6,000 year old earth

Hi hillclimber, and welcome to the board. You are a brave man to jump directly into this forum.

You might be interested to know that Barry Setterfield's wife Helen is a member here. She used to post quite often, including on this very subject, but she has not been around much lately. I think that some other concerns have been monopolizing her time.

Now, there are a few problems with the Setterfield idea. I am going to make multiple posts here because I am about to head off to work and want to get in what I can and because I don't want any one post to be too long.

How familar are you with Setterfield's site and ideas? You at least give the impression that you are quite familar as enthusiatically as you support it. Then you should know that a key aspect of his theory is that things at distance are seen by an earth observer to move more slowly that they actually did because of the changing speed of light. THis slowdown is a key part of the idea and is used to explain many things. For example, Setterfield explains radioactive dating by claiming that a higher speed of light would lead to faster radioactive decay. Yet we see the same rates of decay in space. He claims this is because the accerated decay is proportional to the spped of light while the slowdown is inversely proportional. So the decays seen in distant objects is slowed just enough to make it look right.

This slowdown leads to some predictions, however. And these predictions are where the idea loses traction. Let's look at one example. Astronomers measure the rotational rate of galaxies by looking at how much difference there is in the frequency shift of the light from the side rotating towards us and the side rotating away from us. THis is a Doppler shift and is completely unrelated to the red shift that shows the expansion of the universe.

Now, if you assume that the galaxy is not rotating at relativistic speeds and you only consider the velocity vectors directly towards and away from you, the formula for doppler shift reduces to

(velocity of object)/(speed light) = (change in wavelength) / (wavelength)

(Barry has been very clear that it is frequency that changes with c.)

Now if you solve for the change in wavelength, you will see that it is inversely proportional to the speed of light. So if you take a given situation, plug though the change in wavelength with a higher speed of light to get the change in wavelength, then go back through with today's speed of light, you will see that your speed measured will be off by exactly how much the speed of light has changed. The exact same thing will happen if you use frequency instead of wavelength.

Take M31. It is about 2 million light years away so light would have been necessary to have been traveling at least a few thousand time faster when it left than now to get here in 6000 years. This means that the measured speeds of rotation are off by at least three orders of magnitude. And M31 is the nearest large galaxy. The problems get much worse at greater distances. We will need a lot of dark matter to hold these systems together! They will be rotating at greater than the speed of light!

 

Let me give another example.

According to his ideas, the further away an object is, the more the speed of light has slowed since the light you see left that object and therefore the slower you will see that object move relative to how fast it is actually moving.

I want to take the case now of objects orbiting one another in space. A prediction can be made that if his ideas are true, that as you look further into space that there should be an increasing discrepancy between the observed orbital time and that predicted from the objects masses. The predicted orbital time is a fairly simple calculation once you know the mass of the objects and how far from each other they are.

I present the example of an eclipsing binary. We can measure their distance apart. We can use spectroscopy to determine their spectral type and therefore their masses. The distance between them and their masses leads to a direct calculation of their orbital period. Surely we should be able to tell that the period is off by a few percent and certainly that they are of by several factors or even orders of magnitude. All my reading of Barry's work says this is an obvious prediction. So why is it not seen? This a purely orbital clock and should be completely unaffected by slowing light except for the slowdown effect to the observer. The effect should be seen in every object of this type, the discrepancy should be able to be predicted in advance, and the discrepancy should increase with increasing distance in a predetermined way.

As another example of this, let's consider stars orbiting Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy. We have observed a star, S2, that orbits so close to the black hole as to only complete an orbit in 15 years. We know the mass of the star and its distance from the black hole over a wide part of its orbit. From this, we calculate the mass of the black hole. It is in agreement with other measurements. If faster speed of light made this star orbit much quicker than what is observed, then the calculated mass is way off and no longer agrees with other estimates. And the light must have been going faster to have reached us in less than 6000 years.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s702556.htm

 

Let me give one more example this morning.

Gravitational lensing. We can look out and see example of gravitational lensing. The most impressive are distant quasars lensed by clusters of galaxies. Already, we infer a substantial amount of dark matter to give enough gravity to provide the amount of lensing observed. (The amount of dark matter needed agrees well with the amount inferred by a seperate method using the CMB.) Now, if you consider that the light was traveling at much greater speed while being lensed, the amount of mass required goes up tremendously. At the higher speeds, much more mass would be needed to give the amount of deflection observed.

