Jason Lisle and the Asynchronous Speed of Light

[Graybeard]

(I would appreciate it if people would call me Jaime, if they want to shorten it from Jaimehlers)

@RNS:

(7) Well, let's take a concept or idea which existed before science and is not proven by science, such as the soul.  Does the fact that the existence of the soul is unproven mean it is necessarily disproven?  To put that another way, what science does not observe cannot be recorded or studied and thus falls outside the bounds of science; so the failure to observe something does not disprove the existence of the thing not observed.

To put this in perspective, before we had telescopes, humans could only see stars bright enough to be visible to the naked eye.  Afterward, we could see stars that weren't.  Yet those stars still existed before we had the ability to observe them.  If someone had said that there were no stars but those we could see with our eyes, who could have proved him wrong back then?  Based on what he could see, and his own reasoning and logic, he would have been correct.  And yet, we know now without question that such a statement would have been unequivocably wrong.

The lack of proof cuts both ways, though.  Just as we can't disprove the existence of the soul, neither can we prove its existence.  Someone who says "no, this thing definitely does not exist" without any proof is just as wrong as someone who says "yes, this thing definitely does exist" without any proof either.  So it's certainly good to be skeptical.  Yet, if someone had said a century ago that solid objects weren't actually solid and in fact had large amounts of empty space incorporated into them, who would have believed them without proof?  Yet, based on what we understand now, such a person would have had the right of it.

So here we see that your claim is that it is a 50:50 chance that there is such a thing as a “soul.”

First problem with Lisle's supposition is that he states without proof that the Bible is inherently accurate.  Except that we can prove (not claim, not assume, prove) that parts of the Bible have been altered over time by the simple fact that even the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament differ from each other in various ways (source: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/manuscripts.html).  If some parts of the Bible have been proven to not be inherently accurate, due to scribal errors (both accidental and intentional), then no part of it can simply be assumed true.  Therefore, Lisle's claim that one can simply calculate the genealogies in order to come up with the age of the Earth (let alone the universe, as he claims) is unsupported.

Here we see that you claim that the Bible is unreliable. The only mention of a soul (and it is not what most people think it is) is in the Bible.

You continue:

The second is that he is making an unsupported assumption about the age of the Earth/universe, and then using that as justification for calling geological conclusions about the age of the Earth and astronomical conclusions about the age of the universe into question.  He gives no proof to support either, instead posting various rationales for why scientists and their conclusions might be wrong without ever seriously touching on most of the weight of evidence that supports them.  In short, he is claiming that a source of questionable accuracy is instead perfectly accurate and using that to call basic precepts of science into question without any sort of proof
In short, because of those two major problems, all of his other assertions are dubious, at best, and simply cannot be trusted to be accurate (especially given the lack of any sort of proof)..

Lyle’s reasoning is rather similar to the way you wrote when making statements about the soul, is it not?

I am frankly disturbed about the way you are able to double-think as and when it suits you. It is almost as if you call on God to support your beliefs and call upon science to dismiss those ideas you find erroneous.

This is known as Self-projection as God. It certainly is not religion as we know it.

Have you a comment? As it is, and as I have written before, I cannot see why a deity is necessary to you.

[Bagheera]

Hey there.

I haven't chosen to address whether or not Lisle's YEC beliefs are accurate or not (I personally believe that he's delusional in regards to the Bible). But even biblical fundamentalists can be right about other things even though viewed through their prism of "the Bible is always right". Being delusional does not preclude being intelligent.

What I find ironic is that embracing ASC does not prove the age of the Earth is 6000 years old; it means at best that we can't tell the minimum age of the universe by figuring distance from farthest stars x speed of light. It doesn't support the argument for a young earth, merely questions one of MANY pieces of evidence for a very old universe.

In your experiment, the problem becomes that when the laser is turned on, from the point of view of the observer standing near the laser, the laser light will travel at 75,000 km/s (0.5c), thus taking TWO seconds to reach the mirror, and slightly more than two two seconds to reach the reactor. The light bouncing off the mirror will be reflected back to the observer instantly, followed by the light from the reactor. (and seeing how both the reactor and the mirror are transmitting light back to the observer, you may as well have two mirrors).


A|---------------------|
                               Laser emitter
     B|-----------------|
                               observer

| = mirrors

You could synchronized clocks, one for each mirror, and then just have them stop when the laser hits them. But moving the mirrors, as I understand it, also changes the rate at which time moves for the mirrors, thus making it impossible to tell if the difference is because light got there after one another or because the clocks are no longer in sync. . .

