posted
I enrolled in the geology program at BYU for two semesters. It was all about evolution and the age of the earth being 5 or 6 billion years. The geology professor insisted that Brigham Young had once said that the earth was billions of years old. This didn’t jibe with the Bible’s account of a 7-day creation, or with speculation among LDS folks that the creation took 7000 years.
I had been to the Grand Canyon enough times as a kid to know that the earth is extremely old, and it always bothered me that the Bible only gives the earth a few thousand years of history. I didn’t let the time thing shake my faith, but I hoped that I would someday find an answer that I could live with.
I didn’t expect to find my answer in Scientific American magazine, but it was all there in the excellent September 2002 issue about time. Briefly summarizing the whole issue:
Time is a function of the laws of thermodynamics and how events are recorded in the human mind.
Time isn’t a law, it’s not another dimension, it doesn’t “flow,” and it’s not constant.
To put it simply: only man measures time.
So I’m putting this theory together in my mind about how 6 billion years of earth-building can occur in 7 days. It’s all about perceptions and frame of reference. Sounds like I'm asking for a headache.
posted
no, you're not. you hit on something that some people i know have been talking about for a while. we were mainly trying to tie evolution and the Bible together. Who's to say that God's 7 days was or wasn't a million or so years? Nobody alive was alive then. That and the way the Bible starts out the land was basically already there. It was just sitting there so God shaped it to what he wanted. Genesis (if I remember right) does mention creatures of Large size, and the creation of animals, as is written, was before man. so with that you have your dinosaurs, destruction of dinosaurs (I don't know where it is written, but maybe God changed his/her/it's mind). then we come to the creation of man and woman. evolution.....it is my belief....as well a few others, that we were created to evolve, therefore adapting to the changes in or to the world that God saw forthcoming.
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posted
The way I read Genesis, it was not meant to be a paleontology textbook, but rather is meant to tell us those spiritual things that are needful for us to know about how the universe began.
But then, I'm pretty heterodox. I love the idea of the Ainur singing everything into being, too.
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skillery, I know this might sound lame and condensending. It isn't meant to be, but read "The Pearl of Great Price." Specifically the Book of Moses and The Book of Abraham. If you have already, than read it closer with the questions you have had.
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skillery, you may well be heading down a cool path in your thoughts about creation. Don't let the occasional condescending poster dissuade you Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Skillery: I think your approach has a lot of merit.
Here's another idea I was thinking about - supposing one's belief is that the story of Genesis did come from God: however it had to be scribed by a human. Given the time it was written, it seems extremely unlikely people would have access to ideas of such huge massive time frames as an evolutionary veiw of creation necessitates.
Could it be that the 7 days are an interpretation: a way of conceptualising in human terms what was at that stage an amount of time that seemed inconceivable?
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posted
There's also the possibility that at the time of the fall and the great flood, the Earth or maybe the whole solar system was transplanted to a different galactic orbit. But that's still basically magical creationistic type thinking.
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posted
One article in that Scientific American issue explained time in terms of thermodynamics with a simple model of an observer watching an egg falling and breaking. Maybe there’s a clock ticking away the seconds in the background as you watch the egg fall. As the egg falls, your mind lays down visual memories of the position of the egg in space. All the while you perceive the passage of time, not only from the ticking clock, but also using past experience as a reference. You know from past experience how long it takes for an egg to fall. As the egg falls it gives up energy, and finally when it breaks on the floor, it changes from organized to disorganized. That’s thermodynamics.
It would take a lot of energy to put that egg back together and raise it back to its original position. As long as you’re putting the egg back, you might as well turn the clock back, and erase the neural patterns in your mind that form the memory of the egg falling. You’d need a lot of energy to undo all that and a lot of knowledge of eggs and brains. Once the mess is cleaned up, the question is, did it ever happen?
Man doesn’t have infinite energy at his disposal, nor does he have the knowledge to fix eggs or memories. But if there were a person with such capabilities, would time or the passage of time matter to that person?
