The Speed of Light

[herme3]

The ChristianAnswers web site attempts to explain how we can see light from stars that are millions of light-years away if the universe was only 10,000 years old. Visit http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c005.html to see their explanation. I don't want this thread to turn into any type of religious debate, so I just want everyone to look at this scientifically and tell me if it's possible. Can the speed of light or time change? It seems to me that this theory would cause some type of conflict between light and time. How can you change one and have the other one remain constant?

[ecoli]

If c slows down, then it would appear as if the universe was expanding. So, perhaps it is.

[swansont]

Your link admits that Setterfield's contention is wrong (a prediction is not borne out), and that the work of Humphreys did not yield anything.

 

There are a number of experiments that show that the fine structure constant, which depends on c, could not have changed by more than a tiny amount.

[alt_f13]

Why the hell would God make stars we can't even see with our own eyes, and then produce the light that we would see 10,000 years later with giant space-faring telescopes?

 

Does that serve any purpose whatsoever? Is god trying to fool us? Hell, the link could be right, just as in the giant computer theory(?) that I find so much more plausible than a floating space deity, but it's not Cosmology. It's speculation based on baseless speculation about the origins of the universe.

 

Religious debate or not, it's really illogical. Creationists make up so much garbage to excuse their beliefs...

[herme3]

Why the hell would God make stars we can't even see with our own eyes, and then produce the light that we would see 10,000 years later with giant space-faring telescopes?

 

I don't think you all are reading the whole article. The first part about God just creating the light, and the second part about Setterfield were just examples. The article said that neither one of these are true.

 

My post is about the third part of the article. I'm wondering if the laws of physics will allow this to be possible:

 

A new Creationist cosmology

 

Nevertheless, the c-decay theory stimulated much thinking about the issues. Creationist physicist Dr. Russell Humphreys says that he spent a year on and off trying to get the declining c theory to work, but without success. However, in the process, he was inspired to develop a new creationist cosmology which appears to solve the problem of the apparent conflict with the Bible's clear, authoritative teaching of a recent creation.

 

This new cosmology is proposed as a creationist alternative to the "big bang" theory. It passed peer review, by qualifying reviewers, for the 1994 Pittsburgh International Conference on creationism.[2] Young-earth creationists have been cautious about the model,[3] which is not surprising with such an apparently radical departure from orthodoxy, but Humphreys has addressed the problems raised.[4] Believers in an old universe and the "big bang" have vigorously opposed the new cosmology and claim to have found flaws in it.[5] However, Humphreys has been able to defend his model, as well as develop it further.[6] The debate will no doubt continue.

 

This sort of development, in which one creationist theory, c-decay, is overtaken by another, is a healthy aspect of science. The basic biblical framework is non-negotiable, as opposed to the changing views and models of fallible people seeking to understand the data within that framework (evolutionists also often change their ideas on exactly how things have made themselves, but never whether they did).

 

A clue

 

Let us briefly give a hint as to how the new cosmology seems to solve the starlight problem before explaining some preliminary items in a little more detail. Consider that the time taken for something to travel a given distance is the distance divided by the speed it is traveling. That is:

 

Time = Distance (divided by) Speed

 

When this is applied to light from distant stars, the time calculates out to be millions of years. Some have sought to challenge the distances, but this is a very unlikely answer.[7]

 

Astronomers use many different methods to measure the distances, and no informed creationist astronomer would claim that any errors would be so vast that billions of light-years could be reduced to thousands, for example. There is good evidence that our own Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across!

 

If the speed of light © has not changed, the only thing left untouched in the equation is time itself. In fact, Einstein's relativity theories have been telling the world for decades that time is not a constant.

 

Two things are believed (with experimental support) to distort time in relativity theory -- one is speed and the other is gravity. Einstein's general theory of relativity, the best theory of gravity we have at present, indicates that gravity distorts time.

 

This effect has been measured experimentally, many times. Clocks at the top of tall buildings, where gravity is slightly less, run faster than those at the bottom, just as predicted by the equations of general relativity (GR).[8]

 

 

When a concentration of matter is very large (dense enough), the gravitational distortion can also be so immense that any light rays trying to escape the enormous pull of gravity bend back on themselves. This lack of escaping light rays forms an invisible boundary called the 'event horizon' around the matter. At the event horizon, time literally stands still.

 

Using different assumptions...

 

Dr. Humphreys' new creationist cosmology literally "falls out" of the equations of GR, so long as one assumes that the universe has a boundary. In other words, that it has a center and an edge -- that if you were to travel off into space, you would eventually come to a place beyond which there was no more matter. In this cosmology, the earth is near the center.

