How is that really different from invoking universal expansion at thousands of times the speed of light which the Big Bang Inflation requires, or alternatively Zippy light models. That was my point. If you accuse me of tilting at wind mills, why don’t you accuse the proponents of these hypothetical kludges to the Big Bang – and with undetected Dark Matter to boot!
Why is the expansion of space a problem for you Sal?
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The difference is that inflation is postulated in order to satisfy observed data, while you are invoking VSL in order to satisfy a biblical interpretation.
By the way, there is a healthy contingent of mainstream physicists who works on non-inflationary cosmologies and dark matter alternatives. Given this, I find it odd that you cite works by people who publish in known pseudoscience journals, as well as a statement signed by people like Menas Kafatos (who is so pseudoscientific, he wrote a book with Deepak Chopra…). You are right in wanting to search for datapoints, but please remember that not all datapoints are of equal quality.
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But aside from a Biblical interpretation of Young Cosmos, there is the other question of the origin of galaxies and stars. At what point will an act of instantaneous special creation be considered a possibility? I know L’maitre was a Catholic priest, and presumably believed in miracles. If the origin of the galaxies is a miraculous act of instantaneous special creation, when will that be allowed as a possibility? It could be the universe is structured to prevent an interpretation that involves emergence of galaxies by any known law of physics. We are at the point we’re postulating unknown, and untestable new laws. It seems to me, if one is believer in a God of miracles, one could entertain at some point that miraculous instantaneous origins are possible, much like Jesus feeding the 5,000.
The above questions are rhetorical questions. I’m not suggesting there is a formal answer. But, speaking only for myself, when I was in class hearing of inflation theory, that began to eliminate my doubts about the special creation of the universe. The age is a separate question.
I thank you for the conversation, and if I may venture to ask, do you have any opinions on the theological implications of fine-tuning?
Thanks in advance.
I will answer personally, not official, but compatible to (Catholic) Church teaching:
I believe the physical universe is closed, in the sense that all miracles have physical explanations, including Jesus feeding the 5000, or the resurrection of Jesus. Depending on what your definition of miracles is, this does not mean that there are no miracles.
I think this way because I believe that God created the physical universe to be, in a mechanical sense, perfect. A universe that requires his constant meddling and fixing is not mechanically perfect to me.
I think cosmological fine-tuning arguments are ill-posed, as the probability distributions for e.g. the ratio of the strength of electromagnetic to gravitational interaction is unknown.
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*Lemaitre
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When the evidence suggests it.
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An what about gravitational waves and LIGO?
Well @stcordova it is already considered a possibility in the GAE. How do you think we accomplished this?
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I am about to deal with a subject in which I am a literate non-expert. I invite credentialed physicists to correct anything that I might have misunderstood or omitted.
As @PdotdQ mentions, they are dealing with real data points emerging from an extremely high-energy regime that is not yet fully understood.
The thing you have not mentioned is that the regime where c and the fine-structure constant might not have been truly constant ended very early in history of the universe. Consider this analysis by Tom Roberts, a UC-Riverside physics prof:
The Constancy of Physical Constants
- Tubbs and Wolfe, “Evidence for large-Scale Uniformity of Physical Laws”, Ap. J. 236 (1980), pg L105.Uniformity to 1 part in 104 is shown, subsequent to an epoch corresponding to less than 5% of the current age of the universe.
- Potekhin and Varshalovich, “Non-Variability of the Fine-Structure Constant over cosmological Time Scales”, Astron. Astrophys. Suppl. Ser. 104 (1994), pg 89.Quasar spectra with redshifts z ~0.2–3.7 are used to put a limit on the rate of change of alpha of about 4 x10−14 per year.
This is why your appeals to “zippy light” and neo-Lorentzian ideas do not make any sense. You are appealing to hypotheses that might possibly apply to an era that ended over 13B years ago. As the results from Tubbs, Wolfe, Potekhin, and Varshalovich show, these hypotheses have no applicability whatsoever to the question of how long it takes for light from the Andromeda Galaxy to reach us today.
I am reminded of YEC geologists who cite the acceleration of radioactive decay under “laboratory conditions” in an attempt to undermine radiometric dating. However, the laboratory condition was a tiny mass of plasma heated far above the temperature of the surface of the sun. If you are appealing to a condition that requires the entire earth to be heated to a temperature far higher than the surface of the sun, you are clearly outside any reasonable scientific framework.
The burden of proof is on you, @stcordova, to show how “zippy light” could possibly exist in most recent 95% of the universe’s history. The speculation that it might have existed for a short period over 13B years ago does not help you in the least.
Roberts’ analysis of experiments that purport to show violations of special relativity (SR), general relativity (GR), and physics constants is also quite illuminating:
10. Experiments that Apparently are NOT Consistent with SR/GR
It is clear that most if not all of these experiments have difficulties that are unrelated to SR. In some cases the anomalous experiment has been carefully repeated and been shown to be in error (e.g. Miller, Kantor, Munera); in others the experimental result is so outrageous that any serious attempt to reproduce it is unlikely (e.g. Esclangon); in still other cases there are great uncertainties and/or unknowns involved (e.g. Marinov, Silvertooth, Munera, Cahill, Mirabel), and some are based on major conceptual errors (e.g. Marinov, Thimm, Silvertooth). In any case, at present no reproducible and generally accepted experiment is inconsistent with SR, within its domain of applicability. In the case of some anomalous experiments there is an aspect of this being a self-fulfilling prophecy (being inconsistent with SR may be considered to be an indication that the experiment is not acceptable). Note also that few if any standard references or textbooks even mention the possibility that some experiments might be inconsistent with SR, and there are also aspects of publication bias in the literature—many of these papers appear in obscure journals. Many of these papers exhibit various levels of incompetence, which explains their authors’ difficulty in being published in mainstream peer-reviewed physics journals; the presence of major peer-reviewed journals here shows it is not impossible for a competently performed anomalous experiment to get published in them.
