posted
Science doesn't start with an outcome you want to prove. It works by trying to falsify the hypothesis. I can't take Creation Science seriously as long as these people are trying to prove something. When they try to DISprove their hypothesis and then repeatedly fail, I'll begin to listen.
This is not even remotely similar to science. You find a way to jimmy the data to give you the outcome on one tiny point - and then expect us to wipe out all the other evidence.
And the dead giveaway is the idea that lightspeed changes would have anything to do with radiation decay rates ... puh-leeeeze. This only works on people who are either ignorant or so eager to believe the outcome that they become functionally, deliberately ignorant.
And what's the point? Nowhere does the Bible claim and nowhere does God say that the document called "the Bible" is inerrant. This is a very late concept. There is no contradiction between science or religion as long as both parties are behaving rationally and recognizing the limits of our understanding of either source.
So why wreck science in order to affirm a relatively trivial point in religion - the literal inerrancy of Genesis? Why can't we just hold these questions in abeyance? If God thought it was essential to our salvation to know the exact way he created the earth, he would have told us so. But nowhere does Jesus suggest that to enter into the kingdom of heaven, you have to have correct opinions about creation.
Oh why, why, why did I plunge into the argument over creationism vs. darwinism? A plague on both your houses! Distorting evidence on either side, to "prove" points as meaningless as quantifying angelic pinhead dancing.
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quote: This makes it difficult to have a conversation on scientific merits, or indeed with anyone who does not share your assumption about the accuracy of the Bible.
Now, I can laugh at you all - until rivka, Raia or Ela come and provoke me for patronising you on the Bible's accuracy.
Who'd believe I'd love Hebrew? I mean, the Bible has some poetry that English simply distorted.... So I gain from reading the true Psalms of David.
Then, "he makes me lie down in green pastures", "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures", "He takes me to lush pastures", "In pastures of tender grass He causeth me to lie down", - none mean "בנאות דשא ירביצני". That's because "נאות" also can be used in the context of an oasis.
Hey, who can blame the translators?
[ April 06, 2005, 03:00 PM: Message edited by: Jonathan Howard ]
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So our scientific determination of the age of the earth should have no bearing on the validity of a Biblical account. There is no timebase. There can be no absolute measure of elapsed periods. It doesn't matter whether we call it days, weeks, or eons; past events happened at the rate that they happened.
posted
Thanks Ya'll. I'm forwarding him the link to this thread. Keep on the disucssion, its fascinating. (Spock Ears)
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posted
I keep wishing that Creationism will actually come up with something worthwhile, maybe a new perspective. But to date, I see nothing but holes.
Now, didn't the Catholic Church actually give an award to Stephen Hawking for his work on the big bang? They saw it as proof of a beginning to everything, as in Genesis. I believe they realize that the dates are not to be taken literally. What is one day in the life of an omnipresent Creator? Posts: 410 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
Waht you're talking about is philosophy. From a scientific perspective, a second is quite well defined -- of course anybody could call the word a "second" something else. That's not a some sort of pseudo-scientific concept called "timebases" or anything, that's called language.
And I'd like to point out I haven't been distorting evidence on either side
*can plague his own house, darn it*
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posted
Oh, and yes, considering time to have a flow is mistaken. WHich is why I put "speed" in quotation marks. There are different frames of reference, which we mentally conceive of as having different "rates" of time, though.
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My point is that a college of theologians can take the Bible a little more liberally, but many view it too literally.
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Though this isn't nessasarily a Darwin vs Creation debate its just me worried that my belief system of A: evolution is a theory that I think makes sense, B: The universe is billions - trillions of years old. and C: if there is a heaven I'll get in it for being a good person and D: The revolution will come to all nations. So seeing anything that conflicts with the big 4 made me anxious so I looked to the Hatrack family for guidence and a second (and third and fourth...) opinion. So far I'm satisfied with the result but the discussion has gotten very interesting and I hope for it to continue.
However in the context of the discussion this indirectly becomes a creation vs darwin thingy because evolution requiring millions of years would be "disproven" supposedly if the Earth was only <= 10,000 years. And wow Mr Card sir, this is the first time I've seen you post on this side of the forums.
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quote:From a scientific perspective, a second is quite well defined
...as long as the surface tension of water, the speed of light, and the strong nuclear force remain constant relative to some absolute standard outside the system.
But in reality the whole thing could change and we'd never know it.