 

This might sound like common sense, as indeed it is, but all modern secular ("big bang") cosmologies deny this. That is, they make arbitrary assumption (without any scientific necessity) that the universe has no boundaries -- no edge and no center. In this assumed universe, every galaxy would be surrounded by galaxies spread evenly in all directions (on a large enough scale), and so, therefore, all the net gravitational forces cancel out.

 

However, if the universe has boundaries, then there is a net gravitational effect toward the center. Clocks at the edge would be running at different rates to clocks on the earth. In other words, it is no longer enough to say God made the universe in six days. He certainly did, but six days by which clock? (If we say "God's time" we miss the point that He is outside of time, seeing the end from the beginning.)[10]

 

There appears to be observational evidence that the universe has expanded in the past, supported by the many phrases God uses in the Bible to tell us that at creation he "stretched out"[11] (other verses say "spread out") the heavens.

 

If the universe is not much bigger than we can observe, and if it was only 50 times smaller in the past than it is now, then scientific deduction based on GR means it has to have expanded out of a previous state in which it was surrounded by an event horizon (a condition known technically as a "white hole" -- a black hole running in reverse, something permitted by the equations of GR).

 

As matter passed out of this event horizon, the horizon itself had to shrink -- eventually to nothing. Therefore, at one point this earth (relative to a point far away from it) would have been virtually frozen in time. An observer on earth would not in any way "feel different." "Billions of years" would be available (in the frame of reference within which it is travelling in deep space) for light to reach the earth, for stars to age, etc. -- while less than one ordinary day is passing on earth. This massive gravitational time dilation would seem to be a scientific inevitability if a bounded universe expanded significantly.

 

In one sense, if observers on earth at that particular time could have looked out and "seen" the speed with which light was moving toward them out in space, it would have appeared as if it were traveling many times faster than c. (Galaxies would also appear to be rotating faster.) However, if an observer in deep space was out there measuring the speed of light, to him it would still only be travelling at c.

 

There is more detail of this new cosmology, at layman's level, in the book by Dr. Humphreys, Starlight and Time, which also includes reprints of his technical papers showing the equations.[12]

 

It is fortunate that creationists did not invent such concepts such as gravitational time dilation, black and white holes, event horizons and so on, or we would likely be accused of manipulating the data to solve the problem. The interesting thing about this cosmology is that it is based upon mathematics and physics totally accepted by all cosmologists (general relativity), and it accepts (along with virtually all physicists) that there has been expansion in the past (though not from some imaginary tiny point). It requires no "massaging" -- the results "fall out" so long as one abandons the arbitrary starting point which the big bangers use (the unbounded cosmos idea, which could be called "what the experts don't tell you about the 'big bang'").

 

This new cosmology seems to explain in one swoop all of the observations used to support the "big bang," including progressive red-shift and the cosmic microwave background radiation, without compromising the data or the biblical record of a young earth.

[JustStuit]

Why do they try to create theories to fit what the bible says? The bible was written by humans so wouldn't it make more sense to compare it to new science? If it didn't work, there are some mistakes in it, big deal. Their results/theories could be biased because they try to get it to produce the answer they want - sometimes at the cost of accuracy.

[ydoaPs]

It passed peer review, by qualifying reviewers, for the 1994 Pittsburgh International Conference on creationism.

now that's quality peer review.

 

Dr. Humphreys' new creationist cosmology literally "falls out" of the equations of GR, so long as one assumes that the universe has a boundary. In other words, that it has a center and an edge -- that if you were to travel off into space, you would eventually come to a place beyond which there was no more matter. In this cosmology, the earth is near the center.

in other words, it DOESN'T fall out of GR.

[herme3]

Why do they try to create theories to fit what the bible says? The bible was written by humans so wouldn't it make more sense to compare it to new science? If it didn't work, there are some mistakes in it, big deal. Their results/theories could be biased because they try to get it to produce the answer they want - sometimes at the cost of accuracy.

 

Well, that was my question. Is this theory compatible with modern scientific facts?

[swansont]

Well, that was my question. Is this theory compatible with modern scientific facts?

 

No. Invariably, when they contort their hypothesis to fit some facts, it doesn't end up fitting a bunch of others. That was a problem with Setterfield's work. IIRC it failed when analyzing supernovae intensity decay profiles, while GR gave the right answer.

