creationliberty writes:In 1999, experiments were done at Harvard, Smithsonian, and Cambridge to slow light down using a specially treated cesium gas.
I am wondering what point you think you are making.
Nobody claims that the speed of light is constant. It is the speed of light in empty space that is constant. Once you allow a medium such as a gas, then it is expected that light travels more slowly.
creationliberty writes:Red Shift, for example, ASSUMES the speed of light is a constant, it ASSUMES light has always traveled at the same rate, and it ASSUMES that the light has not traveled through anything that may change its speed and/or appearance.
Red shift is directly observed. It does not depend on anything other than the reliability of observation.
If light from a distant galaxy travels through some gas clouds on the way here, and if light slows down in those gas clouds, that would not in any way affect the red shift that we would observe. Think of a clock that emits a chirp or click every second. We observe that as a chirp or click every two seconds. A slow down of light somewhere between the clock and us would not affect the observed rate of chirps or clicks. What would change the observed rate of clicks is
- the galaxy is moving away from us;
- time is running at a different rate at the far galaxy than it is running here;
- we are not seeing the actual clicks - instead, they are being absorbed somewhere in between and new clicks are being emitted at a slower rate.
A changing speed of light at some intermediate region won't have the effect that you claim.
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