Can we take today's "seconds" and use them to measure periods that elapsed between yesterday's events? Sure, but our results would be in todayseconds, not yesterdayseconds. And we can all agree that there is no scientific basis for equating todayseconds with yesterdayseconds.
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posted
Based on a literal interpretation of Genesis, There is water above the sky.
quote: Genesis 1: 6 And God said, "Let there be space between the waters, to separate water from water." 7 And so it was. God made this space to separate the waters above from the waters below. 8And God called the space "sky." This happened on the second day. And God said, "Let the waters beneath the sky be gathered into one place so dry ground may appear." And so it was. 10 God named the dry ground "land" and the water "seas."
Or in simpler terms, the atmosphere of the earth was originally formed between two great expanses of water. The water below the atmosphere was then gathered together to expose the land.
If you insist on a literal translation of genesis, then no only should you be seeking to prove that the earth was created in exactly 7 24 hour periods, but also to prove that outer space is not a vacuum but is actually water.
[ April 06, 2005, 03:25 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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posted
Another one of my friends put forward a theory that the loss of that extra layer or water caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, since supposedly that water allowed for more oxygen. Though how god knows how many millions of tons of water can possibly be held above the amtosphere and not fall towards gravity is beyond me, unless that water is the atmoshpere.
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posted
Well, no, its not dependent on most of that stuff at all.
And even what its dependent on doesn't really work like what you're talking about. Time perspective doesn't really change like that.
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quote: The astounding fact, as noted in another context a page or two earlier, is that we do have a direct observation pertaining to ancient decay rates! The light of supernova SN1987A, in its trailing phases, was produced almost entirely by the radioactive decay of cobalt-56, at first, then cobalt-57 a few years later. Those two nuclides of cobalt were positively identified by their gamma rays as they decayed. In both cases the rate at which the light faded precisely matched the decay rates for cobalt-56 and cobalt-57! (Regarding the claim that the speed of light may have slowed down, see topic A6.)
All we need now is the distance to SN1987A which turns out to be around 170,000 light-years (i.e. 52,700 parsecs). See topic A6 for more details. Surprisingly, that distance does not depend on the speed of light (in a Newtonian sense). Putting it all together, we reach the firm conclusion that we are seeing SN1987A as it was about 170,000 years ago. Thus, as it were, we have a window on the past which confirms that there has been no changes in the decay rates for cobalt-56 and cobalt-57. Hence, there is no reason for believing that any of the decay rates have changed as quantum mechanics describes them all and has been vindicated in the case of the two cobalt isotopes.
Jay, the "scientific" paper you linked to ( http://www.icr.org/research/df/index.html ) had I think one equation--sorry if I missed some. And though written from a creationist POV, it finds a large number of flaws in creationist astronomy.
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quote:Well, no, its not dependent on most of that stuff at all.
Well our good ole cesium fountain clock at the NIST depends on all that stuff.
quote:Time perspective doesn't really change like that.
Nobody can know for sure if it changes or how it changes. To assume that it remains constant is also a mistake.
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posted
Oh, we have a pretty good idea of many of the ways it changes -- we have measured time distortion due to relativity, for instance.
Of course, we could have a limited or incorrect understanding, but that's always true. The most we can say is that what you're talking about makes zero sense in the context of modern physics.
Also, your link is only a problem if we presume science can explain everything. It likely can't, and I don't presume it can.
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I think it's silly for these Bible believers to take up arms in defense of their concept of the age of the earth, when time itself is an unknown commodity.
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posted
You were presenting this as a thought that somehow impacts science, which it doesn't and couldn't as far as we know.
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quote:Another one of my friends put forward a theory that the loss of that extra layer or water caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, since supposedly that water allowed for more oxygen. Though how god knows how many millions of tons of water can possibly be held above the amtosphere and not fall towards gravity is beyond me, unless that water is the atmoshpere.
But the Genesis account doesn't describe a layer of water above. Clouds clearly don't fill the description. The literal picture described is that there was water everywhere and to create the earth, God first made a layer of air in the water and then put land in the water below the air and the sun moon and stars in the water above the air. The Genesis account literal says that the Universe is water. That account is pretty well irreconcilable with modern science.
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quote:Someone tell me how entropy can effect the speed of light please?
Since the constant we are talking about is the speed of light in a vacuum, entropy is irrelevant. Entropy is a property of matter and there is no matter in a vacuum.
