The Decay in the Speed of Light and the truth about Red Shift
By Dr. Grady S. McMurtry of Creation World View Pastor Dewey Note: My thanks to Pastor Leonard Navarre for introducing me to Dr. Grady years ago! Dr. Grady has become a Dear friend of FGGAM.
|
|
The question that is becoming the number one question being asked of me after our presentations is: “How can the universe be billions of light years across and only be 6,000 years old?”
One of the single greatest differences between Young Earth Creationists (YEC) and old earth atheistic Evolutionists, Theistic Evolutionists, Progressive Creationists and Intelligent Design advocates is the issue of time. YECs believe that for both excellent scientific and Biblical reasons the earth and universe are about 6,000 years old. The other groups accept and promote that the earth and universe are old; in the range of 4.5 to 5.0 billion years for the earth (the general consensus being 4.6 billion) and 12 to 20 billion years for the universe (the general consensus being around 14.6 billion). [For some reason unknown to me, the numbers ending in .6 always appeal to these people as sounding more scientific.]
I have enumerated in other Bible Labs some of the over 200+ Geochronometers that demonstrate that there is ample scientific evidence for a young earth and universe. What so many people do not realize is that old earth/universe advocates only have five to twelve pieces of evidence that they say may be used to suggest that the earth/universe are old.
Perhaps the two most often mentioned reasons that they put forth for an old earth/universe (after simply saying: “Well, it just looks old.”) are: 1) that the universe appears to be between 12 and 20 billion light years in radius and the speed of light is a constant; and, 2) that the red shift of light (the Doppler Effect applied to light) supports the concept of a “Big Bang” as the cause of the universe.
Why do they say the earth and universe are old? They believe that if these two things are true; then the universe must be 12 to 20 billion years old in order for light at its present velocity to reach us from the most distant galaxies and quasars; and, that the universe came into existence as the result of a totally naturalistic mechanistic cause (without them being able to explain where the mass and energy for the explosion came from!), that the red shift of light is caused by objects in space moving away from a central point in the universe at very high speeds.
The idea that the speed of light is a constant is the chief actor in the “plot” for old earth/universe advocates to claim that the earth and universe are old. But, are constants really constants? Is the red shift of light in the universe only caused by objects moving away from us? Is the speed of light a true constant? Are the earth and universe billions of years old? Does the red shift of light indicate that the universe is the result of a Big Bang, or does it prove that the earth is at the center of the universe? Are there other scientifically viable reasons for the astronomical evidences that we see and would they, if properly understood, support a young age of the earth and universe consistent with the Biblical account of a recent creation?
These questions are highly controversial and there is no absolute clear consensus as to the answers. There are, however, substantial reasons to believe that the speed of light is not a true constant over time, and that the red shift of light may well demonstrate the absolute accuracy of the Biblical account of a recent creation!
We were all taught that there are constant values at “work” in nature and that these constants may be used to discover great new insights to the inner workings of the universe. Indeed, the reliance upon natural constants is a cornerstone of scientific research. Mathematical and scientific constants allow us to run our great modern industries.
There is, however, a great difference between a scientific law, i.e., The Law of Gravity, the Laws of Thermodynamics, the Laws of Motion, the Laws of Genetics, and the value of a natural constant which is merely a mathematical number or value. Laws in science are immutable, constants may not be.
In order to better understand the situation let us first discuss the vast size of the known universe. A light year (the distance light travels in one year at the current speed of light) is approximately 5.78 trillion miles. A star and planetary solar system would have a diameter of about 0.0015 light years. A Star Cluster, a local group of stars usually consisting of 100 to 1,000 stars, would have a diameter of between 10 to 100 light years. A Star Cluster would contain between 100,000 to several million stars with a diameter of between 150 to 500 light years. There are many Star Clusters within a galaxy.
Galaxies contain from as few as 10 million stars to as many as 1 trillion stars each. An average-sized galaxy contains 100 billion stars and has a diameter of 50,000 to 60,000 light years. (Our Milky Way Galaxy contains about 200 billion stars and is about 100,000 light years across.) Our galaxy is in the Local Group consisting of 40 galaxies with a diameter of about 500,000 light years. Going out further, our Local Group is part of a Galaxy Cluster. Galaxy Clusters contain 50 to 1,000 galaxies with a diameter of 10 to 15 million light years. Next up in size are the Super Clusters of galaxies. Super Clusters contain approximately 100 Galaxy Groups and Galaxy Clusters and have a diameter of 100 to 200 million light years. Continuing on across the universe we come up to the even larger super structures such as the “Great Wall;” containing 800,000 galaxies in an area that is 500 million light years long, 300 million light years wide, and only 15 million light years thick. Finally, as we reach the edge of the known universe, we find that there are about 100 billion+ galaxies that we know of, and I stress that is just the ones we know about, there could be easily twice that number or more.
Between the years 2000 and 2005, the size of the known universe has been variously estimated to be between 12 and 20 billion light years in radius, or 24 to 40 billion light years (that is 1.5 X 1028 inches) in diameter. The evolutionary and theistic evolutionary position is that the speed of light is a constant and thus this information indicates an age for the universe between 12 and 20 billion years.
The first question we must address then is are constants in nature really constant? A review of the scientific literature between the years 2000 and 2005 yields an ample number of papers indicating that natural values that were considered constant for a 100 years or more are in fact not constant. I will only mention three of these (two evolutionist and one creationist) as a Google search for others may be done by anyone that wishes to do so.
