#cosmic time

Cosmologists routinely compress the large-scale geometry of the universe into one line of mathematics.

Written without preparation, that line looks less like an explanation than a security fence:

$$ ds^2=-c^2dt^2+a^2(t)\left[\frac{dr^2}{1-kr^2}+r^2\left(d\theta^2+\sin^2\theta\,d\phi^2\right)\right]. $$

This is the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric, usually shortened to the FLRW metric. It is the mathematical framework behind most modern statements about the expansion, age, curvature, and observable history of the universe.

But the equation does not need to remain a ceremonial inscription that everyone respectfully walks past. Each part has a clear job. Taken piece by piece, it expresses a surprisingly economical idea:

If the universe is homogeneous and isotropic on sufficiently large scales, then its geometry can change with time while keeping the same general spatial form everywhere.

The FLRW metric is the measuring rule for that kind of universe.

Begin by Smoothing the Universe

At familiar scales, the universe is plainly not homogeneous. Earth is denser than the space surrounding it. The Milky Way has stars, gas clouds, a central black hole, and large regions containing very little matter. Galaxies collect into groups and clusters, with enormous voids between them.

Cosmology does not deny any of this. Instead, it asks what the universe looks like after we step back far enough that individual galaxies become local texture rather than the main pattern.

Relativity took away the master clock.

Before Einstein, it was natural to imagine time as an invisible current flowing uniformly through the universe. Clocks might run badly, people might lose track of the hour, and trains might fail to respect the timetable, but beneath these local disappointments there was supposedly one true time. If two events happened simultaneously, they happened simultaneously for everyone.

Relativity tells us otherwise. Observers moving relative to one another can disagree about which distant events happened at the same time. Clocks following different paths through spacetime can accumulate different durations. Gravity changes the rate at which clocks tick. There is no clock mounted somewhere above the universe, safely outside the proceedings, displaying the correct cosmic hour.

And then cosmologists say that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old.

This sounds suspiciously like the master clock has been smuggled back into the building.

Whose 13.8 billion years are these? A clock on Earth? A clock drifting between galaxies? A clock moving at nearly the speed of light? There is no inertial reference frame for the entire expanding universe, so where does this age have any truth?

The short answer is that the age of the universe is not the reading on an arbitrary observer's clock. It is an amount of cosmic time: the proper time measured by an ideal family of observers who move with the average expansion of the universe.