Re: [asa] Near Starlight Problem; Adam would never see all of Orion's belt?

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Michael Roberts
<michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
> Iain cant you persuade Bill to publish it somewhere ? What about Science and
> Christian Belief or PSCF, or get ASA and CIS to put it on their website. Ask
> Jack Haas for the ASA.
>
I've been suggesting to Randy that the ASA should have a wiki so
material can be posted by members just like on wikipedia. I suppose
the exec committee is thinking about those sort of things but of
course they take a while. The point is that a webmaster only has one
set of hands but hundreds of members have thousands of fingers.

I believe the statistics show that only 1/2 of 1% will actually
contribute as opposed to just reading. Hopefully that percentage
would be higher on an ASA wiki.

Whats really cool about mediawiki is it is *exactly* the same
technology that wikipedia uses, and virtually anyone can learn to edit
with wiki markup and can contribute to both.

-Dave
PS. The latest mediawiki technology is including a math markup
language as well.

> Please do it!!
>
> I could check the maths:):)
>
> Michael
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Iain Strachan" <igd.strachan@gmail.com>
> To: "Ted Davis" <TDavis@messiah.edu>
> Cc: <asa@calvin.edu>
> Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 4:17 PM
> Subject: Re: [asa] Near Starlight Problem; Adam would never see all of
> Orion's belt?
>
>
> Dear Ted,
>
> I was wondering if the Humphreys cosmology would come up here.
> Following my talk with my creationist colleague, I looked up some
> pages on the Distant Starlight problem, and came upon a page from
> "ChristianAnswers" that approached it from a YEC perspective.  Right
> till the end it did a very good job of debunking the existing ideas;
> it showed clearly how c-decay doesn't work, and it explained how the
> light could not have been created "in transit" as it would contain
> recorded information about events that never occurred.  However, it
> finished by describing the Humphreys model in some detail, saying that
> though it wasn't infallible, it was an exciting approach with
> considerable theoretical support.
>
> However there is no support and it was completely sunk by a former
> colleague of mine, Bill Worraker, who is also a YEC, and an
> accomplished amateur astronomer and a former post-doc researcher in
> mathematics.
>
> Bill's simple observation completely sinks the theory without trace.
> If one examines the "light curves" from Humphreys's model, the
> inevitable conclusion is that the "look back time" for anything
> between 6000 LY and 2 billion LY is negative (it just falls out of the
> equations and can be demonstrated on a spreadsheet that takes about 10
> minutes to construct).  In other words, nothing between 6000 LY and 2
> billion LY is visible from the earth because the light hasn't got here
> yet.  Andromeda should not be visible, as a direct prediction of
> Humphreys's theory.
>
> Bill wrote and got published a letter to the AiG Technical Journal
> explaining this, with accompanying graph from the spreadsheet.
>
> The result was tragi-comic.  Humphreys wrote to Bill asking him to try
> and get the model to work in different formulations of the General
> Relativistic equations (I think with different values of the
> cosmological constant).  The maths he had to work through was quite
> horrendous, but he was well up to it (I'm afraid it was a bit beyond
> me).  He wrote up the mammoth task in a paper containing over 160
> equations, rigorously worked out (I can claim that my input was to
> help him to typeset the LaTeX, which I had used to write up my PhD).
> His conclusion was much as he had predicted - the model failed in
> exactly the same way in all possible conclusions.
>
> He sent his work off to several creationists in the field, including
> Humphreys  (who had initially helped him by translating a 1920's key
> paper by Schwartzschild from the German).
>
> Practically no-one read his work or took any notice of it.  Humphreys
> simply wrote back and told him not to be so negative; it was his job
> to come up with a better model, and until he did this, he would
> continue with his own - ignoring the fact that Bill had completely
> busted it.
>
> And from what you say, this theory of Humphreys is still being mooted
> as a valid approach.
>
> There are some YEC's I respect enormously, and one of those is my
> former colleague Bill, who is honest enough to admit that there is
> currently no solution to the distant starlight problem that works.  He
> treats it as an "unsolved problem".
>
> However, all that is pretty hard to understand, GR etc, which is why I
> proposed a simpler model about when the stars could be seen following
> creation, as a means of getting people to think about the logical
> consequences of the YEC interpretation of the bible.
>
> Iain
>
> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Ted Davis <TDavis@messiah.edu> wrote:
>>
>> I'm quite sure that arguments about what Adam could see in the night sky
>> on the "day" of his creation have been made multiple times.  I can't cite
>> chapter and verse without doing some checking, but an internet search could
>> be helpful for this type of thing.
>>
>> The larger "omphalos" problem (look that up on the web to fill in the
>> blanks if this isn't already clear) is among the most serious problems faced
>> by a YEC position, and YECs generally admit this.  Understandably, there is
>> great reluctance to employ arguments from apparent age (vs real age), though
>> in some cases they must still be used--e.g., Adam was not created as newborn
>> babe, so he had to look "older" than he really was. Related questions about
>> whether (e.g.) he had any evidence in or on his body of specific incidents
>> from a past history he never actually had (such as the remnants of
>> yesterday's dinner in his bowel or a slight scratch (which must not have
>> involved any real pain, according to YEC theology) on his left arm from
>> brushing against a tree last week are relevant here, but usually overlooked.
>>  Those are obviously similar to questions about historical events revealed
>> by the starlight (such as a magnetic storm on the sun 5 mins before he was
>> created, revealed b!
>
> y the light that arrives 3 and a half minutes later).
>>
>> In general, today's creationists try to answer at least some of the
>> astronomical questions by appealing to Russell Humphreys' "white hole"
>> cosmology as much as possible.  When I attended the planetarium show at the
>> Creation Museum 18 months ago, that model was apparently behind some of the
>> more interesting things that astronomer Jason Lisle said, including his
>> frank acceptance of cosmological distances larger than a few thousand light
>> years (believe me, I was listening for any such and definitely heard it),
>> which creationists traditionally just rejected out of hand.  I will admit
>> that I haven't made the effort to understand Humphreys' model in detail; I
>> have forgotten too much physics to plow through some of it anyway.  I leave
>> that task to others.  The new issue of PSCF, which arrived in yesterday's
>> mail, contains an essay by physicist and philosopher of science Brian Pitts,
>> in which there are some negative comments about Humphreys' model with
>> (apparently) a lot more in t!
>
> he citations, but Pitts' essay (which is mainly about how the RATE project
> fails to account for the dissipation of the enormous heat they need to
> "explain" why radioactive dating is just no good) is also just too technical
> for me to read anymore.  A leading Christian astrophysicist, Don Page (a
> former student of Hawking) has been among the most pointed critics of this
> view (see e.g. http://www.trueorigin.org/rh_connpage1.pdf), but allegedly
> the various criticisms have been answered satisfactorily by Humphreys (it
> always seems to work out this way somehow).
>>
>> That's enough for now,
>>
>> Ted
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> -----------
> Non timeo sed caveo
>
> -----------
>
>
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Received on Mon Feb 23 23:28:49 2009