The unified age of the universe?

Question

Guage sysmetries offer physcist a reasonable theory to conclude that the early universe operated under a superforce.

My question is could the forces that in exist in nature now diverge further and could this be a mechanism for the "big crunch" ?

Answer 1

They say that the universe is many million yrs of age but there isnt hard evidence.Acoording to me none of the predicted timings is actually right

Answer 2

its always possible that an existing force could split into 2 at extremely low energies. the problem with this is, weve pretty much probed as low as it can go. weve cooled things down to a billionth of a degree above 0K. so, unless this new force splits off at like a quadrillionth of a degree above 0K, its unlikely.

even if it did it wouldnt matter. because by the time the energy density of the universe is that low and the average temperature cools down that far the universe will be so large, and matter will be so far apart that its hard to imagine a long range force that could possibly be that strong. but, if im remember right, the equations that govern the strandard model do say that there should be 2 other long range forces.

Answer 3

  The universe is a finite entity so it must have a maximum size.

  Space expands at the speed of light and the universe is likely about 6 billion light years in radius.

  The universe could be much older than this,as the farthest reaches go out of existence the information required to gauge it's true age may go out of existence with it.

  Were are in the outer arms of the milky way and it took us about 4.5 billion years to get here.

  The galaxy is in a state of accelerated collapse so we can consider the life of the milky way may be about another 1.5 billion years.

Answer 4

Both previous posters are wildly incorrect. The Universe is billions of years old (13.7 at last count) and there is plenty of proof, such as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, the Hubble constant, the observable ratio of elements deduced from stellar spectrography, etc.

And since we can see about 13 billion light years in any direction, the radius of the observable Universe must be at least double that. It may be larger, but we have no reliable way to verify that.

To answer the question, gauge symmetry in the early Universe broke down fairly quickly into the four known forces we see today. The only one that could change over time would be gravity, but so far there is no evidence that it will. Recent studies in brane theory may one day lead to evidence of a possible 'big crunch', but right now it's just too soon to say.

And there is no proof that I'm aware of that the Milky Way is in a state of "accelerated collapse". That's nonsense.