I am wondering though if your idea might have some merit. What if. . . what if the observer was standing behind a material with a high refractive index?

The speed at which light propagates through transparent materials, such as glass or air, is less than c. The ratio between c and the speed v at which light travels in a material is called the refractive index n of the material (n = c / v). For example, for visible light the refractive index of glass is typically around 1.5, meaning that light in glass travels at c / 1.5 ? 200,000 km/s; the refractive index of air for visible light is about 1.0003, so the speed of light in air is about 90 km/s slower than c.

Fire a laser at an observer, with a material between the observer and the laser that partly obscures the laser.

If the speed of light is indeed 300,000 km/s both ways, then the observer should see the light from the unobstructed side of the laser arriving before the light from the glassy side, because it has to slow down going through the glass. If, on the other hand, ASC is correct, the light from BOTH sides should appear at the same times, because the speed of light moving towards the observer is infinite. I mean. . . infinite / 1.5 should still be infinite, right. . . ?

[jaimehlers]

So here we see that your claim is that it is a 50:50 chance that there is such a thing as a “soul.”

No, just that I said that you can't prove or disprove anything without evidence either way.  In other words, there is not a 50/50 chance of the soul's existence, because there is no evidence by which to assess a meaningful probability.

Here we see that you claim that the Bible is unreliable. The only mention of a soul (and it is not what most people think it is) is in the Bible.

All that means is that we go back to "cannot assess a meaningful probability due to lack of evidence."

You continue:

Lyle’s reasoning is rather similar to the way you wrote when making statements about the soul, is it not?

Given that I made no statement at all about whether I believed in the soul in the first place, there can be no meaningful comparison between his reasoning and mine.

I am frankly disturbed about the way you are able to double-think as and when it suits you. It is almost as if you call on God to support your beliefs and call upon science to dismiss those ideas you find erroneous.

I am frankly disturbed by the way you are able to take a statement saying that we cannot prove or disprove something without evidence to support either conclusion and twist it into a 'claim' about probability.

This is known as Self-projection as God. It certainly is not religion as we know it.

Have you a comment? As it is, and as I have written before, I cannot see why a deity is necessary to you.

And I cannot see why you are bringing up that subject in a different forum, in a totally unrelated thread, especially when it has nothing to do with Jason Lisle or Asynchronous Speed of Light.

----

Bagheera:

My thinking was that the observer would be facing the emitter.  They would be able to see when the emitter was turned on, and they would be able to see when the light bounced back and hit the solid surface near the emitter.

You have an interesting idea, though.  I assume you mean having something which allows part of the laser through, unaffected, and slows the other part of the laser down by a small but detectable fraction.  And you're right, infinity is infinity no matter what operations you use on it.

[Bagheera]

Jamie,

The problem with that setup is that it still falls victim to two-way observation.


A|---------------------|
          o                   Laser emitter
     B|-----------------|
                               

A|, B| = mirrors
L = laser
o = observer

According to ASC the light from the laser emitter will reach the observer  "o" instantly (from the observers' POV), then continue to propagate away from him toward the mirrors at 75,000km/s (from his POV), reaching mirror B first then reflecting back to him instantly, followed a very short time later by the laser light reaching mirror A then reflecting back to the observer. Under this setup, it is not possible to tell what the one-way speed of light is, because it must take a round trip; away from the observer then back to the observer.  It always moves away from him at 75,000 km/s and towards him at infinite speed.

Yes, your understanding of my experiment is accurate. From the observer's point of view, looking at the laser, he would see the laser light appear on the open side before you would see it appear through the glassy side.

         -----------------------------------} LASER
O                                                   } EMITTER
       G|----------------------------------}  ARRAY
       
G| = glass, O = observer

Something like that.

So . . . where do i apply for my PhD . . . ?

[Graybeard]

And I cannot see why you are bringing up that subject in a different forum, in a totally unrelated thread, especially when it has nothing to do with Jason Lisle or Asynchronous Speed of Light.

I accept your criticism. You are quite right. I can only imagine that I had 2 browsers open and posted in the wrong one. I recall that I tried IE9 yesterday, I will stick to Firefox.

I have considered moving my post and your reply but that would remove your reply to Bagheera.

My apologies.

[jaimehlers]

And I cannot see why you are bringing up that subject in a different forum, in a totally unrelated thread, especially when it has nothing to do with Jason Lisle or Asynchronous Speed of Light.