The speed of light in any region of space containing matter, will be slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. In fact, a material has been constructed in which the speed of light is ~ 38 mph. There is a general trend for light to propagate more slowly in denser more highly ordered materials (ie materials with lower entropy). I don't know how strong the correlation is between the entropy of a material and the speed of light in that material but even if is a strong causal correlation, it would be irrelevant because the constant "speed of light in a vacuum" is by definition independent of entropy.
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quote:You were presenting this as a thought that somehow impacts science
...or the originator of this thread might have been.
I'm not going to come up with any thoughts that might impact science sitting here at my desk.
My first love and my first attempt at a college major was geology. It always bothered me that the earth was billions of years old, but that Moses wrote that it all came together in days. Those articles about time in the September 2002 issue of Scientific American helped to settle my mind upon a reasonable explanation.
I've got some thoughts about anti-gravity and luminiferous aether that might be fun to punch holes in. Gotta explain how angels' feet don't touch the ground and how prayer works without a transmitter.
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posted
This is kind of off topic but it doesnt deserve a whole new thread. Can someone tell me what this 10,000 year mark has to do with the Bible and it not being true? I have heard 10,000 a number of times but I do not understand how it proves or disproves anything. Thanks alot whoever answers this for me.
quote:And the dead giveaway is the idea that lightspeed changes would have anything to do with radiation decay rates ... puh-leeeeze. This only works on people who are either ignorant or so eager to believe the outcome that they become functionally, deliberately ignorant.
I'm sorry to have to point this out again, but decay rates do in fact depend on the speed of light. Alpha, the fine structure constant, is inversely proportional to the speed of light; it determines the strength of the electromagnetic interaction.
Now, the last time I posted on this subject, I said that since the electromagnetic and weak forces are unified, alpha would influence G_F, the Fermi coupling constant which determines weak decay rates. Having thought about it, I don't believe this is accurate : Electroweak unification occurs at energy scales where the mass of the weak carriers (about 80 GeV) may be considered negligible, while nuclear decay occurs at energies of a few keV - many orders of magnitude below that unification point.
However, there are a few slightly more subtle effects of changing the speed of light that would still occur. First, of course, E = mc^2 (actually, this only applies to particles at rest, but let the subtleties go for now). Now, when you do the quantum mechanics of a decay, you find that the rate is proportional to a quantity called the phase space, which grows as more energy becomes available to the decay. Let me run that by you again : Before the decay, you have a mother particle of mass M, and energy Mc^2. Afterwards you have two (or more, but let me stick to two for simplicity) daughters, whose total mass is M' = m_1 + m_2, so the total energy is (m_1 + m_2)c^2. (Again ignoring kinetic energy). The decay can only proceed if M' is less than M; thus the mass-energy after the decay is less than you had before the decay. This is what makes atom bombs work, in that you can extract energy from fission. However, energy does not disappear : The mass-energy has gone over to kinetic energy, and the larger that kinetic energy is, the greater the phase space.
Now we can get to the point : The kinetic energy released in the decay is just (M-M')c^2. In other words, if you change c, more energy becomes available, the phase space grows, and the decay goes faster.
This reasoning applies to all decays; for the special case of alpha decay, there is another effect. Unfortunately this is a bit difficult to explain without a blackboard, but I'll do my best.
Alpha particles are essentially helium nuclei : Two protons, two neutrons. Thus they have two units of positive charge. We can assume for the purposes of this calculation that the helium nucleus exists inside the larger radioactive nucleus before the decay occurs; this is reasonable as helium nuclei are very stable, so if one formed by accident it would stick around for a while.
Nuclei are held together by the strong nuclear force. This force has a very short range; if the helium nucleus gets out beyond about 10^-15 m from the center of the nucleus, it stops operating, the electromagnetic repulsion takes over, and you have a decay. However, this can't happen, because the strong force is very strong.
Ah, but wait - this is quantum mechanics, where anything can happen. The position of the alpha particle is somewhat analogous to a marble in a glass buried on the top of a heap of sand. If the marble could get out of the cup, it would roll down the pile; but it can't get through the walls. Except through the phenomenon of tunneling. In essence, the alpha particle is bouncing against the walls several million times a second, and each time, there is a small but nonzero chance it will tunnel through and find itself free.
