternally. But it also had to have been in motion eternally.

Some find it logical to believe there was at least an eternal energy equlivant to the energy and mass in the universe at constant motion from which order evolved. Others find it logical to believe in a god. Yet others find it logical to believe in God.

Degrees of logic. And of course what's logical isn't always true

 

[John Caldwell]

No. Some of the energy in either an open or closed system
may act to temporarily increase order.
I don't think that energy goes from chaos to order.

But in some cases energy may become more concentrated.

These events are readily observed as in examples given

How can energy in a closed system (what we are by necessity dealing with in a first cause event) become more concentrated?

Can you offer an example?

I ask because of my limited knowledge. I work in the nuclear field and one primary fact is with nuclear energy the energy disperses as the energy travels. This comes into play with shielding as well.

So, perhaps due to my limited experience, I am not able to picture an example where energy moves from chaos to order, or from one state to a more concentrated state.

Thanks.

 

[John Caldwell]

Degrees of logic. And of course what's logical isn't always true

That all matter has an anti-matter counterpart is dependent on science (it is unproven theory based on observable data).

But that energy can be one matter (pair production), matter can be converted back into energy (annihilation), that beta radiation shielded by led can yield x-rays (bremsstrahlung radiation), etc. is observable.

With pair production (when a gamma photon passes close enough to a nucleus) the energy is converted into mass - an electron (really a negaton) and a proton. The mass equates to the energy. When the negatron (anti-matter) collides (they attract) with a proton (matter) they are converted into energy (no loss of energy). But even hete there is kenitic energy (in addition to the photon energy I was dealing with).

With the begining of everything you have to account for preexisting energy/mass equlivant to all mass and energy in the universe as well as kinetic energy, and by necessity you have to do so in a closed system.

Science has skipped the most import aspects of the issue to theorize about how observable things could have happened should an undefined thing have occurred to act upon an undefined source.

 

[Hans Blaster]

The issue is not explaining things but explaining causality.

What on Earth does that mean? How does "causality" need to be explained.

 

[John Caldwell]

What on Earth does that mean? How does "causality" need to be explained.

No matter what sparked the universe it had to have had a beginning. Was energy "god"? Was mass "god"? Was this energy or mass simply always in motion without something setting it in motion?

I read a lot of things about tree rings, thermodynamics, and big bangs. But that's starting mid-story.

"Let's start at the beginning, a good place to start." (Mary Poppins).

 

[Hans Blaster]

No matter what sparked the universe it had to have had a beginning. Was energy "god"? Was mass "god"? Was this energy or mass simply always in motion without something setting it in motion?

I read a lot of things about tree rings, thermodynamics, and big bangs. But that's starting mid-story.

"Let's start at the beginning, a good place to start." (Mary Poppins).

Why try to equate energy or mass with god? Makes no sense and adds nothing.

Why does the start of our Universe have to be "the Beginning?" Why not have that hot-dense state always exist as part of some thing that always existed?

 

[46AND2]

There is plenty of evidence suggesting a 13+ billion year old earth, but only if God is removed from the equation. With God present as Creator then the data is far from evidence (for or against an old earth) and the issue becomes theological (Could God create a mature universe at the start? Does nature itself testify to how God created? Does nature form an obstacle that only faith corrects? Ect).

If a god is considered for all questions, how can we ever know anything? For example: it sure looks like you flipped heads, but what if god reversed the sides of the coin?

It's for this reason that science MUST exclude god's whims lest every single question of any kind be futile and unanswerable.

 

[sjastro]

The Big Bang being discussed in this thread which is problematical for cosmologists is the Planck era where the universe is t < 10⁻⁴³ s where the physics break down.

There is another Big Bang that cosmologists are interested in which occurred around
t =10⁻³⁰ s.
This is the Hot Big Bang which can be explained with current physics in the form of Quantum Field theory (QFT).
In QFT there is no such thing as an empty vacuum, rather a true vacuum is a quantum field of the lowest energy level.
The quantum field in a true vacuum have been confirmed in the laboratory via the Casimir effect.
A false vacuum on the other hand behaves like a true vacuum except it exists at a higher energy level.
The transition of a false vacuum to a true vacuum releases energy while mathematically complicated can be explained by the Mexican hat potential.

The Hot Big Bang is believed to be the result of the Universe going from a false vacuum to a true vacuum.
In this case the field associated with the vacuum is the scalar inflaton field Ф which causes an exponentially rapid inflation of the universe for a brief interval.

Like the ball in the Mexican hat potential, the universe can be visualized as a ball (slowly) rolling down the field; when it reaches the bottom into the true vacuum state it oscillates around the minimum and reheats the universe resulting in the Hot Big Bang.

If inflation is chaotic this raises the idea of bubble universes or a multiverse where each universe is created by its own hot Big Bang.
Chaotic Inflation theory

Unfortunately external universes are causally disconnected from our own and are unobservable.

 

[Astrid]

I disagree. The data points to an order and design that can only be attributed to a designer.

Thus far there have been no proofs - no data - against God as Creator. In fact, the data points to the opposite, as an affirmation.

Of the ideas of how the universe came to be, no scientific theory had challenged Creationism (although some have challenged individual ideas about how God created).

Do you believe the First Law of Thermodynamics to be correct?

If so, then there has to be an origin equal to all energy (to include mass) in the universe today.

