Scientists claim the universe is twice as old as believed
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36714228 (249 Comments)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41847656 (79 Comments)
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41760006 (40 Comments)
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36784319 (1 Comment)
Needless to say, this result is not considered credible by the scientific community. It's borderline crackpot territory if you ask me.
Further reading: https://www.iflscience.com/why-its-extremely-unlikely-the-un...
That's how a lot of HN likes their physics, with a side of conspiracism as to why most scientists don't buy into these ideas.
I wonder which number this matches, since we’ve repeatedly measured 2 different values and we can’t figure out why they disagree. As much as this is currently non-peer reviewed ideas that probably won’t lead anywhere (as with most news articles about new research), radical ideas like this are probably what is needed to get to the truth of the Hubble tension and other paradoxes in cosmology.
It was probably a coincidence, but now there's another model with changing constants. I'd love to see where this goes.
This does not mean anything, at all.
Or it’s just humans project meaning into a meaningless universe.
What else is there to do?
-- Ecclesiastes 8:15Even among professional physicists, a surprisingly large number of them do not have clear ideas about the meanings of the fundamental constants and of the fundamental units of measurement. The reason is that the subject of metrology, even if it is the fundament of physics, is almost never treated correctly in physics textbooks, if it is mentioned at all.
Ignoring the extra constants that might be needed in the theory of nuclear strong and weak forces, and also the extra constants that may be needed in certain variants of Einstein's theory of gravitation (e.g. "the cosmological constant"), in the physics that is encountered by the majority of people there are only 2 fundamental constants, which determine the strength of the electromagnetic interaction and the strength of the gravitational interaction, i.e. the constant of Coulomb's law of electric attraction and the Newtonian constant of gravitation.
None of these 2 constants can be claimed to be particularly close to 1, even when expressed in natural units, much less when arbitrary units are used. These 2 constants can be expressed in several equivalent ways, but none of the different values obtained thus has any unexpected values.
For example, a constant that is equivalent with Coulomb's constant is the so-called "fine structure constant" a.k.a. Sommerfeld's constant, about which a huge number of aberrant research papers have been written by people who did not know what it means. The "fine structure constant" is the speed of a particle with unit charge that revolves around a fixed particle with unit charge, when having unit angular momentum (in natural units). That speed is determined by the equality between the electric attraction force and the inertial centrifugal force, so it is a measure for the strength of the electric force and it is inversely proportional with the constant from Coulomb's law.
The poor handling of metrology in modern physics textbooks is in contrast with classic masterpieces, like Maxwell's "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism", which started with a good description of how physical quantities are measured and how systems of fundamental units of measurement are chosen, because without such a solid base all the following theory can be flawed, as it frequently happens in some modern theoretical research papers, where bogus numbers are computed.
In the SI system of units, besides the 2 constants of Newton and Coulomb there are a few other "fundamental constants", which are fake fundamental constants, because they are some exact numbers, chosen by convention instead of being measured experimentally, which are chosen is such a way so that the legal units, like meter, second, kilogram, have values approximately equal with the values corresponding to their old historical definitions.
The speed of light in a vacuum is pretty important too, but I don't think that you can derive that exclusively from the Coulomb constant (without also allowing the permittivity/permeability of free space). Planck's constant is also important, depending on what you consider "physics that is encountered by the majority of people".
> The poor handling of metrology in modern physics textbooks
It's not really covered in textbooks, but all my physics labs had extensive coverage of error propagation, dimensional analysis, and running statistics on measured data.
> In the SI system of units, besides the 2 constants of Newton and Coulomb there are a few other "fundamental constants", which are fake fundamental constants
I agree that Boltzmann's and Avogadro's constants are "fake", the elementary charge is borderline, and the candela is a joke, but I wouldn't put c or ℏ in this category—time is special in physics (the arrow of time and such), so the relation between time and space (c) seems fundamental and non-trivial; similarly, conservation of energy is probably the most important conservation law, so the relation between frequency and energy (ℏ) seems fundamental too.
I'm aware of natural units, but I don't think that the fact that you can give c and ℏ values of one makes them any less fundamental.
As first proposed by Maxwell in 1870, currently the unit of time is derived from the unit of distance by imposing the condition that the constants from the expressions of the electric force and of the magnetic force are equal.
