http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science...hestgalaxy.html

www.caltech.edu

www2.keck.hawaii.edu/

hubblesite.org/

I think the speed of light has NOT always been constant. :P

They've found PatrickHenry's(freeper) brain????

Don't go jumping to conclusions. The first step in the scientific method is observation. Its existence has not yet been observed.

Hi ALS, Charity, Andrew, and Ignatz.

Charity, you posted you were not sure that the speed of light has not always been a constant. I was curious why you think this. I can show direct evidence that it has been a constant. If it were not, certain observed phenomena (including extra solar isotope ratios) would be different.

Hi Consilium. :)

Well the reason I think this is because when God Created the universe and light, I think it would have been different than now. This is just my theory, I really don't know for sure.

Hello RA

Glad to see you back. :)

This is an Interesting article:


Speed of light slowing down after all?
Famous physicist makes headlines

by Carl Wieland

9 August 2002

Headlines in several newspapers around the world have publicized a paper in Nature by a team of scientists (including the famous physicist Paul Davies) who (according to these reports) claim that ‘light has been slowing down since the creation of the universe’.1

In view of the potential significance of the whole ‘light slowing down’ issue to creationists, it is worth reviewing it briefly here.

Well over a decade ago, AiG’s Creation magazine published very supportive articles concerning a theory by South Australian creationist Barry Setterfield, that the speed of light (‘c’) had slowed down or ‘decayed’ progressively since creation.

In one fell swoop, this theory, called ‘c decay’2 (CDK) had the potential to supply two profound answers vitally important for a Biblical worldview.

The distant starlight problem
One was, if stars are really well over 6000 light years away, how could light have had time to travel from them to Earth? Two logically possible answers have serious problems:

God created the starlight on its way: this suffers grievously from the fact that starlight also carries information about distant cosmic events. The created-in-transit theory means that the information would be ‘phony’, recording events which never happened, hence deceptive.

The distances are deceptive: but despite some anomalies in redshift/distance correlations (see Galaxy-Quasar ‘Connection’ Defies Explanation), it’s just not possible for all stars and galaxies to be within a 6000-light-year radius—we would all fry!

But if light were billions of times faster at the beginning, and slowed down in transit, there would be no more problem.

Radiometric dates
The definitive technical creationist resource on modern radiometric dating
Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth
Larry Vardiman, Andrew A. Snelling, Eugene F. Chaffin

The age of the earth stands out as one of the most important issues among Christians today. The RATE group, consisting of six young-earth creationist geologists, geochemists, and physicists, is cooperating to research the issue of Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth. They have dared to ask the tough questions and are searching for an alternative explanation for the billions of years found in rocks.

MORE INFO / PURCHASE ONLINE


Visit our Q&A page on
Radiometric Dating!
Since most nuclear processes are mathematically related to the speed of light, a faster ‘c’ might well mean a faster rate of radioactive decay, thus explaining much of the evidence used to justify the billions of years of geological hypothesizing. In fact, top-flight creationist researchers involved with the RATE (Radioactive Isotopes and the Age of the Earth) project have found powerful evidence of speeded-up decay in the past (see their book (right). CDK might offer a mechanism.

CDK—the history of the idea
Barry Setterfield collated data of measurements of c spanning a period of about 300 years. He claimed that rather than fluctuating around both sides of the present value as measurements became more accurate, they had progressively declined from a point significantly higher than today’s value. He proposed that this decline had been exponential in nature, i.e. very rapid early on, gradually easing to stabilize at today’s value for c, just a few decades ago.3

He and Trevor Norman, a mathematician from Flinders University in South Australia, published a monograph4 (still stocked by this ministry for the assistance of potential researchers) outlining this, and answering several arguments raised against the theory. The monograph also showed how, over the past years, the measurements of the value of various constants (e.g. electron mass, Planck’s constant (h)) were varying progressively, if ever so slightly, in a ‘directional’ fashion consistent with the direction predicted by their mathematical linkage with ‘c’.

