Age of the "universe"

HOLLISTER GUYHOLLISTER GUY Regular
edited June 2011 in Spurious Generalities
Nobody knows how old this shit is. For all you know everything was created within the last 5 seconds (including all your memories)

Comments

  • LuxJigabooLuxJigaboo Regular
    edited June 2011
  • LSA KingLSA King Regular
    edited June 2011
    Anyone who thinks it's 16 billion years old is full of shit too. I love how scientist theorize everything and that winds up in the text books as if it's a known precise fact which it isn't. We don't really know how old Earth is, just using our current scientific measurements we came to roughly 4.6 billion years and no suns don't explode after about 8-14 billion years either. Just a theory somehow being turned into a fact. I love science but it's starting to turn into the opposite of what it was originally, a religion.
  • HOLLISTER GUYHOLLISTER GUY Regular
    edited June 2011
    And what about m-theory multiverse. Infinite universes = infinite possibilities. With that logic everything is true and nothing is false. It's a cop out. It's correct though.
  • LuxJigabooLuxJigaboo Regular
    edited June 2011
    And what about m-theory multiverse. Infinite universes = infinite possibilities. With that logic everything is true and nothing is false. It's a cop out. It's correct though.

    Then, there is the idea that the universe is created, and later destroyed, then created once more in an infinite cycle.
  • HOLLISTER GUYHOLLISTER GUY Regular
    edited June 2011
    vozhde wrote: »
    Then, there is the idea that the universe is created, and later destroyed, then created once more in an infinite cycle.

    If you believe in infinity than both ideas are correct.
  • edited June 2011
    Although they are not sure what the age of our universe is, they have hypotheses formulated through the Socratic method... It's very much more accurate, and has at least 100% more of the evidence in it's favor over say, a statement claiming the world is less than 10 000 years old.
  • MayberryMayberry Regular
    edited June 2011
    LSA King wrote: »
    Anyone who thinks it's 16 billion years old is full of shit too. I love how scientist theorize everything and that winds up in the text books as if it's a known precise fact which it isn't. We don't really know how old Earth is, just using our current scientific measurements we came to roughly 4.6 billion years and no suns don't explode after about 8-14 billion years either. Just a theory somehow being turned into a fact. I love science but it's starting to turn into the opposite of what it was originally, a religion.

    Take a course on the philosophy of science. I'm not smart enough to explain it, so I'll leave it to the experts.
  • LSA KingLSA King Regular
    edited June 2011
    Although they are not sure what the age of our universe is, they have hypotheses formulated through the Socratic method... It's very much more accurate, and has at least 100% more of the evidence in it's favor over say, a statement claiming the world is less than 10 000 years old.

    Completely the opposite. I think the age is far greater than a few billion years but I'm just being skeptical.

    Mayberry wrote: »
    Take a course on the philosophy of science. I'm not smart enough to explain it, so I'll leave it to the experts.


    The problem I have with that is they tend to go far off into things that if you're not planning to go into science you're not going to understand. I'm sure science has a very good definition at at least put things into a human understandable scope, but I just don't think it's complete. The wording I think just isn't very accurate. Science is hardly perfect regardless of the theories, even Einstein is now being proven wrong but only have humans expanded upon the original idea and technology advanced to the point things are later discovered that couldn't possible be foreseen.

    If books and scientists just used words like approximately or about, far more often I think it would allow people to come to the conclusion on their own that this isn't a FACT but an estimate based off what we know today. Then again I'm assuming most people will give a shit and or have the mental competence to actually think for themselves instead of just read random words. So maybe I'm just thinking too much like a scientists already :mad:
  • MayberryMayberry Regular
    edited June 2011
    LSA King wrote: »
    Science is hardly perfect regardless of the theories, even Einstein is now being proven wrong but only have humans expanded upon the original idea and technology advanced to the point things are later discovered that couldn't possible be foreseen.

    That's the point of science. It's continually changing and building on past knowledge. It is impossible to know everything at any given point in time, and that is not a flaw of science, but a fact of nature that science has to work with.
    LSA King wrote: »
    If books and scientists just used words like approximately or about, far more often I think it would allow people to come to the conclusion on their own that this isn't a FACT but an estimate based off what we know today. Then again I'm assuming most people will give a shit and or have the mental competence to actually think for themselves instead of just read random words. So maybe I'm just thinking too much like a scientists already :mad:

    Yeh, scientists aren't going to dumb it down. They don't use 'approximately' or 'about' because that isn't how research works. They find exact numbers along with their degree of error. It is the exact number that is determined by the present capabilities of the research, so there is nothing approximate about it. Future research may then have more precise or accurate methods that might come up with a different number and theories will be updated.
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