I accept your criticism. You are quite right. I can only imagine that I had 2 browsers open and posted in the wrong one. I recall that I tried IE9 yesterday, I will stick to Firefox.

I have considered moving my post and your reply but that would remove your reply to Bagheera.

My apologies.

Fair enough.  I reacted too strongly for what you were saying, because of that, and so I'll apologize for that myself.

[Grogs]

Grogs,
I'm grateful for your info but:

Yes, (a) we can dispense with the balloon analogy, of which I was aware, (b) I am happy with the universe expanding (c ) from the Wiki article: “The horizon is the boundary beyond which objects are moving away too fast to be visible from Earth.”

Yes. Right now, our cosmological horizon is about 46 billion light years from Earth. This is the location of objects that emitted light at the time of (or shortly after) the Big Bang RIGHT NOW. Things beyond that horizon essentially don't exist as far as we're concerned. Note that the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, which is much smaller than the horizon. The actual travel distance for photons reaching us from the horizon is 13.7 billion years, i.e., they've been traveling at exactly the speed of light the whole time. Although the objects that emitted those photons were (and still are) moving away from us far faster than the speed of light, the photons have been traveling through regions of space that are moving away more and more slowly, and they have finally "caught up" with us. Note that the reason that the horizon (46 GLY) is larger than the age of the universe (13.7 GY) is because the rate of expansion is slowing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Size

So if the matter that originally emitted the oldest CMBR photons has a present distance of 46 billion light years, then at the time of decoupling when the photons were originally emitted, the distance would have been only about 42 million light-years away.

My question, inelegantly expressed earlier, remains – what would cause an object at a greater distance to exceed the speed of light? Points on an horizon cannot increase at greater speed than the speed of the objects which give rise to those points. The speed of objects is limited by their initial motive power unless an exterior force influences them. To exceed a speed of light, the impetus would have to be greater than the speed of light.

Reference the bolded part, you've got it backwards. The objects don't give rise to the points in space. The points in space are the fabric of space-time. The objects are just along for the ride. We could have a completely empty universe that was uniformly expanding, although it would obviously be extremely difficult, probably completely impossible, to gauge the relative speed of expansion in such a universe.

The thing to keep in mind is that we're not saying that Object X is moving at the speed of light. We're saying that relative to us, Object X is moving away at faster than the speed of light. Relative to something closer, it's going to be moving away more slowly.

Here is a pretty good article that explains the difference.

Notice that, according to Hubble's law, the universe does not expand at a single speed. Some galaxies recede from us
at 1,000 kilometers per second, others (those twice as distant) at 2,000 km/s, and so on. In fact, Hubble's law predicts
that galaxies beyond a certain distance, known as the Hubble distance, recede faster than the speed of light. For the
measured value of the Hubble constant, this distance is about 14 billion light-years.

Does this prediction of faster-than-light galaxies mean that Hubble's law is wrong? Doesn't Einstein's special theory of
relativity say that nothing can have a velocity exceeding that of light? This question has confused generations of
students. The solution is that special relativity applies only to "normal" velocities--motion through space. The velocity in
Hubble's law is a recession velocity caused by the expansion of space, not a motion through space. It is a general
relativistic effect and is not bound by the special relativistic limit. Having a recession velocity greater than the speed of
light does not violate special relativity. It is still true that nothing ever overtakes a light beam.

The only answer is that the singularity did exceed the speed of light in it’s initial expansion and the inverse square law has reduced any common gravitational effect between distant particles – however, (1) as we do not know the original size of the singularity and the expansion is expressed as a percentage of the original size, then, regardless of how many powers of 10 it is expressed by, is this not mere speculation? And (2) when in the form of the singularity, the strong at weak forces must have been at their maximum, so any expansion would have lessened, rather than increased, their mutual attraction, thus, increasing their velocity as the forces waned and everything everywhere would be travelling faster than light.

