If the universe is 13 billion years old …

If the universe is 13 billion years old, then how is it that we are able to see light from stars 13,000,000,000 light-years away? There is a paradox of measurement in present-day cosmic theory for which I have never found an explanation — in layman’s terms. I won’t pretend to understand the math. Still, with all the television documentaries, popular science magazines and books, and Web sites that try to bring science within reach of the non-scientific community, no one seems ever to addressed this point.

Astrophysicists believe, based on their measurements, that the universe burst into existence about 13,500,000,000 years ago. The universe began in a Big Bang at a single point somewhere in space (or maybe space-time). To explain certain esoteric anomalies, physicists have suggested there must have been a period of Inflation when different laws of physics worked for a brief time. That is, the universe supposedly expanded into an immense volume at a faster rate than would be possible under today’s physical laws.

Still, we’re observing light from stars that began traveling toward where Earth now is more than 11 billion years ago. There is a television series here in America called The Universe, and on one of their recent broadcasts they pointed out that we are able to “see” light from as much as 13,000,000,000 light-years away in any direction. We have, in fact, mapped the uniform edge of the observable universe in all directions around us, and our estimates show us that the observable universe extends about 13.5 billion light-years in every direction.

There is a threshold that tells us that 13.5 billion years ago the universe extended at least 27 billion light-years across. But if the universe extended 27 billion light-years across 13.5 billion years ago, when the Big Bang supposedly happened, how fast did the universe expand to that size?

Scientists believe that the universe we are able to observe today may extend to about 52 billion light-years across right now — a fact we won’t be able to verify for another 13.5 billion years (assuming we can hang on that long).

Some people would be quick to point out that light gets shifted due to the movements of various bodies (including Earth) through space. While that’s true, the size estimates of the universe supposedly take all the shifting into consideration.

At an intuitive, unscientific level, one must conclude either that the universe is at least 27 billion years old (which is approximately how long it would take all the most distant observable parts of the universe to move at the speed of light to the positions from which light we now observe would begin traveling to where Earth now is) OR that the universe expanded so quickly in the early phase of the universe’s existence that matter and energy expanded into a volume extending at least 27 billion light-years across at some multiples of the speed of light in order to have accomplished that expansion so quickly.

Scientists estimate that the universe continues to expand (in fact, they now calculate that the expansion will continue indefinitely, so that all currently observable galaxies will eventually move beyond each other’s perception ranges).

Some very esoteric theories have been proposed to explain various anomalies that scientists have observed, including one which suggests that everything we see in the universe might actually be contained in a sort of expanding black hole (or maybe an expanding white hole), and we’re simply on the inside looking out.

Another esoteric theory suggests that if we could transport ourselves to where we think the edge of the universe is today (about 27 billion light-years from Earth — in regions so distant we won’t see their light for another 13.5 billion years), we might actually be able to see beyond the “known” edge of the universe into another volume of space time that was about the same size as the one we have identified around us.

If that is the case, is it a different universe or simply a part of a much larger universe the origins of which we have yet to understand? The television broadcast illustrated this concept with a matrix of spheres all arranged in rows and columes, each just touching six others.

And none of this has anything to do with SEO theory — I just wanted to get it off my chest because, frankly, it has tickled my curiosity for a very long time. The idea that the universe is less than 14 billion years old just doesn’t make sense in an intuitive, non-scientific sense.

Besides, I have a bad cold and can’t really think straight anyway.