How old is the universe?

Thank you very much for those videos i've never seen them before. How many suns fit into that star i wonder that is truly mind boggling from what i can work out that one star is bigger than the entire solar system!

Originally posted by thesun
What i am saying is that science can not claim the uinverse is only 13/14 billion years old and at the same time claim that energy can not be created or destroyed, it only changes form. If the energy that created the uinverse had been around before the big bang, then it only just changed form and it was not and could not have been created at the moment of the big bang.

I think that you confuse the terms. If the cosmologists say that the universe is 13 to 14 billion years old, then they refer to THIS universe that we live in and not to THAT universe that could collapse due to gravitational influences upon itself, which resulted in an extremely dense region, or singularity, and expanded (Big Bang) to form another universe. So the First Law of Thermodynamics can be safely applied to this scenario.

When THAT universe collapsed into singularity, it was surrounded by something called "Space." When the singularity big banged, it began expanding into the Space transforming its properties. At the moment when Big Bang took place, thousands of similar explosions could have taken place elsewhere in the Space. This Space is a completely unknown region, because we can't see beyond our universe.



[edit on 9/21/2008 by stander]

Originally posted by thesun
What i am saying is that science can not claim the uinverse is only 13/14 billion years old and at the same time claim that energy can not be created or destroyed, it only changes form. If the energy that created the uinverse had been around before the big bang, then it only just changed form and it was not and could not have been created at the moment of the big bang.

There is a quite counter-intuitive definition of the universe (see the 1st paragraph bellow) that really contradicts the First Law of Thermodynamics.

What was there before the Big Bang and what is there outside of our universe?

We can define the universe as everything there is, so in that case there is nothing outside of it. We also say that space and time both started at the Big Bang and therefore there was nothing before it.

Another definition for the universe is the observable universe - which is the part of it that we can technically see. We cannot know what is outside of that (since we can't observe it), but we think that physics works the same everywhere and so we think that it should be very similar to the observable universe. We actually think that the universe might be infinite in extent, and so goes on forever, even though we can only see a finite part of it.

We can speculate in meta-physics or in religion about what was before the Big Bang, but again, we cannot use science to tell anything about it as physics as we understand it breaks down at that point.