In the Science News, Vol. 160, October 6, 2001, the evolutionist Peter Weiss wrote an article entitled Constant Changes – If a constant of nature can vary, then so might laws of physics. I will quote extensively from this article as it sets a very good stage for our further look at this problem.
“Sometimes it’s the tiniest differences that change everything. This summer, astrophysicists reported tantalizing evidence of just such a discrepancy.”
“Using one of the world’s largest telescopes, a team of Australian, British, and U.S. astrophysicists observed clouds of gas in space backlit by beams of radiation from ancient, super powerful quasars.”
“By doing so, they have found evidence that one of the constants of nature, which are never ever supposed to vary, was smaller billions of years ago than it is today. The quantity that was measured, known as alpha, wasn’t smaller by much – less than 1 part in 100,000 – but the finding has sent tremors through physics and astronomy.”
“‘Atoms, the whole periodic table, and the way it exists are dependent on the value’ of alpha, notes Barry N. Taylor of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD. ‘If alpha didn’t have the value it has, Earth as we know it wouldn’t exist,’ he adds.”
“. . . Although no flaw has been found so far in the study, researchers are rushing to measure alpha’s ancient value by other approaches that wouldn’t be prone to the same potential sources of error.”
“Alpha is known formally as the fine-structure constant. . . . NIST defines this constant as ‘the strength of the electromagnetic force that governs how electrically charged elementary particles (e.g., electrons, muons) and light (photons) interact.’” [Emphasis added]
“Since the universe was born some 15 billion years ago, it has ceaselessly expanded and changed. Nonetheless, a few characteristics of the cosmos appear to have remained immutable across all of space and time. These fundamental constants of nature include alpha, the gravitational constant, and the speed of light in a vacuum.”
“The constants have been viewed as fixtures of reality. They are part of the foundation of physics, embedded deeply in both the classical science and quantum mechanics, as well as in relativity and the so-called standard model of particle physics.”
“If the measured variation in alpha turns out to be real, then one of the most basic assumptions of science – that the laws of physics are the same everywhere and at all times – will prove untrue, notes Michael S. Turner of the university of Chicago.”
“’Constants are invented by man to help him describe the natural world that he sees.’ . . . points out Taylor, a physicist who since the 1960s has been a leader in assessing the values of constants.”
“ . . . ‘There’s a whole industry of people thinking about the variation of constants,’ Taylor notes.”
“Since the late 1960s, observers have been checking to see whether the spacings between the absorption lines in quasar spectra differ slightly from those observed in laboratory experiments. According to theory, alpha is one of the factors that affects the size of the spacings. So, if alpha during the earlier phases of the universe was slightly off from today’s value, that difference might show up in the spectra of quasar light traversing gas clouds on its way to Earth.”
“That’s where the new spectral measurements that Webb and his colleagues harvested come in. In the August 27 [2001] Physical Review Letters, they present data suggesting that the spacings between absorption lines for several types of atoms 8 to 12 billion years ago were different than they are today.”
“ . . . More evidence of the discrepancy appears to be on the way. Webb says that a preliminary analysis of an additional set of observations twice as extensive as the one described in the August 27 report also indicates that alpha was once a wee bit smaller than today.”
“ . . . Adds Taylor, ‘To the best of my knowledge, there’s been no definitive observation of a time variation in a constant. This case may be the strongest that we’ve seen.’”
“One of the most profound implications for science would be that the presumption of immutability for the laws of physics may be wrong.” [Emphasis added]
So, according to evolutionary believing scientists the laws of physics and the immutability of constants is in question. Weiss continues his article with a most revealing paragraph which illustrates the faith component of the evolutionary worldview.
“As an example, Taylor points out the accepted theoretical claim that elementary particles known as the W boson and the Z boson had no mass when the universe first exploded into being. Modern accelerator experiments have shown, however, that both are very massive today. Even so, physicists have not concluded that the laws of physics have changed. Instead, they envision that as the universe evolved according to the steady laws of physics, the inherent possibility for the W and Z bosons to become massive was realized. Something similar may be behind the apparent discrepancy between ancient and modern values of alpha.” [Emphasis added]
The whole situation is far more complex and interwoven than you might expect and the ramifications are huge. We need to understand that even the smallest change in alpha really does have a serious impact on us. It is in the components that are used to calculate alpha that we start to see the true picture. Read on as Weiss continues his article.
“Complicating the interpretation of a once-smaller alpha, the quantity’s magnitude relies on the values of other fundamental constants. Those are the size of the electron’s charge, the speed of light, and Planck’s constant, which defines the scales at which quantum phenomena operate.” [Emphasis added]
So, if the speed of light were different in the past, then it would have an effect on the value of alpha. If the speed of light were different in the past it would have a profound effect on our view of the age of the universe. If the speed of light were different in the past, life as evolutionists envision it would be impossible. It is the value of the speed of light that we are delving into and we are trying to determine if the speed of light is a true constant over time or not.
