No that would be a indeterminant form. In math when you get into this situation you have to take the limit and it can result in an actual number, zero, or infinity depending on the situation.
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As @Mervin_Bitikofer said. Example? And isn’t nearly zero x infinity, infinity?
No matter what language Aesop’s Fables are written in they are still fables, and should be easily recognized as such.
You are insisting on a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2, and it is far from clear that Genesis 1 and 2 are describing a literal historical event.
More to the point, there are physical consequences if the universe is only 6,000 years old. One of them is that light has a set speed, so we should only be able to see stars less than 6,000 light years away if the universe is as young as claimed. That’s not what we see. If your interpretation of Genesis doesn’t match the observable facts, then that’s a very clear signal that your interpretation is wrong. The only other option is to conclude that the Bible is false.
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Well it has been quite a few years since I did calculus, but Google AI provided an example.
Does that help?
It depends. Remember infinity isn’t a number.
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Respectfully, did you actually watch the video?
Derek was quite specific that c is the two way (round trip) speed of light. Derek never claimed that c was infinite nor much faster at any point.
Derek addressed GPS in the video, he is by no stretch a Young Earth Creationist, and again, he was not remotely claiming that c was infinite. He emphasized that, while the round trip speed of light is invariably c, that even so, even if if it were instantaneous in one direction and c/2 in the other direction, that nothing in all of physics (including GPS) would differ.
I’m guessing that it isn’t like all the physicists since Einstein that affirm this principle have just missed the observations you’re making here… and Veritasium is the kind of channel that puts some serious research into what it puts into its videos…as popular a science channel as Veritasium is, this video - made 4 years ago with 23 million views - would have had some serious pushback from physicists if they had seriously erred or missed obvious problems.
Unless presented with other expertise, Im going to assume that the information Derek presented in the video does not differ from the consensus of modern physicists.
Simple example while typing on my phone here … so that will make me be brief.
Calc 1 intro to derivatives…
Imagine a bicycle going at steady speed of 10 mph (miles per hour). That concept comes from a non zero distance traveled over a non zero time… say ten miles traveled in an hour of time. So obviously it’s an average speed. But what if I want to know my speed right now, on this given instant? Knowing that after an hour I’ll have traveled ten miles doesn’t really help me know how fast I’m going right now. So I take a shorter time… and shorter distance. I get my average quicker now. Maybe I traveled 1 mile in 0.1 hours. Better but still not really useful for my speed right now. So keep making it shorter all the way to zero. My bike travels zero distance divided by zero time. Zero divided by zero is the same thing as zero times infinity: Indeterminant. And yet… there my bike is, going 10 mph right there in that instant! So in that context, zero x infinity turned out to be 10. Think of it as a secant line crossing a smooth curved line in two different points, giving the average slope of the curve between those two points. Then let those two points move closer and closer together, until they merge into one point - at which point the rise and run of that slope have both become zero. Your calculator won’t tell you what 0/0 is, but in just such a case as that the limit of the slope of that line approaches the very finite and observable slope of the curve at that point.
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Nope. Last Tuesday.
That is entirely correct, but it does solve the distant starlight conundrum for YEC (which is a theological problem, not a scientific problem).
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Many, many years ago I used to adjust signal delay in coax cables by adjusting the cable length. I don’t remember the formula we used but it was so many picoseconds per foot of cable. The propagation speed is dependent on the speed of light in a vacuum and this would be in one direction.
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If said stars and galaxies were all in the same direction relative to us, then perhaps. Since they’re in all directions, speeding light in one direction doesn’t help.
One would need to hold a geocentric view of the universe where Earth is a fixed center (regardless of its apparent movement around the sun or in the Milky Way) and all light towards Earth travels instantly while all light away from us travels at half c. But young-earthers willing to adopt geocentrism probably aren’t too worried about the distant starlight problem or any other intrusions of reality into their ideas.
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I’m fascinated, but I just don’t understand your reply… Wouldn’t any Young Earth Creationist that understands anything whatsoever about relativity fully recognize and fully acknowledge without hesitation that when they say creation in “six days” they mean six 24-hour days as recognized from earth’s vantage point… and that observers in other reference frames at other locations, distances, or speeds throughout the universe would de facto have experienced or observed something different than an identical precise144 hours?
This doesn’t seem an objection to their position as much as it seems something inherent and inescapable that they would acknowledge and embrace, no?
Jason Lisle has been pushing that concept for some time…
It is true that no one has succeeded measuring the ‘one way speed of light’. One can play with reference frames but this doesn’t really help with making the universe only a few thousand years old, however, because other phenomena counter that. Other observations like
- The galaxies furthest away from us appearing the youngest. If light arrived with little or no delay when inbound, the near and distant galaxies would have the same apparent age.
- Ejecta tails from black holes ~23 million light years across (Porphyrion).
- The most distant stars are hydrogen and helium rich compared to the nearer population (also an indicator of age).
Certainly, one could imagine thousands of possible corrections to current theories in every case, but in toto, multiple metrics point to age of the universe around ~14 billion years.
And none of this would have an effect on determining the age of the Earth.
