Starlight Within a Young Universe

It has been a challenge within the Christian community to come up with an answer to the question: "If the earth is only a few thousand years old, how do you explain the millions of years it takes for light from distant stars to reach earth?".I want to talk about two cosmologies; a well known cosmology, the Big Bang, and the creationists cosmology that D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D. has put forth.There is a book called "Starlight and Time; Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe" by Humphreys himself. This talks both about the Big Bang and his cosmology.The Big Bang, if I am correct, says that space AND matter are expanding. But also that matter goes out to infinity in any direction.
That in the beginning of the big bang, matter was more dense and hotter, but still goes out to infinity. Space itself was smaller in the beginning as well. It stretches and matter stretches with it. Like blowing into a balloon that has dots that represent galaxies on it expand as the balloon (space) expands. The dots are evenly spread out over the surface of the balloon. The balloon's surface is a 2-d representation of the 3-d universe to explain a 4-d universe in 3-d. the fourth dimension is not time. Humphrey uses the balloon to make it easier to understand.Humphreys cosmology is similar to this, except there is a center and a edge to the universe. But space and matter also expand. Consider the same balloon except the dots are located at one spot on the balloon.From what I understand is that the physics both cosmologies use, are IDENTICAL, like general relativity. The only difference is the starting assumptions.The Big Bang uses the starting assumption that the universe has no edge, and therefore has no center. But Humphreys assumption is this, that the stars are numbered, that is the universe has an edge, and therefore has a center. And we are close to the middle of it. Since matter distorts space, the whole universe in the beginning can be closely related to a black hole. That is, there is a dip in the balloon where the center of the mass is. And earth was below the event horizon where it experiences no time. So the outside boundary of the universe, as God is spreading out the heavens, move outside this event horizon and experience time faster than earth. Time also is distorted by gravity. So as the light travels from these outside galaxies, earth 's time is still slowed down or still stopped. But as time goes on, maybe on the sixth Earth day as space and the universe is spreading earth finally is at a point where time is matching more closely to that of the outside universe. This is because as matter spreads out the 'dip' in the black hole gets 'shallower' and thus eventually space is distorted less at the center as the universe gets less dense. Then on the 6th day when God created man, the light already on its path for billions of years came in on the sixth earth day for Adam to see all that God has created, including far reaching galaxies.Which starting assumption is correct? Or, if we do not know, why chose one over the other? Well, Humphreys has an explanation, he uses the Bible as a guide, and the Bible says that the stars are numbered. But also that earth, and us, human beings are central to God's creation.What reason does the big bang have over choosing the no center/no edge? I believe Humphrey is correct in saying that secular scientists have no scientific evidence for choosing this one. For only the two assumptions proposed can explain why every direction we point our telescope, the universe is relatively homogeneous. Instead, secular scientists have tried avoiding a center/edge due to religious implications. If we are at the center, (Life itself is improbable to form on its own, let alone forming a place that is relatively close to the center of the universe), it would seem we are maybe part of a special creation.

---

We have already shown that life is overwhelmingly loaded with information; it should be clear that a rigorous application of the science of information is devastating to materialistic philosophy in the guise of evolution, and strongly supportive of Genesis creation. Information, Science and Biology | Answers in Genesis

This makes no sense. If we are below the event horizon, how come we aren't ripped apart by gravitational forces? Nothing in here makes any sense. Do you even understand what a black hole is?But let's assume that somehow all of this is correct. Wouldn't it have been more accurate for the bible to say something like "a very very very old universe with a very young earth"? Here's the thing. How does Humphrey's version explain the cosmic background radiation predicted and discovered by the BB theory? Um, no. It's not just the direction that appear to be homogeneous, it's also the distance. According to Humphrey's version, shouldn't we find a hell of a lot more "stuff" nearer to us and a hell of a lot less "stuff" farther away? Scientists don't buy into the center implication because there is no evidence for them to do so.

---

Place yourself on the map at http://www.frappr.com/evc

​

The thread about this map can be found here.