This condition ensures that the strength of the electromagnetic interaction is described by a single fundamental constant, that from the law of Coulomb.
A consequence of this condition proposed by Maxwell is that the velocity of light in vacuum becomes an exact constant, whose value depends only on the choice of the fundamental units of measurement, and not on any measurement. In a "natural" system of fundamental units, the numeric value of the speed of light in vacuum is "1".
In the older systems of units, where Maxwell's condition is not true, the speed of light was obtained from measurements, but nonetheless it still was not a truly fundamental constant, because its value depended on arbitrary choices made by humans for the electric and magnetic units of measurement and not on properties of nature.
The SI system of units still uses an obsolete definition of the unit of time, which is kept for now until a consensus will be reached about its best replacement. However, the best practical way to implement the units of space and time is with a stabilized laser from whose wavenumber the unit of distance is derived, while the laser also drives an optical frequency comb and the unit of time is derived from the pulse frequency at the output of the frequency comb (an optical frequency comb behaves like a frequency divider, whose input is in the tens of THz or hundreds of THz range, while the output is in the hundreds of MHz or few GHz range, where a digital counter can be used to measure time and frequency).
The relationship between the wavenumber of the light generated by the laser and the pulse frequency of the frequency comb includes the conventional value of the speed of light (299792458).
While the speed of light is a conventional constant that expresses the relationship between the units of time and distance, when they are chosen arbitrarily by a human, the elementary electric charge and Planck's constant are not fundamental constants, but they are 2 fundamental units of measurement, the units of electric charge and angular momentum.
In a system of units of measurement that uses arbitrarily chosen units instead of "natural" units, the elementary electric charge and Planck's constant are the ratios between the arbitrary units of electric charge and angular momentum and the corresponding natural units. In SI the elementary electric charge and Planck's constant are conventional exact numbers, chosen so that the historic values of the ampere and of the kilogram are well approximated.
Over the system of fundamental units that are sufficient for kinematics, dynamics adds 2 fundamental units, whose "natural" values are the elementary electric charge and Planck's constant, plus 2 fundamental constants whose numeric values must be obtained by measurement, which are Coulomb's constant (or equivalently its inverse, the permittivity of vacuum, which is approximately 68.5 in natural units) and the Newtonian constant of gravitation.
The distinction between fundamental units and fundamental constants is clear and important. The former are chosen and the latter must be measured experimentally.
There exists a huge number of physics books that say incorrectly what Planck's constant is.
Planck's constant is not "the quantum of action", even if Planck himself used this erroneous phrase.
There is no such thing as a "quantum of action". Action is a physical quantity that increases monotonically with time for any physical system, so it is never constant, much less quantized.
Like the electric charge, action is a primitive quantity, which is not defined using other quantities. Energy is action per time, momentum is action per distance and angular momentum is action per angle. Therefore the ratio between energy and frequency is an angular momentum, and that is the meaning of Planck's constant.
In a uniform rotation movement, both the angle of rotation and the action increase proportionally with time, so the 3 ratios between the 3 quantities time, angle and action, are constant, i.e. the angular velocity, kinetic energy and angular momentum are constant. Resonance conditions between multiple rotation movements result in the quantization of the angular momentum, which is very frequently encountered in quantum physics, unlike the quantization of action, which is as impossible as the quantization of time.
But then it becomes impossible to exactly measure distance or time, which seems kinda problematic. We can then exactly measure speed, but that's not very useful because rapidity is arguably the more fundamental quantity.
> While the speed of light is a conventional constant that expresses the relationship between the units of time and distance, when they are chosen arbitrarily by a human, the elementary electric charge and Planck's constant are not fundamental constants, but they are 2 fundamental units of measurement, the units of electric charge and angular momentum.
Ok, I see your argument here, and I think that I mostly agree.
> Like the electric charge, action is a primitive quantity, which is not defined using other quantities. Energy is action per time, momentum is action per distance and angular momentum is action per angle.
Ah, I see, so you're using Noether's theorem to claim that action really is the fundamental property. I've never really thought of it this way before, but now that you point it out, it seems kinda obvious (and I now agree with you here too).
In physics, there are primitive quantities and derived quantities. The derived quantities are defined using the primitive quantities, e.g. velocity is defined as the ratio between distance and time. The primitive quantities are not defined using other quantities, but they are assumed to exist and to satisfy certain axioms, e.g. of being a scalar quantity or a vector quantity.