Now suppose eggs fell faster than they do, and clocks ticked faster, and neurons in the brain fired faster. Would the observer perceive the increased rate at which events occurred?
Suppose Grand Canyons were dug faster then than they are today. There was nobody around to witness and record the perceived passage of time during the original digging. Is it reasonable to apply our current timebase to that past event? All we’ve got to go on is our experience of eggs falling and clocks ticking.
Also, maybe radioactive carbon decayed faster back then than it does now. Consequently, carbon 14 dating couldn’t tell us how fast things happened back then, it could only tell us how many egg-falling-seconds in our current time-perception have elapsed in relation to some past event.
If there was a person with infinite energy and perfect knowledge at his disposal, can we assign any time limit to how quickly that person could reassemble an egg or dig a canyon? That same person could make the neurons in your brain fire faster and the clocks tick faster as you observed the event and you’d never know the difference. You’d think that eons had elapsed.
Since the whole creation of the world thing was recorded by Moses after the fact, as the result of a vision given him by an all-powerful, all-knowing being, that Being could have assigned any timebase that he pleased to Moses’ neurons as Moses viewed the vision. So perhaps Moses perceived the passing of seven days while he viewed the 6-billion year creation-of-the-world vision. Talk about causing a headache!
quote:There's also the possibility that at the time of the fall and the great flood, the Earth or maybe the whole solar system was transplanted to a different galactic orbit. But that's still basically magical creationistic type thinking.
Forgive me for this point which a lot people will disagree with.
If you believe in an invisible, omnipotent, omniscient, ubiquitous being who watches over you (God), then that's basically magical creationistic type thinking. If you allow for the existence of God then, you cannot really rule out the transplantation of the solar system simply because it's basically magical creationistic type thinking. You need better reasons than that.
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quote:I enrolled in the geology program at BYU for two semesters. It was all about evolution and the age of the earth being 5 or 6 billion years.
Incidentally, this always strikes me as something very suspicious about geology courses. They aren't always all that scientific, which is a problem for a supposedly scientific subject. Instead, they're more historical - speculating on things that happened long long ago that could never be tested in any scientific way.
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posted
Yeah. At the time, the geology texts totally dismissed catastrophism as an explanation for changes in the earth's crust over time. Now it's coming on in a big way. Scientists now realize that catastrophes happen relatively frequently throughout geologic time. You need a good catastrophe to explain some of the stuff that happened in the Bible.
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I think you mean "only man measures anthropic time." (Yes, I just made up that term). Or put another way, you're distinguishing between measuring and experiencing. Now do you see how it becomes a tautology?
Of course, while only man may measure his self-perception, man also has learned to measure physical time. Clearly Genesis describes only the former (if anything at all). Keeping this separation in mind will prevent a lot of confusion. For instance:
quote:Who's to say that God's 7 days was or wasn't a million or so years?
Trying to map a function between subjective and objective time will never work; it can never be surjective. If nothing else, the order of events isn't even right.
Ponder: is there really a difference between calling a passage subjective and calling it allegorical?
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quote: Trying to map a function between subjective and objective time will never work; it can never be surjective. If nothing else, the order of events isn't even right.
I really don't understand what you're getting at here. Blame my slow brain.
But how about time expansion/dilation under general relativity? It is easy in physics to plot a function between observer A and observer B, even if they are in different relative time frames, and so experience different measures of time.
On a side note: in such cases, the orders of events do change. Causality in the time line we observe may not be evident to another observer, travelling at near light speed.
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posted
Late nights bring out the math geek in me. Basically: Moses' neural interface must have left out some details, and besides which tried to grow grass without a sun.
Of course, under GR we have no concept of simultaneity at all. (This doesn't affect the notion of causality, though, and I don't think it's the direction the OP was taking.)
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posted
True on the causality. As I wrote it, I was fuzzily remembering the hour-glass diagram...
You know the one... I forget the proper name. (And to think they gave me a physics degree... )
The order of events can be changed, but not the causality. But it can be made impossible to work out *if* something caused something from a different time frame - we can just determine whether it is possible it did or not.
