Omega=1 (to within 0.4%) which means the universe is very close to flat (or even "hyperflat"). This is what would be predicted by inflation (which is just as well, because I believe inflation was invented specifically to solve the "flatness problem" !)
If one treats the universe as having uniformly expanded from a point in hyperspace, this measurement would make it very large (and hence, naively one would think it was very old). But of course inflation means the expansion was very, very nonuniform. Assuming the universe is a hypersphere, it blew up to a huge size (by a scale factor of 10^78) in a very short time (around 10^-33 sec), and then continued to coast at a much reduced speed thereafter. This makes any measurement of the universe's (hyper-) radius unlikely to give us a useful answer concerning "p-time" (taken as roughly the distance of the universe from its hypothetical origin in hyperspace divided by how fast it is expanding away from that point, I assume). If this was a useful calculation, I think it would be reasonable to treat the universe as an ideal fluid, where the only bound systems are atoms, for the purpose of getting a rough answer. But I doubt that it would give any sort of useful answer, assuming inflation really happened. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
