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Time ran 5x slower in the early universe (www.eurekalert.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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In the early universe time ran much slower compared to the current period. This was already known, but scientists have pushed this back to a billion years after the big bang, when time ran 5x slower compared to now.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

to me that just makes no sense - I mean there's probably some kind of math-evaluation that said so, but... uh...

slower compared to what? It's not like you can take a stopwatch and look how long a second feels.

Time "now" isn't fixed either - move closer to a black hole or just move faster and your time becomes slower - COMPARED TO THE REMAINING UNIVERSE.

But you'll only notice when you return and compare clocks. Back then, when everything was faster, there wasn't something to compare to? So nothing was faster?

[–] terath 2 points 1 year ago

From the article:

“If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second – but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag.”

They are comparing to time now. If you assume a quasar expels stuff at the same rate through all time, then when you look far back in time you should see pulses coming from the distant stars at the same rate as now. Yes, that light took billions of years to get here but the pulsing rate should be the same.

They found that it isn't, it's five times slower, which implies that time then must be five times slower than now.

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