To determine the numeric value of a quantity, a unit of measurement for it is necessary. The units of measurement are either fundamental units a.k.a. base units, or derived units, which are defined using the base units.
Ideally, the base units should be the units of the primitive quantities, because this leads to the simplest expressions for dimensional formulae and for derived unit definitions. Unfortunately, reality is not so simple, because for 3 of the primitive quantities, i.e. for time, distance and action, it is not possible to make a physical device that would provide directly units for them in such a way that those units would have good enough stability and reproducibility.
On the other hand, for other 3 quantities that are ratios involving these 3 primitive quantities, it is possible to choose units with excellent stability and reproducibility. Thus their units can be chosen as base units and the units of those 3 primitive quantities must be derived from them.
The determination of the units for time, distance and action starts with another base unit, that of plane angle. The plane angle has the advantage that it is possible to choose a unit for it by convention. Most physics books choose the radian, but the radian is an extremely poor choice, both for numeric computations and for practical measurements. This is why despite claiming that the radian is the unit chosen for plane angle, most physics books are inconsistent by using other units implicitly in many places, where using radians would be too inconvenient.
In practical measurements, the unit of plane angle that is always used is the cycle, not the radian. So starting with the cycle as the unit of plane angle, and with 2 natural units for velocity (the speed of light) and for angular momentum (Planck's constant), one more base unit is needed, which is the unit of energy and work. That unit is chosen arbitrarily as the work required for the transition of some atom between 2 states corresponding to different electronic energy levels. Currently there are several candidates for the future redefinition of SI, including certain energy levels of lutetium, ytterbium, strontium, aluminum, calcium or mercury. Because it is not clear which is the best it is possible that instead of choosing only one of them, the geometric mean of the differences in energy levels will be used.
Having established the choices of the base units for plane angle, angular momentum, energy and velocity, the units of the primitive quantities action, time and distance can be determined successively from them. Angular momentum is action per angle, so we get the unit of action by multiplying a cycle with Planck's constant. Energy is action per time, so the unit of time is determined from the unit of action and the unit of energy. Velocity is distance per time, so the unit of distance is determined from the unit of velocity and that of time.
The practical determination of the units is more complicated than the chain of multiplications described above, because some of those multiplications cannot be realized in a convenient way.
In practice, the unit of energy is prepared by pumping some ions or neutral atoms of the desired type to the upper energy level used in the definition of the unit of energy, in which case that energy is transferred to light by stimulated emission, or the ions or neutral ions are prepared in the lower energy level, and the unit of energy is detected by absorption of light having the right energy.
In any variant, eventually we get light whose energy corresponds to the unit of energy. In coherent monochromatic light, all the 6 ratios possible between the 4 quantities time, distance, wave angle and action are constant, so if one of them, i.e. the energy, is known, all the other 5 are known, including the wavenumber and the frequency, so this provides units for wavenumber and frequency. By counting cycles, the unit of distance can be derived from the unit of wavenumber and the unit of time can be derived from the unit of frequency.
However, at frequencies in the range of infrared light to ultraviolet light, counting cycles can be done only in the spatial domain, not in the temporal domain, so a laser with known frequency can be used directly only for spatial measurements, e.g. with an interferometer. For time measurements the frequency of light must be divided down to the microwave range, where cycles can be counted with a digital counter, by using an optical frequency comb (which is a certain kind of laser oscillator, which produces pulses of light in such a way that there is a fixed ratio between the frequency of the pulses and the frequency of the light).
The exact nature of action is one of the current mysteries of physics. Action is the source of inertia and gravity. Action behaves like it were some kind of rotation angle of an intrinsic rotation movement that affects all matter.
Action for a particle is the integral of the Lagrangian over the worldline of that particle through space-time, so the Lagrangian is the projection of the 4-gradient of the action on the worldline. Thus action, like electric charge, remains a scalar in the theory of relativity (where some quantities that were scalars in classical dynamics, e.g. energy, are no longer scalars). The fact that both electric charge and action are true scalars, even in the relativistic theory, is an important reason why they are the best choices for the primitive quantities of dynamics.