Of course, this is off topic.
And I'm still not getting the grass without sun reference.
posted
Geoff, did you think my post sounded condescending? I hope it didn't! I sure didn't mean it that way.
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The way I understand the latest theoretical physics models, time is something that is part of the fabric or conditions of our universe. I always think of God as being outside that. In the same way that I could, say, run a simulation on my computer, tweak parameters, run it over again, start it at an earlier point, and so on. The time flow of the simulation is all available to me at once. For me, that's the sense in which God is outside of time and transcends time.
Or another analogy might be playing an RPG. It's taken our email D+D group six months to get a few weeks to pass inside our game. If the DM so deems it, we could go back to an earlier point and replay it, or fast forward, or whatever.
A third analogy that strikes me is when I'm practicing a musical piece. There's the time inside the piece, which I can interrupt the flow of to stop and work out a tricky passage, perhaps taking it at half time. I might back up and begin again at an earlier point, or skip forward, or whatever. But all the while the way I'm hearing the piece inside my head... well, I bridge the gaps... I suspend musical time and restart it... I stitch the pieces together... so that it sounds right. I guess that's why it's so much more enjoyable to practice piano yourself than to listen to someone else practicing.
Oh, and I just want to say that Brigham Young rocks. He was the coolest! I love him.
quote:you're distinguishing between measuring and experiencing...
... man also has learned to measure physical time
There was another article in that same issue of Sci-Am about the various clocks that man has used over the ages to "measure" time. The problem is that all of those clocks are made of matter, whether it's and hourglass or an oscillating cesium atom. They are all part of the same system, governed by the same rules as the event that we are trying to measure.
If light were to travel a little faster and cesium atoms were to oscillate a little faster, our "measured" speed of light would remain the same, and we'd never know the difference.
So you're right. When it comes to time, there is no measuring, only experiencing.
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quote:If light were to travel a little faster and cesium atoms were to oscillate a little faster
Relative to what? There's no absolute standard. And even if there were, it would be necessarily outside of the physical system you're trying to justify.
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If c's value were to change, the fine structure constant would also change, and there would be a dramatic, experimentally measurable change in quantum interactions.
quote:Time isn’t a law, it’s not another dimension, it doesn’t “flow,” and it’s not constant.
Whoa, hold on.
Time is most certainly a dimension. One of the four. Relativity is not wrong, so far as we know.
Whether time "flows" is a serious question in the philosophy of physics, with advocates on either side. I personally don't believe that time flows, except subjectively, any more than space flows. But many well-informed people disagree with me.
I'm not sure what time's being "constant" would even mean. Normally when we say that something is constant, we mean it's constant in time, so that it does not change with changes in time. What is it that time could be either constant or non-constant in relation to?
Additionally, much of the talk on this thread of time "slowing down" or "speeding up" is strange when you stop to wonder what time could be speeding or slowing with respect to. There would have to be some sort of separate, real time in which the time we perceive could move faster or slower. Without time, the idea of something's moving faster or slower isn't even really coherent.
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posted
This may or may not be relevant, but about four years ago, at the NEC Research Institute at Princeton, Dr. Lijun Wang succeeded in getting light to travel 300 times faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. The light pulse that he sent toward a chamber filled with specially treated cesium gas traveled 60 feet across the laboratory, before it had fully entered the chamber, meaning the beam of light existed in two places at once. The peak of the pulse emerged from the chamber 62 billionths of a second before it entered.
Here is an excerpt from a Reuters story by Deborah Zabarenko:
quote:Researchers at the NEC lab created this medium by using lasers to specially prepare atoms of cesium gas inside a cylindrical chamber about 2.5 inches long, and then shooting pulses of light through it.
. . .
Normally light would pass through a vacuum chamber of that length in 0.2 nanoseconds, or .2 billionths of a second. But the cesium atoms in the chamber shift the light pulse, making it zip through the chamber and exit 62 nanoseconds sooner, or more than 300 times earlier.
