On 24 April 2014 04:25, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > > Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps. >
Oops. They are the same person (Twain was Clemens' pseudonym). I thought it was common knowledge, perhaps because I read the "Riverworld" series by Philip Jose Farmer. > > Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of > Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many > physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. > > I think it was considered perhaps infinite, in that no one knew how long it had gone on and there was no obvious evidence of cosmological change - telescopes weren't good enough to even resolve stars in galaxies outside the Milky Way, I believe - but there was also no idea of processes lasting billions of years. Hence Twain's "hundred million" was about the largest size anyone could grasp, so it was in a sense akin to him saying infinity. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
