Does distant starlight prove the universe is old?

Question

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-starlight-prove

Take a look at this website, Does this help you understand the age of the universe?

Answer 1

This is the best argument used against creationists and AIG has admitted to that. I don't understand why people call them liars because what I gather from that article is that while they do have some ideas about starlight and time none of them are without flaws and it needs more research and that was stated in the article. There has been only one good refutation of this article by the yahoo answerers and that was the guy that talked about redshifts and blueshifts. All though, stating that because we see redshifts proves the universe/ earth is not in a gravitational well would be wrong because a gravitational well produces both it just depends on which way your viewing. If you look down on the gravitational well you will see redshifts and if you look up from the gravitational well you will see blueshifts. I am not sure about how this effects the Humphrey's model, but it seems like it's because the Earth would have to be at the bottom of the well (where gravity has the most impact) and so we would be looking up at the stars and therefore we should see blueshifts not redshifts. However it seems like Humphrey's talks about the Earth being at the center of the universe and we wouldn't necessarily be looking up at the stars and redshifts would be from the expansion of the universe. However I could find nothing that refuted the blueshift claim so I am not sure whether it is legitimate and creationists just don't have an answer or Humphrey's never saw it as a problem. Here is a link for his refutations of his critics which I didn't see anything about blueshifts. http://www.trueorigin.org/camplist.asp The other argument about the strength of gravity being too strong sounded like speculation more than a scientific fact, so that doesn't effect me one way or the other.

Seems how you are a creationists I will also refer you to this site which tries to explain the starlight problem, but it is an idea that can not be scientifically verified so not a great argument can be made for it but it could be said that it is logically possible.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/tj/docs/v17n2_cosmology.pdf

I wish there was a good scientific answer for this question but there really isn't one at this time. I still have faith that there is one which I will always admit there is an element of faith to what I believe unlike the evolutionists who want people to believe there are no problems with their theory.

Answer 2

1

Answer 3

Suprisingly, distant starlight is invalid in determining the age of the universe. The usual reasoning goes like this:

"we observe stars and galaxies billions of light-years away, and the speed of light is the constant c (3x10^8 m/s), this means it took billions of years for its light to reach us. Therefore, the universe is billions of years old."

However, this reasoning is not correct. This assumes that the one-way speed of light from the distant stars to the earth is c. This is what you would infer based on what is taught in schools. However, the textbook teaching is not entirely correct. What is postulated by Special Relativity is the constancy of the "two-way speed of light." In fact, you can choose the one way speed of light arbitrarily as long as the two-way speed adds up to the constant c (3x10^8 m/s). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light

An astrophysicist put forward a thesis that you can just DEFINE the speed of INCOMING light to be instantaneous. That would mean that light from however far away (billions of light-years away) reaches us instantaneously. To compensate for consistency based on Relativity, we can then define the speed of OUTGOING light to be 1/2 c.

This sounds counter-intuitive, and seems contrary compared to what is normally taught in schools. However, Einstein himself is aware of this, that this is still a perfectly valid and consistent with Special Relativity. This is very amazing!

Time is relative, there is no such thing as "objective" time that works for all observers. In the end, distant starlight cannot be used as argument for counting the age of the universe.

Answer 4

no.

The universe is old because it is old. The light from distant objects is a good hint since the speed of light is finite (not infinite) and, on astronomical scales, quite slow.

We can tell (roughly) the distance to objects by different means (other than by "age of light") and we notice that the further something is, the younger the universe looks around it.

The Big Bang theory was formulated by a Christian priest, therefore it is not "anti-religion".

The article does address the question: is God so devious that he would give us a fake universe on which to practice the intelligence He gave us?

I hope not. 'cause if he did, then only devious people can go to heaven (and we certainly do not suffer a lack of those).

Answer 5

I think it's amusing that someone with the screen name "Free Thinker" would be using "answersingenesis.com" as her source of information about the age of the Universe.

And "theway," obviously. You believe in the literal interpretation of an ancient myth and so this "obviously" makes the scientific view wrong.

Why bother saying that light was faster at earlier times? Why not just keep it simple and say that nothing in the Universe is more than 6000 light years away? Both are equally absurd. The second one's easier for the flock to understand, though.

Phoenixshade, your effort may be wasted on some, but not on me. Thanks.

Answer 6

People only read Answers in Genesis to look for a comforting confirmation of their precious mythological beliefs. They do not go there looking for sound science. Some of the key points of the cited article are easily disproven.

The section titled "The Assumption of the Rigidity of Time" hypothesizes that time flows slower on earth than in most of the rest of the universe, because the earth is located in a gravity well. It cites the gravitational time dilation predicted by Einstein's general relativity to "support" this idea.

Let's assume then for a minute that this is true, that time moves slower on earth than in the rest of the universe. Is there a way to test this?