As soon as this leading edge of the pulse enters the chamber, the atoms start to reconstruct the pulse at the chamber's far side. This reconstructed pulse can then emerge from the far end of the chamber sooner than it would go through a vacuum.
This has caused some uproar, because the implication is that information can be transmitted on such a light beam into the past. Some scientists are trying to come up with reasons why there would be some limitations in the system, to prevent causality from being violated.
posted
Ron, the light didn't move faster than the speed of light, the wavefront of the light did (which is perfectly acceptable). No information was transferred.
For instance, if you want to move something faster than the speed of light yourself, take a flashlight and shine it up at the heavens. Now move it back and forth a few times. When those photons touch upon some planet sufficiently far out there, the point of focus of the beam will traverse its surface faster than the speed of light.
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Fugu13, you need to read some of the articles first. Some scientists are trying to find ways to explain it in an effort to preserve causality, others are convinced it is possible to transfer information faster than light. There is a controversy here, and it is not settled the way you tried to.
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posted
No, fugu is right. The speed of light limit applies only to group velocity -- the speed of the entire wave. These experiments have increased phase velocity -- the speed of the wave packet's peak -- past c. This does not violate causality, and if the articles say it does then they are taking part in the venerable tradition of deceptive science reporting. The electrogravityphysics article seems to make use of out-of-context quotes.
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Basically, the front of the wave contains all the information necessary to reconstruct the wave itself. Thus, that the a facsimile of the wave emerges before the entire wave enters doesn't allow any information to travel faster than light.
That particular experiment contains no evidence suggesting information can travel faster than light. There are other experiments which do, but not that one.
For instance, Bell's experiment with entangled polarization.
I don't think its solved. But its not complicated by that experiment.
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posted
Seems as good a thread as any to ask: Has anyone read Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation? I thought it was very interesting, more from a "politics of science" aspect than anything else. The theory was not explained enough that I could evaluate its feasibility at all.
As far as I could tell, though, he didn't say that the speed of light is variable now, just that in the past it had been faster than it is now.
I'm interested in anyone's thoughts on the subject.
posted
The really cool story in cosmology right now is the accelerating expansion of the universe. One way to think of it is that the action of gravity over long enough distances is negative. Instead of the galaxies slowing down relative to one another and falling back together, it seems they are speeding up and will fly apart faster and faster.
Back when there was a conflict between the age of the universe and the age of globular clusters (the globular clusters seemed older than the universe itself, which is of course impossible), I knew that the globular clusters ages were the ones to trust. Because they are closer and we understand them better. At one time there was a conflict between the age of the earth and the age of the solar system, as well (when they thought the heat of the sun came from contraction only and had to be only a few hunderd thousand years old at most). In that case the geologists were correct. The sun works by fusing hydogen, which lasts far longer than thermal contraction as a source of heat. In that case again, the earth was the closer thing that we knew more about at the time. So I knew it must be true of the globular clusters too, and I was right.
Based on a similar analogy, I think we will discover that our universe is only one of a vast array of universes in the cosmos. Over and over again in history, we think our own place is unique, then as we learn more we find that we are only a tiny part of a larger whole. Our earth used to be THE planet, with the rest being lights in the sky. Then our solar system was special, until we realized all the other stars in the sky are suns too, and many of them also have planets.
Similarly, what we now think of as our Milky Way galaxy was once considered to be everything there was. Someone started looking at the rather odd nebulae, though, and realized they were a lot further away than we once thought, and that our galaxy is only one of billions of "island universes", as they once were called.
I've read a few things here and there which suggest new big bangs can be created in this or that situation. Someone once speculated that a big bang can happen when one universe bumps into a universe next door. I can't remember what theory that was based on, though. Whatever turns out to be the exact situation, I've no doubt that we will be dethroned again, and that our universe will turn out to be only a tiny part of all that is.
posted
Dude, aka, I learned about that not long ago too. It so doesn't seem to make sense. The scientist looked at the data they gathered and that was the only reasonable way to describe what they saw. Just goes to show what a crazy universe we live in and how much we don't yet understand.