With such a bombshell, there were, not surprisingly, substantial efforts at scientific assessment and criticism. The critiques were not only from those motivated to undermine Biblical cosmology, but from leading creationist physicists. Criticism (‘iron sharpening iron’ as Proverbs 27:17 puts it) is meant to be a healthy process enhancing the search for truth in science.

The criticisms centered around two issues: the first was the validity of the statistical data itself, particularly the reliability of some of the earlier measurements of c given their large uncertainties, and the other was the consequences we should find in the present world if c has declined. This is an immensely complex area; for one thing, when c changes, so do other things, which can become mind-boggling to sort out, even for the experts.

One of the attacks concerned Einstein’s special relativity, E = mc2 and the like. (If c is a billion times greater in the past, then E would be a billion billion times greater, so would not a campfire be like an atom bomb, and so on?) Critics at the time used this to mock CDK, but Setterfield answered that rest mass itself is inversely proportional to c2, so that energy is still conserved. He also claimed that there is experimental evidence that the charge to mass ratio of an electron has been decreasing (supporting his claim that mass has increased as c2 has decreased). But as usual, the skeptics, along with ‘progressive creationist’ (long-age) astronomer and ardent ‘big bang’ advocate, Dr Hugh Ross,5 kept repeating this claim as if Setterfield hadn’t thought of this and answered it. Whether one agrees with his answer or not, it was improper to ignore it (or perhaps his critics, lacking any qualifications in physics, didn’t understand it).

Critics of CDK said that accepting it would mean one would have to discard Einstein, despite all the evidence for his theory. Setterfield said (and it seems to me correctly) that all that special relativity claims in this matter is that c is constant at any point in time with respect to the observer, it does not involve any magic, canonical value for c. In other words, the actual value of c could change with time, so long as that change was consistent throughout the entire universe.6

Others dismissed CDK by claiming that if c had changed, the fine-structure constant (FSC, symbol α) should be different as measured using light from distant stars than from those nearby, but that this was not so.4 However, Setterfield’s particular theory predicted that the FSC would remain constant.7

A word of caution
But, intriguingly, it now turns out that the fine-structure constant is in fact slightly different in light from distant stars compared to nearby ones. In fact, this is the very reason that physicists of the stature of Davies are now prepared to challenge the assumption that light speed has always been constant. And in addition to being different from the prediction of the Setterfield theory, this research by itself does not support c-decay theory of the magnitude that Setterfield proposed. The change is billions of times too small. In fact, the newspaper hype surrounding Davies’ theory, and the quotes attributed to him, hardly seem to be justified by the Nature article itself, which is rather speculative. NB, although Setterfield predicted constant α, given the small change and tentative nature of this new discovery, by itself it is not conclusive evidence against the Setterfield theory either. See an earlier AiG response to reports of a change in a, Have fundamental constants changed, and what would it prove?

Unfortunately, despite being urged to continue to answer critics and further develop his theory within the refereed technical creationist literature, Setterfield effectively withdrew from that forum some years ago, though not from individual promotion and development of the idea, e.g. on the Web.

Well known creationist physicist, Dr Russell Humphreys (now with ICR), has long given credit to Setterfield’s challenging hypothesis for stimulating the development of his own cosmology, which seeks to answer the same question about starlight, and which is currently in favour among many creationist astronomers (see How can we see distant stars in a young Universe?). Humphreys says that he tried for over a year to find a way to get CDK to ‘work’ mathematically, but gave up when it seemed to him that so many things were changing in concert that it would be hard to detect a change in c from observations.

It’s also important to note, as we have often warned, that newspaper reports are often very different from the original paper. The actual Nature article, as shown by its accurate title, was about how the theory of black-hole thermodynamics might determine which is correct out of two possible explanations for previous work that claimed that FSC might have increased slightly and slowly over billions of years. The details are summarized in the box below. In conclusion, the authors (who are also prepared to accept that their interpretation of the data may be wrong) still believe in billions of years, and would reject the relatively rapid change in c that Setterfield proposed since they are talking about <0.001% over 6–10 billion years.

