Starlight and time—a further breakthrough
A stunning new book by a physics professor purports to show more firmly than ever
how light from the most distant stars would have reached Earth in a very short time.
by Carl Wieland
The problem: Many stars are millions, even billions of light-years away (a light-year
is the distance light travels in one year). So it would seem obvious that it takes
light millions of years to reach us from those stars. But how can this be in a universe
that, the Bible makes plain, is only thousands of years old?
For many, this is a huge stumbling block to accepting the straightforward creation
history in the Bible. But Genesis history is crucial to the logic of the gospel
(a good world, ruined by sin, to be restored in the future), so this is a major
issue.
The ‘answer’ that doesn’t fly
A common response from believers is to say that God could have created the light
‘on its way’. But light from distant stars also carries information—galaxies
rotating, stars exploding. So if that information never left the star, but was created
‘en route’, this means that in a 6,000-year-old universe, anything we
see beyond 6,000 light-years away would be a phony light show.1 This is because
the information in the light beams recording those events would have necessarily
been created ‘en route’, thus the events would never have taken place
in the actual stars themselves. In other words, it would involve a God of truth
creating a completely unnecessary false history.2 It’s really not far removed
from the embarrassing suggestion around Darwin’s time that God created the
fossils in the rocks.3
The right approach
NASA, ESA and J.M. Apellaniz (IAA, Spain)
When asked about this conundrum, I have often, prior to suggesting possible answers,
talked about facing God to give an account. I would not like to have to say, ‘Lord,
I did not believe the straightforward teaching of your Word on recent creation,
all because I, with my very limited knowledge, could not figure out how you managed
to do the trick of making a universe that was at once immensely large and relatively
young.’ To say it is ‘impossible’ in the light of modern physics
is really very naïve. Intuition says that it is ‘impossible’ for
time to change, or the length of objects to change depending on such things as the
speed of travel. Or for observations on one object to instantly affect another one
on the other side of the universe. Yet experiments on Einstein’s relativity
and quantum mechanics have demonstrated that such effects are real.
Long-agers have much the same problem
CMI speakers also like to point out that the darling of long-agers, the big bang
idea, has its own light-travel-time problem. There are apparently points in the
distant universe which are today all at the same temperature, yet they are so far
apart that there has not been anywhere near enough time for energy travelling at
the speed of light (the speed limit of the universe) to cross that distance to equilibrate
the temperature. So even though the big bangers’ model allows them billions
of years, they need billions of years more time than that.4 Big-bangers
have suggested all sorts of exotic solutions to their puzzle, including that the
laws of physics must have changed, or that there was expansion faster than the speed
of light. So they can hardly point the finger at creationists who propose similarly
esoteric-sounding solutions to essentially the same problem.
Photo by John Hartnett
Two of the large telescopes at the summit of the extinct volcano Mauna Kea, Hawaii,
used to image the heavens. Left telescope is the James Clerk Maxwell 15 m sub-millimetre
telescope. Right telescope is the Caltech 10.4 m sub-millimetre telescope.
Earlier suggestions
Years ago, we reported enthusiastically about the evidence for the notion that the
speed of light (c) had changed historically. This is not completely ‘dead
in the water’, but most creationist physicists we know of, though they might
wish ‘c decay’ to be true, find insurmountable physical hurdles with
this idea.
Changing c causes huge numbers of other changes in physics, some of which should
show up in the light from distant stars. These problems have not been overcome to
date.
A stretch in time
Image by NASA
This gold-plated record was sent into space on Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft carrying
languages and samples of man’s existence into outer space.
A breakthrough came in 1994 with creationist physicist Dr Russ Humphreys’
pioneering work Starlight and Time, still a mind-popping and important
read.5 Humphreys reminded readers that we have long known from Einstein’s
General Relativity, and the experimental support for it, that time does
not flow at a constant rate everywhere. Clocks in gravitational fields of different
strengths, for instance, will run at different speeds. And since we know that God
‘stretched out the heavens’ at creation, this opens the door to all
sorts of gravitational (and thus time) effects. The whole universe could have been
created in six earth-rotation days, 6,000 years ago, as measured by Earth clocks,
while there was simultaneously enough ‘time’ (by galactic ‘clocks’)
for light to reach us from billions of light-years away.6
Humphreys said that it was unlikely that his was going to be the ‘last word’
on the subject, and he encouraged others to develop these ideas further. Now Dr
John Hartnett, a well-known creation speaker for CMI, has done just that, in Starlight,
Time and the New Physics.7 For some time now, with the support of the University
of Western Australia where he is an Associate Professor, he has been engaged in
research on what he calls the ‘fudge factors’ in big bang thinking.
