Light, "shallow seas" and what's the real reason?

Could the speed of light never have changed, if not, why not? What is the criteria for calling an ancient water body a shallow sea, rather than a regular, or deep sea? ( I spend time in Canadian Rockies, and hear about them a lot there). I am interested in the underlying reasons for why things are pegged as such (minus the old age assumptions).

Simple,Your post seems to be two separate questions, neither one seemingly dealing directly with the Noahic flood. I am going to move this post to the Misc. Topics forum until it is better understood just where you are going with this one.Also, you have replies awaiting you in the "Fossil Sorting For Simple" thread. Specifically, one by Admin... http://EvC Forum: Fossil sorting for simple

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AdminAsgara
Queen of the Universe

Thread moved here from the Geology and the Great Flood forum.

Briefly: it could have changed a teeny bit, it probably hasn't, and it's because we don't see what we would if it had changed.More detail:The speed of light is not a really fundamental quantity. We can tell this because it has units (distance divided by time); since units are arbitrarily sized inventions of humans, nothing with units is truly fundamental. The speed of light is related mathematically to several other quantities that do fundamentally describe our universe and do not have units.From this it follows immediately that the speed of light cannot change on its own; if it does change, there will be other effects. What these effects are and why is a subject beyond the scope of this kind of forum, unless Eta or someone else wants to try.The conventional thinking, based on lots of theoretical and experimental studies of these possible effects, is that the speed of light has either never changed and will never change, or maybe it's changed in the distant past by a tiny bit (more on that below).There are, however, mainstream scientists investigating the possibility of significant changes in the speed of light. Their work has not gained widespread acceptance, but it hasn't been censored or suppressed; when and if they come up with some truly convincing results people will listen to them.The main creationist proponents of a changing speed of light are Barry Setterfield and Russel Humphreys. They have different and independent models.Setterfield's model is based on a mathematically invalid analysis of measurements of the speed of light over many years, using data that he fudged and from which he discarded data that he didn't like. He's been tweaking his model ever since in an attempt to make it fit the observed universe, without success. The last I heard his model predicted that stars don't shine. See Acts and Facts Magazine | The Institute for Creation Research, BlueHost coupon offers 43% bluehost discount pricing, The Decay of c-decay, and Re: Flood dating discrepanciesHumphreys' model is more sophisticated, but ultimately fails the test of agreeing with what we observe. See The Unravelling of Starlight and Time and both criticisms and responses at http://www.trueorigin.org/ca_rh_03.asp.About tiny changes:There is a quantity called the "fine structure constant". Here's a definition and some discussion. The fine structure constant is a combination of the speed of light and some other important quantities and does not have units; it's truly fundamental.There were recently some studies that indicated that the fine structure constant may have changed slightly in the very early universe. I don't know the current status of these studies (e.g. whether they've been replicated, repudiated, accepted widely, rejected, or what). Mabe Eta knows and will stop by.If indeed the fine structure constant changed, one possiblity for how it changed is a small change in the speed of light. Haven't got a clue.[This message has been edited by JonF, 02-04-2004]

My answers until the expert answers get here:
1) The speed of light possibly could have changed by a minute amount in the last 13.7 billion years, but not by very much. The observation that supernova light curves are essentially the same for exceedingly distant ( = old) and nearby ( = recent) events means that the rate of nuclear decay hasn't changed. A change in the speed of light would cause a change in decay rates, unless there just happened to be a change in some other fundamental property that just precisely compensated for it in determining rates.
2) Shallow seas have different, and much more abundant, life than deep seas - coral reefs, for example. The fossils and the rocks themselves are very different than those found in deeper ocean. Here beneath Snyder, for example, is the "Horseshoe Atoll," an ancient reef built up of the skeletons of organisms that only could grow in shallow water where sunlight penetrated and nutrients were available. Deep-sea sediments are typically made of very fine particles that settled from near the surface, and show few obvious signs of life in the sediment proper. (The sediment may be made up of the skeletons of diatoms or other small life forms, but the skeletons fell to the bottom after the critters in them died.)