Now, if you change the strength of the electromagnetic force, you change the distance the particle has to tunnel; and the probability of a decay depends very strongly - exponentially, in fact - on that distance. A stronger electromagnetic force leads to a shorter tunneling distance and faster decay rates.
The problem with this approach, of course, is that a faster speed of light gives you a smaller fine structure constant and a weaker electromagnetic force. Hence slower, not faster, decay rates. But oh well, who cares about mere math when the Bible is on your side? You would have to do some very careful math to find out how any given change in c would affect alpha decay rates.
Then there's gamma decays. Now gamma decays occur when a nucleus is in an excited state, which it de-excites from by spitting out a photon. At some point that photon will have coupled to a quark, and the likelihood of that happening is, again, proportional to alpha (the fine structure constant). So once again, faster lightspeed would lead to slower gamma decay rates.
We see, then, that the question of how lightspeed changes affect radioactive decay rates is by no means trivial. If you increase lightspeed, the phase space increases for all types of decays, alpha, beta, and gamma. But the matrix elements for alpha and gamma decays go down. The decay rate is proportional to the product of the two. So you might see beta decays getting faster while alpha and beta slow down, or remain the same, or get faster but less so than beta. Or alpha might be more affected than gamma. In short, you would need to do some fairly heavy math to find the exact effects.
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posted
Oh, and as someone pointed out, the speed of light depends on the permittivity and permeability of free space. Now, alpha is inversely proportional to the permittivity, but not to the permeability. So you get an additional effect depending on how you change the speed of light : If you do so by changing the permeability of free space, you just get what I outlined above, but if you change the permittivity, the effect would be slightly smaller. (Or larger if I've remembered the relation between permittivity and lightspeed wrongly).
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posted
skillery -- the thing is, you don't have to. So long as there's no measurable mechanism for prayers to be received, they can happen in a totally (scientifically) impossible way.
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quote:decay, you find that the rate is proportional to a quantity called the phase space, which grows as more energy becomes available to the decay...The mass-energy has gone over to kinetic energy, and the larger that kinetic energy is, the greater the phase space.
So the rate of decay increases with an increase in heat? Was the universe much hotter in the past than it is now? Maybe you'll say that there hasn't been a significant change in the heat of the universe over the last 15 billion years, but a fraction of a second after the big bang, wasn't the universe hot enough that the speed of light was different from what it is now?
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posted
Ah, no. I phrased that badly. I should have said, "the more energy comes out of the decay". Any external energy, such as the kinetic energy from heat, can always be removed by considering the decay in the rest frame of the particle.
Let me put that another way. All reference frames are equal; this is basic Einstein. No matter what speed a particle is going at, there exists a frame in which it is at rest. So decays are not speeded up by heat, because they go at the same speed in our frame of reference as in the rest-frame of the particle.
In principle, you could postulate so much heat that the rest frame of the particle is moving at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light; that would look to us as though the decay was slowing down. However such temperatures have not exited in the Universe since about 10^-30 seconds after the big Bang, and at that time, there were no nuclei anyway. Nor could nuclei exist at such a temperature, they'd fall apart as soon as they collided.
DIT : In any case, while the speed of light affects the decay rate, the reverse is not true.
[ April 06, 2005, 08:41 PM: Message edited by: King of Men ]
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Heat is an aggreggate property of a lot of molecules.
When you're talking about one molecule, it doesn't have any heat, though as part of a system it may contribute to the heat by having a high energy (kinetic energy, perhaps).
posted
Well, that's true, of course, but there is a sloppy-language sense in which temperature does exist. Namely, consider a particle having some definite energy : If a large assembly of particles had that as their average kinetic energy, that would define some definite temperature. Conversely, in an assembly of a given temperature, there is a well-defined average energy. So particle physicists often talk of even a single particle having a temperature.
Also, any quantum system has a temperature, in the sense that temperature is just the derivative of energy with respect to entropy.
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quote:So the rate of decay increases with an increase in heat?
What do you mean by "heat"? Since you connect this with temperature, I assume you mean the energy that is "stored" in the random kinetics of atoms and molecules. This energy is orders of magnitude smaller than the nuclear binding energies involved in radioactive decay.
For example, the energy released in the formation of a single Iron 56 nucleas from free protons and neutrons would be sufficient to increase the temperature of a gram of water (~3x10^22 molecules of water) by about 4 million °C. Because the thermal kinetic energies of molecules are so much smaller than the nuclear binding energies, temperature has no effect on decay rates of atomic nuclei.