To be fair to the journalists, Davies has long been something of a publicity seeker. So he possibly didn’t mind at all that his actually quite non-descript paper was being publicized (it was actually less than a full page in total length in the ‘Brief Communications’ section, and didn’t rate a mention as a feature item), even for something peripheral to the paper.

Other c-decay ideas
Still, it is fascinating to see vindication for at least the possibility that c has changed. Whether this decline (if real) has only just ceased recently, as Setterfield proposed, or happened earlier (perhaps in a ‘one-step’ fashion), or is still going on, is another question.

Physicist Keith Wanser, a young-universe creationist and full Professor of Physics at California State University, Fullerton, told Creation magazine in 1999 that he was open to the idea of changing c (see God and the Electron8). He said:

‘I don’t go along with Barry’s statements on this; he’s well-meaning but in my opinion he’s made a lot of rash assumptions ... and there’s a misunderstanding [of many of the consequences of changing c].’

But Wanser, also said:

‘there are other reasons to believe that the speed of light is changing, or has changed in the past, that have nothing to do with the Setterfield theory.’

The interview also quoted a 1999 New Scientist cover story two years ago, which also proposed the ‘heresy’ of c-decay.9 (More recent New Scientist articles have reported on how it seems to be acceptable to propose c-decay to try to solve another well-known difficulty of the big bang theory, called the horizon problem. That is, the cosmic microwave radiation indicates that space is the same temperature everywhere, indicating a common influence. But no connection between distant regions would be possible, even in the assumed time since the alleged ‘big bang’, because of the ‘horizon’ of the finite speed of light. As an ad hoc solution to this problem, Alan Guth proposed that the universe once underwent a period of very rapid growth, called ‘inflation’. But now it seems that even this has its own horizon problem. So now some physicists have proposed that the speed of light was much faster in the past, which would allow the ‘horizon’ to be much further away and thus accommodate the universe's thermal equilibrium.10 Note that these other proposals even have c much faster than in the Setterfield concept.)

Whether Setterfield is truly vindicated remains to be seen; the process would be greatly helped by further scientific debate of the actual issues in TJ or the CRSQ. In the absence of such involvement by skilled proponents of the theory, AiG cannot take a strong stand. In fact, in our publications over the last few years, we have tended to strongly favour Humphreys’ relativistic white hole cosmology, though always pointing out, along with Humphreys himself, that it was just one alternative model, and not ‘absolute truth’.

It is clear, though, that the issue is so complex, that one or two pronouncements of ‘certainty’ by a physicist or two, whether creationist or evolutionist, should not be taken as the death knell of the notion or any aspects of it—nor as final proof of it.

The irony of bias
It is truly ironic to look back at the time when some creationists were actively putting forward CDK as a profoundly important hypothesis. The anticreationists, both the anti-theists and their compromising churchian allies, launched their attacks with glee. Skeptics around the world seldom failed to have audiences in fits of laughter at the ‘ridiculous’ notion that what they labeled as a ‘certain cornerstone of modern physics’, the alleged constancy through time of the value of c, was wrong. No matter what comes of his notion as a whole, no matter even whether c has actually changed or not, in that sense at least, thanks to Paul Davies, Setterfield (and those, like ourselves, who supported his pioneering efforts) has already had the last laugh.

The real issue
Great resource for refuting the ‘big bang’
Starlight and Time Video
Dr D Russell Humphreys

See in spectacular 3-D imagery how a big bang and creation cosmos differ and why evidence supports a recent creation of the universe! Learn a cosmological model which shows how God may have made and used relativity to create the cosmos in six ordinary days...

MORE INFO / PURCHASE ONLINE


Visit our Q&A Page on Astronomy
Christians worried about the ‘starlight travel-time’ issue have seen a number of theories put forward to try to solve it, including CDK. For instance, the relativistic white-hole cosmology (see video, right) and even the two different conventions of calculated v. observed time.11 Which of these is right? Maybe none. I often say to enquirers, after outlining the encouraging advances made by some of these ideas, something like the following:

‘I don’t know for sure how God did it, but I know that I for one would hate to stand in front of the Creator of the Universe at a future point and say:

”Lord, I couldn’t believe your plain words about origins, just because I couldn’t figure out, with my pea-sized intelligence, how you managed to pull off the trick of making a universe that was both very young and very large.”’

