The Age of the Universe

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2011

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the age of the Universe.Since the 18th century, when scientists first realised that the Universe had existed for more than a few thousand years, cosmologists have debated its likely age. The discovery that the Universe was expanding allowed the first informed estimates of its age to be made by the great astronomer Edwin Hubble in the early decades of the twentieth century. Hubble's estimate of the rate at which the Universe is expanding, the so-called Hubble Constant, has been progressively improved. Today cosmologists have a variety of other methods for ageing the Universe, most recently the detailed measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation - the afterglow of the Big Bang - made in the last decade. And all these methods seem to agree on one thing: the Universe has existed for around 13.75 billion years.With:Martin ReesAstronomer Royal and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of CambridgeCarolin CrawfordMember of the Institute of Astronomy and Fellow of Emmanuel College at the University of CambridgeCarlos FrenkDirector of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at the University of Durham.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:10.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.0	Hello in 1654, the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, James Usher, published a research,
0:18.0	published research, which, in which he said, he proved that the universe had been created at 6 o'clock on the evening of the 22nd of October
0:26.8	4,04 BC. No wonder I stumbled. The evidence for this immacitally precise date was mainly biblical and relied on the Bishop's formidable knowledge of world history.
0:37.0	By the 19th century many scientists realized that the Earth had to be much more than a few thousand years old and by looking deep into space
0:44.0	astronomers such as Edwin Hubble proved them right.
0:47.0	Today scientists tell us that the universe began around 13.7 billion years ago,
0:51.0	but how did they arrive at this figure, and could the estimate yet be proved wrong?
0:56.0	With me to discuss the Age of the Universe of Martin Reese, Astronomer Royal, an emeritus professor of cosmology and Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.
1:04.0	Carolyn Crawford, a member of the Institute of Astronomy and Fellow of
1:07.3	Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge, and Carlos Frank,
1:10.5	director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at the University of Durham.
1:14.8	Martin Rees, before we go into deep space, let's start on Earth.
1:19.8	When did people begin to think about the age of the earth?
1:24.0	Well, of course, in the 19th century they realized that Bishop Asha couldn't be right,
1:29.0	and were really two lines of evidence that led people to think that the earth must have been much older.
1:34.2	The first was geological evidence.
1:36.5	People realized that it would have taken tens or even hundreds of millions of years to lay down
1:40.7	a geological strata and to produce all the valleys etc.
1:45.0	But the second line of evidence at the same time was Darwin's theory of natural selection
1:50.4	because he inferred that it would have taken at least a hundred million years for
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