These are mysterious unknown forms of matter and energy (called ‘dark matter’
and ‘dark energy’). Their existence is not directly observed, which
is why they are called ‘dark’. They are postulated in order to try to
explain certain observations about the rotation of galaxies and the expansion of
the universe, for instance, and to solve some of the problems of the big bang.
recent observational data … overwhelmingly leads to the conclusion that the
universe must have a centre, with our galaxy somewhere near it
In this new book, Hartnett reminds us of other instances in the history of physics
where weird unknown things were proposed (a hidden planet lurking behind the sun,
for instance) to try to ‘explain away’ uncomfortable observations that
did not fit known physics. This required new physics, for example Einstein’s
General Relativity, which added to, without discrediting, Newton’s laws of
gravity.
The new physics in the book’s title is the expanded form of relativity of
the late secular Israeli cosmologist Moshe Carmeli. The book is designed for the
intelligent layman, with all the supporting data in technical appendices suitable
for your local neighbourhood cosmologist (or village sceptic) demanding equations.
Hartnett shows how exquisitely the observational data fits Carmelian cosmology,
with no need for any dark matter or dark energy at all, seriously undermining big
bang-ism.
But wait, there’s more
Dr John Hartnett on a visit to the James Clerk Maxwell telescope.
But this is only the beginning of the exciting implications of this revolutionary
book. Hartnett refers to recent observational data that overwhelmingly leads to
the conclusion that the universe must have a centre, with our galaxy somewhere near
it.8 By plugging this ‘galactocentric’ universe into Carmeli’s
equations, and then adding the biblical ‘stretching out of the heavens’
by God at creation (big bangers can scarcely disagree, as they call something like
that ‘inflation’), what ‘falls out’ is an astonishing by-product.
Namely, that there are built-in gravitational time-dilating effects such that:
a) Adam would have seen light from most of the same stars we see today when he looked
up on the sixth day and
b) light from even the most distant quasar, billions of light-years away from Earth,
would reach us now within the six or so thousand years since creation.
Note that this is not the product of wishful thinking, or mathematics designed to
give that outcome—just a straightforward chain of scientific reasoning:
a) Carmelian cosmology fits the observational data overwhelmingly, data
which has been so puzzling that mysterious (and now unnecessary) fudge factors have
been invented.
b) Observations also indicate that we are in a galactocentric universe.
c) Combining a) and b) mathematically shows that it is inevitable that
an initial rapid ‘stretching out’ completely eliminates the so-called
light-travel time problem for biblical creation.
an initial rapid ‘stretching out’ completely eliminates the so-called
light-travel time problem for biblical creation
The caveat
As John Hartnett himself would agree, only the Bible, not science, gives us absolute
certainty. Models are there to be overthrown, or developed further—in time,
new physics may be needed again for future conundrums and discrepancies. But at
the least, John’s book shows that it is totally misguided ever to simplistically
assume that the Bible’s account has been discredited by science.
These are indeed exciting times for creationist cosmology, and we hope and pray
that John’s book will open the eyes of many thousands now racked by doubt
due to this once seemingly intractable issue.
Recommended Resources
References and notes
- This information is often quite detailed; for example, a burst
of neutrinos (which pass through the matter that slows light) precedes a burst of
light. Return to text.
- Note that this is quite different from the creation of a mature
Adam, or mature fruit-bearing trees. Here the ‘appearance of age’ is
a necessary consequence of creating a grown adult, e.g. But there is no
necessity to create a fullblown picture show of events that did not happen in order
to have a mature universe. It would be all deception. Return to text.
- A famous proponent of this was Philip Gosse in his book
Omphalos. See the book Green Eye of the Storm, by T.J. Rendle-Short.
Some claimed that God did this to fool us, or test our faith. Return
to text.
- This is known as the ‘horizon problem’. Lisle,
J., Light-travel time: a problem for the big bang, Creation 25(4):48–49,
2003, <www.creation.com/lighttravel>. Return to text.
- Humphreys, D.R., Starlight and Time, Master Books,
Colorado Springs, USA, 1994. Return to text.
- All time references in the Bible are clearly invoking the
frame of reference of Earth-based clocks, with the earth-rotation day as the basis.
So the existence of the whole universe dates from 6,000 years ago, period.
Return to text.
- Hartnett. J., Starlight, Time and the New Physics,
Creation Book Publishers, Georgia, USA, 2007. Return to text.
- Demick, D. and Wieland, C., In the middle of the action,
Creation 28(1):52–55, 2005, <www.creation.com/quantized>.
Return to text.
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