What Properties Might Light of Millennia Past Have that Today's Doesn't?

Actually, he’s not saying that it is a conspiratory theory, he’s saying it has no evidence. Different things. Creationists also use the inflation model. It just does not have the evidence to support it. Not in the kind being described.

Right. So when he says this....."Inflation is such a foundation for modern big bang cosmogony that it is almost unthinkable among cosmologists that it might not exist. Thus the claim of first discovery of evidence for inflation carries much reward when compared to the risk of eventually being proved wrong"....he's talking about evidence and not politics?Cobblers, he saying that the majority have the funding and mind share whilst those with minority views are marginalised. Well that's just tough isn't it? It's the way things work but the beauty of science is that the truth will eventually emerge, because it HAS to - errors in science get fixed because eventually things don't work unless they are.And if he thinks that a physicist would sit on positive proof of a mainstream theory being wrong because of some weird conspiracy against it, he's out of his mind.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Actually, he’s not the only one who thinks so. Open Letter on Cosmology Many well regarded cosmologists think the same. Etc. Halton Arp.... (I don’t have to go through their names)

So when you said this..."Actually, he’s not saying that it is a conspiratory theory"You actually meant that it IS a conspiracy theory.Forgive me, but it's hard to keep up.In any case, science can't support errors for long - if the big bang is wrong, it will be demonstrated to be wrong at some point because in the end the evidence will switch against it. Then one of your guys will receive his or her gong from an admiring world.

Hi LimpSpider,This thread is about how light today might be different from light in the past, as a reading of Message 1 from Noitartst makes clear. For some reason he never participated in his own thread so we can not put too much of a finer point on what he wanted to discuss, but it is clear that he was talking about tired light because he said, "Most of all, what comes to mind for me is the speed of light. Its speed has been observed to be slowing consistently since first observed in the 19th century..."Creationists are attracted to the tired light idea because it means that the universe is not necessarily as old as it seems. For example, light reaching Earth from a star 13 billion light years distant is assumed to have taken 13 billion light years to reach us because light travels one light year per year. But the time could have been much less if light in the past traveled a great deal faster than it does today.People have been trying to get a handle on what you're trying to say, but now after 17 posts we're still not sure. Are you trying to say something about tired light? If so, what is it? If not, you should perhaps propose a new thread over at Proposed New Topics.--Percy

"Tired light" and the various theories that c was different in the past (e.g. Setterfield) are two very different and independent things.Tired light is the theory that light loses energy as it travels. No matter what its speed.

But consider the nature of the problem. If there really is a problem (i.e. if the Inflationary Hypothesis is false) then the universe has to be older then 14 billion years --- unless the speed of light can vary, in which case it could be a mere 14 billion years old.

Good point, I'll stop referring to decreasing c over time as tired light.--Percy

And Faulkner says "it could not have possibly" where, exactly, in that ramble on polarization? The same Faulkner who writes about the Earth/Moon system being 6000 years old??

JonF, isn’t the energy directly related to the speed? As in E=mc^2?Percy, I’m just saying that it is observed that the Universe is expanding. Therefore, if light from those clusters that are receding are losing energy (if they lose energy I think they would lose luminosity (correct me if I’m wrong, but this is one of the first times that I’ve heard of tired light.), we would not see it.I said so in my first post, but no one seemed to notice that.Anyway, I read up in the wikipedia article about tired light. It doesn’t seem to make sense to me.

I'm not saying the Inflationary Hypothesis is false. It isn't because there are no disproven predictions, that I can see anyway. It just has many unproven predictions. If the speed of light is variable, why can it ONLY be 14 billion years, why can't it go above c?

It's conceivable, but the argument from the horizon problem doesn't suggest that the universe is younger than 14 billion years. You'd want to find a different argument.Otherwise it gets a bit convoluted. "Most of the evidence shows that this man is twenty-five. But he has gray hair and wrinkles. One explanation for this is that he has some genetic condition which causes accelerated aging. In which case he might only be eight years old!" But the appearance of greater age than can be accounted for is hardly an argument for greater youth than is supported by the evidence.

Hi LimpSpider,Ignore my reference to tired light. I should have said decreasing c. That equation is the equivalency between mass and energy. It isn't the way to calculate the amount of energy in a quantum of light, which would be a function of wavelength. Here's the right equation: Luminosity or intensity is a measure of the number of photons arriving from a light source, and the number of photons arriving would not change. What changes in an expanding universe is the wavelength of light, and so the energy of a photon does decrease as it travels through an expanding universe.In other words, we would still see light arriving from distant galaxies, but shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. The amount of red shift is a measure of how much universe the light has passed through, which tells us the distance of the object.--Percy

I'm not actually using it as evidence for creation. Which would require a different thread.

I thought that was the photoelectric effect? Yeah, I know the equation. Sorry bout the mixI thought wrong about the luminosity...correcting in progress. Ummm...Ok. I understand what you're saying about redshifts,Ok, if light was faster in the past and slowed down, (it has to have been, it could not have been slower) would not the light disappear from view as the c was reduced? Would not it, in such a case, show blueshifts?
If the speed of light was much greater in the past, either the frequencies were higher due to higher excitation energies of the sources or the received wavelengths are shortened by the Doppler effect. In either case, referenced against standard sources on Earth, such light would appear blueshifted.(This last is taken from an article by John Hartnett. I do understand what he's saying, and I do understand what you're saying. I just mixed up the luminosity part (I was reading an article on luminosity of Ia Supernova, my bad))