Did god speed up the speed of light for a few days? If most creationists believe the world was created relatvively recently ~6000 years ago, how did the light from stars reach earth?
This argument has probably been the most detrimental to YEC thought. Its one that I've considered many times over and have sought the instruction of qualified astronomers in understanding how they determine stellar distance. The first line of questioning included how we know the distance of stars at all. I thought of it in the same vein as if you were looking at a photo of a bird. Lets say the bird is pictured with nothing else other than the sky as its background. Supposing that you didn't know what type of bird it was, could you determine that it was a picture of a small bird, close up, or the picture of a large bird, far away? Its kind of like in evidence photos when the police use a coin or a pencil placed next to evidence to give the viewer a sense of size by comparing relationally next to the piece of said evidence.
What about stars? Is it like looking off in the horizon and trying to determine if a large island is 100 miles away or a small island 20 miles away? So I began to investigate. What I'd discovered was that lightyears are not a measurement of time, but of distance. I was informed that our sun is estimated to be 24 trillion miles away and that it takes 8 minutes for the suns' heat to reach the surface of the earth. So if the closest star is 24 trillion miles away and it takes 8 minutes for its light/heat to reach us, how far away are these other stars that it should take, say, 100,000,000 lightyears to reach us? I mean, lets think about that for a minute. That's astronomical. If something was that far away, wouldn't space at some point envelope the light that it would't reach us at all? To me that's like supposing if a submarine was several hundred fathoms below us, that if we shown a light from the surface of the water, that they would eventually see that light. But doesn't the darkness of the deep water envelope the light? Obviously it does because the sun never shines in the Marianna's Trench.
Maybe it does take light millions of years to reach us and perhaps light travelled faster in the distant past. It was Barry Setterfield and Halton Arp that produced a model to support the theory that light did in fact travel faster in the past. It was believed that such great speed would affect radiometric dating and even have caused the red-shift of light from distant galaxies proposed by Hubble.
Is such a thing as light travelling faster even possible? What are the implications if it is true? Such a question is radical because it brings into question the theory of Relativity. Nonetheless, there is now ample evidence to question the paradigm that we all know. Challenging and accomplishing such a feat was the NEC Institute at Princeton University who were able to greatly exceed the standard of 186,171 mps.
Home – Physics World
As well, a team at the Rowland Institute at Harvard yielded impressive results when they were able to bring light to a crawl. Imagine seeing a beam of light in midair that has yet to illuminate the other side of the room.
http://www.gsreport.com/articles/art000084.html
Does any of this mean tht light did in fact travel in the past? Certainly not, however, we at leaset know that it is possible, proven undeniably by two separate teams. These studies lead a legitimate inquiry into how we percieve the parallax of starlight.
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