[ April 06, 2005, 09:26 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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posted
Um, Rabbit, I think you're off by a couple of orders of magnitude there. Just intuition, but it doesn't feel right. Do you mind showing your calculation?
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posted
Remember, when citing the meaning of Hebrew words, that the Bible - Torah, the histories and the prophets and the poets - ARE the repository of the ancient Hebrew language. So words that occur in the Bible have shaped the language - but have also been shaped by it. There are words that are now taught as if they were unambiguous in meaning, which once were ambiguous.
When someone who has been to Hebrew School tells you what a word in the Bible means, he is not telling you what it meant to the original writers of the text, he is telling you what it is now taken to mean in that context by contemporary Jewish scholars; there are many old arguments behind those conclusions, and it is merely a matter of faith whether you believe the meaning that prevailed at the end of those arguments is, in fact, the original intent of the writers.
Translation is a tricky thing - not only between languages, but between centuries in the "same" language. This is true of every language, including Hebrew. Contemporary speakers cannot always accurately recover original meanings.
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quote: Contemporary speakers cannot always accurately recover original meanings.
No, but if you know many Aramaic nouns and adjectives, several verbs, and are studying Arabic seriously - you know a little more.
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quote:Remember, when citing the meaning of Hebrew words, that the Bible - Torah, the histories and the prophets and the poets - ARE the repository of the ancient Hebrew language. So words that occur in the Bible have shaped the language - but have also been shaped by it. There are words that are now taught as if they were unambiguous in meaning, which once were ambiguous.
When someone who has been to Hebrew School tells you what a word in the Bible means, he is not telling you what it meant to the original writers of the text, he is telling you what it is now taken to mean in that context by contemporary Jewish scholars; there are many old arguments behind those conclusions, and it is merely a matter of faith whether you believe the meaning that prevailed at the end of those arguments is, in fact, the original intent of the writers.
That is an excellent point, and one I hadn't thought of. Very interesting.
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posted
Okay, so we know that a change in c can effect decay rates, but are the decay rates changing in such a way that it can be attributed to a change in c?
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posted
I always thought the assumption that the decay rate is constant is pretty safe. I hadn't heard of any experimental confirmation. That's pretty cool.
What I'm still not clear on is how they know the original proportion of isotopes. Small changes there can have big effects in dating. Seems you'd have to know precisely when something died thousands of years ago to experimentally confirm it. Have such tests been done in sufficient quantity to give us high confidence?
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posted
I have a question for people here, and I hope you pardon my lengthy background for why I ask this question:
I have often heard the terms "science" (or "real science") and "pseudo-science" bandied around with creation-evolution discussions. What do they mean? If you can't provide a totally objective definition of either, then what does it mean to you? An implicit assumption made with regard to these terms is that "science" can produce objective truth, but "pseudo-science" cannot (or maybe some would just say it does not guarantee objective truth). What basis do people have for these assumptions? Both the assumption that Science can, and the assumption that Pseudo-science cannot.
The reason I ask is that I have found that for most people, myself included, we distrust the findings or implications of people or ideas that have been branded pseudo-scientific by others, often before actually evaluating their work personally.
I grew up in a Christian home but was also taught to highly value science and knowledge, and evolution/million of years ideas were an obvious part of everything I learned and believed. When I was in high school and found that my parents had difficulty reconciling the Bible to science, I quickly gave them a lecture on metaphors and how the Bible clearly was talking about "why", and objective science answers the "how," and the realms of the two did not overlap. I did not ever have anyone tell me that; those were conclusions I had come to myself based on my own reasoning. My parents readily accepted this, and do to this day.
