Summations Only

I am dealing with the issue you raised using a different fundamental premise than the one you assume.There are no constants anywhere in the visible universe.There is no time dimension. You cannot even measure the speed of light unless you assume that atoms are clocks that have some regularity to the way they tick. Yet the atoms in trillions upon trillions upon trillions of distant stars shines at a lower frequency than modern atoms. The lowest clock speed we have analyzed to date shone at 1/11th the frequency of modern atoms. We can see much more distant galaxies whose atoms shine way down in the microwave and far infrared, but it takes a huge telescope to gather enough of that very faint light to clock the atomic frequencies.Not only did the atoms keep on changing their clock frequencies, but the star orbits (inertia) and the space matter takes up (volume) keep on changing TOGETHER as galaxies grew from tiny naked globs to huge spread out growth spirals. We even see miniature galaxies in the process of being ejected, sometimes in a serial chains like the LMC and the SMC. The river of hydrogen from the LMC and SMC show that they were ejected.There is not a shred of visible evidence for a single constant anywhere in the whole universe - yet you want me to play symbolical games about symbolical constants that have no reality in the visible universe.Can you, without circular reasoning or circular definitions, show me a shred of evidence for the actuality of mass, energy or time upon which your laws of physics depend? How can you prove that these things exist without relying on the basic assumption I am arguing against. I argue against it because the Bible predicts that very idea and ascribes it to the mockers of the last days - the notion that all things remain the same.

The reason you should suppose that there ever was a change in constants is because a supernatural book written by the creator of the universe claims this world is much younger than what you all suppose it to be. You claim that the evidence shows it to be exactly as old as you claim. I am saying that maybe the evidence is all wrong. If the constants were ever different in the past, then the evidence would indeed be all wrong.Now, can you see why you should give the idea of changing constants a serious consideration into possibly being true?

But what if the constants were the same in the past? No, your "what ifs" are not evidence.

I think that I understand what you are saying.If the vacuum energy (the zero point energy of a vacuum) was lower, light would travel faster because it would encounter fewer particles to slow it down. This is true, but only just - it would not affect the value of c, which assumes no particle interactions. So it would allow only a negligible increase in the observed speed of light.The second assertion is that this lower energy would exactly cancel out the expected effects of faster light on the spectra of the various elements. This is not something that can be safely assumed and would need to be demonstrated.In short, it seems that your first point is badly wrong and your second is a massive assumption.

How do you know the value of c? You only know it because it is measured by its current value. To me, the speed of light should be infinite in a true vacuum. Light from stars billions of light years away, should immediately be detected by radar telescopes the instant they leave the star in a true vacuum. Of course you will protest that e=mc2 dictates infinite energy for infinite speed of light. This equation was derived in the presence of the observed light speed of today. It states that energy is dependent upon the speed of light. This is true, but what if the speed of light were dependent upon the zero point energy? What if mass were dependent upon the zero point energy as well. I do believe it is according to setterfield the last time I read him. Not only are electron energy levels and their distance from the nucleus dependent upon the zero point energy, but mass is as well. When the zero point energy is low, the atomic particles don't get bombarded by that energy as much. When they don't wiggle around as much, those particles don't register as much mass as they do when they wiggle around a lot. The particles that have more energy are measured as having more mass. In summary: e=mc2 is not a problem with higher lightspeeds because the same reality that causes greater lightspeeds also causes lighter masses.

So, you will not consider looking into a matter if there is no evidence?The evidence is actually there. It is called the bible. I am sorry you don't consider that to be evidence. If you dug into the ground and came upon a stone that was dated to be 2 billion years old and on its was engraved the following message, would you not look into to the possibility that the claims made on the story had any basis in reality? The message engraved on the stones said that it was written by the creator of the universe and that the stone was part of the bedrock sitting underneath the soil from which adam, the first human, was created from. I take it you would set about to see if the claims written upon the stone had any basis in reality? If so, why aren't you interested in seeing if the claims of the bible have in basis in reality? The former has no more evidence to go on than the latter in my opinion.

Oh for frak's sake! We've been through this oh so many times before.Ok, I guess philosophy has its place. Mind you, I'm an engineer, so I have very little patience for philosophical bullshit.Here's a little story that's been attributed to Carl Sagan:

quote:

---

The Physicist and the Metaphysicist

​

In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast. This was a time when people stood up, made a toast, and then selected someone to respond. Nobody knew what toast they'd be asked to reply to, so it was a challenge for the quick-witted. In this case the toast was: "To physics and metaphysics." Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy -- truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.

​

The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

​

(reportedly from an essay by Carl Sagan)

---

How far are you into your college education? Have you taken a course in logic yet? I did by my second year -- being a devoted fan of Star Trek from the very first broadcast episode, I took that Logic class as soon as was humanly possible. Fascinating thing, logic is. Structure. Every syllogism is a structure. You can analyze every syllogism and determine whether it is valid. Then, whenever you feed true premises into a valid syllogism, you get a true conclusion. So just how do you determine that your premises are true? godsriddle demonstrates what happens when philosophical considerations take precedence over reality. He is clearly lost and confused.What is real? That is the true test. Philosophy be damned!

OK, I talked about this elsewhere tonight.Consider Roman Catholicism. Many different beliefs. How many of them are biblical? To be honest, many come from the Church Fathers, not from the Bible.Fundamentalist Christianity. It claims to be completely based on the Bible.OK, is that true? Are all the fundamentalist Christian claims based on the Bible? Show me!Is every single fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible in the Bible? Show me!Is it true that the Bible cannot contain any single error? Does the Bible tell you that? Show me!If the Bible is ever shown to contain even one single falsehood, are we to cast it upon the trash heap and forever forsake it?
Does the Bible tell you to do that?
Show me!

quote:

---

How do you know the value of c? You only know it because it is measured by its current value.