It is possible that in the future action will have a fate like that of temperature. When the nature of heat was still not understood, temperature was considered a primitive quantity. Later, in the 19th century, when it became understood that all thermal phenomena are caused by a permanent movement of all particles of matter, it was eventually understood that temperature is not a primitive quantity, but just the average kinetic energy per degree of freedom.
Like heat is explained now through a certain kind of universal and permanent movement, it is possible that inertia and gravity will be explained some time in the future as consequences of some kind of universal and permanent rotation movements of all particles of matter, in which case for a particle action would be the rotation angle and kinetic energy its angular velocity.
Nonetheless, for now action must still be handled as a primitive quantity, with no explanation about its nature, but only with the laws of dynamics where it is involved.
If you pick other units, you can make the constants 1. You don't really need to 'recalculate' something for that.
And while this can sometimes be useful to reframe your thoughts and even lead to new insights it doesn't really have an inherent meaning.
What could that possibly mean?
There's a few ways of doing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units
Alternatively, and more likely, it's based on the "relative" strengths of the different forces, where ratios of about 10^40 do tend to turn up.
For example, the ratio of electric force versus gravitational attractive forces for a proton and an electron is 2.3 x 10^39 which is close.
PS: A fun thing to numerological coincidence to consider is that 2^128 is about 3.4 * 10^38, which is weirdly close. It's almost like gravity is "rounding error" on a universe simulator made with 128-bit CPUs. Similarly, 2^256 is close to the Eddington number of ~10^80, which is the estimated number of particles in the Universe...
I mean that literally doesn't mean anything? It literally depends on the units you choose to use?
if we assume inverse Planck time: it's 0.00539 seconds
I can be less helpful if you like
I keep relistening to Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" when I go sleep every 6 months or so.
The brighest minds of their were trying to estimate Earth's age. The differences are widly different!
Scientist Year / Period Estimated age Method
Comte de Buffon 1770s 75,000–168,000 years Cooling experiments
James Hutton 1788 Indefinitely ancient Geological processes
Charles Darwin 1859 More than 300 million years implied Geological erosion
Lord Kelvin 1860s–1890s 20–100 million years Earth's cooling rate
John Joly 1899 90–100 million years Ocean salinity
Bertram Boltwood 1907 Up to 2.2 billion years Radioactive decay
Arthur Holmes 1910s–1940s 1.6–4 billion years Radiometric dating
Clair Patterson 1956 4.55 billion years Meteorite lead isotopes
The results are harvested from the book by Codex, I didn't fact check.
In other words: insufficient data to provide a meaningful answer. Hopefully we'll find ways to gather more data! :)
We're like a goldfish in a bowl. So what can you do except browsing xkcd and be filled with that wonder:
Scientific evidence has not established that nothing existed before the big bang.
Children are perfectly capable of understanding that there are limits to what we have been able to obtain data about, so they don’t really need us to mix scientific understanding with simplifying dogma.
Do you mean geocentric?
> It's way too convenient that entire space evolved from a single point long time ago.
It didn't evolve from a single point.
Also why do we accept doppler shifts as proof if we can't prove the time is uniform in space.
I could never wrap my mind around "point-like" entities, like BHs supposed to be, and after all before BH collapse we have something like neutron stars.. extremely dense matter, kind of a perfect crystal ball made of a strange kind of matter.
So in my view BHs are just that, except you have that informational isolation layer (EH) that allows this giant crystal computer to crunch its quantum computations ad infinitum, simulating an endless array of possible universes.
Mind-boggling.. I'm in awe.
There's no proof black holes have an interior.
Science in modern sense of the word is almost certainly a cult like religion. Try speaking out against it and people who care more about protecting its name are the loudest in the room instead of the actual scientists pushing boundaries and making new discoveries.
A committee of truth keepers is entirely a political entity, not scientists.
More honestly, scientists must be independently literate beyond what peer reviewers endorse, both because peer reviewers cannot cover every report ever produced and also because peer reviewers sometimes get it wrong.
Every scientific reader must function autonomously, engaging critically and thoughtfully with the intellectual material they consume. Maybe a child would expect everything to be curated for them by tastemakers and then handed over on a silver platter, but lazy consumption is not the purpose of being a scientist. Scientists are meant to participate actively in the scientific process, not to merely receive wisdom from others.