Some years ago, someone under the moniker “r_speir” raised some interesting issues with Lisle’s model here. Discussions about the age of galaxies and other phenomena vs. young universe views (here).
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Because there is no preferred reference frame, one can model that and get the numbers to work but I’m told the transformations would be onerous. Maybe something an evil physics professor would include in a class final exam.
This was my reaction at first as well… I thought at first Derek was saying that the speed of light might objectively be a certain speed in one certain direction (just that we could never measure it and tell for certain)… e.g., if the light approaching the earth from say the North Star were instantaneous coming from that star, then any light approaching earth from the south would by c/2… but the more I tried to understand this concept (as it was completely new to me) and read and studied further, then (unless I completely misunderstand), then it isn’t that light might have objective speeds in certain celestial directions, but rather that any observer gets to choose whatever convention they want to use to define these one-way speeds of light according to their own (to use Einstein’s words) “free will.”
Hence any observer could choose a convention as the speed of light as being instantaneous toward the observer and c/2 away, or c/2 toward them and instantaneous away, just as freely as Einstein chose for light to be c in all directions. (In fact, it sounds like Einstein’s choice of that convention was chosen largely because it made the math easier?)
Honestly, this seems absolutely crazy and nearly nonsensical to me… but then so do most things related to relativity. I’ve almost gotten my mind around two clocks at different speeds moving at different rates and observers at different speeds all observing c being the same… but can’t get my mind around things being different physical lengths depending on speed of the observer or of having different observers having different observational perspectives of things being simultaneous or not.
This similarly is something hard for me to get my mind around, but everything I’m reading seems to think this is a consequence of relativity as well. Einstein himself apparently defined c as the average of its “there and back again” journey in his 1905 paper; and as such, any values up to and including instantaneous & c/2 that average c work for all his subsequent equations.
Einstein chose to assume light to be c in all directions simply as a “convention” (known now as the Einstein Synchronization Convention if I follow), but Einstein clarified (as per the video) that the convention of the speed of light being the same in all directions…
“Is neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation I can make of my own free will to arrive at a definition of simultaneity.”
And as Derek further notes in that video, “That sounds a lot more subjective than how I think most people would imagine the speed of light is defined.” Absolutely. Sounds crazy to me, and crazily subjective. But I’ve gotten used to things related to Relativity (and Quantum Physics) not making intuitive sense.
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Helpful, thanks. I’m not suggesting that any such alternate (anisotropic) conventions prove a YEC position… just recognizing that this seems to be consistent with their overall perspective… but not a proof, since someone apparently could hypothetically choose an alternate convention of light from distant galaxies being c/2 toward the earth/observer, which would then be consistent with a universe far older than its current estimate, though similarly this couldn’t by itself be used to prove any such “super-old” date? Actual date of the universe would indeed be determined by other factors… Correct me if I’m misunderstanding here.
But if I’m understanding it rightly, then bottom line is that the light from distant starlight simply cannot be the “problem” for Young Earth Creationists that I’ve always assumed it to be.
I gather that the one way speed of light is about the choice of coordinates. You can choose the coordinates to make that speed whatever you want, so long as the round-trip average is the same. I’ve read that anisotropic time dilation would also occur with anisotropic time dilation so if one direction was ‘faster’ the universe may still appear isotropic.
What I don’t understand is how to make Earth a radially symmetric point where, for example, all inbound light from any direction could be instantaneous and all outbound light travels at 2c.
In any case, many YEC’s invoke ‘time dilation’ to wave away any number of problems.
A related question for anyone who knows… Given these crazy questions about Relativity, simultaneity, time dilation, reference frames, and the like, what exactly does anyone mean when someone says the universe is such and such numbers of years old?
For instance, I just asked Google, and it told me
>The current scientific estimate for the age of the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years
OK, 13.8 billion years according to what observer? Is this date significantly different depending on different observers in different locations or relative speeds across the span of the universe? Are there some conceivable hypothetical observers who experience it as 50 billion years old? 10 trillion years old? 5 seconds old?
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Except Aesops fables and more than a dozen biblical writers reaffirming history over more than a thousand years are worlds apart in terms of authenticity and credibility.
I think the evidence illustrates that is an insignificant example you are using there for comparison.
Well, to be fair, I think we have yet to find anything at all that is or even could be a problem for YECs - at least the ones we hear from here. Here is a sentence I don’t believe I’ve ever heard here or anywhere from any YEC: “If such-and-such turns out to be true, then I guess I would be wrong and creation really would be vastly more ancient than I thought!” Many here have asked Adam or Burawang or others what could possibly falsify their steadfast belief … crickets … (along with the background dull roar of endless Bible passages being copied and pasted). But I’ve never seen any YEC give answer to that simple question. If I missed something, please link me to it. If anybody has heard any such things - I’m all ears.
But so far as I’ve seen, there is no such thing as any problem for young-earthers. Problems are only for those who insist on coherent or plausible explanations for things that is consistent with the most existing evidence. YECers do not share in that concern.
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I think relative to the standard cosmological reference frame. I don’t think we’re near enough to any intense gravitational fields or moving fast enough to make that much of an difference for us.
On the other hand, if you were near the horizon of a black hole, events in the outside universe would appear to zip by.
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