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How do spiral galaxies and supernova remnants fit in with Dr Humphreys’ cosmological model?

Dr Russell Humphreys himself explains …

(Published: 30 November 2006)

(1) Shouldn’t galaxies have had plenty of time to wind up?

No. Remember that we aren’t seeing galaxies as they are today, but at some earlier stage of their development. The evidence suggests that regardless of distance, we are seeing each galaxy at the stage when it had experienced only a few hundred million years of whirling. The diagram (below) shows one scenario (there are other possibilities). It is similar to a figure in my 1998 Journal of Creation article, ‘New vistas in space-time rebut the critics’, also archived on True Origins with other parts of a four-year debate on my cosmology.

This diagram depicts events occurring at various times and places during the fourth day of creation according to one version of my theory. I’ve simplified the figure and exaggerated some of the times disproportionately for clarity. The main feature is the large ‘timeless zone’ in gray which expands out from the center and then inward back toward it. Inside the zone, nothing happens. Clocks don’t tick, and physical processes are stopped at whatever state they were in when the zone engulfed them. Billions of years worth of events occur in the distant cosmos while the earth experiences no time at all. After the earth’s clocks resume again, they measure only twenty-four ordinary hours total during the fourth day.

The two rightward-curving lines show the spacetime paths of two galaxies, A and B, as the expansion of space carries them away from the earth. A could be a nearby galaxy such as M31 in Andromeda, only a few million light-years away. B could be the most distant galaxy observed by the Hubble Space Telescope, more than 14 billion light-years away from us. God creates the galaxies at the points labeled c on the fine dotted line just above the timeless zone. That means He creates the more distant galaxy B before He creates the nearby one A, but both start up during the fourth day.

After galaxy B has been spinning for (let’s say) exactly 300 million years, it has formed a nice set of spiral arms which are not yet overlapping each other. Light leaves spacetime point 2, headed for earth. After traveling billions of light-years, it passes galaxy A at spacetime point 1. At that point, galaxy A has also been spinning for exactly 300 million years, has nicely-developed spiral arms, and it also sends light toward the earth. Photons from each galaxy arrive on earth simultaneously just after the earth has emerged from the timeless zone, near the end of the fourth day. Six thousand years later, we are seeing galaxies which have whirled for 300,006,000 years. That means the images we see are of clearly-defined spiral arms.

If we could see those same galaxies as they are now, my best guess is that they would look like featureless elliptical galaxies, with no hint of spiral arms. However, we are not seeing them as they now are, but instead as they were.

Incidentally, I think from Scripture (Starlight and Time, Appendix B) that another similar time dilation event happened during the Genesis flood, so we are not seeing galaxies as they were during the fourth day, but rather as they were after the Fall of man. That would explain why we see various destructive things happening in the heavens even at great distances.

Timeless Zone

Diagram of Dr Humphreys’ cosmological model on the Fourth Day,
illustrating the Timeless Zone
Click on picture to see larger version

(2) Shouldn’t we see many large supernova remnants?

My understanding is that most of the supernova remnants we can observe are nearby ones, within ten thousand light-years away from us, in our own galaxy. Old remnants in other galaxies would be hard to observe. The nearby parts of our galaxy would be in the upward ‘prong’ of the timeless zone, so those stars wouldn’t be much older than the earth and our solar system. That is perfectly consistent with the number of nearby supernova remnants, reported at the 1994 International Conference on Creationism to be about 7,000 years worth [Ed. note: see also Exploding stars point to a young universe. Where are all the supernova remnants?]

Many people have asked me these questions, but this is the first time I’ve tried to clarify things with the diagram above.