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Scientists Find Universe Is 80 Million Years Older, So Actually How Old Is It? By Roger A. Rydin Emeritus of Nuclear Engineering, University of Virginia 1. Introduction It was announced on March 21, 2012 that new data taken by the Planck telescope show the universe is 13.8 billion years old, or 80 million years older than previously thought. This is an interesting result, since it changes the previous estimate by only about 1 part in 140. If we were to assume that these were two separate measurements, we would assign a precision to the result of ± 0.7 %, a remarkably small amount. Achieving precision is the effect of repetition, and this is a remarkably high precision. What then is the accuracy of the result, meaning the percentage difference compared to the true absolute age of the universe? We do not actually know, because we routinely confuse the concepts of accuracy and precision. The answer may be precise but precisely wrong. We need to look at other data to see if the age estimate itself is meaningful. The concept of the Big Bang is that the universe began as a singularity, which is to say with all its matter concentrated at a point, and then space expanded in all directions to separate the pieces. So when we speak of a galaxy that is 13 billion light years from Earth, that means that light has taken that long to get here from there. A theoretical corollary is that the galaxy in question was seen only a short time after the Big Bang occurred, so it was an infant when the light left it. We can also measure the Doppler shift of the light, and determine that its velocity is only a fraction of the speed of light. The main question is: If the Earth and that galaxy were once close together at t = 0, how long did it take for the two to separate before the light left the galaxy to come here? The logical answer is, at least 13 billion years to move away and probably several times that because it is moving at less than the speed of light away from us. So that gives an estimate of the true age of somewhere between 26 billion years and perhaps 130 billion years. Hence, unless there is something strange about how far an object moves away from another object at constant speed over a time period, the true age is very different from the accepted age, which is indeed precisely wrong! According to Eric Lerner [1], "Tully's super-cluster complexes directly contradict the homogeneity assumed by the Big Bang. This homogeneity has always been a problem, since it's clear that the universe is so clumpy: how did it get that way if it started out so smooth? The general Big Bang answer has been that there were very tiny clumps in the early universe; through gravitational attraction those clumps gradually grew bigger and bigger, forming stars, galaxies, and clusters. Of course, the bigger the clump is, the longer the time it takes to form it." "For stars, a few million years is enough to form, for galaxies one or two billion years are needed. Clusters take even longer. By the time super-clusters were discovered, there was an obvious difficulty, and in the nineteen eighties cosmologists were hard at work trying to overcome them. Tully's objects made the situation impossible - they were just too big to have formed in the fourteen billion years since the Big Bang." "It's not hard to see why. By observing the redshifts of galaxies, astronomers can see not only how far away they are, but roughly how fast they move relative to one another - their true speed, ignoring the Hubble velocities that increase with distance. Remember, redshifts indicate how fast an object is moving away from us. Redshifts increase with distance, but also with an object's own speed, relative to the objects around it. It's possible to sort these two velocities out, using other distance measurements, such as the one Tully and Fischer devised. It turns out that galaxies almost never move much faster than a thousand kilometers per second, about one-three- hundredth as fast as the speed of light." "Thus, in the (at most) fourteen billion years since the Big Bang, a galaxy, or the matter that would make up a galaxy, could have moved only about sixty-five million light-years. But if you start out with matter spread smoothly through space, and if you can move it only sixty-five million light-years, you just can't build up objects as vast and dense as Tully's complexes. For these objects to form, matter must have moved at least 270 million light-years. This would have taken around eighty billion years at one thousand kilometers per second, four or five times longer than the time allowed by the Big Bang theorists." "The situation is really worse than this, because the matter would first have to accelerate to this speed. Even before this, a seed mass big enough to attract matter over such distances would have to form. So an age of one hundred billion years for such complexes is conservative. Simply put, if Tully's objects exist, the universe cannot have begun fourteen billion years ago." 2. Cosmologist’s Reactions to the New Data According to two articles on the web, and one in the Washington Post [2], various conclusions result from the new data: “A new examination of what is essentially the universe's birth certificate allows astronomers to tweak the age, girth and speed of the cosmos, more secure in their knowledge of how it evolved, what it's made of and its ultimate fate. Sure, the universe suddenly seems to be showing its age, now calculated at 13.8 billion years — 80 million years older than scientists had thought. It's got about 3 percent more girth — technically it's more matter than mysterious dark energy — and it is expanding about 3 percent more slowly.” “The Planck space telescope mapped background radiation from the early universe. The results bolstered a key theory called "inflation," which says the universe burst from subatomic size to its vast expanse in a fraction of a second just after the Big Bang that created the cosmos. "We've uncovered a fundamental truth of the universe," said George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge who announced the Planck findings in Paris. "There's less stuff that we don't understand by a tiny amount." The map of the universe's evolution — in sound echoes and fossilized light going back billions of years — reinforces some predictions made decades ago solely on the basis of mathematical concepts.” "What a wonderful triumph of the mathematical approach to describing nature. The precision is breathtaking," Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicist, said in an email Thursday. "The satellite is measuring temperature variations in space — which arose from processes that took place almost 14 billion years ago — to 1 part in a million. It’s amazing." The Big Bang theory says the universe was smaller than an atom in the beginning when, in a split second, it exploded, cooled and expanded faster than the speed of light — an idea that scientists call inflation.” The mathematical concepts referred to above are the idea that General Relativity (GR) is the basis of the expansion of the universe. It is supposed to be a uniform, isotropic, center-less expansion of space from a singular point to what we observe today. Hubble’s Law, which is actually a fit to galaxy data taken not far from Earth, supposedly shows that the farther away from us in all directions galaxies are found, the faster they move away, in accordance with the GR solution. But simply extrapolating backwards 14 billion years, we don’t arrive at a universe that is nearly small enough. “Inflation” [3] is a way to fit the present distribution smoothly back to a point by using an extraordinary rate of expansion over a very brief interval of time. In other words, we adjust the data to fit the theory! Actually, our measuring stick for distance is based upon measuring nearby galaxy distances at two different positions in the Earth’s orbit six months apart using standard surveying techniques, and then extending the scale using standard candles called Cepheid variables to go out to a few hundred million light years, and then using a brighter standard candle called a supernova Type I to go out to far distances. The process is shown in the figure below. Fig. 1 Smoot’s Lecture on Cosmic Distance Measurement The actual data near Earth are shown below in two directions, one along a line toward what is known as the Great Attractor (GA) [4] where the data assumes a rather strange asymmetry. We will comment on this matter again, later. It is seen that the data have a natural uncertainty or spread of about ±10 %. We should actually plot error boxes rather than error bars to indicate that the uncertainty goes along both axes. Fig. 2 Hubble Redshift vs. Distance Plots Near Earth What most people do not appreciate is the idea of a statistical propagation of errors. The original geometrical measurements have an uncertainty of a percent or so due to the ability to accurately measure angles and the Earth’s orbit size. When a boot-strap measurement is made to extend the distance scale using a Cepheid, the uncertainty of the brightness data is compounded with the original uncertainty, with the idea that errors always add.

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