I believe we need to understand, as most physicists really do, how immensely little is yet known about such major issues. What if Humphreys is right, for instance, and the answer lies in the general relativistic distortion (by gravity) of time itself in an expanded (by God who ‘stretched out the heavens’ as Scripture says repeatedly) bounded universe? Would not the world have laughed if such notions (as time running differently under different gravity influences, for instance) had first been put forward by modern Bible-believers? They would have been seen as ad hoc inventions, but they have been experimentally tested.

This ‘secular CDK’ announcement, by one of the biggest names in physics, should really be an antidote to the confident arrogance of long-age big-bangers. So should the recent landmark TJ paper by Humphreys showing observationally that we are in fact close to the centre of a bounded universe (download PDF file Our galaxy is the centre of the universe, ‘quantized’ red shifts Show).

People need to be aware just how abstract, shaky and prone to revision the findings of modern cosmology really are. To quote Prof. Wanser again:

‘The sad thing is that the public is so overawed by these things [big bang and long-age cosmologies], just because there is complex maths involved. They don’t realize how much philosophical speculation and imagination is injected along with the maths—these are really stories that are made up.’12

All in all, it’s an exciting time to be a Genesis creationist. But then, it’s always been an exciting time to take God at His Word.

What was Davies’ paper really about?
The gist of it is:

Already known: the fine structure constant α = 2πe2/hc, where e is the electronic charge and h is Planck’s Constant. Last year, there was a claim that α is increasing over time [as AiG reported in Have fundamental constants changed, and what would it prove?].

So this increase in α could be due to increasing e or decreasing c (CDK). But as mentioned, this conflicts with Setterfield’s model that has α invariant with varying C because it’s h that varies inversely to c.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is in force. The entropy of a black hole increases with area of its event horizon (that’s if the standard formula applies with either varying c or e). Therefore the area cannot decrease unless the black hole’s environment has a corresponding entropy increase.

The key point of this theoretical ‘brief communication’: an increase in e would mean a reduction of a black hole’s area, which would seem to violate the Second Law under the current formula. Increasing e could also lead to an increase of a black hole’s electric charge above a threshold value where the event horizon disappears and we are left with a naked singularity, and this would violate what’s known as the cosmic censorship hypothesis. Davies et al. conclude:

Our arguments, although only suggestive, indicate that theories in which e increases with time are at risk of violating both the second law and the cosmic censorship hypothesis.

But a decrease in c over time would lead to an increase in a black hole’s area, which is in line with the Second Law. So by a process of elimination based on this theory about black hole thermodynamics (not on any new data), a tiny decrease of c is the right explanation for the tiny increase that was previously claimed for α over time.

Return to text


Addendum: Nuclear physicist Dr Russell Humphreys comments:
‘The article on the AiG Web site is well balanced. Paul Davies’ Nature article itself falls far short of the hype, which is much ado about nearly nothing. General Relativity has had a variable speed of light ever since 1917. For the past six years, the physics journals have had a steady trickle of variable-c theories, including some by Davies. His latest article is only peripherally about a variable c. So why all the fuss?’

References
Davies, P.C.W., Davis, T.M. and Lineweaver, C.H., Black holes constrain varying constants, Nature 418(6898):602–603, 8 August 2002. Return to text

The word ‘decay’ is used here to describe declining velocity, without necessarily implying any thermodynamic or moral ‘decay’ in that sense of the word. Return to text

The decay curve chosen to fit the data was c = √[a + ekt(b + dt)], a square root of the critically damped harmonic oscillator equation. A critically damped system is one that reaches equilibrium as fast as possible without any overshoot or oscillation. Return to text

Norman, T.G. and Setterfield, B., The Atomic Constants, Light and Time, 1990. Return to text

Ross, H.N., Creation and Time, Navpress, Colorado Springs, pp. 98–99, 1994. Return to text

Interestingly, Davies thinks that a changing c would have grave consequences for Einstein’s theory, which may be superseded by another theory which encompasses all the observations including changing c. Return to text

