>Perhaps other contributors on this list
>would be interested in offering others.
Here is more detail on the example you were giving.
At 09:51 PM 9/13/98 +0100, Vernon Jenkins wrote:
>
>But Howard, for some 99.999999% of alleged geological time man has had
>neither understanding of, nor direct access to, these parameters. You
>are surely not offering the fact of these linkages as firm evidence for
>the constancy of all, or of any one of them over the period before
>measurements became possible. I have already suggested that this
>represents a fundamental and staggering 'act of faith' on the part of
>evolutionary scientists. How can it possibly be otherwise?
Not so Vernon. As you know, when we look out into the universe we don't
see things as they are, we see things as they WERE. Light has a finite
travel time and the distances to the celestial objects is so great that it
takes a long time for the light to travel this distance. When we look at
the moon with our honey, we see the moon as it was about 1.3 seconds ago.
If the moon blew up, we wouldn't know it for 1.3 seconds after the
explosion. When we look at the sun we see it as it was 8 minutes ago. If
they turned out the lights (as Dandy Don Meredith used to say) it would
take 8 minutes for us to know about it. With a star we see it as it was at
least 4 years ago. So, how can we use this to assure that the physical
constants were constant? Easy but it takes some effort on your part to
understand the argument.
In 1987 a supernova went off in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This thing was
observed less than 2 hours after the explosion. (Pictures of that region
taken
Feb 23 9:22 GMT[I believe] showed no supernova. A picture taken Feb 23 10:39
GMT showed the supernova). About 6 months later, we began to detect a ring
of
gas surrounding the supernova. This ring had been there prior to the
explosion but had been invisible because it was not illuminated. The
geometry
is as follows:
---ring of gas
/\ >
| -> indirect reflected rays
| ->
| ->
***supernova-------direct ray--------------------------------> earth
| ->
| ->
| ->
\/ >
---ring of gas
assuming this picture doesn't get mess-up by e-mail the ->'s are the travel
path of the light from the ring to the earth.
diameter, we can measure the angular diameter of the ring from telescopes on
earth. From this, we can determine that supernova is 169,000 light-years
away. So when creationists like Lubenow write, in 1992,
"Many do not realize that the farthest direct age/distance
measurement we can make in the universe is limited to about
three hundred light years, done by triangulation using the
diameter of the earth's orbit as a baseline. All age/distance
measurements beyond that are indirect, and are based on
assumptions which may or may not be valid)."~Marvin L. Lubenow,
Bones of Contention, (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), p. 201
it merely shows that he has not done his research.
I can give you one direct triangulation out to 12 million
light-years.("Supernova 1993J's Young Radio Shell," Sky and Telescope, June
1995, p. 13)
Now, can we use the supernova to determine how long it took the light to get
to earth? Yes. Theoretical models of supernovas had predicted that cobalt
56
would power the light decay curve early in its life. It would then be
replaced by the longer-half-lived cobalt 57 and the Co-56 vanished. What was
found?
"Observations of Supernova 1987A stunningly confirmed the
prediction. Cobalt 56 has a half-life of 77 days; from 1987
through 1990, the visible light from thesupernova faded at
exactly that rate. The Solar Maximum Mission satellite
andinstruments on National Aeronautics and Space Administration
research balloons alsodetected gamma rays from the supernova
carrying 847,000 and 1,238,000 electronvolts. These are
precisely the energies associated with the decay of cobalt 56."
"Since 1991 the visible light from supernova 1987A has faded
at a rate corresponding to a half-life of about 270 days, the
exact half-life of cobalt 57. It seems that cobalt 57 is now the
main radioactive isotope powering the supernova. OSSE has
followed up on the previous observations by detecting the
122,000-electron-volt gamma rays characteristic of the decay of
cobalt 57."~Neil Gehrels,Carl E. Fichtel, Gerald J. Fishman,
James D. Kurfess, Volker Schonfelder, "The Compton Gamma Ray
Observatory," Scientific American, Dec. 1993, p. 75
The observation verified the theoretical prediction, but it did more than
that. Fundamental physics shows that the speed of light is proportional to
the rate of radioactive decay. Seeing the same half-life and energies for
Co-56 and Co-57 on the star as we see here tells us that the speed of light
has not changed since the light left the star. This means that the light
took
169,000 years to get here.
And if the rates of radioactive decay have been constant for the past
169,000 years, we know that Planck's constant, h, the electron's charge, e,
have been constant for the past 169,000 years. I have a lead on a star
that makes radioactive promethium and have order the article. I don't know
how far away the star is but if it is futher away, then so would be the
length of time over which we have direct access to the constancy of the
physical constants.
I would note that the above calculation is not affected if one tries to
assume that the speed of light changed. If this were true, I believe we
would still calculate a distance of 169,000 lightyears but we would see a
difference in the decay rate that differed from that observed.
And if one assumes that God created the light in transit it raises other
problems. If the universe is only a few thousand years, then everything
prior to the vertical line is false.
---ring of gas
/\ . |
| . |
| . |
| | .
***supernova---------------------------------------> earth
| | .
| . |
| . |
\/ . 6000 light years
---ring of gas
God had to manufacture the light in such a way as to form a sequence of
images for a supernova event which never happened. God must make just the
precise photon energies appear at the appropriate time. God must make the
amplitude of the light images decay precisely with the successive half-lives
of Co-56 and then Co-57. But none of these made up events ever happened.
Since only God Himself is powerful enough to create such an illusion, then
God can not escape the charge of deception IF the supernova didn't happen
169,000
years ago as we see it.
Thus I feel that in order to not have God deceiving us, I must believe in an
old earth.
glenn
References in addition to the citations
N. Panagia et al., "Properties of the SN1987A
Circumstellar Ring and the Distance to the Large Magellanic
Cloud", _Astrophysical_Journal_ 380, L23-L26 (1991) gives the
distance as 51.2 +/- 3.1 kiloparsecs.
Bertram Schwarzschild,"Ring Around SN1987A Supernova Provides a New
Yardstick", _Physics_Today_, February 1991, page 20;
A good book is
Paul Murdin, _End in Fire_ Cambridge University Press 1990
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm