Debate:If the universe is young and it takes light millions of years to reach us from far off stars, how can we see them?

!

THIS IS A DEBATE PAGE, NOT AN ARTICLE. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of Conservapedia. Your opinion is welcome! Please remember to sign your comments on this page, and refrain from editing other user's contributions. New Users: Please read our "Editing etiquette" before posting

Theory 1

Well, I would venture to say that we have not seen the far off ones yet. We can only see the light that has reached the Earth so far. This means that the currently-visible stars are "only" several thousand lightyears away. --<<-David R->> 17:16, 10 March 2007 (EST)

Empircally false. Basic parallax data gets us that there are stars at least 7000 years away and more sophisticated techniques force other stars to be even farther away. JoshuaZ 18:59, 10 March 2007 (EST)

What's more of that were true then why have ancient civilisations recorded lots of the stars that were now see? shouldn't there be masses of new ones that the light of which has reached us in the proceeding years? Ampasand 11:23 29 march 2007 (GMT+12)

Perhaps, the Universe really is billions of years old. Perhaps the Genisis account is merely refering to the creation etc. from the perspective of the Earth. Perhaps God is, say, eternal. Couldn't matter and the elements be eternal too? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Brigham's Homeboy (talk)

That's very close to the white-hole cosmology of Russell Humphreys (see below). According to it, the fringes of the universe are billions of years old, but the near-center of the universe--where we are--is much younger. In short, time did not flow uniformly throughout the universe--and until relatively recently, in our region, time did not flow at all.--TerryH^Talk 22:54, 22 March 2007 (EDT)

Theory 2

When God created the universe, he also created a complete ray of light extending between the star and the Earth. The light that we see now was created only a few thousand years ago. It looks as if it came from the star, but it really didn't; it was created in mid-air, or mid-space as it were, a few thousand light-years away. The light that started travelling from the star itself at its instant of creation will not reach us for millions of years (or perhaps never if the Earth does not last that long).

<
* = star
- = ray of light
O = Earth
> = where the light we see today was when the Universe was created

BEFORE CREATION:
   [Void]
AFTER CREATION of star, Earth, and complete ray of light all at the same instant
*------------------------------------------------->----O

A few thousand years after Creation (today)
*----------------------------------------------------->O

As opposed to:
AFTER CREATION:
*                                                      O
 
Millions of years later (still can't see star)
*---------------------                                 O

Millions and millions of years later (still can't see star)
*---------------------------------------------         O

Millions and millions and millions of years later (finally can see star)
*------------------------------------------------------O

The language of the Bible, "Let there be light," even can be read as supporting this.

This theory is absolutely ridiculous. The stars we see in the sky are millions of light years away, and we can see them because the earth has existed for far longer than a few thousand years. Astronomers can tell roughly how old a star is, and they know that the ones you see at night are older than a few thousand years.

No, I do not believe this. (But I can't prove it's not true.) Dpbsmith 18:27, 10 March 2007 (EST)

Dpbsmith: This is the essence of why this is religion not science, it can't be proven/disproven... Jespur

Jesput, the same is true for science. Science cannot prove anything at all. PhilipB 13:15, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

This is a variant of omphalism and essentially asserts that God has deliberately deceived humans. I don't think most people would want to believe in a deceptive deity and in any event, it would contradict the verse in Isaiah that says that God is truth. JoshuaZ 19:01, 10 March 2007 (EST)

If God is trying to fake us out, He certainly did His best to make it a CONVINCING fake. Just check out those scientists who've been fooled into thinking an entire galaxy was ripped in two several billion years ago. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Fullmetajacket (talk)

I'm sorry, this is a nice theory, but JoshuaZ is right, it's a type of omphalism, and assumes that God deliberately tricked us. At some point, Occam's Razor has to kick in here. But wow, this light argument sure does rip YEC to shreds.-AmesG 20:29, 20 March 2007 (EDT)

The theory does not insinuate that God is deceptive. In Genesis, he talks to Abraham about his descendants and how they will be as numerous as the stars in the sky. What if God made the stars like that, not to deceive humans in any way, but to use them for His own purpose, such as using them as a metaphor? (By the way, how is making rays of light any form of deception? How are we being "tricked" by this creation?) --<<-David R->> 20:36, 20 March 2007 (EDT)

Rays of light carry information; they're records of past events. If light was really created in transit, then we've witnessed the death of stars which never actually existed in the first place. Tsumetai 05:22, 21 March 2007 (EDT)

Descartes approached a similar problem in his meditations. The way out of it was to say that since God is good, God would not do something to intentionally deceive our senses and thus we can trust them. I believe that it is valid to continue that to say that it is reasonable to trust our extended senses that this planet is a several billion years old. Otherwise (as Descartes would say), God is a deceiver and then would not be the most perfect being that can be imagined. --Mtur 20:33, 20 March 2007 (EDT)

Fraid that's the logical conclusion. Then again, a lot of things on this site are quite disconnected from logic.-AmesG 10:08, 21 March 2007 (EDT)

Theory 3

C is not actually constant. All measurements on Earth indicate that it is, but beyond our Solar System it could easily be faster, slower, moving through wormholes to appear faster, etc. Hubble's Law says that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it moves away due to universal expansion, so why couldn't light be similarly expanded with distance? So many of our assumptions about the universe rely on our belief that things happen the same way everywhere - a huge leap of faith for a scientist. --Daniel B. Douglas 13:05, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

I don't know whether you knew, but the official definition of the meter now assumes that C is constant. The meter is defined in terms of C! Someone needs to set up some periodic re-measurements of the orange-red line from the spectrum of krypton-86 that provided the most recent definition of the meter: 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of this radiation. If that number starts to rise, then we know that C is slowing, as Barry Setterfield has stated.

