Philosophy Discussion Forums

The average distance between galaxies is about one million light years. There are roughly 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/9780735421141_001


A light-year is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion killometres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-year

so the average distance between galaxies is 1 million times 9.46 trillion miles. Then there are 100 billion galaxies. So if we drew a virtual line from anywhere e.g. planet earth, and extend it in any direction, there would be a massively further distance across the galaxies along that line, e.g. than that the universe is thought to be! - 13.7 billion years old.

So how old is the universe?

If we are looking at the age of the oldest light we can currently see, such to get the number 13.7, then that is surely a faculty of light. We can only look so far back into light before it becomes unpassable and uniform [background radiation].

I think there are gaps in your argument. I'm not personally up-to-date with the numbers, but your initial quotes of 1m LY between galaxies and 100bn galaxies in the universe, sound suspiciously like numbers plucked out of the air. Not your fault, necessarily; scientists and politicians love to pluck numbers out of the air.

If there are 100bn galaxies, how many of those would fall on a straight line from the Earth in any direction, assuming an isotropic universe? Only a vanishingly small percentage. I suspect that percentage would add up to about 13.7bn years.

got an answer here - which i think agrees with you...

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/c ... s.1046639/

i am a tad suspicious of science though, they closed my 'size of universe' thread, because i questioned the notion that science believes there is nothing outside of universe. i also question relativity but there is no point in placing my postulations on that forum lol.

Don't give up, mate. Most people think my posts are BS too. Every scientist questions relativity. Every scientist wonders what is "outside" our universe.

By the way, the question "how old is the universe?", strictly speaking, has no meaning. We say that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, but it only appears like 13.8 from our perspective. Relative to ourselves, time passes more quickly in the vicinity of a concentration of mass or energy. In the earliest stages of the Big Bang, time would have been passing incredibly quickly (according to our notions). So in a sense it is perfectly correct to assert that, if the universe began from an infinitely small singularity, then it follows that it is infinitely old.

I would argue that an infinitesimal point contains nothing, and that singularity is not that. It is I think, a compression of all energy into one point.
Also, I don’t see how it could have infinite age as singularity prior to expansion. It could be a very long time but you cannot build up to an infinity.

Here’s one for relativity:

over at physics forums, I argued; if tow cars drive in the opposite direction at 100 mph, their combined speed would be 200, and yet a photon is always moving at the speed of light. Their argument to that was that the cars are effectively on their own roads and there is no combined speed.
I didn’t press the argument because I didn’t want to get banned. However, what if the two cars are attached by a stretch of elastic?
Also time travel cannot be possible, because I could go forwards in time and shoot myself so that I couldn’t travel in time. So time does not change! Nothing can move forwards nor backwards in time. Equally if I had a tachyon gun which fired tachyons in an arc [or right across the universe to come back to its own point}, then they would double up on themselves [make for an unlimited power station lol]. Yet energy is conserved, ergo you cannot overlap them so.

While we are at it; is space curved or does light just bend around objects like suns and planets, in much the same way as it curves through a magnifying glass?