Wednesday, February 12, 2003

Not with a Crunch but a Whimper

Several of the most important questions of cosmology have been answered in what looks like a conclusive way. Recent microwave pictures from a space probe show that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that it consists of 4 percent "normal" matter, 23 percent "dark" matter, and 73 percent "dark energy", and that it will continue to expand forever.


From CNN's coverage:



Bahcall's analogy of the process: If the current universe is a 50-year-old man, what WMAP scientists have been able to do is accurately measure the his weight when he was just 12 hours old.


This should, IMO, be the lead story pretty much everywhere, but I think we all know how likely that is.

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