If we were within the event horizon how did we escape? The only way I have heard of for anything to escape the gravity of a black hole is via Hawking Radiation.

quote:

---

But Humphreys assumption is this, that the stars are numbered, that is the universe has an edge, and therefore has a center. And we are close to the middle of it.

---

What evidence is there to suggest we are the center of the universe?Edited by Vacate, : spelling

Hi, Confidence.It is an interesting question, and I suspect that we will have to wait until cavediver or Son Goku notice this thread and give us the benefit of their expertise.Now, the earth placed in a homegenous isotropic universe (the standard Big Bang theory), versus being the actual physical center of a mass distribution of finite extent -- these do not sound equivalent to me. I don't know General Relativity, so I cannot answer this question myself, but surely these two models predict different phenomena that we should be able to observe. I mean, shouldn't we be able to use astonimical observations to determine which model is more likely?So the relevant questions would be: what differences do these models predict for the behavior of space time? What differences do we expect to see if we look at very, very distant objects (which would be objects which existed long, long ago)? What different phenomena would we observe? And what do we actually observe?

---

Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus

In Humphrey's cosmology how far away is the edge? There are several things which are unusual about this paragraph. The kind of cosmological evolution implied would be far to violent for almost anything to form.
It also discribes Earth as being within an horizon and then, due to external conditions, the horizon disappears and Earth emerges from it to join the rest of the universe.
Such at set up is grossly artificial and probably involves unrealistic distributions of matter.
Also a black holes "dip" can't get shallower because material outside it spreads out. Most black holes are materially isolated anyway and by this logic would disappear rather quickly.This isn't including the fact that a center of the universe wouldn't be well defined in GR and very little (none?) of the solutions to the Field Equations have an edge. So I think this cosmology very much goes against the grain of GR.

Event horizons are independent of any gravitational "force". Around a Solar mass black hole, the tidal forces in the region of the event horizon would be enormous, but this is by no means always the case. Around a hypermassive black hole, the tidal forces at the horizon could be unnoticeable. The black hole in this case is significantly different to the normal layman presentation of a black hole. "this makes no sense" is typically not a good defence against the physics of General Relatvity... very little of it makes sense!But don't worry, Humphrey's interpretation of his model IS nonsense and hopefully I'll get to some of it before the end of the evening.

I highly doubt that's what he was after. I take his meaning of black hole as it is, an object with its mass so concentrated that its gravitational pull is infinitely strong and that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. How on earth... how in the universe are we expected to believe that the earth lies beneathe the event horizon and not get squashed?

---

Place yourself on the map at http://www.frappr.com/evc

​

The thread about this map can be found here.

Right, and this isn't what Humphrey means. This is a type of universe usually referred to as a black hole cosmology. It is not a black hole that forms as the result of gravitational collapse.The gravitational "pull" of a black hole only becomes unbounded as you head towards the singularity. For a large enough black hole, you can be well within the horizon yet so far from the sigularity that you wouldn't be aware of the singularity... not yet anyway!

We could be 'on the way' to getting squashed but not there yet, no?Or is it an instantaneous squashing?

Here is what Old Earth Creationist Hugh Ross has to say about Starlight and Time.

quote:

---

...[Humphreys] solicited, publicly and privately, feedback from Christian physicists who did have formal training in these disciplines. Starting even before the appearance of Starlight and Time and continuing to the present, such feedback has been forthcoming, and, to our knowledge, it has been uniformly critical of the theory

---

So Humphreys asked for expert opinion - and then ignored it ?

quote:

---

Four years after the original publication of Starlight and Time, Humphreys has abandoned all the central arguments of that hypothesis. All that remains is a skeleton, consisting of the idea of a bounded universe and a phrase, "gravitational time dilation."

---

So Humphreys has abandoned his original arguments because they have been proven false, but kept the conclusions ?It doesn't look good for Humphreys.

