Another stupid science question!

[Razgovory]

Another thing I was pondering and it's a bit over my head.  This one might be over the heads of some the people here in fact.  It has to do with the beginning of the universe. (Viking this isn't me showing my true colors as a creationist or something).  I've heard numbers thrown around about the age of the universe.  This is around a dozen billion years.  Now my understanding is that time and space are the same thing and altering one alters the other.  For instance if you warp space by piling up a bunch of matter it can change time for that area.  Very fast movement through space can also change how time moves for moving object.  So when the Universe began it was fairly small and has gotten larger over a period of time.  Wouldn't the changing size of space itself also alter how time flows?  Wouldn't the way time passes 10 billion years ago be different then how it passes now?  And if so, how do you give a meaningful age of the universe?

[CountDeMoney]

Who gives a shit, the Russians got their uplink reestablished with the space geckos.  So it appears they can't kill every animal they put into space.

[Razgovory]

Who gives a shit, the Russians got their uplink reestablished with the space geckos.  So it appears they can't kill every animal they put into space.

Okay... there's that.  Not quite the answer I was expecting, but thanks for contributing.

[Grinning_Colossus]

r/askscience would probably give you a better answer.

[garbon]

r/askscience would probably give you a better answer.

And then you would be on reddit which is an auto-fail condition.

[alfred russel]

The speed of light in a vacuum is constant. Age can be relevant relative to that.

[frunk]

The age of the universe is measured in a few different ways, and they generally agree on the result.  Changes in time due to gravitation or velocity are always in relation to somewhere else.  If you are at the bottom of a gravity well time won't seem any different to you.  It will only be noticeable when you compare your clocks with someone outside the well (which is how it was experimentally confirmed).  One of the methods of determining the minimum age of the universe is to look at the oldest stars and see how old they are.  It's possible that there may have been all sorts of relativistic effects on the star, but since these effects only slow time relative to other frames the universe has to be at least as old as the oldest star.  If you can get multiple old stars in different locations it further improves the estimate.

The main method used now analyzes the cosmic background radiation, remnants from the earliest observable period of the universe.  This radiation is incredibly uniform in all directions, which indicates either that it is mostly free from relativistic effects or that any such effects were applied to all of it (presumably from the earliest moments of the universe).  In fact the small variations in the background radiation can be used to determine gravitational influences.

[Siege]

What do you mean by 12 billion years?

[Siege]

Why are my posts waiting approval by a moderator?

[Siege]

Do you want me to wear a yellow star too?

[Razgovory]

I do know about time dilation with large bodies, but what I was thinking about was that since time is a function of space, if space was a different size wouldn't time also change?   If the whole universe was functioning under some time dilation of the first billion years wouldn't that throw our understanding off?

[CountDeMoney]

Why are my posts waiting approval by a moderator?

Because there are 7th grade Japanese schoolgirls that can handle their alcohol better than you can.  I'm tired of having to clean up your vomit when you hit the Zimas.  Fucking lightweight.

[alfred russel]

I do know about time dilation with large bodies, but what I was thinking about was that since time is a function of space, if space was a different size wouldn't time also change?   If the whole universe was functioning under some time dilation of the first billion years wouldn't that throw our understanding off?

I'm definitely not the expert on this stuff, but I think time dilation is a concept for measuring the difference in observed time between two bodies--it wouldn't be relevant for a single body (the universe).

I googled the definition of a unit of time: The official SI definition of the second is as follows:

The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.

So unless that has changed, there you have it.

[frunk]

I do know about time dilation with large bodies, but what I was thinking about was that since time is a function of space, if space was a different size wouldn't time also change?   If the whole universe was functioning under some time dilation of the first billion years wouldn't that throw our understanding off?

It would throw our understanding off how?  The calculated age of the universe is based on several different types of measurements.  Any time dilation would have to effect them all equally, in which case it probably isn't observable from within our universe.  There is no "external to the universe" clock that we have access to, in order to see the extent of time dilation.  All time measurements are based on being in the universe and are therefore based on "universe" time, all time dilation measurements are relative to a different frame that is not experiencing the dilation.  If everything is experiencing the dilation there's nothing to compare it to.

[Viking]

Raz, the answer is "time appears to behave differently". Time isn't an absolute thing, it is a product of our observations about things changing. There isn't some big "T" time that is affected by a big "S" space, they are the same thing.