Weiss’ conclusion is equally noteworthy: “If the slight shift in alpha measured by Webb and his colleagues holds under further scrutiny, then scientists may have to forgo their long-held ideal that the constants of nature are perpetually unchanging.” [Emphasis added]
Weiss is not the only evolutionist that is questioning the constancy of scientific constants. The evolutionists John D. Barrow and John K. Webb (mentioned in the above article) wrote an article for the June 2005 [Un-]Scientific American magazine entitled “Inconstant Constants – Do the inner workings of nature change with time?”
Barrow and Webb start their article by writing: “Some things never change. Physicists call them the constants of nature. Such quantities as the velocity of light, c, Newton’s constant of gravitation, G, and the mass of the electron, me, are assumed to be the same at all places and times in the universe. They form the scaffolding around which the theories of physics are erected, and they define the fabric of the universe.”
“And yet, remarkably, no one has ever successfully predicted or explained any of the constants. Physicists have no idea why they take the special numerical values that they do. In SI units [International System of Units], c is 299,792,458; G is 6.673 X 10-11; and me is 9.10938188 X 10-31 – numbers that follow no discernible pattern. The only thread running through the values is that if many of them were even slightly different, complex atomic structures such as living beings would not be possible.” [Emphasis added]
You and I are, by definition, “atomic structures” according to these evolutionists. You, we, I could not exist if these values were not what they are today! That seems pretty important to me, and I am sure you feel the same way, too.
Barrow and Webb continue: “The desire to explain the constants has been one of the driving forces behind efforts to develop a complete unified description of nature, or ‘theory of everything [T. O. E.].’ Physicists have hoped that such a theory would show that each of the constants of nature could have only one logically possible value. It would reveal an underlying order to the seemingly arbitrariness of nature.” [Emphasis added]
Again, we see the faith statements of evolutionists creeping out from inside this article. They are groping in the dark for a perfect naturalistic mechanistic cause for everything that exists in nature. They see the perfect order that exists in the universe and they desperately want to believe that it came about starting from chaos (without first explaining where the mass and energy came from) by pure random chance.
Evolutionists adamantly reject the possibility of the supernatural origin of the universe and all it contains. They reject real science because real science does not agree with their personal philosophy. For them there can be no creator, no designer, and no outside intelligence guiding and caring for His creation.
Christians do have a complete and perfect T. O. E. The Christian Biblical Worldview position is that there is an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and omnijudicious Creator God, the One revealed to us in the Bible, who sets these “arbitrary” values because they are the perfect values for the existence and maintenance of human, animal and plant life. We believe that this Creator God sent His Son to die for our sins and that He rose again that we, too, may live eternally with Him.
Instead of this blessed hope, Barrow and Webb write: “In recent years, however, the status of the constants has grown more muddled, not less.”
In the next paragraph of their article, Barrow and Webb give the reader an insight to the fairy tale telling methodology used by evolutionists when they are trying to build each other up in “the faith.”
“. . . physicists have also come to appreciate that the values of many of the constants may be the result of mere happenstance, acquired during random events and elementary particle processes early in the history of the universe. . . . So far researchers have no idea why our combination was selected.”
“No further explanation would then be possible for many of our numerical constants other than that they constitute a rare combination that permits consciousness to evolve.” [Emphasis added]
If this kind of psycho-babble alarms you, it alarms me, too. This article and most of them in the [Un-]Scientific American (also a common a practice in the other evolutionary magazines – National Geographic, Smithsonian, Discovery, etc.) use the same kind of psychobabble to indoctrinate those who would be willingly indoctrinated.
Again, looking at the problems that inconstant constants would have for those of us in the real world, Barrow and Webb note:
“If alpha had a different value, all sorts of vital features of the world around us would change. If the value were lower, the density of solid atomic matter would fall, molecular bonds would break at lower temperatures, and the number of stable elements in the periodic table could increase. If alpha were too big, small atomic nuclei could not exist, because the electrical repulsion of their protons would overwhelm the strong nuclear force binding them together. A value as big as 0.1 would blow apart carbon.” [Emphasis added]
There you go again, if alpha is not constant then “carbon based units” (us) would blow apart. That is not a pretty thought.
Toward the end of their article Barrow and Webb get back to their “home field” when they assume a Big Bang start that accounts for everything in the universe. In order to prop up the Big Bang scenario they also assume the existence of the nonexistent “dark energy” and “dark matter.”
“. . . although changes in the fine-structure constant [alpha] do not affect the expansion of the universe significantly, the expansion affects alpha. . . . About six billion years ago dark energy took over and accelerated the expansion, making it difficult for all physical influences to propagate through space. So alpha became nearly constant again.”
Dark energy and dark matter are the products of dark minds. They have never been observed and are invented by evolutionists to try to prop up the Big Bang theory because without them the Big Bang is a Big Dud and they know it. As we shall see later, the Big Bang origination of the universe is terminally ill and should pass away within the next decade. The funeral eulogy is already being written.
In the last paragraph of their article, Barrow and Webb reveal the religious nature of evolutionism:
“The constants are a tantalizing mystery. Every equation of physics is filled with them, and they seem so prosaic that people tend to forget how unaccountable their values are. Their origin is bound up with some of the grandest questions of modern science, from the unification of physics to the expansion of the universe. They may be the superficial shadow of a structure larger and more complex than the three-dimensional universe we witness around us.” [Emphasis added]
I could not agree more with that last statement. The universe cannot be the reason for its own existence. There is “a structure larger and more complex than the three-dimensional universe we witness around us.” What Barrow and Webb, and all their colleagues, will not admit, but do intrinsically know, is that there is a Creator God that brought the universe into being. (Romans 1:18+) He made the universe less than Himself; gave us His eyewitness account of when and how He created it; and constantly reveals Himself to us in a personal and loving way.