Setterfield proposed that since energy must be conserved in atomic orbits, then h must be inversely proportional to c. Therefore any constant that contains the product hc with other constants, including α, must also be constant. Norman and Setterfield, Ref. 4, pp. 33–39. Return to text

Creation 21(4):38–41, September–November 1999. Return to text

Barrow, J., Is nothing sacred? New Scientist163(2196):28–32, 24 July 1999. Cf. ‘C’ the difference, Creation 22(1):9, 1999. Return to text

Adams, S., The Speed of Light, New Scientist 173(2326) Inside Science, p. 4, 19 January 2002. Return to text

Newton, R., Distant starlight and Genesis: conventions of time measurement, TJ 15(1):80–85, 2001. Return to text

Ref. 8, p. 41. Return to text

This too is a good article.:


Have fundamental constants changed, and what would it prove?
by Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D.
August 22, 2001

Recent news headlines have been buzzing with reports of research purportedly showing that fundamental constants of nature may have changed, including the fine structure constant, which is related to the speed of light.1 We have received many inquiries about this, so this is a brief response.

What was discovered?
Great resource for refuting the ‘big bang’
Starlight and Time Video
Dr D Russell Humphreys

See in spectacular 3-D imagery how a big bang and creation cosmos differ and why evidence supports a recent creation of the universe! Learn a cosmological model which shows how God may have made and used relativity to create the cosmos in six ordinary days...

MORE INFO / PURCHASE ONLINE

A research team led by John Webb, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, intend to publish their research on August 27 in Physical Review Letters. (Many scientists frown on media announcements before the proper peer review / publication process is complete).

They used the world’s largest single telescope, the 9-metre Keck Telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to analyse light from quasars about 12 billion light years away. In particular, they analysed how metal atoms such as zinc or aluminium in gas clouds absorbed the light. A spectrometer splits the light into its different wavelengths, but there are black lines where light has been absorbed by the metal atoms. The particular pattern is a ‘fingerprint’ for the element, which is how astronomers can identify elements in space.2

From the splitting of certain lines, spectroscopists can deduce a number called the fine structure constant (FSC or alpha, α).3 This is about 1/137, but has been measured very precisely to at least seven significant figures — (7,297,351 ± 6) x 10–9. The FSC is a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force, and is inversely proportional to the speed of light.4

The researchers claim to have found that spectra from such far distant clouds indicate that the FSC was 0.001% smaller. Since they presume that light from 12 billion light years away comes from 12-billion-year-old objects, they have claimed that the FSC has been increasing with time. It may imply that the speed of light was 0.001% faster in the past too.

What are the implications for creationists?
If correct, then the usual theories that constants have always been that—constant—may need to be modified. Dr Sheldon Glashow of Boston University, who received a Nobel Prize in physics in 1979, said that the importance of this discovery would rank ‘10 on a scale of 1 to 10.’5

However, some string theories involving a 10- or 26-dimensional universe are compatible with changing constants, but they are also very contentious. These extra dimensions above the normal four (three spatial dimensions and one time dimension) are supposed to be curled or folded, so they are undetectable by any physical experiment so far. Therefore no-one should claim that such theories prove or disprove the Bible, and it’s sheer folly to claim that the Bible actually teaches 10 or more physical dimensions, as some progressive creationists do.

Some creationists, led by Barry Setterfield, have proposed that the speed of light was much faster in the past; the main anti-creationist (and progressive creationist) argument was the supposed constancy of fundamental laws, which led to accusations of ignorance etc. Dr Webb’s research undermines this ‘in principle’ objection. So did a New Scientist cover story two years ago, which also proposed the ‘heresy’ of c-decay.6 This would supposedly solve some problems with the ‘big bang’ theory. Apparently, this is OK for the big bang—it’s only wrong to question established theories when this is done to support Biblical creation, it seems!

