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
We aren’t really measuring these things, we’re calculating and simulating them based on known physics and probable theories. It’s still all conjecture, though, and yes they could easily be off by orders of magnitude, if not entirely wrong. Also, the first few moments are currently entirely unknown to us because physics as we know it simply breaks down.
When these things are discussed and documented for non-physicists though, adding all the caveats of “according to XYZ theory/model” doesn’t really help understanding, especially if prevailing theories are well accepted.
Astronomy in general deals with such large numbers usually that what an astronomer might consider pretty close is actually off by several light years. The fact we can even have a pretty good guess at what happened in the first few seconds of the universe is amazing.
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