tgamble

At theology web this site was posted in relation to the age of the universe.
http://www.creationposter.com/sdm.as...ce&specific=os"

Theory: If the stars are millions of light years away, and humans can see them flicker in the night sky, then the universe must be very old.

New facts: Not enough time has elapsed for light speeding at 186,282 miles per second to have traversed the entire universe. Yet light has reached the entire expanse of the cosmos, meaning light has travelled faster than the known speed of light at some time in the past. Researchers estimate light may have travelled 1069 times faster at the beginning of the universe. This means the universe is smaller and younger than most scientists believe.
New York Times, May 30, 2000 and
The London Times, Dec. 24, 2000"-
http://www.creationposter.com/sdm.a...idence&specific

"Does Anyone know anything about this? I see a problem, the artical states that the universe is to young for light to travel the entire expanse of the cosmos. The first problem is how was the age of the universe detirmined indepent of the structure of the universe. How was the conclusion reached that light had reached the entire cosmos? Two articles were cited here, but not quoted from of linked to. I don't want to subscribe to these papers, does anyone have anything on these articles?

Also, my understanding of science is limited, but if the speed of light is not constant, wouldn't that effect everything? Isn't the speed of light an intragel part of the way the universe works? (E=MC2 ?)"
http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/sho...6143#post46143

I'm curious to know myself. Given the other "proofs" mentioned at creation poster I strongly suspect that information is missing here.....

Anyone know anything about this? Thanks.

beausoleil

"New facts: Not enough time has elapsed for light speeding at 186,282 miles per second to have traversed the entire universe. Yet light has reached the entire expanse of the cosmos."

Without getting complicated, one simple question.

How do they know?

We can only see something if light can reach there from here in the age of the universe, so how can we know if there is light in the bits light couldn't have reached?

Ted Hoffman

The universe is very old. Everyone knows that.

May have? Is that proof? And where would light have been travelling to if the universe was just beginning?
The expansion tool place at FTL speeds?

I know light bends and may even slow down but the gravitational field must be REALLY strong for that to happen.

How does one prove this?

We dont even know the size of the universe. What with the talk about dark matter, dark energy etc.

For christs sake if quantum mechanics is to be taken to its logical conclusion and we consider the universal wavefunction, we may end up with a multiverse (according to Everetts MW interpretation) - to claim we know every nook and cranny that light has reached would mean we know every nook and cranny in the universe - ie the size of the universe. I believe YECers are confusing the visible universe with the universe. Or even the world with the universe - if we factor in "decoherence" from other quantum superpositions.

Which we dont.

And can you summarize the evidence that indicates light speed has slowed down?
Why waste time with YECers?

Ted Hoffman

Very pertinent questions beausoleil, where have you been? I have been at ARN with Jesse et al and now I am back home.

Asha'man

So, we can currently see things that are 13 Billion light years away. If that 1069 number were true for all but the last few thousand years, then we would be seeing things that are only 12 Million years old. Sorry, but 12 Million years still dwarfs the YEC idea of 6 Thousand years, so they really haven't supported their case very well.

However, there is an even larger problem. Remember that classic equation, E=MC^2 ? If the speed of light was a thousand times faster, then a matter to energy conversion would produce a Million times more energy. As soon as a proto-star collapsed enough to light the fires of nuclear fusion, it would blow itself to smithereens! Star formation would simply be impossible with a speed of light so high. The speed of light must have slowed down before any stars existed.

Since we can see starlight that is 13 billion light years away, then the speed of light must have been close to it’s current value for 13 billion years, and the universe must be at least 13 Billion years old.

If the speed of light was higher in the distant past, it didn't stay that high for very long.

RBH

tgamble quoted a creto site as sayingUm, well, given multiple light sources scattered all over the universe, each source supplying its own neighborhood with photons, and given that no one (as far as I know) has argued that a specific photon has been required to travel the complete distance from one 'side' of the universe ('side' in single quotes because 'side' of the universe is a weird concept) to the other 'side' during the lifetime of the universe, I see no question to be answered. So screwing around with c is merely gratuitous smoke.

RBH

beausoleil

I haven't been around much - teaching two new courses this semester rather chewed up my time.