So, are all natural constants constant? The answer is most apparently “no.” This answer has tremendous impact on whether the earth/universe are old or young from a scientific viewpoint. If those values which are critical for life to exist in the present were indeed different in the past then an old earth/universe is not possible. This information may only be used to support a young earth/universe!
Is the red shift of light in the universe only caused by objects moving away from us at high speed? This is, after all, an essential given if the Big Bang were to be true. The Bible also speaks of objects in the universe as having been “stretched” out after the initial moment of creation.
There are significant differences between the evolutionary view of a Big Bang and the Biblical view of the heavens being stretched out at creation.
Both start with a universe that comes into existence from nothing.
The Big Bang theories state that first there was nothing and then it exploded. There is no attempt in the various Big Bang theories to account for the sudden appearance of energy and matter, much less time. The theories require that everything starts from an infinitesimal point. In the Big Bang theories the energy must come from within the universe and proceed outward. These theories also require that the expansion continues today.
The Bible informs us that God spoke the universe and all it contains into exist where there was nothing before; God created mass, energy and time in a vacuum where there were no previously existing materials. In the Bible there are eleven references to God stretching out the heavens from the initial time of creation. These references are: Job 9:8; Ps. 104:2; Is. 40:22, 42:5, 44:24, 45:12, 48:13, 51:13; Jer. 10:12, 51:15; and Zech. 12:1.
The Hebrew word for stretched is natah. The word does not refer to an explosion, a violent flinging outward, or a stretching that encounters an increasing resistance (as a spring or rubber band). Natah is the effortless stretching out of one’s hand. It is similar to the way a person cuts a daisy chain of paper dolls from a single piece of paper and then effortlessly opens the paper to reveal all the dolls.
The Biblical account of creation does not start from an infinitesimal point. The energy of creation does not come from within the universe; it flowed into the universe until the stretching ended.
Which explanation fits the facts best? Which explanation does the evidence support?
A Big Bang would produce an expansion, but it would cause a decelerating expansion over time as the energy was used up and spread out. It would not produce an accelerating expansion. Stretching could produce an accelerating expansion.
For galaxies to exist, black holes (billions of times the mass of our Sun) are required to provide the massive gravity needed to hold the stars together in a group. [Yes, black holes exist and they do have a created function!] The Big Bang advocates say that matter was spread out uniformly for the first 300,000 supposed years of time. If this uniformity were true then there would be no galaxies because black holes would not have formed.
The Bible informs us that the Sun, Moon and stars (all galaxies with black holes) were formed on Day Four of the Creation Week and were then stretched out.
According to the physical laws governing stellar velocities, stars should travel faster the nearer they are to the center of their galaxies. Observational data proves that all stars in the outer parts of their galaxies are, in fact, traveling faster than those near the centers of their galaxies. This is in direct conflict with the prediction of these stellar velocity laws. Could this be because these stars were once closer to their galaxy centers and moved outward because of the heavens being “stretched out?”
A similar question arises concerning tight galaxy clusters. Again, observational data has shown that these galaxy clusters are traveling much faster than they should be based on their present distance from their cluster’s center of mass.
There are clouds of glowing, blue gas, called helium-2 nebulas visible throughout the universe. These clouds may only be set aglow by stars hot enough to strip two electrons from each surrounding helium atom. There are no known stars that qualify to do this, nor should “newly evolved” stars be hot enough to do the job. The conditions of a compressed universe “in the heavens” being stretched out would leave such evidence.
The Big Bang Model requires that within a fraction of a second the universe expanded at a rate of trillions of billions of times faster than the current speed of light. The Bible describes the stretching out of the heavens by God after their creation. Neither explanation may be tested directly; nor are these events repeatable. But, we must ask ourselves which one do the facts fit best?
One piece of evidence used to shore up the Big Bang Model was the existence of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. In 1989, the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite measured this residual heat, thought by evolutionists to be the remnant of the heat left over from the Big Bang. The satellite measured the heat as uniform in all directions at a temperature of 2.735 degrees Kelvin (just above absolute zero).
At first, this was thought to be in line with Big Bang predictions; however, if the Big Bang were true, the universe could not be uniform in all directions. If stars and galaxies were to form by gravitational attraction of matter, then the universe had to be “lumpy.”
Sure enough, in 1992, a team of evolutionary scientists massaged the data from COBE and found that, “eureka,” there were actually variations of 1 in 100,000 of a degree Kelvin across the universe. This was enough variation to convince them that larger structures, stars and galaxies, could have evolved from these minute differences.
Of course, one problem with all this is that the COBE satellite was incapable of measuring this small a difference in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. They simply found what they wanted to find, whether it was there or not.
More problems for the idea of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation data variation supporting the Big Bang concept was reported on February 2, 2004 by a team at the University of Durham.
The replacement satellite for COBE was called Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). It was launched on June 30, 2001. It was much more sensitive to heat variations than COBE, and capable of measuring the variations that had been “found” earlier in the COBE data.
