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Originally Posted by troutman
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Nice work counsellor. A little bit misleading in the final quote.
"The answer? Approximately 13.8 billion years: the age of the Universe.
There isn't a fundamental reason for that fact; it's just a fascinating cosmic coincidence."
Also, I do like the interesting logic games being played in the article.
"But no object is actually moving through the Universe faster than the speed of light.
The Universe is expanding, but the expansion doesn't have a speed; it has a speed-per-unit-distance, which is equivalent to a frequency, or an inverse time. One of the most surprising facts about the Universe is that if you do the conversions and take the inverse of the expansion rate, you can calculate the "time" that you get out."
So something obviously does move faster than light, it just doesn't count because it's not classified an object, and any objects riding on that non-object are not moving faster than the speed of light, they're just going along for the ride, like a raisin on a rising muffin. And then when we do math by eliminating this expansion, we come up with numbers that align with our predictions. Cherry picking data or over-normalization of data to comply with a model? Still an interesting article - surprising for Forbes - and provided a cool presentation of red shift. Wish they had gone more into dark energy/matter and explaining its influence on universal expansion and what exists beyond the observable universe with a possible foray into the dark flow and multiverse bubbles.