There is a common thread among most of these experiments: the experimenters make no attempt to measure and quantify the systematic effects that could affect or mimic the signal they claim to observe. And none of them perform a comprehensive error analysis, which is necessary for any experiment to be believable today— especially ones that purport to overturn the foundations of modern physics. For Esclangon and Miller this is understandable, as during their lifetimes the use of error bars and quantitative error analyses was not the norm; the modern authors have no such excuse. In several cases (Esclangon, Miller, Marinov, Torr and Kolen, Cahill) it is possible to perform an error analysis which shows that the experiment is not inconsistent with SR after all.
Another common thread among many of these experiments is the claim of “agreement with Miller’s result” (Kantor, Marinov, Silvertooth, Torr and Kolen, Munera, Cahill). Miller was the first to claim to have measured the “absolute motion of the Earth”, and his result has achieved a sort of “cult status” among people who doubt the validity of SR. The paper referenced below in the discussion of Miller’s results shows conclusively that his result is wrong, and explains why in detail. So claims of “agreement with Miller” generate doubts about the validity of experiments making such claims (how likely is it that a valid result would “agree” with a demonstrably bogus result?).
A key point is: if one is performing an experiment and claiming that it completely overthrows the foundations of modern physics, one must make it bulletproof or it will not be believed or accepted. At a minimum this means that a comprehensive error analysis must be included, direct measurements of important systematic errors must be performed, and whatever “signal” is found must be statistically significant. None of these experiments come anywhere close to making a convincing case that they are valid and refute SR. This is based on a basic and elementary analysis of the experimenters’ technique, not on the mere fact that they disagree with the predictions of SR. Most of these experiments are shown to be invalid (or at least not inconsistent with SR) by a simple application of the elementary error analysis or other arguments relating to error bars, showing how important that is to the believability of a result—the authors merely found patterns:
Amateurs look for patterns, professionals look at error bars.
All that being said, I repeat: as of this writing there are no reproducible and generally accepted experiments that are inconsistent with SR, within its domain of applicability.
Best,
Chris Falter
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I have no immediate opinion. Sorry I don’t have a more substantive response.
Your evidence does not suggest otherwise. And it certainly does not suggest abiogenesis. So here is the challenge. Prove your god of abiogenesis caused all this to begin and I will prove my God used special and instantaneous creation of life forms.
Can do it? Neither can I. So cease claiming that the evidence only supports your hypothesis…!!!
Please stop doing this.
The detection of Gravitational waves and correlation with light from massive stellar collisions is a game changer in our understanding of the universe. YEC has no answer for such monumental achievements in scientific discovery and understanding.
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I certainly respect the implications. The YEC/YCCs like myself do not have a good empirical nor theoretical case. We only hold to it by faith and a few anomalies. That’s why I found this account by a High Schooler being told Old Earth was of the devil (which started this discussion)
Very troubling.
In contrast, I do not think abiogenesis theory is well-supported at all.
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That’s a fine admission, but you seem to act, most of the time, as if you have forgotten it. I suspect you still hold to the symmetry assumption, that scientists also hold their positions by faith and a few anomalies. But there is no symmetry. In reality it’s vast amounts of conclusive date vs. those few anomalies, and faith doesn’t enter into it.
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It depends which discipline we’re talking about. I hold physics as at the top of science’s pecking order. You can guess which discipline I view as the one that “lurks near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics” to quote an acquaintance of yours.
No, it doesn’t. Geology, paleontology, the physics of nuclear decay, and phylogenetics all have conclusive data supporting the views you reject. “Pecking order” is irrelevant.
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Whew, someone is overstating the Truth…!
The only one in your list not up for interpretation is nuclear decay.
The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
– Presidential Address at the British Association, “Biogenesis and abiogenesis” (1870); later published in Collected Essays , Vol. 8, p. 229
For now, the need of Inflation and/or Zippy light, Dark Matter or Mond, are ugly facts, not withstanding the rest of Big Bang is rather a beautiful hypothesis. Big Bang was instrumental to me remaining in the Christian faith 20 years ago, and one young lady I witnessed to, on my recommendation, read Jastrow’s “God and the Astronomers” (a Big Bang book), and was converted to Christianity partly as a consequence of reading that book.
So, unlike most YEC/YCCs, I think the Big Bang was a great boone to the Christian faith and it is a beautiful theory. But, after studying cosmology, especially that one day in class the professor talked of Guth inflation where for just the right amount of time the universe inflated at thousands (maybe more) times the speed of light in order to solve the uniform temperature problem of Dicke – I began to think, “this is an ugly fact.”
Speaking of Jastrow. I would have no problem sharing this book with anyone, even a YEC/YCC. It’s beautiful, and one of the staples of the cosmological-ID movement.
It was my introduction to Big Bang theory in high school/college.