The team from Durham found that the reported variations in the cosmic background radiation data were actually distortions caused by clouds of gas through which the radiation had traveled. This information alone might well seal the demise of the Big Bang Theory. The evolutionist’s idea of a hot big bang inflationary model may well be doomed.
Concerning the precision of newer instruments to yield the answers that evolutionists so desperately want, the Royal Astronomical Society press release on February 2, 2004 stated:
“But if correct, they [newer measurements] suggest that the rumours that we are living in a ‘New Era of Precision Cosmology’ may prove to be premature! ‘Our results may ultimately undermine the belief that the Universe is dominated by an elusive cold dark matter particle and the even more enigmatic dark energy,’ said Professor Shanks.” [Emphasis added]
There they are again – dark energy, dark matter and darkened minds. Dark energy and dark matter are just concepts that are not known to exist, but “are necessary” to make the Big Bang Model work. The Big Bang Model is in deep trouble.
Perhaps the single greatest problem for Big Bangers is the singularity problem, which involves the original cause of the universe and the origin of matter and energy within space. While the Big Bang theorists attempt to describe the early universe and what happened during unseen and untestable history, they have so far been unable to explain why there is a universe to begin with.
The evolutionist’s mechanistic naturalistic theories of the origin of the universe fall into two general categories: one category where the universe appeared from nothing without a causal agent, thus denying causality and the First Law of Thermodynamics (the universal law of the conservation of energy and mass); and the other category where the universe is infinitely old, thus denying the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the universal law of energy decay or entropy).
Neither category can be true, and there are still more problems for the Big Bang Model. The next problem is one of early maturity. When evolutionary believing astronomers look at distant objects which have high red shift values these evolutionists assume that the objects were formed early in the history of the universe. Evolutionists believe that Population III stars were the first stars in the universe, and they are assumed to have formed several billion years after the Big Bang occurred.
These stars have never been observed; they are simply presumed to have existed. The theory continues to say that the Population III stars eventually died when they exploded as supernovas which distributed dust and elemental particles throughout space. The dust and other matter from these Population III star explosions are supposed to have reformed into the Population II stars, which suffered the same fate as the Population III stars, which in turn provided the mass for the Population I stars that we see today. Population I stars include our own sun.
The birth and death of stars to produce more stars that die to produce more stars is supposed to take billions and billions of years according to the Big Bang Model.
Ron Cowan wrote Mature before their time, Science News 163(9): 139, 2003. In his article he described how the Hubble Space Telescope had seen mature spiral and barred spiral galaxies throughout the universe which had to have formed early after the Big Bang, but much too soon for the Big Bang Model to be true. We are also finding that large complex galaxies existed “too early” for the Big Bang Model to be true. In some cases these large complex galaxies were formed “only” one billion years after the Big Bang, much too early for such complexity to exist according to the Model.
Still another recent observation is that the farthest quasars appear to be powered by massive black holes; but, they are so distant that they would have had to form less than a billion years after the Big Bang. This is impossible if the Model is true. To this point the evolutionist L. Ferrarese wrote Feeding the first quasars, Nature 421: 329, 2003. He observed: “Thus, the very existence of quasars at such high red shifts is a challenge to models of structure formation.”
What is the answer to this early maturity problem? You guessed it – dark matter “must” make up most of the mass of the universe. Without the gravitational force of this supposed dark matter there is simply no way to form stars, galaxies, super massive black holes and quasars so early in the history of the universe. There is, however, some observational evidence against the existence of dark matter.
[Wouldn’t it simply be easier to believe Genesis 1:1?]
In addition to the major unsolved problem of the early maturity of stars, there is also a major problem for the evolutionists’ idea of a Big Bang because of the early maturity of chemical elements.
So far, 25 elements (10 heavier than iron) have been found by spectral analysis of a “young” distant galaxy. These elements include zinc, germanium and lead. According to evolutionary assumptions these elements should be less than 2.5 billion years old, but this is too young to suit their purposes. Evolutionists believe that all elements heavier than boron must have been “created” deep inside stars through the process of nuclear fusion. These “too young” elements have caused one evolutionary astronomer to write:
“The presence of these elements, particularly those heavier than iron, in such a young galaxy is striking. Fundamentally, it seems to indicate that in the galaxies (or at least in this galaxy) that formed relatively shortly after the big bang, the onset of star formation and related element production was very rapid.”
Cowan, R., Elements of surprise, Nature 423:29, 2003. [Emphasis added]
What is the answer to their problem? Evolutionists are speculating that massive stars must have evolved quickly and died quickly. The problem with that is that according to evolutionists the element germanium is supposed to have been synthesized inside low-mass stars over a period of billions of years. This situation puts evolutionists on the horns of a dilemma. You cannot have your cake and eat it too!
This situation caused the evolutionist R. Cowan to quip: “If this portrait of precocious galaxies is confirmed by larger studies, astronomers may have to revise the accepted view of galaxy formation.” Mature before their time, Science News 163(9):139, 2003
The evolutionary Big Bang Model is becoming ever more strained to the breaking point. Evolutionary cosmogonists continually have to fabricate just-so stories to support the Model and the subsidiary ideas are becoming laughable.
While the idea of the evolution of galaxies is difficult enough for them to support, now they have to devise ways in which it could all have happened quickly. R. Cowan went on to say in his article Mature before their time:
“In the model, the vast majority of galaxies are relatively late bloomers, taking many billions of years to pack on mass either by pulling in gas from the surrounding intergalactic medium or merging with neighboring galaxies. In regions of the universe that started out particularly dense, this mass-gathering action could begin sooner than elsewhere. But the standard model still can’t easily account for a large number of mature or massive galaxies in the early universe.”