However, this research by itself does not support radical c-decay theory either. The change is billions of times too small. But Setterfield’s particular theory predicted that the FSC would remain constant,7 and given the small change and tentative nature of this new discovery, by itself this is not conclusive evidence against the Setterfield theory. For comparison, the creationist physicist Dr Keith Wanser is also open to the possibility of c-decay but rejects the Setterfield theory—see interview. See also the currently favored creationist answer to the distant starlight problem, also on the Starlight and Time video (above right).

Also, not everyone agrees with the conclusions. Dr John Bahcall, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said that the complicated statistical techniques used could be hiding sources of error.8 But Dr Massimo Stiavelli, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said their work would probably have been regarded as too careful to doubt if they had not been proposing something so revolutionary. Even so, he is reserving judgment.9

Conclusion
This is once again a good lesson—let’s not be too quick to rush to judgement based on media reports. This applies both to pro-evolution topics like the latest Mars life, feathered dinosaur and ape-men claims; but also to claims that seem superficially to support creationist models, such as the Black Sea ‘flood’, speeding up light pulses and slowing and stopping light in Bose-Einstein condensates.

Another good lesson is not to be frightened into eisegetical10 contortions of Scripture when some ‘assured finding’ of science seems to contradict the plain reading of the text. If something as supposedly immutable as the FSC, a part of the ‘hard’ operational science of physico-chemistry, is open to question, then there is even less reason to reinterpret Scripture on the more contentious areas dealing with the past, i.e. the latest ‘missing links’, radiometric ‘dates’, or geological features supposedly incompatible with a world-wide Flood. We should be reminded of Prof. John Rendle-Short’s father, the eminent surgeon and Christian apologist Dr Arthur Rendle-Short. He accepted theistic evolution largely because of the Piltdown hoax, and always wrestled with the unscriptural corollary of death before sin, but died just before the hoax was exposed. See the interview with Prof. Rendle-Short for more information, or his book Green Eye of the Storm.

References
E.g. (a) James Glanz and Dennis Overbye, ‘Cosmic laws like speed of light might be changing, a study finds’, New York Times, 15 August 2001; (B) Cho, A., Nothing stays constant, New Scientist171(2304):11, 18 August 2001. Return to text.

The light is absorbed when the energy of the photon or ‘light particle’, inversely proportional to the wavelength, precisely matches the difference between quantum energy levels of electrons in the atoms. The energy E is related to the wavelength λ by E = hc/l, where h = Planck’s Constant and c = the speed of light in a vacuum. These energy levels are specific to an atom, which is why they can identify the type of atom as a fingerprint can identify a person. Return to text.

The splitting is caused by particular properties of the electrons in the atom. An electron in an atom generates a magnetic field, from its ‘spin’ and often by its ‘orbit’ of the atomic nucleus. (It’s important to note that in quantum mechanics, the terms ‘orbit’ and ‘spin’ do not mean that electrons are regarded as solid balls in orbit and spinning on their axes. See also a creationist view on quantum mechanics.) These magnetic fields interact—spin-orbit interaction—and this splits the energy levels, which in turn causes splitting of the spectral lines, called the fine structure. The intensity of this splitting is proportional to the square of the fine structure constant (at least in one-electron atoms, i.e. hydrogen and other atoms that have lost all but one electron). Return to text.

α = 2πe2/hc, where e is the electronic charge, h and c as per Ref. 2. α is a dimensionless quantity, i.e. it has no units. Return to text.

Glashow, S., cited in Ref. 1a. Return to text.

Barrow, J., Is nothing sacred? New Scientist163(2196):28–32, 24 July 1999. Return to text.

Setterfield proposed that since energy must be conserved in atomic orbits, then h must be inversely proportional to c. Therefore any constant that contains the product hc with other constants, including α, must also be constant. Norman, T.G. and Setterfield, B., The Atomic Constants, Light and Time, pp. 33–39, 1990. Return to text.

Bahcall, J., cited in Ref. 1a. Return to text.

Stiavelli, M., cited in Ref. 1a. Return to text.

Eisegesis is the errant practice of reading things into Scripture, i.e. imposing fallible human ideas onto God’s Word. The opposite is the correct practice of exegesis, meaning reading out of Scripture, i.e. allowing God’s Word to teach us.