Tim Thompson

Hey, if it's in the New York Times, then I guess it's gotta be true, right? And who's gonna argue with the venerable & esteemed London Times? Creationists do such spiffy research.

I don't know where they got the 1069 number from, and I suspect they don't know either. I can think of two possibilities from that time frame.

A time varying speed of light as a solution to cosmological puzzles, A. Albrecht & J. Magueijo, Physical Review D 59(4): art. no. 043516, February 15, 1999; Cosmologies with Varying Light-Speed, J.D. Barrow, Physical Review D 59 (4): art. no. 043515, February 15, 1999. These two papers set the stage for what is still an ongoing debate, though less so now than was the case a couple of years ago. Albrecht & Magueijo argue that one can replace inflation in cosmology with a variable speed of light, acomplishing most of the same harmonizing theory & observation, but eliminating the need for a difficult to explain adventure in exponential expansion of the universe (i.e., inflation). In general it's not a bad idea, since the speed of light acts as a factor of proportionality between space & time in general relativity, and is not necessarily required to be constant in GR (though it is in special relativity). Most cosmologists don't accept the idea, because it violates special relativity, and because it creates problems where the electron charge does not have to be constant either (which is a far bigger headache to physics than screwing around with the speed of light). But the inflationary epoch is all contained within the first tiny fraction of a second in the life of the universe, and so ir the variable speed of light in their cosmology, so it is of no consequence or relevance to light getting here from distant galaxies, no matter how you slice it.

A Search for Time Variation of the Fine Structure Constant, J.K. Webb, et al., Physical Review Letters 82(5): 884-887, February 1, 1999. This paper, which came out only a couple weeks before before the Albrecht & Magueijo paper, has been far more controversial, and far less easy to resolve. Webb et al. continue to push their claim that there is observational evidence, in quasar spectra, for a time variability of the fine structure constant. That constant is made up from a small collection of more fundamental constants, namely the speed of light, the electron charge and Planck's constant. From the beginning it has been assumed that this variability, if real, is most likely caused by a variability in the speed of light, since changing the electron charge is catastrophic for electromagnetism, and chaning Planck's constant has bad side effects too. But their claim remains well in the minority; most cosmologists & astronomers are simply unconvinced by the apparently marginal nature of the observations. But it may still pan out that there is some variability, which would be big news. But they are talking about changes in the fine structure constant, on the order of 1 part in 100,000, a far cry from 1069, so it still seems not to be the culprit.

It does not appear that the creationist makes any sense (big surprise), and if the best they can do is cite an article in the Times (London or NY), I'm not going to work hard figuring it out.

MrSparkle

But if Earth is at the center of the universe, then we would be seeing light that traveled HALF the distance of the cosmos, right?

This quote (about the speed of light) is also on that hillarious poster.

Magus55

Ok, so a quasar that is 13 billion light years from Earth is 7.6X10^22 miles away. Now lets say light was 1069 times faster at the creation of the universe. At that speed, light can travel 6.27X10^15 miles per year. 7.6X10^22 / 6.27X10^15 = approx 12 million years. Now, that doesn't take into account the fact that some of farthest quasars are travelling 88% times the speed of light away, so their distance is getting greater. Had light traveled that fast in the beginnings of the Universe, when stars weren't so spread out, light could have reached Earth from stars only 10,000 or so years old.

Ok more math. Say when the universe was created, the farthest known quasars were only 10,000 light years from earth. If they were travelling 88% of 200,000,000 (speed of light times 1069), thats 1.76X10^8 miles per second. So in 10,000 years the quasars would have traveled 5.6X10^19 miles which would put it somewhat close to the estimated distance we see today. Now there are lot of other factors to look at since we don't know when the speed of light presumably slowed down or actually how far away the quasars started from Earth etc. ( according to Genesis, the Earth was first, so had God put the Earth down, then created stars and quasars already distanced away from the Earth and they began expanding at those speeds, they could very well have traveled 13 billion light years in only 10,000 years).

Now this is all conjecture and hypothesis. I'm not saying i believe this or it is credible whatsoever, since obviously i'm not a mathematician or physicist. Just saying, had the speed of Light not always been 186,000 miles per second, a universe looking to be 13 billion years old could very well only be 10,000 or so years old. Just throwing some math out to look at options