Evolutionists are ever more relying on a growing number of hypothetical inventions to prop up the Big Bang Model. These inventions include, but are not limited to; dark matter, dark energy and universal inflation. If these inventions of their minds do not exist, there will be a fatal contradiction between their observations and their predictions.
There is no other arena of physical science besides evolutionary cosmogony which would tolerate such a continual appeal to newer and newer hypothetical inventions as a means of bridging the gap between observation and theory.
Why do they continue to invent this fiction? Because, if they are wrong there is a Creator God and they would be responsible to Him.
The Big Bang Model also has another problem with its underlying assumptions and the current speed of light.
Penzias and Wilson discovered the Constant Microwave Background (CMB) radiation in 1964. They won the Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery in 1978. As mentioned above, the temperature of this radiation is basically uniform in all directions throughout the universe (to a precision of 1 in 100,000). In an attempt to make the universe “lumpy,” an essential condition if stars and galaxies were to evolve by gravitational accretion, evolutionists had to “find” variations within the CMB in order for stellar evolution to be true.
What is the problem? If the Big Bang were true, and objects were initially close to each other, then the heat of the early objects would have radiated quickly from one area to another and the universe would have come into thermal equilibrium early in its existence; that is, it would have become uniformly warm quickly. In the Big Bang scenario, however, objects would be separating rapidly from one another in all directions. Under that condition, light and its associated heat might have had enough time to reach earth, but it would not have had enough time to spread from one remote area of the universe across to the other side of the universe. There simply has not been enough time for the exchange of information from one side of the universe to the other. This was labeled the “horizon” problem by A. Lightman in his book, Ancient Light, Harvard University Press, London, p. 58, 1991.
The scientific observation is simply not consistent with evolutionary theoretical predictions.
There is also a problem a little closer to home. If the our sun were billions of years old, then it should have been much cooler and fainter to begin with and it should be getting hotter and brighter as it gets older. The reason for this is that as nuclear fuel is burned inside the sun, it should be shrinking; this in turn would cause the elements in the sun to be squeezed together more tightly; which in turn would cause the nuclear reactions to speed up over time. There is, however, no evidence that our sun has ever been cooler and fainter in the past. This has been labeled the “faint young sun paradox.”
This problem becomes more obvious when we consider that evolutionists postulate that the life on earth evolved into existence between 3.5 and 4.0 billion supposed years ago. If these time frames were true, then today our sun would be 25% brighter than it was back then. The cooler sun back then would have caused temperatures on the earth’s surface to average about 27F, or below freezing everywhere. To suggest that life could evolve into existence under this condition is a case of special pleading.
I have shown previously that natural constants may not be so constant over time; and, that there is a huge difference between the concepts of the existence of natural constants and the immutability of scientific laws.
Almost everyone has heard of Einstein’s famous formula E=mc2 (energy is equal to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared). Indeed, we use it every day to generate a lot of our electricity from nuclear electric plants. We almost always take matter and make energy from it. But, we have taken energy and made mass out of it, too, proving that the formula is accurate and that nothing is lost in the process regardless of which direction we go within the formula.
This experiment was reported in Photonics Spectra, a trade magazine for the Photonics Industry. Kathleen G. Tatterson wrote an article entitled “Boom! From Light Comes Matter,” November, 1997, page 31. In the article she reported how a team of scientists from Stanford University, the University of Rochester, Princeton University, and the University of Tennessee, had used the two mile long Stanford Linear Accelerator to take a high energy electron beam and hit a high energy photon beam with it. The result was the creation of the first electron-positron pairs via a “light by light” process. The reaction produces particles of matter. Laws in science are immutable.
The speed of light, however, is not a constant over time. Starting with measurements made by the Danish mathematician and astronomer Olaf Roemer (1644-1710) in 1675 AD, we have been able to measure a slight decay in the speed of light. This is known as CDK (speed of light decay).
Of more interest may be the fact that in recent decades we have been able to manipulate the speed of light in various ways.
In July, 2000, scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton reported having accelerated light beyond the speed of light! Their experiment was published in the British journal Nature. They shot a laser beam into a glass chamber containing cesium vapor. The photons from the laser traded energy with the cesium atoms and created a beam exiting the chamber faster than the light beam had entered the chamber.
Light is supposed to travel at its highest speed in a vacuum where there is no resistance, and slower when traveling through any other medium because of the added resistance. For example, everyone is familiar with light traveling slower in water than through air. In the NEC experiment the light beam exited the chamber of cesium vapor before it had even finished entering the chamber.
The difference was truly interesting. The laser beam jumped 60 feet ahead of where it should have been. In concept this might be considered as the effect preceding the cause, but this is not exactly correct. The scientific area of study for accelerating light beyond the speed of light is called superluminal propagation.
The correct interpretation of this research would be that the speed of light is not constant and that light may be accelerated as any other physical object in the universe, given the right circumstances and an appropriate energy source.
We have made matter out of energy without any loss; we have accelerated light beyond the currently accepted speed of light; so, what about slowing the speed of light down? Has any success been reported on that? No problem; consider it done!
