The Age of the Universe

The Most Up To Date Scientific Information

On February 7, 13.7B 2003 NASA announced:

"A NASA satellite has taken a picture of the Big Bang's ancient afterglow. Scientists have analyzed the data and learned that the universe is 13.7 billon years old (plus or minus 1 percent) and that the first stars appeared only 200 million years after the Big Bang.  These results are a milestone in cosmology, says the NASA director of astronomy and physics."

To access NASA on the Age of the Universe go to:
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_mm/mr_age.html

For more about the WMAP Project go to:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/11feb_map.htm?friend

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Books

Two new books have recently been released on the age of the universe.

Measuring Eternity, The Search for the Beginning of Time by Martin Gorst (13.7B) 2001 Broadway Books.

The Birth of Time, How Astronomers Measured the Age of the Universe by John Gribbin (13.7B) 2001 Yale Nota Bene. 

Measuring Eternity is a delightful overview of the West’s effort to find a starting point for time beginning with Bishop Ussher’s very precise pronouncement that the birth of the world was at 6pm on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC.  (Clarence Darrow asked during the Scopes trial, “Is that Eastern or Standard time?”)  Ussher arrived at this number by counting up all the “begats” in the Bible from Adam to Jesus.  Although his methodology was unassailable, the information was not, and the rest of the book traces other intriguing efforts to explain one of life’s most fascinating puzzles.

The Birth of Time summarizes in its first chapter most of what Measuring Eternity covers in detail and then delves into a discussion of the various methodologies used by scientists to determine the age of the universe.  The final chapter explores fully one of the most recent discoveries – that the universe is expanding at an ever-faster rate.