I understand that we build models and do calculations but aren’t there any potential errors/assumptions? That accumulate over multiple calculations and grow bigger the further we go back or over distance?
I.e. “At approximately 10−37 seconds into the expansion, a phase transition caused a cosmic inflation, during which the universe grew exponentially, unconstrained by the light speed invariance, and temperatures dropped by a factor of 100,000.”
In: Physics
There’s always potential errors. A really big part of science is in quantifying and understanding all the possible sources of error, so that at best you can minimise them, and at worst understand what the confidence in your result is.
As an example, the current estimate for the age of the universe is 13.787±0.020 billion years. The “±0.020” part is just as important as the “13.787” part.
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