So, in other words, in Humphrey's universe, we could be falling into the singularity right now?

---

Place yourself on the map at http://www.frappr.com/evc

​

The thread about this map can be found here.

http://www.nmsr.org/humphrey.htm

quote:

---

To this day, Humphreys has not corrected egregious errors in his claims that have been made known to him for a decade!

​

Humphreys says that if the solar system were really billions of years old, there wouldn't be any comets left around. He dismisses one possible source of new comets, the Oort cloud, as "unobserved," and dismisses another source, the Kuiper Belt, as having to be supplied by the unobserved Oort cloud, and therefore "unobserved" itself. For a decade, Humphreys has ignored numerous sightings of actual Kuiper Belt objects, and has also disregarded evidence that the Kuiper Belt supplies the Oort Cloud, not the other way around (as Humphreys claims), even when that evidence is cited in his own handouts!

​

His arguments are shredded marvelously in the article "Young-Earth Creationist Helium Diffusion 'Dates' Fallacies Based on Bad Assumptions and Questionable Data." by Kevin R. Henke, Ph.D., November 24, 2005. Humphreys has "responded" in a way, in an article called "Helium Evidence for A Young World Overcomes Pressure," January 5, 2006. However, in this 4-page article, Humphreys addresses only one claim of Henke's, and completely disregards most of the 47 pages (and 19 appendix pages) of Henke's detailed rebuttals and criticisms. For creationists, you don't have to be right, you only need to have made the most recent response. Even on the one item Humphreys criticized, he's still wrong.

​

Humphreys also discussed how he and his fellow creation scientists have been finding radiocarbon in diamonds, regarded as far too old (billions of years) to have any amount of fast-decaying radiocarbon left in them. In this regard, I had contacted Dr. R. E. Taylor, of the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Riverside, and the Keck Laboratory for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry at University of California, Irvine. Taylor is a serious radiometrics scientist. Like Humphreys, he also looks for radiocarbon in diamonds, but Taylor does so as a way to monitor instrument background and noise. Diamonds are so old, they shouldn't have any residual radiocarbon (C14 decays with a half-life of under 6,000 years), and indeed, they don't. So diamonds are as close to a carbon-containing C14 "blank" as scientifically possible.

​

The abstract that got me talking to Taylor is called "Use of Natural Diamonds to Monitor Radiocarbon AMS Instrument Backgrounds." I contacted Dr. Taylor late last year, and inquired about the creationist group's misuse of radiocarbon methods.

​

On October 18th, 2005, Dr. Taylor replied (with his permission to cite) that

My take on their problem is that they [RATE creationists] apparently have little or no understanding of operational details involved in AMS technology and the nature of how ion sources and AMS spectrometers work since, as far as I know, none of these people have any direct research experience in this field. They are thus not aware of the many potential sources of trace amounts of radiocarbon in the blanks and how a detector can register the presence of a few mass 14 events that are not radiocarbon.

​

Regards, Ervin Taylor

When creationists crow about radiocarbon in diamonds proving that the diamonds are only thousands of years old, you can remind them that they're just measuring noise in an atomic mass spectrometer!

---

It would appear that your source is ignoring evidence that contradicts his precepts. That is not science, it is delusion.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : preview, not send ...

---

Join the effort to unravel {AIDS/HIV} {Protenes} and {Cancer} with Team EvC! (click)