One of my favorite articles:


How can we see distant stars in a young universe?
By Ken Ham, Jonathan Sarfati, and Carl Wieland, Ed. Don Batten

First published in The Revised and Expanded Answers Book
Chapter 5

If the universe is young and it takes millions of years for light to get to us from many stars, how can we see them? Did God create light in transit? Was the speed of light faster in the past? Does this have anything to do with the big bang?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recommended Resources:
The Revised and Expanded Answers Book
Why Won't They Listen?
The Lie: Evolution
Refuting Evolution
Refuting Evolution 2

Some stars are millions of light-years away. Since a light-year is the distance traveled by light in one year, does this mean that the universe is very old?

Despite all the biblical and scientific evidence for a young earth/universe, this has long been a problem. However, any scientific understanding of origins will always have opportunities for research—problems that need to be solved. We can never have complete knowledge and so there will always be things to learn.

One explanation used in the past was rather complex, involving light traveling along Riemannian surfaces (an abstract mathematical form of space). Apart from being hard to understand, it appears that such an explanation is not valid, since it would mean that we should see duplicates of everything.

Created light?
Perhaps the most commonly used explanation is that God created light ‘on its way,’ so that Adam could see the stars immediately without having to wait years for the light from even the closest ones to reach the earth. While we should not limit the power of God, this has some rather immense difficulties.

It would mean that whenever we look at the behavior of a very distant object, what we see happening never happened at all. For instance, say we see an object a million light-years away which appears to be rotating; that is, the light we receive in our telescopes carries this information ‘recording’ this behavior. However, according to this explanation, the light we are now receiving did not come from the star, but was created ‘en route,’ so to speak.

This would mean that for a 10,000-year-old universe, that anything we see happening beyond about 10,000 light-years away is actually part of a gigantic picture show of things that have not actually happened, showing us objects which may not even exist.

To explain this problem further, consider an exploding star (supernova) at, say, an accurately measured 100,000 light-years away. Remember we are using this explanation in a 10,000-year-old universe. As the astronomer on earth watches this exploding star, he is not just receiving a beam of light. If that were all, then it would be no problem at all to say that God could have created a whole chain of photons (light particles/waves) already on their way.

However, what the astronomer receives is also a particular, very specific pattern of variation within the light, showing him/her the changes that one would expect to accompany such an explosion—a predictable sequence of events involving neutrinos, visible light, X-rays and gamma-rays. The light carries information recording an apparently real event. The astronomer is perfectly justified in interpreting this ‘message’ as representing an actual reality—that there really was such an object, which exploded according to the laws of physics, brightened, emitted X-rays, dimmed, and so on, all in accord with those same physical laws.

Everything he sees is consistent with this, including the spectral patterns in the light from the star giving us a ‘chemical signature’ of the elements contained in it. Yet the ‘light created en route’ explanation means that this recorded message of events, transmitted through space, had to be contained within the light beam from the moment of its creation, or planted into the light beam at a later date, without ever having originated from that distant point. (If it had started from the star—assuming that there really was such a star—it would still be 90,000 light years away from earth.)

To create such a detailed series of signals in light beams reaching earth, signals which seem to have come from a series of real events but in fact did not, has no conceivable purpose. Worse, it is like saying that God created fossils in rocks to fool us, or even test our faith, and that they don’t represent anything real (a real animal or plant that lived and died in the past). This would be a strange deception.

Did light always travel at the same speed?
An obvious solution would be a higher speed of light in the past, allowing the light to cover the same distance more quickly. This seemed at first glance a too-convenient ad hoc explanation. Then some years ago, Australian Barry Setterfield raised the possibility to a high profile by showing that there seemed to be a decreasing trend in the historical observations of the speed of light © over the past 300 years or so. Setterfield (and his later co-author Trevor Norman) produced much evidence in favor of this theory.1 They believed that it would have affected radiometric dating results, and even have caused the red-shifting of light from distant galaxies, although this idea was later overturned, and other modifications were also made.

Much debate has raged to and fro among equally capable people within creationist circles about whether the statistical evidence really supports c decay (‘cdk’) or not.