Another aspect of my upbringing is that I progressed rapidly in school. This isn't a subject I like to talk about because it's no fun when everyone you know thinks of you as the "smart" kid, and the first thing people ask you when they meet you is "how old are you?" because you're obviously too young to be their peer. As a side note, this is one reason Ender's Game resonated so well with me, and I became interested in OSC's work to begin with. Like Ender, I consciously worked to overcome this social stigma, and still be the "best" at everything. My parents say they never pushed me to skip grades in school, and I acknowledge that they often tried to discourage me from doing everything so fast, because they wanted me to have a normal life. However, their attitude spoke louder than words, and I grew up thinking that knowledge and academic performance was the most important thing in life, and that I was going to be someone "great" in that I would be famous and do something amazing. This was also pushed on me by many of my teachers and friends, who would often make comments like saying I would grow up to cure cancer or something. Well, this had to come to a halt. When I was the equivalent of a Junior in college at the age of 15, I started thinking about what the point of it all was. I was majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science, and was having a hard time seeing what exactly I could do that would be so great. Making the most money was clearly not a great goal in life, neither was any academic pursuit I could think of. The stuff I was the most interested in was the most abstract mathematics and least practical to help people in their daily lives. What good would that do? And I even began to think, even if I had pursued more practical sciences and cured diseases or made people's lives better, what was still the point of that? What was really the point in saving lives? They would die anyway. What was the point of making people happy? People will always have something to gripe about. I was in a spiral that was drawing me dangerously close to complete nihilism and apathy about absolutely everything, except for the fact that I did still cling to the idea of God existing somewhere, and having some sort of solution to this dilemma.
That's primarily the reasoning that drove me to accept a literal interpretation of creation according to Genesis. My background in logic and questioning into mathematical philosophy gave me the intellectual tools I needed to overcome the belief that all scientific knowledge as I knew it then pointed toward a old earth and evolutionary origins of life, without also holding views I would deem inconsistent. At that point, I still viewed "creation science" as "pseudo-science", and continued to do so for a while. I just also began to view evolutionary/long age thought with the same level of skepticism, because I knew both were equally based on foundational assumptions. It was only later, after I had already come to these conclusions from a philosophical point of view, that I began to read creationist ideas and materials, and allowed myself to be influenced by them to reconstruct a view of history consistent with what I now know to be true. Furthermore, my desire to find purpose in life told me that the only way life could have any meaning was if evolution was not true, and the literal truth of the Genesis account was a historical reality. I then realized it did not really matter what "great things" I might do with my life; there was no great or small if it was done to God's glory as he intended for us to when he gave us a paradise to live in and have dominion over. However our sin has rejected that goodness that God created for us, and so we have death and suffering now in this world as a result of our actions, not part of the original creation that God called Very Good. And that physical death and suffering was instituted in God's mercy as a loving punishment so that we would see the consequences of our suffering, as I could readily see in my own search for truth. If I had not been driven to desperation to find meaning to life, if we had all still been living sinfully in a physical paradise, I would never have come to the realization that I am not my own authority.
I am now happily married, and I consider one of the greatest roles I play in this life to be that of a husband and hopefully a father soon. I can be satisfied in my job because I know I work to the glory of my creator. And I try to share what I know about my purpose in life with others, so that they too would know. But the point of all this background is that I only allowed myself to question what I "knew" about science until I was driven to a point of desperation in a search for meaning. When things are labeled "real science" or "pseudo-science" by people, they are operating under specific assumptions which I find people don't often know exist. So my question is, are these assumptions justified?
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quote: The problem with this approach, of course, is that a faster speed of light gives you a smaller fine structure constant and a weaker electromagnetic force. Hence slower, not faster, decay rates.
Are you sure about this, KoM? There seems to be some contradictions with what I recall.
For one, according to one of the references I found at Talk.Origins (see my previous post), they said decay rates would be faster with a faster speed of light.
For another, there is the relationship between electric permittivity and magnetic permeability and the speed of light per Maxwell’s equations. Since the speed of light squared is equal to the inverse of permittivity and permeability, increasing the speed of light would require a decrease in the permittivity and permeability constants.
Since the electric force is inversely proportional to the permittivity constant, wouldn’t that imply that increasing the speed of light would increase the electromagnetic force?
(Don’t ya’ll love it when we speak in Jargon? )
Admittedly, I may be mistaken in my physics. It’s been quite a few years since I worked with the equations, I don’t have my Feymann’s lectures in front of me, and I was never really all that good at it anyway. But when I examined this problem previously, I recall deciding that the electric force would have to increase with an increase in the speed of light. Am I mistaken?
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posted
Avin: there's nothing (scientifically) wrong with believing something for non-scientific reasons. Its asserting those beliefs are scientific when they're not that's problematic. Your belief in creationism seems founded on a religious philosophy, which is perfectly fine. We can't know, scientifically, so believing otherwise for nonscientific reasons is scientifically reasonable.
However, we can come very close to knowing due to a preponderance of evidence, such as with the age of the earth. Anyone asserting science's estimates of the age of the earth are scientifically incorrect, as most YECs (Young Earth Creationists) do, needs actual scientific evidence. Beliefs founded on philosophy don't count.