Yes, there is. When a star emits light in the form of photons, those photons must pass through the star's atmosphere - mostly hydrogen. When a photon encounters a hydrogen atom, if it has the exact energy required to move its electron into a higher energy state, it is absorbed by the electron, which jumps up to the atom's next orbital. This creates dark bands in the star's spectrum at the very specific wavelengths that correspond to these amounts of energy. And indeed, this is how we determine what elements are present in stars, because each element has its own unique set of absorption lines.

Now imagine a photon arriving at earth's gravity well. As it descends into the well, it must gain energy. Since the speed of light is constant, it cannot gain this energy in the form of increased speed. Instead, the photon gains energy by increasing its frequency (and thus shortening its wavelength). This results in a shift of the photon's color toward the blue end of the spectrum. This effect is known as gravitational blueshift.

In the case of hydrogen, one of the strongest absorption lines occurs at a wavelength of 656.3 nm. Light from a distant star will be missing photons of this wavelength. But it will have photons of wavelength 656.2 and 656.4. When these photons fall into the gravity well, the wavelengths shorten, let's say to 640.7 and 640.9 for the purpose of illustration. The dark band of missing photons will thus appear to shift to a wavelengh of 640.8. From this example, you should be able to see that the other aborption lines will appear to shift, too.

When we look at light from distant galaxies, we do not see ANY indication of gravitational blueshift. (In fact, it is REDshifted, for a different reason: all distant galaxies are moving apart as the universe expands.) This effectively disproves any argument that the earth is in a gravitational well, and therefore destroys the idea that time runs slower on earth due to relativistic effects.

There's another reason that the "gravity well" hypothesis fails. The author of the article states that we would not feel the effects of being in such a well. This assertion is patently false. A gravity well capable of the degree of time dilation required by any young-earth cosmology is MANY orders of magnitude. This would require a very steep gravity well, and anyone in it would experience gravity many millions of times stronger than what we do experience. We would be crushed by it.

Additionally, there is no known way to produce such a gravity well other than with supermassive objects. The earth would need to be denser than a neutron star to achieve a gravity well this steep.

The second-to-last sentence of this section of the article reads: "And although there are still a number of mathematical details that need to be worked out, the premise certainly is reasonable." This is also absolutely false. Most undergraduate physics majors have both the necessary theoretical knowledge and the underlying math skills necessary to mathematically DISprove the entire notion of the gravity well argument presented here.

The next two sections, "Assumptions of Synchronization" (in which the author proposes a "cosmic local time," as if God divided the universe into time zones), and "The Assumption of Naturalism" (in which the author declares that God's allowed to break the laws of physics) are unfalsifiable and are therefore not science. They should not be convincing to any but the superstitious folk who believe their salvation DEPENDS on it.

The latter of these sections, in fact, is all but an admission that the author is not expressing a scientific notion at all, but rather a religious one in borrowed scientific robes.

In the final section before his conclusion, "Light Travel-Time: A Self-Refuting Argument," the author makes the claim that the only way that the microwave background radiation could have reached a universally constant temperature of 2.7 K is if this was through an energy exchange between all points of like temperature. He claims that even with a 14 billion year old universe, insufficient time has passed to reach a uniform temperature.

The refutation of this is just as sound as the argument against the gravity well model. The author is conveniently presenting a model for the cooling that conveniently dismisses the inflationary mode of universal expansion, which explains this flatness of temperature and matter distribution. I'll spare you the details, but do a search for "big bang," "cosmic inflation," and "horizon problem" if you want to research this further.

In short, this article does nothing to support the notion that the universe is young. It only APPEARS to do so to those who lack a sufficient understanding of science to see through its obvious shortcomings.

If you've read this far, I thank you for your patience and urge you to research the claims made by young-earth creationists. You will find that most of them don't stand up to even a cursory critical evaluation.

Answer 7

Answers in genesis is a website filled with lies.

Measuring red shift of stars does set a lower limit on the age of the universe. To get a more accurate estimate we have measured the background microwave radiation (WMAP study).

Answer 8

The convoluted steps in logic that you attempt in order to justify a pre-existing scripture are transparent and weak. Nothing that you have shown here makes any sense at all in terms of evidence, unless you twist it to make it fit - JUST RIGHT - and then say - "see, it works!" This is the worst kind of deception masquerading as science and it is the entire reason for the silly reputation that fundamentalist Christians are earning for themselves in all circles other than their own. How sad.

Answer 9

Well since it takes the light from the furthest stars millions of light years to reach us I would say that compared to me the universe is quite old.

Answer 10

Obviously our understanding of the speed of light being a constant is flawed. The big bang hypothesis is impossible too if you hold that the speed of light has never changed. The speed of light must have been much greater at the time of creation.