Think about it this way. You have an an object passing the earth at a given height. There is one velocity that will deflect the motion just so that it enters a (circular) orbit. A lower velocity will deflect it right into the earth. A higher velocity and the object will not be deflected enough to enter orbit.

Light travelling by a galaxy cluster will not have had enough time to be deflected by the amount seen in the lensing effects we have observed if the velocity was significantly higher.

So, we are now looking for three things which have not been observed. One would be observations that show doppler meansured galaxy rotations are much too slow and get slower with increasing distance. One would be a steadily increasing discrepancy between observed orbital periods for binary objects and their distance from earth. And a third would be the amount of lensing observed is much less than would be expected for the amount of mass involved in the lens.

These three simple predictions have not been observed. Actually, observations are quite the opposite from the expectations of Barry's ideas. To not see these observations is a clear sign that while he is obviously a smart guy to have hatched such an idea, that the idea is just not compatible with reality. If we were to see such observations consistently, then that would give reason to investigate his ideas further. But we don't.

 

Hillclimber,

Barry Setterfield's courage in the face of academic discrimination for the faith is an example that we all can be PROUD of.

 

Barry is a smart guy and a very likable guy. But observations are at odds with the predictions that follow from his ideas. They cannot be correct. There is no discrimination in that statement. Just the facts.

These are questions that I have been posing for quite a long time. And in many exchanges, they have yet to be addressed.

 

Whether or not this is true depends upon the question of whether Barry is defending the truth or a lie. I believe that he is defending a lie. The earth is NOT only thousands of years old, but billions of years old, and there are no responsible scientists today who are saying anything different. All laymen who claim to be scientists and ignore its very principles and foundations deserve something much more severe than mere “academic discrimination.”

But of course this is not only about academics—it is also about Christian ethics and the consequence of those ethics. Both the careless and the willful and deliberate mishandling and interpretation of scientific data by those who profess to be Christians does much more harm to the Christian community than it does to science. Multitudes of specific examples of such careless and willful and deliberate mishandling and interpretation of scientific data by those who profess to be Christians have been posted on this message board, and I suggest that you take a look at them.

 

Let us conduct a very simple thought experiment. Let's consider a one pound rock present on earth at the time of Adam.

It will have a given amount of energy in total, given by the equation e=mc^2.

Now let us lock the rock up in some safe place where it can neither gain nor lose any energy. Lay it in a cave somewhere, lock it up in some bigger rock at a constant temperature, Rocks are notorious for staying inert without doing things in a very energetic fashion, so this isn't going to be so hard to do. We keep it safe until today and take it out. It weighs one pound. It has the same amount of energy.

Hello. M is the same. E is the same. E = m c^2. Therefore c is the same.

Well, no doubt these simple absolutes have been bugging Barry Setterfield, so he's decided Einstein's theory is ... ummmm .... misunderstood.

All that time spent learning how to take scriptures and make them mean what you want are not wasted. He goes and finds words that sound like science to say that sometimes mass isn't mass!

Here is a direct quote from his web site:

"It is becoming apparent that masses measured macroscopically via inertia are showing different results than when measured atomically. This appears to be a consistent trend over the last 70 years or so."

Please, somebody, enlighten me where this is becoming so "apparant" . . .I've not been seeing anything like this anywhere except in the musings of Setterfield.

Now it remains perfectly true that, for example, you can smash together a couple of nuetrons and protons and the result will somehow weigh . . . less. Same number of protons and neutrons, there they are, weighing less.

Does that happen to mean that energy doesn't equal mc^2 after all? On the contrary, the missing mass is RELEASED as energy and that is the reason why we have the hydrogen bomb.

Barry's discussion about "mass" seems to depend on taking a change in mass between different states of elementary particles as proof that we can somehow forget e=mc^2, but without any discussion at all on the possibility - the ignored possibility - that energy came and went according to the change in mass.

Let's not ignore the Hydrogen Bomb. It works because e=mc^2.

e=mc^2 remains a basic problem for Setterfield change of light speed theory. You can have one or the other, you can't have both.