---

By my understanding the value is also derived from Maxwell's equations.

quote:

---

To me, the speed of light should be infinite in a true vacuum. Light from stars billions of light years away, should immediately be detected by radar telescopes the instant they leave the star in a true vacuum

---

Do you have any scientific basis for this idea, or is it just a convenient assumption?

quote:

---

Of course you will protest that e=mc2 dictates infinite energy for infinite speed of light. This equation was derived in the presence of the observed light speed of today

---

I believe that that is incorrect - it is based in the theoretical constant, not the actual measured speed.

quote:

---

but what if the speed of light were dependent upon the zero point energy? What if mass were dependent upon the zero point energy as well

---

I really doubt that mass is dependent on the vacuum energy. I also very much doubt that you have done the calculations to show that your speculations are even remotely plausible (what particle density is required to slow an infinite light speed down to the observed value ? What particle density should we expect from the current vacuum energy?) or properly considered the effects on other areas of physics.Besides, since the equation does not rely on the measured speed, your argument is moot.

Now I can see even less reason to suppose it true. Where reality contradicts the Bible, that means that the Bible is wrong. It doesn't mean that reality is wrong, which is essentially what you are suggesting. Since the only thing motivating you to propose this silliness is the supernatural, then I feel content to write it off entirely.Foreveryoung, I have a newsflash for you; the Bible is not supernatural. The Bible is a human concoction, frquently wrong, often hilariously, laughably, contempably wrong. It gets it wrong as often as it does because it was written by ignorant men in an ignorant age. At best it is an interesting historical document. Basing science upon the Bible is a pathetic waste of time. The evidence shows that the universe is around 13 billion years old no matter what I claim. And if Grandmother had a beard she would have been a grandfather.You seem to genuinely believe that you have cited evidence for your claims. You have not. All you have brought to the table is a string of flimsy "What if..." scenarios. None of it is evidenced, indeed you have gone out of your way to explain why there could be no evidence.Well I have a simpler explanation for you; the rocks don't lie, the Earth is old, the universe is old and the Bible is wrong. Simple.I know it's not what you want to hear, but sometimes the universe just fails to rearrange itself in accorance with our desires. It's tough. My advice is to accept it, get over it and move on, because right now, you are wasting your best years making poor apologetics for an intellectually bankrupt philosophy.Mutate and Survive

Well no. But that's not the situation.The real situation is that we have plenty of evidence. It's just that all the evidence tells us precisely the opposite of what you want to hear.Should we bin all this evidence and the conclusions it supports in favour of your personal daydreams? Hell no! Arguing from scripture is pointless. Would you be impressed if I offered you the Quran as evidence?Besides, the Bible does not comment on the speed of light or ancient physical constants. That's all just rationalisation that you (and other creationists) set up after the fact in order from rescue the Bible from its many embarrassing mistakes. Don't mistake your personal pet theories for holy writ. Yes, absolutely I would. That would be a fascinating piece of evidence and I would love to see it.Do you have a 2 billion year old engraving? No, you do not. Yes I would. Thing is, if those claims turned out not to be true, I would not blame reality. I would blame the claims on the rock and say that they were wrong. That's where you are going wrong; when the Bible fails a test, you blame reality rather than admit that the Bible contains errors. Because the rock in your example was clearly not a human artifact; it was frigging 2 billion years old! The Bible very clearly is a human artifact. It has no more authority than any other human fairy story. Nonetheless, the claims in the Bible have been tested, many, many times; they failed. Miserably. Get over it.Mutate and Survive

Barry Setterfield has bee n trying for decades to come up with some way the speed of light and other constants could have changed that isn't falsified by our observations.. He's failed. Here's an example:http://groups.google.com/...alk.origins/msg/e7ae80158cdc5c60&
http://groups.google.com/...alk.origins/msg/3d9bf09a674e2a3bUntil you learn a lot more about physics, you aren't capable of formulating a hypothesis about changes in physical constants.Everything is interrelated.Changes leave evidence.

Not for that reason, but for other reasons, scientists have seriously considered and continue to seriously consider the idea of changing constants. The problem for you is that nobody, even some of the cleverest people around, have been able to come up with any possible significant change that isn't already falsified. You haven't looked at The Constancy of Constants and The Constancy of Constants, Part 2 and the links in Message 144. Until you have, and until you know enough physics to understand them, you have no argument.

Although you claim that you did not see any evidence, it was there.If the strong and weak forces were different in the past it would leave evidence.We can look at stars and see what is happening in the past. We can observe planetary bodies that orbit a distant sun and from that we can determine things like the masses involved. What we find is that at that scale, the planets behave just as here.Since when looking at stars we are directly looking at how things were in the past, we can compare those solar systems from millions of years ago to what is happening today.We can also look at those halos produced at Oklo. Are they different?Changing the nuclear force so that an object even less massive than Mercury can undergo nuclear fusion does not change the effects of gravity.If the sun was the mass you suggested then the solar system would not have formed.The earth though is here.Do you agree that there is evidence that the Earth is here?

"To me [foreveryoung]"? Why should we care what you think the speed of light in a vacuum should be? You know next to nothing about the physics of electromagnetic radiation. Why would we even use a radar telescope to detect light?We know that the speed of light in a vacuum is just a hair greater than the speed of light in air. We have experienced and measured the delay in E&M radiation travel to Venus, the moon, and to man made robot devices at distant places in the solar system. The evidence from SN1987 that the speed of light is finite at great distances from earth. Beyond, that we have Maxwell's equations that predict the theoretical speed of light in a vacuum, and guess what that predicted result is. Well, given your claim that the speed of light is infinite "To me", then lighter masses is not much help here.