Cosmologists often quote the age of the Universe at 15 billion years according to the Big Bang.
How is this possible?
If time is relative, then the duration of a year increases as the gravitational field increases, which occurs as you approach the singularity.
You cannot say that they’re just using an objective unit of measurement, because the Big Bang is based on General Relativity, which says that the only objecive unit is the speed of light. An entity traveling at the speed of light, such as the photon, however, does not register the passage of time at all. For it, all there is is the singularity.
From our subjective vantage point, it appears to me that the universe is infinite in both temporal directions. Whether the expansion continues indefinately or the universe collapses on itself is irrelevent, it’s still infinite.
I also don’t think its right to say the singularity is meaningless because of quantum mechanics because the Big Bang is a Relativistic theory not a quantum mechanical one. Unless the two are unified, there is no Big Bang in quantum mechanics.
Why do cosmologists continue to present this fallacy? Simplicity? I don’t buy that because of the huge philosophical implications of the theory outweigh the need for simplicity.
ever heard of my fellow-Belgian lemière, a priest he was,
very interested in astronomics
he observed the sky for many years, and about the time hubble did, he noticed everything was moving away from everything…
he got the brilliant idea of simply turning back the clock… till the whole thing imploded…
after that scientists have been trying to understand what mechanisms and speeds were involved, and with that knowledge, estimated the age of the universe
also, looking into the universe is looking back in time…
i’m sure you heard of that… the exact times are hard to measure, we’re still very unsure about hubble’s constant and so…
this is my cup of tea it’s been a while, but with the help of my memory and my physics book, i’ll try to manage
(not that i’m an astrophysic or so, ask Hawking if you wanna be more sure )
It’s an interesting question. One possibility that springs to mind is the idea that it’s the rate of time flow that slows, rather than the amount of time that changes per se, at the singularity. So there’s a fixed “unit” of time that passes in this period, but which is compressed or rarefied, and which still comprises the same “distance” in time (so to speak). But there is no appeal to a second time dimension implicit in this idea. If this universe is all there is, then this rate change in time’s flow is not relative to anything, and so it is comprised only in the events that occur, and therefore in only its own timeframe. Conversely, if the universe is merely embedded in a larger, perhaps infinite, spatial medium, then the rate slowing is conveniently relative to the timeframe of the medium, and again no second dimension need be appealed to. In either case, cosmologists can interpolate graphically to reach a point at which our universe, or our Hubble volume, began in the Big Bang.
One can estimate the age of the Universe from the Hubble constant and the “deceleration parameter”, which in turn depends on the energy densities in the Universe (usually expressed as Omega and Lambda).
You need a great deal of physics background to understand exactly how they calculate it.
The physical aspects aren’t being ignored here, not that it’s apparent that it’s generally necessary to look at them. The point is that we know how the age of the universe is gauged, but this very process raises further questions, and it is these questions being addressed in this thread.
Most of you really don’t understand the implications taken to figure out the age of the universe (along with many other trivial theories in deep theoretical physics), so it is folly to try to further your understanding in something which you don’t truly understand.
From your posts it appears you don’t even understand what this question is about, so I guess it’s folly expecting anything useful from you on this issue.
it’s been a while, but with the help of my memory and my physics book, i’ll try to manage 
)