So let me get this straight...now you're accusing me of not reading the books/papers I'm quoting, or not having the understanding of the science myself to discuss this? I'm "copying out creation talking points" I took from a youtube video? WTF is that? crowtrobot's website quotes 3 separate books from Dalrymple. I'll have to check that out. It's odd, though...I ask about uncertainty in the assumptions Liddy made and you give me meteorites. Can't you just say: you're right, that's something that is might not potentially be a good assumption, instead of changing the subject? Don't get me wrong, the meteorite data was fun to read and I'll read more of dalrymple so that I'm not cherry-picking, but neither of you in your posts answered the question I asked. I'm kind of getting used to it, though. Which part of my post of prompted to you write 4 paragraphs agreeing with me, and to ignore the question about rates of formation and decay being constant and at equilibrium (assumption #2). Supposedly you've got every scientist in the world on your side, but the question isn't being answered!
I'm saying I have heard these arguments before and to be mindful of your sources. Ken Ham isn't an idiot because he is a theist. He's an idiot because he has no understanding of science and tries to cope his beliefs to anything. He comes into investigation with a bias. Plus assuming you believe in the literal creation story, then you should know it says that the earth is flat and how rain supposedly works (flat out wrong on both accounts). I wanted to expand on your analysis and similar ones because science is not limited to one field of study (i did get carried away, but i was having too much fun typing about it ). But every time someone attempts to give you an answer, you try to cope it with your worldview. In other words, you are investigating a crime scene with the assumption that the accused is guilty. Creation "Scientists" search and choose which evidence supports their hypothesis, ignoring other finds in the universe and on our planet. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html
I wonder what your take on my post is... I tried to point out that things may not be what they appear to be even though we can measure them. An example I didn't give, perhaps to make things clearer, would be if now were shortly after the big bang - the mass of everything was in a much more confined volume, gravity's effect would be much more powerful, and I don't see how we'd measure much of anything as we do now. Or if we looked for water on the earth 4.5B years ago, we'd have found none. The ~13.5B age of the universe offers another paradox (that is addressed on wikipedia, but not to my satisfaction). The universe is effectively a time machine of sorts. We're seeing light from the sun that took 8 minutes to reach our eye, so we're effectively seeing the sun as it was 8 minutes ago - if it exploded, we wouldn't know it for 8 minutes. As we look deeper into space, we're looking further back in time. So when scientists talk about seeing the oldest things 13.5B light years away, the light from those things would have traveled for 13.5B years and originated 13.5B years ago. Yet 13.5B years ago, the origin of that light would have been virtually right next to us. So how does it take light 13.5B years to reach us? It would make sense if we moved away from the source for this whole time at 99% the speed of light, even taking into account the expansion of the fabric of space time But we're not: The Earth travels around the Sun at 18.55 miles per second. The Sun travels around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at 487,383 mph or 135 miles per second. It takes 225 million years to make one circumference of the galaxy. The Sun is 4.6 billion years old, so it has made the trip 20.5 times. This WWW page says 1.9M miles/hour. http://www.jyi.org/features/ft.php?id=1346 In other words, we're not even travelling at 1/670th the speed of light let alone 99%.
everything we know about "shortly" after the big bang is inferred from evidence, not measured. the speed of revolution of the earth around the sun, sun around the galaxy etc. have nothing to do with the speed of the expansion of the universe. the furthest galaxies we can see are indeed being carried away from us at close to the speed of light by expansion. in fact cosmologists believe there is a lot we can't see beyond them moving away from us at FASTER than the speed of light (the relative speed of exansion between two objects is not constrained by the speed of light).
I know the universe is larger than the radius of 13.5B years by about 2x. Not enough to justify what you wrote about expansion being enough to carry things away from us at the speed of light. The 2x would make it 2/670ths, if you get my point. I also know that there is a "visible" universe which is determined by how far light can travel in 13.5B years. Assuming the big bang was a spherical explosion, the radius of that sphere would be 13.5B light years, or 27B diameter. We obviously cannot see 27B light years distance because light has had only 13.5B years to travel. That's not accounting for the ~60B diameter of the actual universe factoring in the expansion of space time. And as far as I've learned, the speed of light is not additive like other speeds are. If you are riding toward me on a beam of light and I am riding toward you on another, we do not appear to be coming towards each other at 2x the speed of light (but 1x!).
Cosmology's a bit out of my realm. My initial thought is that: if God did "speak the heavens and earth into existence" (and I get that that's fantasy to many), then I don't see a disconnect with His speaking into existence, say, a star that's 10B light-years away and moving farther. Or that He spoke into existence the residue of an exploded supernova I love planetary astronomy. I just diverged from that path at about the time it went into hard-core physics, since I was studying into the Aerospace Engineering track, not the Astro. I'll push the "I believe" button on your numbers, b/c I have no idea how something measures 13.5B light-years away (and moving away from us). I'll take that as a look-up...is there a better site than wiki to explain it?
Agreed, there's no disconnect. Nor is there a disconnect with God telling some dude to kill some other dude. Or with the idea that you will explode with the force of 1000 tons of TNT if you read the last sentence in this post. Or with, indeed, absolutely anything at all. Invisible little green people with penises on their heads walking among us and stealing our fingernail cuttings? God works in mysterious ways. barfo
the 1/670th speed of light thing you mention is nothing but a measure of the earth's local movment through space relative to our immediate surroundings. it is NOT a measure of the speed we are being carried away from more distant objects by the exansion of space itself. the earth's local movement through space and the expansion of space itself are two entirely different things.
except god would also have had to create the light from the star already in transit to make it look exactly like it had been travelling for 10 billion years. your god is apparently a devious trickster who likes to plant false evidence to fool humans.