The biggest difficulty, however, is with certain physical consequences of the theory. If c has declined the way Setterfield proposed, these consequences should still be discernible in the light from distant galaxies but they are apparently not. In short, none of the theory’s defenders have been able to answer all the questions raised.

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 / 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 the concentration of matter is very large or dense enough, the gravitational distortion can be so immense that even light cannot escape.9 The equations of GR show that at the invisible boundary surrounding such a concentration of matter (called the event horizon, the point at which light rays trying to escape the enormous pull of gravity bend back on themselves), 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, as it appears to be as we look out into space.

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. 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 traveling 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 traveling 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”’).

Caution
While this is exciting news, all theories of fallible men, no matter how well they seem to fit the data, are subject to revision or abandonment in the light of future discoveries. What we can say is that at this point a plausible mechanism has been demonstrated, with considerable observational and theoretical support.

What if no one had ever thought of the possibility of gravitational time dilation? Many might have felt forced to agree with those scientists (including some Christians) that there was no possible solution —the vast ages are fact, and the Bible must be ‘reinterpreted’ (massaged) or increasingly rejected. Many have in fact been urging Christians to abandon the Bible’s clear teaching of a recent creation [see Q&A: Genesis] because of these ‘undeniable facts.’ This reinterpretation also means having to accept that there were billions of years of death, disease, and bloodshed before Adam, thus eroding the creation/Fall/restoration framework within which the gospel is presented in the Bible.

However, even without this new idea, such an approach would still have been wrong-headed. The authority of the Bible should never be compromised as mankind’s ‘scientific’ proposals. One little previously unknown fact, or one change in a starting assumption, can drastically alter the whole picture so that what was ‘fact’ is no longer so.

This is worth remembering when dealing with those other areas of difficulty which, despite the substantial evidence for Genesis creation, still remain. Only God possesses infinite knowledge. By basing our scientific research on the assumption that His Word is true (instead of the assumption that it is wrong or irrelevant) our scientific theories are much more likely, in the long run, to come to accurately represent reality.

References and notes
T.G. Norman and B. Setterfield, The Atomic Constants, Light and Time (privately published, 1990). Return to text.
D. Russell Humphreys, Progress Toward a Young-earth Relativistic Cosmology, Proceedings 3rd ICC, Pittsburgh, pp. 267–286, 1994. Return to text.
J. Byl, On Time Dilation in Cosmology, Creation Research Society Quarterly, 34(1):26–32, 1997. Return to text.
D.R. Humphreys, It’s Just a Matter of Time, Creation Research Society Quarterly, 34(1):32–34, 1997. Return to text.
S.R. Conner and D.N. Page, Starlight and Time is the Big Bang, CEN Technical Journal, 12(2):174–194, 1998. Return to text.
D.R. Humphreys, New Vistas of Space-time Rebut the Critics, CEN Technical Journal, 12(2):195–212, 1998. [Ed. note: Refs 5 and 6, as well as other criticisms of Dr Humphreys’ model, with his responses, were published in the CEN Technical Journal, and are available here. Return to text.
Many billions of stars exist, many just like our own sun, according to the analysis of the light coming from them. Such numbers of stars have to be distributed through a huge volume of space, otherwise we would all be fried. Return to text.
The demonstrable usefulness of GR in physics can be separated from certain ‘philosophical baggage’ that some have illegitimately attached to it, and to which some Christians have objected. Return to text.
Such an object is called a ‘black hole.’ Return to text.
Genesis 1:1; Ecclesiastes 3:11; Isaiah 26:4; Romans 1:20; 1 Timothy 1:17; and Hebrews 11:3. Interestingly, according to GR, time does not exist without matter. Return to text.
For example, Isaiah 42:5; Jeremiah 10:12; Zechariah 12:1. Return to text.
D. Russell Humphreys, Starlight and Time, Master Books, Green Forest, AR, 1994. Return to text.

Perhaps the universe isn't young. Rather the earth and our place on it are a recent addition. In Genesis it said "the Earth was without form and void" not the unverse.

Who Knows? :unsure: I guess we will find out for sure when we get to Heaven. :)