Light Matters: Is Einstein a friend of young-earth creationism?

Taking our current observations, it is impossible to say whether the Big Bang had a spatial “origin”, also because the CMB is homogenous and isotropic. Either we just can’t see the “edge” yet, or the Universe is infinite. This reminds me of a famous quote, (probably falsely) attributed to Einstein:

“There are two things infinite: the Universe and the stupidity of mankind. However, I’m still not sure about the first one.”

It might be strange to consider the expansion of something that is already infinite. The expansion of an infinite Universe might be visualized by imagining a metal fence with horizontal and vertical bars separated from each other by a certain distance. Consider the fence to be infinitely high and infinitely wide. Now imagine that the distance of separation between the bars starts to grow… The infinite fence is “expanding”, but of course remains infinite… There is no spatial origin of the expansion of this infinite fence. In the same way, the Universe does not need an origin in space.

Hi Casper,

What implications would gravitational lensing of distant supernovae have for the anisotropic synchrony convention? (Article of interest here) Since the light from the same supernova arrives at different times by different paths, wouldn’t that falsify the idea that the one-way speed of light is infinite?

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Hi James,
Using the ASC only changes the way in which events are time-stamped, not the actual physical phenomena like gravitational lensing or redshift. This point is also emphasized in the animation: both plots look exactly the same.

A hand-waving way to look at it would be that the rays of light that undergo gravitational lensing are moving in different directions (they wouldn’t have arrived at earth if their paths wouldn’t be bent along the way). Therefore, even though they left at the same time, their paths differ in how much they deviate from the direction that points directly towards the observer. This results in a time difference since the speed of light has a directional dependency within ASC.

Strictly speaking, we’re walking on thin ice with this way of arguing because Lisle’s proposal centers on the formalism of Special Relativity (SR) which only describes flat spacetime. Gravitational lensing is a consequence of the curvature of spacetime caused by massive objects. That takes us into the realm of General Relativity (GR). It’s not straightforward to generalize statements on chronology from SR to GR.

Hi Mike, thanks for your question. In short, the answer is no. Roemer’s measurement does not prove that the one-way speed of light is constant because it already assumes the standard synchronization (Roemer used Newtonian absolute time).

In the ASC, the synchronization of clocks depends on the distance to the observer. So when the distance from Earth to Jupiter is large, the clocks near Jupiter are set differently than when the distance to Earth is relatively small. The different settings of these clocks correct exactly for the difference in distance. So applying the ASC would give you zero minutes traveling time for both distances, i.e., infinite speed would be measured in both cases (towards the observer on Earth).

Mervin, I suggest a Scientific American article: Misconceptions about the Big Bang, Scientific American 36-45 March 2005. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147

Thanks for the suggestion, Paul. The link took me to a Scientific American site, but with apologies that the page was missing beyond that. So it appears to be a partially broken link.

"The interesting thing about synchrony conventions is that they cannot be empirically verified or falsified.

For example, if you measure the speed of a ray of light travelling from a satellite (clock 1) to Earth (clock 2), you first need to decide what is an appropriate way to synchronize those two clocks."

Just recently I came up with a new idea to measure one way speed of light and/or synchronize distant clocks:

Let’s have two light sources at points A and B separated by distance d and sending constantly (perpendicular to AB) signals to clocks at A’ and B’ (see attached diagram)
Let’s have an opaque rigid rod of the length d (it can be measured against AB while at rest with AB, so accuracy can be high) traveling with constant speed v (non-relativistic) parallel (and very close to) the line AB from B towards A. Initially the light from B to B’ will be blocked and the light from A to A’ will be allowed to be transmitted. When front end of the rod will start cutting off the light from A to A’ the light from B will start to be transmitted to B’ . At this moment, we will have both clock at A’ and B’ synchronized.

Alternatively when front end of the rod will start cutting off the light from A to A’ we can start the clock at A and when the light from B will start to be transmitted to B’ we can also send the light from B to A .When the light from B arrives at A the clock at A will measure one way speed of light. This method would need only one clock.
We can improve the accuracy of the measurement sending the rod from A to B with the same speed v and measure one way speed of light from A to B. The average 2 way speed of light from A to B and from B to A has to be c.