- For those who may be intrigued by the possibilities that
depend on the various estimates of the expansion rate of
the universe and its density, or especially by the
reintroduction of a "Cosmological Constant",
there is a software program called "Age of the
Universe" which is based on the Friedmann equation.
Written in Q-Basic by members of the Department of
Physics at West Texas State University. The program can
be downloaded free from the Sky
& Telescope Magazine astronomical
software library. To run the program after
downloading and saving the file, simply switch into the
MS-DOS Q-Basic utility, load the program, enter a Hubble
parameter (Ho), a density factor (Omega #), and any
chosen Cosmological Constant (Lambda omega) and the
program will graph the results in terms of the estimated
age of the universe (past and future) with a curve
indicating whether the results will be
"open" or "closed".
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