It all goes back to 1982 in an article written by Dr. Barry Setterfield of Australia entitled “The Velocity of Light and the Age of the Universe.” In that article he outlined the fact that the measured speed of light had declined in a smooth curve for over 300 years.
In 1987 a Stanford Research Institute Report (written by Australian mathematicians Trevor Norman and Barry Setterfield) postulated that a large decay in light speed had occurred in the past.
Also, in 1987, the Russian theoretical physicist, Dr. V. S. Troitskii working at the Radio-physical Research Institute in Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia, postulated that a huge decay in the speed of light had occurred over time. Dr. Troitskii was talking about the speed of light having been 10 million times faster in the past compared to what it is today. His work is found in the British journal Astrophysics and Space Science 139 (1987) 389-411 “Physical Constants and Evolution of the Universe.”
In 1998, Albrecht and Joao Magueijo, theoretical physicists at Imperial College, London, England, also postulated a reduction in light speed. On Nov. 15, 1998, the London Times published an article called “The speed of light – the fastest thing in the universe – is getting slower.” A measured reduction on the speed of light would help to solve some of the current problems in cosmogony.
In the February 18 1999 edition of the highly respected (and totally evolutionary) science magazine Nature, a scientific paper was published that detailed an experiment in which the speed of light was reduced to 17 meters per second or a mere 38 miles per hour. This means that you could watch it go by like cars on a city street.
The experiment was conducted by the Dutch physicist Lene V. Hau and an international team of researchers from Harvard and Stanford Universities. They sent light through a sodium vapor that had been cooled to an incredibly low nanokelvin temperature (that is, to billionths of one degree Kelvin, or almost absolute zero [absolute zero is defined as -459.67 °F]). Depending upon the exact temperature of the vapor, the speed of light was reduced to between 72.7 and 38 M.P.H.; or basically 1/20,000,000th the normal speed of light. In Science News, March 27, 1999, page 207, Dr. Hau and Dr. Stephen E. Harris of Stanford U. reported slowing light down to a bicyclist’s speed, and later reduced the speed of light still further, but they did not stop it.
By January 2001 Dr. Hau and her associates had worked out a way to stop and then restart the same light photons. This was also announced in Nature, Jan. 25, 2001. “We park the light pulse in the atom cloud. When we feel like it, we turn the coupling laser back on . . . and out comes [the original pulse].”
The Science News, Jan. 27, 2001, also reported that two independent teams of physicists had not only stopped light, but that a third team might be developing a method that would make light back up! At Kaiserlautern University in Germany, Dr. Michael Fleischhauer announced a method for stopping light while preserving the photons. They also parked a light pulse in an atom cloud.
In the same publication, it was reported that Drs. Ronald L. Walsworth, Mikhail D. Lukin and their associates at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA, had stopped light in a rubidium gas cloud at a temperature of +80 Celsius. This experiment proved that ultra-low temperatures were not necessary to achieve similar results. The same announcement was printed in the Jan. 29, 2001 edition of Physical Review Letters.
Philip R. Hemmer of Hanscom Air Force Base near Boston, MA, heads a group that has slowed light in solids, rather than in gases (like the others). His group slowed light to 45 meters per second, just over 100 M.P.H., in an exotic type of crystal. Similar work was announced at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, in the Jan. 22, 2001, Physical Review Letters.
On August 7, 2002, Reuters (August 8, 2002, Canberra Times) announced that Australian theoretical astrophysicist (and evolutionist) Dr. Paul Davies of Sydney’s Macquarie University, believed that “light has been slowing down since the creation of the universe.” Dr. Davies went on to suggest that the speed of light may not be a constant!
In the Jan. 17, 2004, Science News, there was a further report, also announced in Nature on Dec. 11 2003, that Mikhail D. Lukin of Harvard University and his associates had found another method for stopping light. They put light into suspended animation within hot rubidium gas using lasers. This method could lead to the first quantum computers.
Why are evolutionists so afraid of the public finding out that the speed of light has slowed down in the past, or that the speed of light may be manipulated proving that it is not a true constant?
There are two simple answers. First, if the speed of light is not an invariant constant over time, their assumptions about the age of the earth and universe go flying out the window. Second, the rate of decay of radioactive elements is directly related to the speed of light.
If light was faster in the past, then the earth and universe are young and evolution theories are not true. If the speed of light was faster in the past, then radioactive elements decayed much faster in the past, and the radioactive dating techniques, so highly touted by evolutionists, are totally unreliable – they are useless. The evolutionist’s presupposition of the constancy of the speed of light is an Achilles Heel for them.
I am reminded of the quote by the Russian Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lev Landau: “Cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt.”
Cosmology is not an exact science. While most scientists use laboratory error factors measured at 0.00000001% (1 part in 1010) or less; cosmologists and cosmogonists are happy with error factors of 100% (1 part in 2). For example, the Hubble Constant, supposedly describing the expansion rate of the universe, is a value currently accepted with a plus or minus error margin of 12%.
Evolutionists talk about cold dark matter and dark energy as if they “know” they exist, yet both are unproven. In fact, the most recent research from the BOOMERANG (Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics) experiment suggests that the universe is filled only with normal matter, that there are no exotic particles and no cold dark matter.