The 1/670th is a measure of how fast you or I are moving when sitting still. It factors in the movement of the earth, the sun, and the milky way. The entire universe has expanded 2x larger than the radius that light would travel from the big bang to the "edge" of the universe. You can 2x our speed and it still doesn't make any sense that anything but light is travelling near light speed towards or away from us.
In case I wasn't clear... The big bang happened like 13.7B years ago. 13.5B years ago, the universe was a really dense place compared to now. The origin of the light that's now hitting our eyes had to be of a source really close to us (back then). If we're moving at 2M miles/hour away from the source and the source is moving 2M miles/hour away from us, it sure seems like light travelling at 670M miles/hour would have passed us by billions of years ago. If we were moving away from the source at the speed of light, the light would never reach our eyes. And when I say "back then" and "us", Earth wasn't formed until 4.5B years ago, so I'm basically talking about the space we occupy. If everything were stationary/static, and some star was 13.5B light years away, it would take 13.5B years for the light to reach our eyes (telescopes, whatever). As an aside, I once interviewed a fellow who was Chief Scientist for AT&T's Bell Labs for a job as a board member of a company I ran. His name is Arno Penzias.
it makes no sense to measure the speed of an object unless it is in relation to the frame of reference created by another object. there is no fixed background frame of reference that would allow you to say we are moving at 1/670 without referencing another object. you can only measure speed when comparing 2 specific objects (basic general relativity). using LOCAL nearby galaxies as a frame of reference, you might say that due to the revolution of the earth, rotation of the milky way etc we are moving at 1/670 speed of light relative to those galaxies. this however says nothing about the movement between objects due to the expansion of space, which is a different kind of motion you aren't accounting for - one that increases with distance. for the galaxies closest to us the rate of expansion is negligible and local movement can overwhelm it (andromeda is actually moving towards us). the further out you look, though, the greater and more prominent the rate of exansion becomes, quickly dwarfing local movment through space, to the point that the most distant galaxies we can see are indeed moving away from us at near the speed of light. think of this like objects moving around on the surface of a baloon WHILE the baloon is being inflated. an object's movment accross the surface of the baloon is local movement through space, while the expansion of the surface of the baloon itself due to it being inflated is like the expansion of space. the further away from us an object is on the exanding surface of the baloon the faster it will be moving away from us. this admittedly isn't gonna make sense if you don't have a basic understanding of GR. if you want to understand anything about cosmology gotta start there.
I get General Relativity, and I've already pointed out that the universe is 2x larger than the possible radius of the big bang explosion (assuming everything flew out from the center at C) due to this effect. My understanding is that we're moving in relation to the origin of the big bang at 1.9M miles/hour. And at an accelerating rate. It's also my understanding that when they are looking as far back in time as possible, they are looking toward where the cingularity was.
The answers are: 1) The speed of light is not a constant. 2) The forumula d = r x t is meaningless, since 'r' is indeterminate due to expansion of space. 3) Everything in the universe is not moving away from everything else (you mentioned Andromeda, though the Milky Way is currently in collision with 2 other galaxies) 4) Supposedly, you can in a finite time catch up with something "moving away from us at the speed of light or greater" travelling at only a slow velocity.
the expansion rate of the universe itself is (theoretically) not limited by the speed of light at all. in fact most current models of the big bang include an inflationary period where space expanded exponentially faster than the speed of light, leaving the universe exponentially larger than 14 billion light years wide. some cosmololgists think the space of our universe could even be infinite. the big bang happened everywhere in space and there is no "origin" point to measure our speed of expansion relative to. we can measure our movement THROUGH space relative to the cosmic microwave background radiation - which is everywhere, which might be what you read about (not sure), but again our movement through space is a different thing than measuring how fast 2 objects are being carried away from each other by the expansion of space itself. again, if there was truly a singularity (there isn't a consensus on that) it would have been everywhere in space. hard to conceptualize. yes what we see when we look further out is how the universe looked when it was younger. unfortunately the earliest universe would have been completely opaque so there is a limit on how far back we will be able to see.
One more thing. I take it that the Universe was a singularity because it's what the evidence presented to me says it was. In particular, I've seen a 3D image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope where the guy who runs the program was given 10% of the telescope time for whatever he chose. He chose to point the thing, I presume, toward the center of the universe and took this photo of the oldest things in the visible universe. If they didn't point the telescope toward the center of the universe, where the singularity was, then I don't understand how they could have taken such a picture.
again, there is no center of the universe - no point in space you can look towards that everthing is expanding from. the big bang (and the singularity if there was one) would have encompassed all of space obviously, and from any point in space right now would have appeared to happen everywhere in space equally. the singularity would now be everywhere equally. the big bang/singularity is like the inflating balloon surface. the surface starts very small, and as it expands all points on the surface of the balloon move away from each other, yet there is no point on the surface you can look to that everything is expanding from. the perspective looking along the surface is the same at any point on the surface. this is a 2D conceptualization of what is going on in our expanding 3D (4D) spacetime. the oldest light we can see is reaching us from all directions, and the oldest objects we can find could potentially be in any direction. and also again, we will never be able to "see" all the way back to the beginning using any technology, because the earliest universe was completely opaque to radiation. if there was a singularity we will only ever be able to infer it from indirect evidence.