---

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand

​

RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

I will talk mostly about some misconceptions on the theory,The Creationists cosmology uses a 'white hole' (black hole running in reverse). So the universe is spreading out, not collapsing. This, appearantly, comes from the theory of relativity, so its not something just made up.Evidence that the earth is close to the center:
Observations were made on the redshifts themselves, and they appeared to be quantized, this would make it seem that our galaxy is the center of concentrated rings of galaxies outside of our universe. There is debate on this, but from what I can tell, redshifts are quantized.Here is the forum on redshifts itself from this site
EvC Forum: Quantized redshifts strongly suggest that our galaxy is at the centre of the universeHere is a recent paper on redshifts(quantized)
Quantized Redshifts: A Status Report - NASA/ADSRedshift is mainly caused by the expansion of space itself. Not just by the recession of galaxies. (for both the big bang and humphreys cosmology). Genesis 1: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.Notice that there is a beginning to time itself, probably because it is closely related with matter and space. But remember that in the Humphrey's cosmology there are multiple times of reference, but God uses earth's point of reference for time. This is a misconception about black (& white) holes. Gravity forces, and density are not always huge. And in the beginning water was at the center, being compressed until nuclear reaction took place to cause the expansion (and perhaps the light which God said He made before the sun and stars). Funny how a theory can discover things, I thought people made the discovery. In any case, the cosmic background also follows from Humphreys cosmology, since the physics are similar as that of the big bang. The only difference is the assumptions. Humphrey's model suggests that the radius of the universe is a bit bigger than we are able to observe. His model does not predict the radius of the universe. God created the universe that we observe today out of water. Humphrey does talk about the radius of the waters that God has created. But I forget how big that number is, from this we can predict the average amount of mass in the universe. However, God did spread two bodies of waters in the beginning. So in Humphreys model, there is a ring of water around where the universe is held 'captive'. Like a giant wall.As for the density, I do not see how there should be more mass in the center. For the density will be the same at the beginning, before the expansion out of the 'white' hole, and as it comes out of the 'white' hole. Hmmm... Kuiper belt - Wikipedia
There are definitely Kuiper objects around, they just aren't comets!! So Humphrey's argument still hold regarding comets.This is just a weak website you use. Click on the websites they point to for more Kuiper objects, they don't mention comets. Emphasis mine. His take??, means what to you? You really think RATE is out to lunch that bad? My take is that your sources are not so reliable as you think they are.I encourage more criticism, but not ignorance.Humphrey, in his book, suggest that the theory be called a theory not a fact. He hopes others will be interested in what he proposes to flesh out mistakes etc, like what real scientists do. Do keep in mind that most of you have read my version of it, which could be a bit off. I encourage you to read up on what Humphrey has to say himself. In the future, when you do make criticism, do not write as if we believe this is fact and the infallible word of God. I believe it will change, but as of yet, there does not seem to be a big problem with it. Especially regarding the quantized redshifts.Edited by Confidence, : No reason given.

---

Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared”the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific Age.’*Lewis, C.S., Miracles: a preliminary study, Collins, London, p. 110, 1947.

If the gravitational pull isn't always huge, then by what miracle can a black hole maintain itself and not allow anything, even light, from escaping? The evidence for this being? Good nitpick there. I'll be more careful with my words next time. Please expand on this a little. You are simply making unsupported assertion for now. Nice prediction there. I'll just wait for someone to find this wall of water that is suppose to surround our universe. While black holes have been discovered, or rather cosmic objects that behave like black holes have been discovered, white holes are nothing but pure speculation. Here, you are using it as though it's fact. I'm simply not convinced.But going back, according to Humphrey's model, there should be more mass in the center in order for enough mass concentrated in an area to produce black hole-like affects, like having an event horizon and time dilation. Without such concentration of mass, where's the immense gravity coming from? And yet you are using concepts like white holes and the wall of water as if they were facts.PS Is it water or ice that's suppose to contain our universe?

---

Place yourself on the map at http://www.frappr.com/evc

​

The thread about this map can be found here.

quote:

---

There are definitely Kuiper objects around, they just aren't comets!! So Humphrey's argument still hold regarding comets.

---

We wouldn't see comets in the Kuiper belt because they are so small. So Humphrey's argument doesn't provide any positive reason to think that they aren't there. The fact that there are larger objects in that part of space that we can see, on the other hand, is a good reason to think that there will be smaller objects. And why should they not include comets ?So Humphreys' argumetn was never any good in the first place, and there is good circumstantial evidence against it - which he is ignoring. Hardly the mark of good scientific work.