You are just making assertions

 

[PeterDona]

M'boy....this (and similar such and such for beginners) looks like so much fun ! [**cough**]

Astronomy 201: Angular Momentum

https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/Functions.html​

I think a more simple explanation will do the job for a "beginner".
Consider a bicycle running down the road. The linear momentum is the bicycle moving. The roational momentum is the wheels spinning while at the same time moving. The spinning of the wheels help keep the bicycle stable.

i remembered that rotational momentum is better known by the name anglican momentum
demonstration of angular momentum - Google Search

 

[PeterDona]

Given that Cuvier was born in 1769, I find that a hard claim to accept.

Naturalists from the 1500s onwards suggested the earth was ancient. There was a particularly rich vein of Italian naturalists (Gasparo Contarini, Girolamo Fracastoro, Tiberio Russilano) who published their speculation. While they didn't give firm estimates, the idea of 'deep time' was already pervasive - millions of years, rather than thousands.

The idea that the world was only 6,000-10,000 years old really only gets legs under it in the later part of the 1500s. Martin Luther, John Calvin and other Protestants declared the earth to be no more than 6000 years old. Then the Catholic Church, looking for ways to push back against the 'heresies' of the Protestant Reformation and the early stages of the Enlightenment, shifted into its own phase of biblical literalism and sought to align the claims of naturalists with a strict chronological interpretation of the Bible.

Serious scientific attempts were made in England and France to actually date the earth starting the early 1700s.

Somewhere around 1715 (potentially earlier), Edmund Halley suggested a method for estimating the age of the earth (based on salination rates). Event the lowest end of the estimates would have produced an age in the millions of years. Halley never tested his hypothesis as he never had the data he wanted, but others did in the 1800s and got ages ranging from 25 million to over 100 million years.

Benoit de Maillet estimated in the mid 1720s that earth was around 2 billion years old (based on sea declination rates). But his estimate wasn't published until after his death in 1738, due to fear of what the Church would say/do. Even then, the estimate was published anonymously.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comet de Buffon, estimated in 1741 that the earth was a little under 75,000 years old. He also delayed publishing his estimate (until 1778), partly because of fear of rejection from other naturalists and also from reprisals from the Church. It was only after he was made a count that he felt safe enough to publish. Even so, he eventually had to publish a retraction.

There was a cottage industry in the second half of the 1700s into the first quarter of the 1800s of trying to estimate the age of the earth through various methods. By the 1820s, it was pretty well established that the earth was millions of years old, if not 10s or 100s of millions of years.



Lyell's estimates of the age of the earth were a refinement of the work of earlier naturalists like Steno and de Saussure and geologists like Werner and Hutton, who proposed rock formation took place under what we would geological time scales. Hutton was probably most responsible (in the 1780s) for the development of what we understand today as 'deep time'

Thanks for a wonderful recap there. Can you reference a book on the topic?

 

[PeterDona]

John Gribbin, in his book 13.8: The quest to find the true age of the universe and the theory of everything (Icon Books Ltd., 2015) lays out the evidence for the age of the universe in detail. In particular, he describes the ages determined from the Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams of globular clusters (being Danish you should be familiar with the scientific work of Ejnar Hertzsprung), from the lower luminosity limit of white dwarf stars, from the recession rates of galaxies, and from the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (WMAP and Planck).
Gribbin concludes that the oldest globular clusters in our Galaxy are 12.6 billion years old, two nearby white dwarfs have ages of 11 and 11.5 billion years, and the oldest individual stars are 14.5±0.8 billion years. The measurements of the recession speeds of galaxies yielded a Hubble constant of 73.8±2.4 km/s/Mpc. The WMAP and Planck measurements of the cosmic microwave background, carried out between 2001 and 2013, yielded a Hubble constant of 67.8±0.77 km/s/Mpc and an age for the universe of 13.798±0.037 billion years.
The good agreement between these three independent methods of measuring the age of the universe is good evidence for the accuracy of the result. Notice that the WMAP and Planck measurements were carried out after 2000 and therefore less than 25 years ago, so the story of scientists at an informal meeting agreeing on an age of 13.7 billion years is incorrect or is based on a misunderstanding.

Thanks for joining the conversation. The Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams, those with white dwarfs and red giants and white giants and a main sequence, right?

I have a consideration on this. All those years are mathematical years, not real years. Given that, it could be that they point not to real years, but to some reality which may have to do not with real years but with some fact yet to be realized.

 

[PeterDona]

Recession velocities of galaxies due to spacetime expansion are characterized by purely radial motion (no transverse component) and is proportional to the distance from the observer according to Hubble's law.

Can you turn this into a more easily accessible explanation please?
Does this imply that angular momentum simply came into existence as a phenomenon of space-time?

 

[46AND2]

Thanks for joining the conversation. The Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams, those with white dwarfs and red giants and white giants and a main sequence, right?

I have a consideration on this. All those years are mathematical years, not real years. Given that, it could be that they point not to real years, but to some reality which may have to do not with real years but with some fact yet to be realized.

Sure, and my drive to work maybe just mathematical miles, when in reality, I shouldn't be whining about my commute.

 

[HARK!]

MOD HAT ON

NO FLAMING

NO GOADING

NO JOKE!​

MOD HAT OFF​

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

Unless, of course, they can blaspheme God with them.

Like El Niño and His [sister? transgender?] counterpart, La Niña.

And, of course, let's not forget the God Particle.

You do know that El Niño and La Niña were given their names by Catholic South American fishermen in the 1600s, right?

 

[AV1611VET]

You do know that El Niño and La Niña were given their names by Catholic South American fishermen in the 1600s, right?

I do now.

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

I do now.

So not really 'scientific blasphemy' then, is it?

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

Also, to bring it back to the OP topic, I do find the idea of scientists from all across the world meeting to go "Right! ... how old do we think the universe is?" like some cheesy pyramid scheme sales pitch.