Estimate of the Age of the Universe
Through Time
By Dr. Harold Williams
of Montgomery College Planetarium
http://montgomerycollege.edu/Departments/planet/
Just Goggle Montgomery College Planetarium!
First given on Creation day celebration
October 23, 2010
Now given on October 20, 2012!
Some Internet Resources
• Creations Dates
• James Ussher (born 1581) was Church of
Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate
of All Ireland between 1625–1656
• Ussher chronology Night preceding Sunday
October 23, 4004 BC
• Creation Wikipedia
• Myth Wikipedia disambiguation
KJV center column reference
Bible, Scofield Reference Bible
Cyrus Ingerson Scofield
• Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (August 19, 1843
- July 24, 1921) was an American
theologian, minister and writer. During the
early twentieth century, his best-selling
annotated Bible popularized
dispensationalism among fundamentalist
Christians.
Other Christian Biblically-Based
Estimates
• Bede 672 / 673 – 735 (3952 BC),
• Ussher's near-contemporary, Scaliger 1540–
1609 (3949 BC),
• Johannes Kepler 1571–1630 (3992 BC),
• Sir Isaac Newton 1642–1726 (c. 4000 BC),
• John Lightfoot 1602–1675 (3929 BC).
Who, Why, What, Where, When,
and How
• All of these are philosophical questions
• Only the Blue ones What, Where, When,
and How are generally falsifiable and
therefore scientific questions.
• Tonight we are essentially focusing of
When Creation was!
• We are assuming there was a beginning,
that assumption does have some
considerable scientific evidence, though.
Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519 and
Mollusk fossils in Tuscan Mountains
• http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/vinci
.html
• “Since things are much more ancient than
letters, it is no marvel if, in our day, no
records exist of these seas having covered
so many countries. . . But sufficient for us is
the testimony of things created in the salt
waters, and found again in high mountains
far from the seas.”
Galileo Galilei 1564–1642
and fossils
• Chapter 11, Fossils, in “The Eye of the
Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the
Beginnings of Modern Natural History” by
David Freedberg © 2002 University of
Chicago Press. Fossilized wood, iron
concretions, and ammonite fragments found
in what is now Italy by the Linceans
founded by Frederico Cesi in 1603.
Radioactive Decay of
Potassium-40
• Some isotopes
decay into
other nuclei
• A half-life is
the time for
half the nuclei
in a substance
to decay
Radioactive Decay of
Potassium-40
• Some isotopes
decay into
other nuclei
• A half-life is
the time for
half the nuclei
in a substance
to decay
K-Ar dating
•
The ratio of the amount of 40Ar to that of 40K is directly related to the time elapsed since
the rock was cool enough to trap the Ar by the following equation:
t=t1/2 /ln(2) ln ( (Kf + Arf /0.109) / Kf )
•
•
•
•
•
•
t is time elapsed
t1/2 is the half life of 40K=1.248×109 yr
Kf is the amount of 40K remaining in the sample
Arf is the amount of 40Ar found in the sample.
The scale factor 0.109 corrects for the unmeasured fraction of 40K which decayed into
40Ca (89.1% of the time); the sum of the measured 40K and the scaled amount of 40Ar
gives the amount of 40K which was present at the beginning of the elapsed time period.
In practice, each of these values may be expressed as a proportion of the total potassium
present, as only relative, not absolute, quantities are required. Potassium naturally
occurs in 3 isotopes – 39K (93.2581%), 40K (0.0117%), 41K (6.7302%) in terrestrial
samples.
Radioactive Decay (Weak Nuclear Force) revealing
asymmetry between matter and anti-matter
• 4019K4020Ca+ν0e 89.1% of the time
• n0p++e-+ν0e
• 4019K4018Ar+e++ν0e 10.9% of the time
• p+n0 +e++ν0e
• Baryogenesis How come the observable
universe have more matter than antimatter?
• Baryon Asymmetry CP Violation Kaon B
Meson CKM Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix
• Penguin Feynman diagrams
From radioactive decay of Earth
Rocks and Meteorites we can
estimate the age of the Earth’s
formation from the sun.
• 4.76 Billion or Giga years
• So the Cosmos, Universe must be still older.
Steady State Theory
• Infinite Universe of Continuous Creation
• Sir James Hopwood Jean 1920
• Latter revised in 1948 by Fred Hoyle,
Thomas Gold, Hermann Bondi
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_cos
mological_principle
Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper,
or αβγ paper
• “The Origin of Chemical Elements”
Physical Review, vol. 73, Issue 7, pp. 803804 Publication Date: 04/1948
• Big Bang nucleosynthesis
• predicts elemental abundances that agree
with measurement for H, D=2H, 3He, 4He,
6Li, 7Li, and 9Be
Temperature of the Big Bang
• R. A. Alpher and R. Herman, "On the
Relative Abundance of the Elements,"
Physical Review 74 (1948), 1577. This
paper contains the first estimate of the
present temperature of the universe
• R. A. Alpher, R. Herman, and G. Gamow
Nature 162 (1948), 774
I saw your lecture Saturday night. You showed a slide of the 3 degree
background radiation. Is this an average of the temperature from the earth
to the edge of the universe? I'm wondering if the edge of the universe
should be hot, at the temperature at the big bang.
