From: Rich Blinne (richblinne@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Aug 21 2002 - 17:23:59 EDT
BIO:
Rich Blinne, Age 40
B.S. Computer Engineering Iowa State University
Professional Computer/Semiconductor Engineer
Amateur Astronomer
I came to the Lord in 1983 partly in a result of creationist/evolution
arguments. I never have accepted the apparent age argument made at the
time. What was/is compelling was Jesus referring to Adam as a real person.
My theological views are very similar to Terry Gray's (we attended the same
church at one time). When I as one of the ruling elders we were considering
Terry as an elder in our church. So, I had to deal with the controversy
surrounding him when he was in the OPC. The material Terry provided at the
time was helpful in moving me along. At the time I was a YEC am now an OEC
and it wouldn't surprise me that my views on origens will fully coincide
with Terry's some time in the (near) future.
On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Iain Strachan wrote:
>My creationist colleague, whom I mentioned in the last posting, has
>reviewed in depth the work of another maverick astronomer Halton Arp, who
>similarly maintains that the cosmological red-shift is incorrect. It is of
>interest to note that the general response of the scientific community has
>been to ostracize Arp, to the extent that he is not able to publish
>anything in peer reviewed literature.
Arp was most famous for his catalog of peculiar galaxies. B.J. Boyle et al
in their paper on the 2dF QSO redshift survery (Second Coral Sea Cosmology
Conference, 1999) concluded that QSOs are hosted by normal galaxies rather
than the unusual galaxies Arp specialized in. It was the anomolous behavior
of quasars in Seyfert galaxies which produced the "data" Arp used to debunk
orthodox cosmology. I think your colleague may be playing with fire,
though. Arp's continuous creation theory to explain the red shift is an
explicit denial of creatio ex nihilo. Since old quasars had less red-shift
than new ones, he posited that quasars were matter generators and the
created matter accounted for the larger red shift. When considering whether
the matter comes from "somewhere else", Arp replies "there is nowhere else".
Your creationist colleague is trading a created universe with an
inconvenient age, for an uncreated, self-existent universe!
On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Loren Haasma wrote:
>Some quasars are positioned such that a large galaxy or, more typically, a
>cluster of galaxies is almost exactly along a line-of-sight between us and
>the quasar. We know the distances to these "intervening" galaxy clusters by
>measuring the distances to the variable stars and supernovas within them.
>We know that the quasars are beyond these galaxy clusters because the
>gravitational field of the cluster bends the light (and radio waves) from
>the quasars on their way to us. This bending or lensing of the light (radio
>waves) can create multiple images of the same quasar. Moreover, because the
>light (radio waves) of each image of the quasar takes a different path to
>us, there is a "time delay" amongst the images. (The light from one image
>reaches us several hours or several years before the light from the other
>images.) The exact time delay amongst the images depends upon the exact
>geometery of the particular lens. By measuring the time delays and modeling
>the mass of the intervening galaxy clusters, we can get an independent
>measure of the cosmological distances involved. These distance measurements
>from gravitational lenses independently confirm the cosmological red-shift
>measurements of distance.
An example of such a gravitational lens is HST 14176+5226. Go to
http://astro.phys.cmu.edu/~kavan/lenses/u26x8g0009.html and see "Einstein's
cross" for yourself.
_________________________________________________________________
Join the worldís largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail.
http://www.hotmail.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Aug 21 2002 - 17:32:43 EDT