There it says, " Like all good preachers of [woo], he carefully tailors his ideas to avoid being verifiable or falsifiable. He claims that the decay curve just recently flat-lined. It was still decaying, honest, but we just missed it. Unfortunately for him, it has been demonstrated to be false."
This is the kind of thing I’m looking for…
I published a critique of his work in the CRSQ and I stand by that paper. Setterfield mangled the data
Morton, G. R., Slusher, H. S., Bartman, R. C., and Barnes, T. G., (1983). Comments on the Velocity of Light. Creation Research Society Quarterly. 20:63-65.
I also sent a critique of his work to Ex Nihilo and as I recall, the editor tried to make it sound like I supported Setterfield. The level of dishonesty with that crowd was amazing
Morton, G. R. (1982). It’s No Light Criticism. Ex Nihilo. 4(1982):4:77-78
Hi there,
I’m very interested in reading your two critiques that you mentioned. Are you willing to email me PDF’s of them?
My email is:
loewen.chris@gmail.com
I may have one of them avalable, the CRSQ article. Back in the early 80s, everything was done on paper, and I wrote on a typewriter. When my cancer got out of control, I moved to be near my son and got rid of my 4000 volume scientific library which also contained those papers. If I still have the Ex Nihilo article it is in a file cabinet in my garage. lol
In the history of the YEC debate, Setterfield is famous for 2 things:
The speed of light slowed down over the last few hundred years.
Earth’s decaying magnetic field means the Earth is young.
Both are rather bad arguments. The speed of light measurements used various different and flawed methodologies over the years, so they can’t be relied on to tell us about the history of the speed of light here on Earth. If you used those same methodologies today you would get the same measurements they got hundreds of years ago. Next, the Earth’s magnetic field does decay, and then it flips and strengthens. Setterfield just kind of ignored this fact.
I highly doubt that Setterfield gained all of this scientific knowledge and then concluded that the Earth was young. Rather, he started with a belief in a young Earth and then found some rather bad arguments to justify that belief.
I haven’t looked at that article in about 30 years. We did several things, take his measurements of various constants and back calculate what c would be. The values of lots of constants depend on c. Here is the article.
click on the pictures to make them bigger and thus readable. As I told one guy today, when I was a YEC I was no more comforting to them than I am to people here.
That’s perfect! Thank you
It appears that the article was cut off at pg.65
Any chance you have more?
Thank you so much
p 65 was the last page of our article. You can see our names in the top of the 2nd column on page 65
Hypothetically, how does that work? Einstein’s famous equation (E=MC2) governs the conversion of mass into energy and vice versa. But if light moved faster in the past, wouldn’t that mean that mass and energy conversation rates have changed over time too? Soooo, the Sun burned hotter and brighter in the past too presumably?
How much of a decrease is he suggesting?
Presumably, God would adjust all of those other physical laws on the fly so that nothing bad would happen? Dunno. It reminds of a Steven Wright comedy bit where thieves broke into his house while he was sleeping, stole all of his stuff, and then replaced everything with exact replicas so that he wouldn’t report the burglary. As to the actual numbers:
The link in the quote gets you to Setterfield’s work.
Ah, good old Barry Setterfield.
Barry Setterfield’s c-decay was the first indication to me that all was not well in the land of YEC-dom. I had been an all-guns-blazing YEC for less than three months when I was introduced to it, and even as a first year A level physics student it looked waaaaaaaaay off base. Historical measurements of the speed of light, made with primitive equipment and techniques that were simply not up to the job of tightening down the error bars enough to make a reasonable case, an equation for the decay curve that seemed to be pulled out of thin air, and then there was this cut-off date in the late 50s/early 60s which coincided suspiciously closely with the invention of the laser, and with it the necessary precision to blow the gaff on the whole thing – what was that all about??? It breaks every rule on how to measure things that you can think of, and then some. I ditched YEC in favour of OEC a couple of months later on discovering 2 Peter 3:8.
What amazes me is that some of the more lucid and scientifically literate YECs that I know on Facebook actually think he’s onto something. The mind boggles.
Well if this AiG article is anything to go by then that would be a big job:
To give some idea of the trend of values, the speed of light was 391,966 km/sec. at AD 1 according to the curve. If we accept the short Biblical chronology of 1,656 years from Creation to the Flood, the curve predicts a value at the time of the Flood (2384 BC) of 1,621,908 km/sec. (The Velocity of Light and the Age of the Universe | Answers in Genesis)
1,621,908km/s! That’s 5.5 times the current speed of light. That’s our sun burning 5.5 times hotter and brighter (Assuming, I’ve not bungled the physics). I hope Noah had sun screen…
Whatever happened to the word ‘crank’?
One would have to wonder about the decay of naturally occurring radioactive isotopes, such as the 40K found in every human being. There might even be stable atomic nuclei that become unstable if physical constants are changing like this.
YECs favorite verse to ignore:
Is there any evidence of his work published in peer reviewed journals??
Can we advance to whack job?
Wouldn’t that be about 30.25 times (5.5 squared) hotter, not merely 5.5? Energy = Mass times the square of the sped of light?
(Oh… but then there’s the inverse square of the radiation over distance, so perhaps it might just have been only 5.5 times the radiative effect. Or something like that. My brain hurts…)
Or 5.5 squared times hotter? E = mc^2, right?
…for all the difference it makes to your point, anyway. 5.5 times … 30 times … that’s all well within YEC error bars, right?
[Ahh – I see @David_Lee beat me to it … No the inverse square law would still just be working on the changed quantity - if it’s ‘K’ times brighter at the source, it’s ‘K’ times brighter everywhere.]
Science progresses by searching outwards. Mostly this is by adding to what is already known, not by fundamentally changing it.
Occasionally, but only occasionally, a well-established understanding (or “theory”) needs to be revised. Classic examples include:
the “ultraviolet catastrophe” in the early 1900s (and it was work related to this, rather than to his more famous relativity, that earned Einstein a Nobel prize)
deep-seated changes in the understanding of gravity and space-time, also in the first quarter of the 20th century
But this is rare. Usually science is about filling in the gaps and about expanding beyond the edges.
It is quite possible to come up with new ideas. But these ideas are usually to explain data that otherwise don’t yet fit established models. Here’s an example. In geophysics, the idea of the “deep mantle plume” developed in the 1970s as part of plate tectonics and is a good fit to the data in certain areas such as the Hawaii chain. It also does a good job of explaining other areas of volcanic activity. But more recently some scientists propose an alternative model of “shallow lithospheric melting” that seems to be a better fit for some volcanic regions. This is an active, live debate. But crucially, this debate, which is lively within the community, is conducted on the basis of real evidence. “We propose this new model for at least some areas (e.g. Iceland, possibly Yellowstone) because it provides a better fit for the observed data.”
So how does that relate to YEC? Real science is based on an already deep understanding of the real science-so-far, and on real data which needs to be fitted into that real science. Peer-review is about arguing and debating all of that, from an already deep knowledge of, and sympathy with, the existing body of knowledge and understanding. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with YEC, which is about starting from a philosophical human opinion and trying to fit all the data into it.
Still, if a YEC person or group can genuinely come up with a scientific framework, that can be well-argued and that fits all the existing data in all the relevant fields, their Nobel prize awaits collection…
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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