Yes, of course light travels at the same speed in a vacuum. That is because this is a constant appearing in Maxwell's equations which turns out to be the wave speed when you convert them into wave equations for electromagnetic waves. The fact that this is the only speed to be a constant (I am aware of anyway), is, in fact, at the heart of relativity.
However, neither I nor Schroeder ever said that the speed of light changed. The thing we all agree changed was the size of the universe as it expanded. Hence, the imaginary light signal had to cover a greater distance, and since, as you accurately noted, the speed is constant, it required a greater time. This little thought experiment is the only thing Schroeder is doing to get the match.
I had promised to reproduce his numbers, but not having taken the work too seriously, I'm afraid I left the book in another residence
. However they seem to have been reproduced (vaguely familiar anyway
) at
http://spot.colorado.edu/~vstenger/Briefs/genesis.html (not sure if somebody gave this link earlier). This link makes some excellent points critical of Schroeder's work. I don't quite remember Schroeder using quark confinement to begin his initial clock, but I'll take their word for it. It is a bit arbitrary. Exclusion of old galaxies is, of course, very problematic as well. The writer of the afore-mentioned link thinks it significant that he ignores the flood and ends with Day 6. Since Schroeder's position seems to have been only to justify the creation account and no amount of evidence of which I am aware can justify a world-wide flood account, this position seems a reasonable start to me.
But, as I implied earlier...I have no real stake in Schroeder's theory and am certainly not the best person for arguing his points for him.
I simply thought, for the sake of argument, it should be clarified how he was getting his match, and that it was not by having god sit around on an arbitrarily moving reference frame. We can make anything match anything that way
(almost
). But if you want more information about the guy and his ideas, his web site is at:
http://www.geraldschroeder.com/sog.html . He does respond to email (like I mentioned..I questioned him how better information on inflation affected his calculations). Scrolling down his web site, he does seem to have something to say about the flood as well, but I guess I either skipped that part or found it forgettable
. Unfortunately the site seems to exist soley to promote his books and is quite a dearth on real information and the actual numbers. That alone makes me a bit suspicious...
cheers,
anOnion