The Age Of The Universe - In Case You Didn't Know

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For the most part I hated my experience in post secondary education. I have a degree in accounting and in order to get that degree I needed to take a lot of courses about administration and management and I struggled to tolerate the arbitrary rules and lists of ethereal imaginings of subjects that were entirely subjective since they depended upon a countless number of variables determined by unnamed or described situations. Basically I had a hard time regurgitating the nonsense they tried to teach me since I could see right through it all and I have never suffered stupidity well.

Before I settled on accounting (since I wanted a job when I graduated) I took a variety of courses in mathematics and a few courses in physics and astronomy. While challenging I did love the subject matter of these courses, making them difficult for the exact opposite reason that made administration and management courses difficult.

On one particular project in Astronomy 101 I was asked to use the program “Starry Night” to calculate the momentum of stars in the night’s sky. Based on their movements in the night’s sky from the perspective of earth and using trigonometry we could calculate the direction and relative velocity to earth for any object in the sky, from there we could calculate the momentum of the object. I was then asked to compare multiple objects in the sky to one another and see how their relative momentum was related. I was instructed to work backward to find when two objects in the sky would have been together, based on their outward momentum. When I calculated the time that must have elapsed for any two objects for them to get where they were before experiencing the same force of momentum that sent them in their different directions I found it to be approximately thirteen billion years. I was then asked to repeat this calculation using two different stars and then three at a time, and then four at a time. It became very clear immediately that every object in the entire universe was moving with the same momentum away from a common point, and every object had been traveling away from each other for the same amount of time, then it clicked, around star number four I realized this is how we know, this is how we know the big bang happened and how old the universe is.

I kept up with the calculation up until about seventeen stars or so and my calculation for the universes age kept getting closer and closer to the scientifically agreed on estimated age of the universe of 13.798 billion years old. It was so very clear to me then, the big bang must have happened literally every single object in the universe was moving away from the same central point with the exact same momentum, also because we could do hundreds of billions of calculations to determine the time required to move from the central point it was inarguably thirteen billion seven hundred-ninety-eight billions years old.

I often think back to that moment, it really stuck with me holding the numbers in my hands understanding the mathematics required to make sense of it all and discovering the same fact that so many astrophysicists before me have been telling the world. It gave me new appreciate for the term “universe” for I know now the universe is nothing more than the cosmological distribution of all matter and I am always very careful now to distinguish between the universe and all existence when talking about the origins of things. We know how the stars and planets got to where they are, we know where they once were, we know what kind of event must have occurred to have sent every object set in motion and we know how long ago it began. I often think if others could invest the time necessary to calculate the movement of the stars as I did they would dismiss forever any archaic notion about the earth being the center of anything or the universe being young. Seeing the correlation between all objects and knowing how connected everything in the universe is one of the most beautiful things I have ever experienced, I recommend it to everyone.

Interestingly, cosmology is not the only way we have been able to determine the age of the universe, radiometric dating of the elements and determining the age of the oldest stars also assist in narrowing the age of the universe. If you are curious to learn more about this, or if my lawman’s explanation of extrapolating back to the big bang was too simplified for your liking I recommend reading more at NASA’s web page:

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_age.html

We all should probably spend more time hanging out at NASA's web page.

- Colin Kelly, The King of Braves