The Ever-Changing Speed of Light - More Evidence for Creationism

[GenesisNemesis]

As usual evilutionists are still struggling with their explanation of the origin of the Universe

http://m.phys.org/news/2014-06-physicist-slower-thought.html

If Franson's ideas turn out to be correct, virtually every measurement taken and used as a basis for cosmological theory, will be wrong. Light from the sun for example, would take longer to reach us than thought, and light coming from much more distant objects, such as from the Messier 81 galaxy, a distance of 12 million light years, would arrive noticeably later than has been calculated—about two weeks later. The implications are staggering—distances for celestial bodies would have to be recalculated and theories that were created to describe what has been observed would be thrown out. In some cases, astrophysicists would have to start all over from scratch.

 

[Keith&Co.]

When kindergarten teacher says 'that snake's harmless' it means something different than when a herpetologist says 'that snake's harmless.' The later is often considering just how venomous, and whether or not the local emergency room has an antivenin handy.

So when this says 'distances would have to be recalculated' are we talking about a slightly cozier universe or what? I mean, if you have to go to another galaxy to find a 2-week difference, what does that mean for the distance to Proxima? Or the Sun?

 

[dystopian]

When kindergarten teacher says 'that snake's harmless' it means something different than when a herpetologist says 'that snake's harmless.' The later is often considering just how venomous, and whether or not the local emergency room has an antivenin handy.

So when this says 'distances would have to be recalculated' are we talking about a slightly cozier universe or what? I mean, if you have to go to another galaxy to find a 2-week difference, what does that mean for the distance to Proxima? Or the Sun?

It doesn't necessarily mean much to the average person of course. But still, I can imagine that even minute differences in stellar distances could mess up all sorts of models that would then have to be recalculated in order to provide an accurate result. It's like an architect designing a building under the assumption that material x can bear a load of y, when in fact it can only support a load of y-1; it probably won't have any big effects, but would you really want to live in a skyscraper designed on a flawed assumption regarding how much weight its core material could sustain?

 

[Keith&Co.]

but would you really want to live in a skyscraper designed on a flawed assumption regarding how much weight its core material could sustain?

Well, that's still what i'm asking. When they say that this calculation was wrong, do they mean that the load limit per floor is one pencil less than they thought it was, but with an included safety margin of 400 pounds, or is it off by three 250-pound executives, with a safety margin of 400 pounds?

Because either way, the creationists are going to say that the building's unsafe because science was wrong. I'm just trying to get a handle on how wrong....

Like Asimov said, "People used to believe the world was flat. That was wrong. People then thought the world was a sphere. THAT turned out to be wrong. But it's foolish to think that the latter is AS wrong as the former."

or something like that....

 

[James Brown]

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Link to great essay. Asimov didn't argue on message boards with Creationists, but he did receive many letters from them. Here's another great line:

[O]nce scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.

This is exactly correct, and has not changed since the days of Aristotle and Eratosthenes. Folks like rhutchin and the members of Answers in Genesis find popular articles that state, essentially, "Latest findings show that theory X is still not fully complete." They then trumpet these headlines as proof that science has learned nothing and that we should just read our Bibles and turn our attention to more important matters.

And as Asimov would say to those folks, "You're more wrong than all the others put together."