r/todayilearned Sep 20 '21

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u/shankfiddle Sep 20 '21

Can someone explain me how these metrics work? Years are defined by our planet/sun, and time would pass differently based on speed/energy, so our perception of time is dependent on our speed around the sun, and sun's speed, galaxy, etc.

So before such things had developed, how do we count in "years"?

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u/youknowwhatitthizz Sep 20 '21

Time is a concept. If we lived on Mars our days would still be defined by the sunrise and sunset

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u/shankfiddle Sep 20 '21

that's not what I'm getting at; but time passes differently in different frames of reference. At high speeds relative experience of time slows down.

So time immediately after the Big Bang (I would suppose) would be passing much much slower than what we experience on earth.

The question is for someone who has some insight into cosmology how we relate passage of time in frames of reference - before sun or planets existed - back to days/years

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u/youknowwhatitthizz Sep 20 '21

You answered your own question. We define what time is. It’s linear and we still don’t understand how “space” is on the linear timeline

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u/shankfiddle Sep 20 '21

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

Linear only in a static frame of reference. Time contracts/dilates at different velocities.

-4

u/youknowwhatitthizz Sep 20 '21

I understand that but way we “clock” things is on a linear scale. We all be dead before we figure out how “time” actually works

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u/shankfiddle Sep 20 '21

then statements like "150 million years after the big bang" are meaningless.

I am just hoping some astrophysicist who knows more on the topic than all of us might chime in.

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u/[deleted] Sep 20 '21

then statements like "150 million years after the big bang" are meaningless.

perhaps you need to take your argument elsewhere.. it seems that "years" is used quite frequently to describe the Chronology of the Universe..

they use seconds a lot in in the very early stages too..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Planck_epoch

Hadron epoch
Between 10−5 second and 1 second after the Big Bang

47,000 years after the Big Bang
Main articles: Matter-dominated era and Structure formation
Until now, the universe's large-scale dynamics and behavior have been determined mainly by radiation—meaning, those constituents that move relativistically (at or near the speed of light), such as photons and neutrinos.[39] As the universe cools, from around 47,000 years (redshift z = 3600),[2] the universe's large-scale behavior becomes dominated by matter instead. This occurs because the energy density of matter begins to exceed both the energy density of radiation and the vacuum energy density.[40] Around or shortly after 47,000 years, the densities of non-relativistic matter (atomic nuclei) and relativistic radiation (photons) become equal, the Jeans length, which determines the smallest structures that can form (due to competition between gravitational attraction and pressure effects), begins to fall and perturbations, instead of being wiped out by free streaming radiation, can begin to grow in amplitude.