• It was hot around 3000 K, but because of cosmic
expansion, the “Big bang,” that radiation has cooled to 3 K
or actual, 2.72 K to be more precise. Just as predicted by
Alpher, Herman, and Gamow in the second paper in
1948. This, in fact, is one of the indications that the
universe had a beginning! The steady state theory does not
predict a uniform temperature in space of around 3 K like
the “Big Bang,” hypothesis. Both COBE and WMAP and
now PLANCK space missions have now measured to very
high precession the uniformity of this radiation that was
3000 K when the universe was around 400,000 years old,
but is now 2.72 K now that the universe is 13.76 Giga
years.
Age of the Universe
• Big Bang maybe a poor term, but we
seem to be stuck with it.
• Timeline of the Big Bang
• Graphical Timeline of the Big Bang
• Graphical timeline of the Stelliferous Era
Distance Measurements to Other
Galaxies: The Hubble Law
E. Hubble (1913): Distant
galaxies are moving away
from our Milky Way, with a
recession velocity, vr,
proportional to their
distance d:
vr = H0*d
H0 ≈ 70 km/s/Mpc
=> Measure vr is the Hubble
parameter through the Doppler
effect  infer the distance.
Hubble’s Law
Distant galaxies are
receding from us with a
speed proportional to
distance
The Expanding Universe
On large scales, galaxies are moving apart,
with velocity proportional to distance.
It’s not galaxies moving through space.
Space is expanding, carrying the galaxies along!
The galaxies themselves are not expanding!
SHOW COSMIC EXPANSION
Simulation overhead transparency
The Cosmic Background Radiation
The radiation from the very
early phase of the universe
should still be detectable today
R. Wilson & A. Penzias
Was discovered in mid-1960s as
the Cosmic Microwave Background
Radiation:
Black body radiation with a
temperature of T = 2.73 K
Cosmic Microwave Background,
CMB, radiation
Universe cools down as time passes
The History of the Universe
Universe expands as time passes
The Early History of the Universe
Electron
Positron
Gamma-ray photon
Electrons, positrons, and gammarays in equilibrium between pair
production and annihilation
The Early History of the Universe (II)
Protons and neutrons form a few
helium nuclei; the rest of protons
remain as hydrogen nuclei
25 % of mass in helium
75 % in hydrogen
No stable
nuclei
with 5 – 8
protons
 Almost no
elements heavier
than helium are
produced.
The Early History of the Universe (III)
Photons are incessantly scattered Photons have a black body
by free electrons; photons are in spectrum at the same
temperature as matter.
equilibrium with matter
Radiation dominated era
Recombination
Protons and electrons recombine
to form atoms => Universe
becomes transparent for photons
Transition to matter
dominated era
z ≈1000
The Cosmic Background Radiation
After recombination, photons can
travel freely through space.
Their wavelength is only stretched
(redshifted) by cosmic expansion.
Recombination:
z = 1000; T = 3000 K
This is what we can observe today as the
cosmic background radiation!
Recombination
around 377,000 years after the
Big Bang
Cosmological Dark Ages
No stars yet very Dark
Reionization
After less than ~ 250 million
years, the first stars form.
Ultraviolet radiation from the first stars
re-ionizes gas in the early universe
Formation of the
first stars
Reionization
 Universe
becomes
opaque
again.
Reionization
Lambda-CDM model
Hubble parameter H0 =70km/sec/Mpc
km, kilometers, and Mpc, Mega parsecs, are both
distances, so H0 has the units of an inverse time
• 1/H0=(sec Mpc/70km) (106 pc/1Mpc)(3x1013
km/1pc)=4.28x1017sec(1yr/3.15x107sec)=13.58x10
9years
• or 13.58 billion years in USA
• or 13.58 Giga years all over the world.
Cosmological Relativity
the Special and General Theories for the Structure of the Universe
by Moshe Carmeli (the man)
• ds2=dx2+dy2+dz2-c2dt2-τ2dυ2
• x, y, z usual meaning lengths in space
• c, maximum speed in the universe, speed of
light in a vacuum
• t, time, what good clocks keep
• τ, age of the universe=1/ H0
• υ, recessional velocity (of the galaxy)
Relativity: Modern Large-Scale
Spacetime Structure of the Cosmos
• Moshe Carmeli editor
• Probably his last book
• Finished by John Hartnett creationist Wiki
John Hartnett regular Wikipedia
• Preface finished by Moshe Carmeli
• Also in this text Gianluca Gemelli
• 5-dimensional special relativistic
hydrodynamics and cosmology by Gianluca
Gemelli