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Oh, really cool Nova "trilogy" about finding a unified theory. Sounds like some of the last stuff you mentioned, aka. I can't remember right now what it was called. I loved it, though I wished it gave a little more specific information.
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posted
It was "The Elegant Universe," named after Brian Greene's book (Greene was the host). Definitely a very popularized and vague treatment of the subject.
I may have the chance to meet Greene at a philosophy of physics conference in May. That'd be cool.
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posted
Let me also point out another possibility: that large sections of most religious works are just convenient fictions written to make sense to the audience alive at the time the words were written.
I recognize that not everyone here is going to appreciate this possibility, but I submit that it is at least as likely as the world having been created quickly in a pocket universe and then transferred to our own for the touch-up work (as has also been suggested on this thread).
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quote:Let me also point out another possibility: that large sections of most religious works are just convenient fictions written to make sense to the audience alive at the time the words were written.
I recognize that not everyone here is going to appreciate this possibility, but I submit that it is at least as likely as the world having been created quickly in a pocket universe and then transferred to our own for the touch-up work (as has also been suggested on this thread).
Well, yes, but if we admit that possibility, we might as well also admit the possibility that scientists are mistaken in thinking the earth is so old, and Genesis is literally true - another that many won't appreciate, but is probably as likely some of these other theories.
posted
You've also got to add another "if" to that one -- that all observational evidence is meaningless, and/or forged by God. If you add that "if," however, your statement is correct. And I agree that it's no more or less likely than some of the other theories put forward on this thread.
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posted
Tom, clearly we have little understanding of the large scale features of the universe, either in time or space. We don't know what causes big bangs, for instance, and we don't understand where qualia come from in brain studies.
There's nothing in science or in the established observations that rules out God. Plenty of cosmologists are religious. Just thought I'd point that out.
Brigham Young said that everything that's true is part of our religion. I believe that.
posted
One thig that hasn't quit been mentioned is that mabey what is 7 days was just the closet thig the Human mind could come up with. Just as mabey it wasn't an appel thats Adam and Eve ate rather it was some other act such as genetic munipulation or some such thing.
An exaple from an OSC book is when Ender is talking to the Hive queen about philotes he recives the word doorway for how they arrive but that is just his mind trying to give the process a word/name.
quote:You've also got to add another "if" to that one -- that all observational evidence is meaningless, and/or forged by God.
Why would that be needed? No human being has ever observed the origin of the earth, or anything prior to the dawn of mankind.
Now, maybe we should add "if people have misinterpreted the implications of the observational evidence." But we'd pretty much have to add that condition to every explanation, since all these explanations (even the literal Genesis explanation) are supposedly based of observational evidence, and each involves claiming every other alternative explanation has misinterpreted the implications of the observational evidence in some way.
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posted
The Elegant Universe is online here in its entirety. I highly recommend you take the time to watch it, but keep in mind that this is only one idea about the way the universe works. It's compelling because it's so good at explaining things, but very hard to prove.
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quote:Tom, clearly we have little understanding of the large scale features of the universe, either in time or space. We don't know what causes big bangs, for instance
Alexander Vilenkin has a theory about that. I think it was in Amer. Jrn. Phys. a while back.
There is also the possibility (if you accept string theory) of brane collisions causing big bangs.
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quote: One thig that hasn't quit been mentioned is thats what is 7 days was just the closet thig the Human mind could come up with. Just as mabey it wasn't an appel thats Adam and Eve ate rather it was some other act such as genetic munipulation or some such thing.
I am reminded of a science fiction short story that I read as a child. Moses comes to Aaron, all excited, and explaining all about the big bang, billions of years, galaxies forming, entropy, etc.. Aaron has to stop him because they don't have enough parchment to go through all of that. "How many pages do we have?" "We have seven pages for that" "Ok. In the beginning..."
Has anybody else read that? I would love to know what it was.
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