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  Age of the Universe Margin of Error

The current age of the universe has a stated margin of error.
That value cannot be justified.

The critical value for the age of the universe is the Hubble Constant.

In July 2019 top cosmologists met to discuss the universe expansion rate. I posted about this meeting on August 9.

The range of different values brought to the meeting could not be reconciled to a final value.

The measurements obtained from different methods:
67.4: Planck; 67.4: DES; 69.8: CCHP; 73.3: HOLICOW: 73.6: MIRAS; 74.0: 74.8: SH0ES; MCP; 76.5: SBF

More of these details are in the article linked in that earlier post.

The outcome of that meeting can be found in a comment from an attendee:
'
And there in the middle was Freedman's 69.8, the wrench in the works, the hole in the narrative, the painful conciliatory suggestion that all the measurements might come together in the end, leaving us with the mysteries of Lamda-CDM and nothing new to say about nature.
'

My observation:
The result is uncertain in the range from 67.4 to 76.5, with 69.8 considered the 'middle.' They failed to reconcile them, leaving a 'mystery.'

From Wikipedia:

'
 physical cosmology, the age of the universe is the time elapsed since the Big Bang. The current measurement of the age of the universe is 13.799±0.021 billion (10^9) years within the Lambda-CDM concordance model. The uncertainty has been narrowed down to 21 million years, based on a number of studies which all gave extremely similar figures for the age. These include studies of the microwave background radiation, and measurements by the Planck spacecraft, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and other probes. Measurements of the cosmic background radiation give the cooling time of the universe since the Big Bang, and measurements of the expansion rate of the universe can be used to calculate its approximate age by extrapolating backwards in time.
'

The summary:

The current margin of error for the 'approximate' age of the universe is about 21 million years on 13.8 billion
years.

The uncertainty has been narrowed down to this value by numerous studies.

That is about 0.15%

That is a very low margin of error!

The article has a quote from one of the two main speakers:

'
"We're working on pretty amazing data. Things that are telling us something about how the universe is evolving."

"And the numbers are this close; we're arguing about a few percent," Scolnic said. "For all the sociological drama, it's funny that it's about 3 kilometers per second per megaparsec."
'
My conclusion:

It is impossible to claim certainty within 0.15% when knowing the critical value is certain within 'a few percent.'
When the critical value is uncertain then the age calculated with this value cannot be certain.

The Hubble Constant and the age of the universe are two very critical values in modern cosmology. They are not known with the certainty being claimed.

Perhaps this discrepancy is 'funny.'

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Here is the list of topics in this Cosmology Topic Group .

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