The great evolutionary theoretical physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking wrote:
“This [Big Bang] picture of the universe . . . is in agreement with all the observational evidence that we have today,” but he admitted, “Nevertheless, it leaves a number of important questions unanswered . . . (the origin of the stars and galaxies).” [Emphasis added]
Excuse me. It leaves in doubt how the stars and galaxies formed? I thought that this was what the Big Bang was supposed to answer in the first place. Is this the best that the evolutionists’ best theoretical physicist can come up with?
The Big Bang cosmogonists cannot explain why the universe exists. They cannot explain the existence of stars and galaxies by using Big Bang reasoning. The Big Bang theories simply fail the test of being logical rational evidence based reasons neither for our existence, nor for anything else in the universe.
What then does the red shift of light, seen as we look out into the universe in all directions, really tell us?
The evolutionist wants to believe that our place in the universe is not special. Yet, the red shift of light is overwhelming evidence that we do occupy a special place in the universe. We occupy the center of the universe! This is consistent with the statements in the Bible.
This conclusion is philosophically unacceptable to evolutionists. For this reason Dr. Edwin Hubble wrote in his 1937 book The Observational Approach to Cosmology:
“Such a condition [these Doppler shifts] would imply that we occupy a unique position in the universe, … But the unwelcome supposition of a favored location must be avoided at all costs … is intolerable … moreover, it represents a discrepancy with the theory [evolutionary Big Bang] because the theory postulates homogeneity.” (pp. 50, 51, 59) [Emphasis added]
Hubble did not have the intellectual honesty to allow the hard evidence to lead him to the obvious conclusion; rather he rejected the hard evidence in order to support a theory that he believed in and would not give up.
In the 1980’s, the evolutionary astronomer William Tifft at the Steward Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, studied red shift data from galaxies spread throughout the universe. He found irrefutable evidence that the red shift of light coming at us from all directions is quantized; that means that it is coming at us in specific discrete amounts occurring at specific discrete distances. This data indicates that the universe has a shell within a shell within a shell concentric configuration. Therefore, the galaxies are located at points with regular distances between each shell.
This evidence puts the Milky Way Galaxy (our galaxy) in the center of the universe! We do occupy a unique place in the universe. This information is anathema to evolutionists and is absolutely contradictory to the various theories of galactic evolution.
The astronomer Halton Arp measured the red shift coming from 70 quasars and demonstrated that the light coming from them was also quantized. They also followed a predictable pattern.
These measurements have caused great distress among evolution believing astronomers. So much so, that it caused three of them to have such a dilemma that they wrote:
The reason that they cannot answer the questions they pose is because they intentionally censor themselves from the source of information that would give them the answers. They are looking only for the natural answers that will never give them the correct results. They refuse to consider that there may be a supernatural source of information that would satisfy their desire for an adequate answer.
We know that the answers to these questions are readily found if we read the Bible and trust the Creator of the universe to tell us His eyewitness account of the creation of everything that is visible and invisible.
“The heavens are telling of the glory of God; their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech; and night to night reveals knowledge.” (Ps. 19:1, 2, NAS)
There are 17 verses in the Bible that state that God “stretched out” space. These 17 verses use four different Hebrew verbs and demonstrate that God stretched out space while the objects He created within that space were fixed in place. This means that as space was stretched out, the objects in that space would increase in distance from each other.
Added weight to the evidence for quantization of red shift, and our special place in the universe, was provided by William Napier and Bruce Guthrie in their 1997 study of 250 galaxy red shift patterns. They concluded:
Additional data from the Hubble Space Telescope has shown that this effect is visible out to distances of billions of light years. (Cohen et. al., Red shift clustering in the Hubble deep field, Astrophysical Journal 471:L5-L9, 1996.)
This information has stood the test of 25 years of professional peer scrutiny and it has proven to be reliable. The discrete distances found by Napier and Guthrie measure 1.6 and 3.1 million light years.
In order for us to see these quantized shells of red shifted light around us, the earth has to be less than one million light years from the center of the universe in all three dimensions. If we were more than one million light years away from the spherical-shell center of the galaxies, then there would be a blurring or smearing of the red shifted light and the effect would not be visible. Further refinement of this data has shown that we are located within 100,000 light years of the center of the universe. This is the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy.
This information proves beyond a reasonable doubt that our home galaxy is at the center of the universe. The probability that we would be located at the center of the universe by random chance is in the order of one chance in one trillion attempts. This is equal to no chance at all. We were put where we are at the moment of creation by an infinitely intelligent Creator God who gave us His eyewitness account of that creation in the Bible. No other explanation may account for this evidence.
Contrary to popular thought, the Big Bang theories of the evolutionists require that there is no center and no edge to the universe. Yet the observational data clearly show that the universe does have a center, and we are it.
Evolutionists do not believe in the Big Bang because it is supported by evidence. They believe it because they start from a presupposition that evolution is true. They want to believe that we are here by accident. This is emphasized by astrophysicist Richard Gott:
The ultimate belief system of the evolutionist is atheistic naturalism. Atheistic naturalism is the foundational rationale for naturalistic evolutionism. The acceptance of Darwinian evolution and the Big Bang theories is irrefutably linked together.
The evolutionary “sage,” Dr. Carl Sagan wrote:
Oh, yes, there is!
“But when these things begin to take place, straighten up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Luke 21:28
Read more from Dr. Grady S. McMurtry at https://www.creationworldview.org/aboutus.asp