However, most of the proposed "evidence" is laughable. Lets take a look at one of my favorites, the moon dust argument. Here's how its presented in the link Jay has on "the current state of creation astronomy":
quote:Lunar Dust
Back in the 1960's estimates of the depth of the dust on the moon were made. This was important information to know during the Apollo program, because if there were a thick layer, the lunar landers could have sunk and disappeared. The dust on the moon results from meteors falling onto the surface. Each meteor strike, no matter how small, knocks some debris from surface rocks, and this gradually accumulates along with the incoming material. If we can measure the rate at which meteors are falling today, then we can estimate how much should accumulate over 4.6 Gyr. Actually, this would be an upper estimate since the meteor flux would have been greater in the past. Measurements of the meteor flux made nearly 40 years ago indicated that the lunar dust should be many meters thick. The actual depth is only a few centimeters, consistent with a recent creation but not an old one.
This remained a mystery until new meteor flux measurements in the early 1970's were far lower, consistent with the measured depth of lunar dust and an old age. Creationists apparently were ignorant of these newer measurements that were consistent with an ancient moon, and were rightly criticized [52, pp. 143-145], [53, pp. 67-82] for this lapse. Snelling and Rush [49] have reevaluated this issue, and they recommended against using this argument for recent creation.
Many creationists have abandoned this argument, but some continue to use it. It seems that there are some questions about the more recent meteor flux measurements, especially when one considers that the earlier measurements that were supposedly too high have never been explained. About the time that the paper by Snelling and Rush appeared, a new, more direct, and higher measurement of meteoroid influx was published [34]. This has been one factor in the rejection of some creationists to the warning by Snelling and Rush against this argument. The newer measurements should not be taken as the final word in this matter, and future measurements should be carefully monitored. Furthermore, laboratory measurements show that the bulk of lunar dust is made of lunar material rather than meteoritic material (the ratio could be as much as 67:1 [12, pp. 213-215]). If that is the case, then the depth of lunar dust would be more consistent with a young moon rather than a 4.6 billion year old moon.
First, they just say meteor flux would have been greater in the past. That's incredibly scientific -- we'll assume something that supports our argument without even a theoretical argument to back it up. Not that such an argument's hard to come by, but there needs to be one.
Then they talk about how the dust should be many meters thick given a certain rate of accumulation. The argument is clearly that any dust must remain there in a powdery form. They're neglecting a few things, even assuming that high rate of accumulation:
meteorites compact material as well
dust compacts itself, take a look at all the sorts of rocks on earth that form from pressure
once you have a layer of dust down, subsequent meteor impacts don't knock of more and more lunar material into dust, they just move the existing dust around
There are more points to be made, but you get the idea. I'll give this paper the credit for acknolwedging that those old estimates of lunar dust accumulation were likely hooey, but note they still insist there's a possibility that they weren't. The thing is, even if they weren't, they wouldn't be at all inconsistent with an old moon for the reasons I've cited above. Or then there's the convenient ignoring of evidence:
quote:What is left unexplained by gradual reversals over millions or billions of years is how the field is regenerated once it ceases to exist.
is stated in reference to the earth's magnetic field's reversals. This is silly for a number of reasons. That these magnetic field reversals happen can be practically "read off the rocks", its not some weird interpolation. Also, allow me to propose a very simple explanation for why our magentic field decreases in magnitude then increases again, rotating in the opposite direction, that is, where the energy comes from. The freakin' rotation and orbit of the earth! Its not like we have to look far for where the energy's coming from. We've got a core which, when turned, rotates at a different speed than the mantle. That's your basic electric motor right there. There's nothing mysterious about where the electric/magnetic field gets its energy fed from, as they strongly suggest.
Anyone with a basic high school science education and a little thoughtpower should be able to understand a high rate of lunar dust accumulation doesn't mean the dust has to be really thick if the moon is old, or where the earth's magnetic field might get energy from. That they're suggesting the former is necessary, or that the latter is mysterious, reflects significant ignorance and/or intentional misdirection.
That article is a prime example of pseudo-science. It looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, and it quacks like many people think a duck should quack like, but a duck thinks it sounds like a guinea fowl.
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But when I examined this problem previously, I recall deciding that the electric force would have to increase with an increase in the speed of light. Am I mistaken?