Give or take some orders of magnitude. It is enough to sit in awe
i used to think it was cringe and maybe it is, but many normies love that show and watching it with them when they find it funny is actually endearing.
i prefer the higher quality of modern shows that have richer narratives and are more immersive?
but sitcoms for me have a sentimental value. my dad would come home tired after work and my parents would watch everybody loves raymond, and before sleep me and my dad would watch fresh prince of bel air and cosby show.
big bang is the one of the last shows before my parents moved on to forming a youtube vlogs addiction.
that is somewhat true, at least from the point where i was able to choose what to watch myself. i used to eat lunch at my grandpa's place as a kid because he lived closest to my school, after eating i then watched Big Bang because that's what was on TV. also watched a couple of seasons of "How I Met Your Mother" with my dad during the same time.
then about 10 years later my gf wanted to watch Big Bang together and i noticed that i just couldn't do it anymore. tanked through three seasons and then had to give up.
i did watch through all of "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" a couple of years ago, so it's not like i got an overall issue with "older" sitcoms, my brain just can't process canned laughs anymore, to the point where it legitimately pisses me off. even if there's a joke i actually find funny, as soon as the laughs and claps come in, my smile vanishes.
considering the birthyear-ranges for Millenials and Gen-Z, i am in theory an "old zoomer". i did witness the birth of YouTube on my WindowsXP-PC, and later TikTok on a smartphone, maybe that mix of experience causes such weird mismatches :D
I've seen a few videos on YouTube where someone has taken an old sitcom and removed the laugh track, and they are universally terrible.
oh, well, that could explain it... :')
> If you have to signal me it's time to laugh, it's not funny
yes 100%! i will search for such a video when i got time, but i can imagine that they're even less funny without the forced "wasn't that funny, haha?"-cans.
Until we get radically new data, I'll consider the universe ageless. This is the most elegant solution anyway.
Not any reputable ones. The consensus on the estimated age of the universe has shifted only slightly in the last several decades.
I'm not disagreeing, but this is _slightly_ shifting the goal posts. When scientists in this field talk about the 'age of the universe', it's nearly always the short form of 'the time distance from now back to the big bang, beyond which there is no way to see beyond'.
> It can't come from nothing
That depends on your definition of 'nothing', which Krauss spends a lot of time communicating to the public :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Universe_from_Nothing
How could it start from absolutely nothing?
Time is part of spacetime, and spacetime is a property of this universe. So there's no "when" or "where" outside the universe. So it doesn't make any sense to talk about "before" the universe. Time started when the universe started. Causality is a property of time; one thing follows from another because of time. If there's no time, there can't be any causality.
> How could it start from absolutely nothing?
So this question doesn't really make any sense. There's no other way it could have started, because the very concept of "nothing" and "started" didn't apply outside of the thing we're saying started (sorry, it gets very difficult to talk about this using a language so firmly grounded in time). It doesn't make any sense to ask what caused the universe because causality itself is a property of the universe.
Like I said, interesting concept and thought. I have no idea if it actually describes reality.
Since Hubble launched there's been a near complete consensus on the bounds that were radically reduced down from before. Perhaps you were born in the seventies or earlier? Well before CMB studies and the Hubble telescope launched.
There's just been a ton of science trying to reconcile the difference in the upper and lower bounds that are far closer than they were before. But it's a few billion years, not doubling or halving.
For the second part, it's completely fine to dismiss the first question as irrelevant as "what is 'it' in 'it rains '". That is, language artifact are not evidence of ontological correspondance in actual things happening. So, "we", "being", and "me" can be regarded as illusions. The illusion itself actually happen, but it's more straight forward interpretion is generally misguiding.
The first approach on the other hand can lead to dismiss consciousness as relevant tool to reach some absolute substance which is postulated as ultimate reality. That is, there is some "being", and "I" and "we", just as there are actual ideal spheres in existence in a platonic sense.
Both don't give much credits to the most trivial intuitive interpretation of phenomena, but they kind of point to very different directions.
This one is pretty clear to me, "it" is the nature, or the weather. In Russian we instead say literally "rain goes". This is also clear to me because of course it goes down to the ground out of the clouds.
But I meant that more in the sense of "what consciousness is" and "what causes me to experience what we call reality as myself".
And illusion implies that something exits, where the illusion can be casted and experimented.
--Douglas Adams
pauses to look at mafioso behind him
"...24 stars in the cosmos."
And 100 times 0 is zero, so it really depends on which operator you choose