 

The creationists don't seem to realized that they are trying to solve a massively overconstrained problem, and the constraints placed by their interpretation of the Bible are the reason their hypotheses don't work.

[Severian]

Well, that was my question. Is this theory compatible with modern scientific facts?

 

Does it matter? It is non-predictive, so it is not a valid scientific theory anyway. So why do they bother trying to accommodate observations in some semi-scientific way when they are throwing science out of the window anyway?

[aguy2]

Why do they try to create theories to fit what the bible says? The bible was written by humans so wouldn't it make more sense to compare it to new science? If it didn't work, there are some mistakes in it, big deal. Their results/theories could be biased because they try to get it to produce the answer they want - sometimes at the cost of accuracy.

Many of my fellow theists seem to be making a mistake in seeing their primary documents as being predictive in nature, when the documents clearly state that their function is to 'confirm', not to 'predict'.

aguy2

[sunspot]

One of my earliest cosmology models, twenty years ago, tried to equate the six days of creation to the evolution of the universe. The way the original model worked was to chose a reference that is highly time dilated to measure time. For example, the first roughtly 1M years of the universe's expansion (hydrogen and transparency for light appear) is equated to our earth reference. On the other hand, if one was stting on the BB reference, the enormous gravity could have made that amount of time appear like one day. At that time, I figured there is no logical reason why God would use our reference (which didn't exist yet) if he is busy sitting on the BB making sure his project is on schedule. Someone else published the gist of my relativistic slowdown model a few years later, but by then my theories were taking a different direction.

[Ragib]

As ecoli stated, if the speed of light slowed down, the universe would be seen as expanding, however, we would actually see no differnce. Say we somehow magically cut in half and changed to c/2, (but with all dimensionless physical quantities continuing to remain constant), then the Planck Length would increase by a factor of

 

from the point-of-view of some unaffected "god-like" observer on the outside. But then the size of atoms (approximately the Bohr radius) are related to the Planck length by an unchanging dimensionless constant:

Then atoms would be bigger (in one dimension) by

, each of us would be taller by .

Our clocks would tick slower by a factor of

(from the point-of-view of this unaffected "god-like" observer) because the Planck time has increased by ,

but we would not know the difference (our perception of durations of time relative to the Planck time is, by axiom, an unchanging dimensionless constant). This hypothetical god-like observer on the outside might observe that light now travels at half the speed that it used to (as well as all other observed velocities) but it would still travel 299792458 of our new meters in the time elapsed by one of our new seconds. We would not notice any difference.

[S.Ingvar]

Why do they try to create theories to fit what the bible says? The bible was written by humans so wouldn't it make more sense to compare it to new science? If it didn't work, there are some mistakes in it, big deal. Their results/theories could be biased because they try to get it to produce the answer they want - sometimes at the cost of accuracy.

There are many reasons to write articles that support the "holy scripture".

 

Here is one economical example at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Templeton_Prize

 

Another reason is that if you follow your intellecually sound common sense but not the consensus canon, your questioning is not accepted, and your articles -- even emprical based on understandable experiments and observations -- will not be accepted for publication. You will also be banned from debate forums.

 

Anyhow, the big bang interpretation is a hypothesis that help to explain the spectral lines expanded wavelengths. The only known idea was the Doppler shift, that Edvin Hubble multiplied with the speed of light. There was no problem when the redshift was lower than 100%. But today redshifts are up to z=6 (600%).

It forced the big bang theorists to invent new help-hypotheses that make astronomy and astro-physics complicated and impossible to understand.

 

My experience is that the big bang hypothesis is a hinder for new facts that can give the right explanation.

 

I have made some interesting experiments that demonstrate that the same natural phenomenon explains the light’s redshift and the waterwaves' expanding and even the frequency shift of the sound with the distance (a new discovery).

You can see pictures and diagrams from my experiments at http://www.theuniphysics.info

 

Mathematical analyses show that Max Planck and Edvin Hubble have found the same radiation entropy phenomenon about how energy is dissipating towards equilibrium; but they made different interpretations. This is not my hypotheses. This is what the analyses and the facts and the history of science say.

Read for example the history at Planck's Nobel Lecture at http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1918/planck-lecture.html

Either the quantum of action was a fictional quantity, then the whole deduction of the radiation law was in the main illusory and represented nothing more than an empty non-significant play on formulae, or the derivation of the radiation law was based on a sound physical conception. In this case the quantum of action must play a fundamental role in physics, and here was something entirely new, never before heard of, which seemed called upon to basically revise all our physical thinking ...

 

Ingvar, Sweden