I have another variation on this theory, however: what if C were originally much faster, is now the speed at which we now find it, and is not going to change anymore? Except that I have an Occam's razor problem with that.--TerryH 14:31, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

I don't dispute at all that the meter is based upon C, but it hardly matters whether it is or not. Either C is constant or it isn't, no matter what units you use. Rather than C slowing since time began, I was thinking more the velocity of C being a function of its distance away from us. Also, your theory satisfies Occam's razor equally well or better than the Big Bang does, so I see no problem with it logically. --Daniel B. Douglas 03:28, 18 March 2007 (EDT)

This hypothosis sounds awkwardly non-falsifyable. It is proposed that light used to travel faster than it does today, but conveniently stoped slowing down before measurement became possible. How can it be determined either way? Also, this would not be a slight slowdown... its going to require light travel a lot faster. The most distant objects known are ten billion light-years away. So, even assuming light slowed from its super-speed to todays speed in a single instant as soon as civilisation emerged, thats going to require it used to travel about 1.67 million times as fast as today to achieve the 6000-year target figure. Im not a physicist, but I dont think thats even remotely possible. A little variation, perhaps, but a factor that huge... it would require adjusting too many other figures to keep the formulae valid. Permiativity of free space, planks constant, a lot of very fundamental things. -- Suricou

The basic problem with any variable-c model is that the entire observational record is exactly consistent with constant c. So we're left with two types of model; the one Terry mentions, where c changed in an unobservable way in the distant past, and the one Daniel mentions, where c is different in other parts of the Universe, but these differences manage to leave every observation we make exactly as we would expect if no such change had happened. That essentially leaves us with two different ways of saying "sure, the Universe looks old, but because of an unobservable, untestable effect, it really isn't." Which may be true, but it'll never be good science. May as well propose that we all live in the Matrix and be done with it. Tsumetai 05:30, 19 March 2007 (EDT)

Oh, theory is out - of course, should have realised earlier. If C is altered, the knock-on effect ould include a shift in emmission spectrum. That would be very easily observed in distant stars. As it isn't observed, that means C must be constantish. Perhaps just a little variation, but not a 1.67-million-times factor. I think that just about kills the 'C is faster elsewhere' idea. - Suricou

White-hole Cosmology

The universe began as a white hole. Initially, as matter expanded into it, time did not flow--because the very space-time continuum had four dimensions of space and none of time. Eventually, time began to flow at the outer fringes of the expanding ball of matter, and this region of timeliness worked its way back to the center. So the earth really is six thousand or so years old--by clocks on the earth, which are the only clocks that need to matter to us. By any clock on the outer fringes, the cosmos might well be twenty billion years old. The light impinges on us now because it was always impinging on the border of the region of timelessness until that region shrank away to nothing.--TerryH 19:15, 10 March 2007 (EST)

Not bad, what about the four-day simultaneous harmonic Time Cube? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Fullmetajacket (talk)

Cute. Very cute. And incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.--TerryH 21:36, 10 March 2007 (EST)

Falsified by the distinct absence of massive blueshifting of distant light sources. I highly doubt anybody's even attempted to formalize this as a solution to Einstein's field equations, either, which would be a prerequisite for it to be considered a coherent proposition at all. Tsumetai 14:25, 11 March 2007 (EDT)

I dug out a few of Humphrey's papers defending this model and reached two basic conclusions. One, as I suspected, there is no model, merely handwaving. Two, he doesn't actually understand GR. Tsumetai 05:39, 19 March 2007 (EDT)

That's obvious, given the idiocy of the theory. NousEpirrhytos 09:23, 7 April 2007 (EDT)

Silliness

Physics has had for many years more-than-adequate explanations. All of these verbal acrobatics into non-falsifiable theories to try to get around physical fact are humorus. Wouldn't it be easier for those who deny physics to just say "I accept physics, and God is mysterious and powerful enough to make it happen."? Palmd001 16:17, 19 March 2007 (EDT)

Proverbs 25:2

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter. --Cracker^talk 22:58, 22 March 2007 (EDT)

Wise words Cracker, wise words indeed. -- Rob Pommer_TALK 19:33, 28 March 2007 (EDT)

This About Kills YEC

The Starlight Problem is scientifically unsolvable assuming a young universe. You either have to make up pseudoscience, or concede that YEC is based on faith alone, but science disproves it. Agreed?-AmesG_yo! 16:07, 7 April 2007 (EDT)

Theory 4?

While it is perhaps not a direct answer to the question, a very plausible explanation is that the universe is not young, and that light from distant stars has therefore had ample time to reach Earth.--Άθεος 22:22, 11 April 2007 (EDT)