1) The actual size of the singularity is unknown. There are some theories that say that the entire universe is actually smaller that the observable universe, there are theories that say the whole thing could actually be infinite, and everything in between. For all practical purposes though, things outside of our cosmological horizon simply don't exist since light hasn't had time to reach us from there yet.

http://space.mit.edu/~kcooksey/teaching/AY5/MisconceptionsabouttheBigBang_ScientificAmerican.pdf

This ubiquity of the big bang holds no matter how big the universe is or even whether it is finite or infinite in size.
Cosmologists sometimes state that the universe used to be the size of a grapefruit, but what they mean is that the part
of the universe we can now see--our observable universe--used to be the size of a grapefruit.
Observers living in the Andromeda galaxy and beyond have their own observable universes that are different from but
overlap with ours. Andromedans can see galaxies we cannot, simply by virtue of being slightly closer to them, and vice
versa. Their observable universe also used to be the size of a grapefruit. Thus, we can conceive of the early universe as
a pile of overlapping grapefruits that stretches infinitely in all directions. Correspondingly, the idea that the big bang was
"small" is misleading. The totality of space could be infinite. Shrink an infinite space by an arbitrary amount, and it is still
infinite.

What we can do is take the observations of distances and relative expansion that we see now and rewind the film to try to figure out what the parts of the universe that we can see looked like shortly after the Big Bang. Obviously, we can't actually measure the events in the early universe directly, but we can make predictions about them based on what we know about particle physics.

http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/John_Gribbin/cosmo.htm

This might all seem like a philosophical debate as futile as the argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, except for the fact that observations of the background radiation by COBE showed exactly the pattern of tiny irregularities that the inflationary scenario predicts. One of the first worries about the idea of inflation (long ago in 1981) was that it might be too good to be true. In particular, if the process was so efficient at smoothing out the Universe, how could irregularities as large as galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on ever have arisen? But when the researchers looked more closely at the equations they realised that quantum fluctuations should still have been producing tiny ripples in the structure of the Universe even when our Universe was only something like 10(exp-25) of a centimetre across -- a hundred million times bigger than the Planck length.

In short, they took predictions about the state of the early Universe based on the inflationary model, applied quantum mechanics to predict what we should see if they were true, and eventually found those effects. That obviously doesn't prove that the inflationary model of the early universe is correct, but it's pretty strong evidence that we're on the right track.

As for 2) the inflaton field that is predicted would have been far more powerful than any standard force that we know of today. It would have been an exponentially accelerating force that got stronger and stronger as time went by - we simply have no classic analogue to this. You are right though, from the point of view of a single point in space, the rest of the universe would have been ripped away and disappeared from view, leaving only a very, very tiny cosmological horizon behind. The thing is that the inflaton field was extremely short-lived. Once it turned off the universe was coasting and then ordinary forces did begin to pull the universe back together and slow the expansion. Gravity has been slowing things down ever since.[1]

It may well be the case that “While special relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, there is no such constraint in general relativity.” but this speaks more of a lack of a ToE than certainty. I can’t see that it much matters than there may be more dimensions. If they do exist and a particle has another dimension that allows it to “reappear” somewhere else, it has not actually defied the limit of the speed of light: a line of length 20cm will never fit in a sphere of diameter 10cm.

It's not really a lack of a ToE at all. The relevant piece that's missing from that is how gravity affects things on an extremely small distance scale. So we don't know, for example, how gravity works between two hydrogen atoms, but we're about as sure as we can be on any theory that we understand how it works on massive objects over large distances. General relativity tells us that, in an expanding universe, objects that are far enough away should be moving away at faster than the speed of light, and, indeed, our measurements seem to confirm that that is exactly what is happening. The only alternative is that our present understanding of the universe is wrong at a much greater level than what we had in the classical physics days before we developed the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity.

And to reiterate, nobody[2] is saying that a beam of light ever has or ever will travel through space faster than the speed of light. It's just that the region of space through which they're traveling through might be moving away, relative to another observer such as us, faster than the light can travel.

http://space.mit.edu/~kcooksey/teaching/AY5/MisconceptionsabouttheBigBang_ScientificAmerican.pdf

The idea of seeing faster-than-light galaxies may sound mystical, but it is made possible by changes in the expansion
rate. Imagine a light beam that is farther than the Hubble distance of 14 billion light-years and trying to travel in our
direction. It is moving toward us at the speed of light with respect to its local space, but its local space is receding from
us faster than the speed of light. Although the light beam is traveling toward us at the maximum speed possible, it
cannot keep up with the stretching of space. It is a bit like a child trying to run the wrong way on a moving sidewalk.
Photons at the Hubble distance are like the Red Queen and Alice, running as fast as they can just to stay in the same
place.

1.	Strong and weak forces have an extremely short range, so at scales larger than an atomic nucleus they're unimportant.
2.	except Jsoson Lisle, obviously

[Graybeard]

bm - a lot to take in...

[jaimehlers]

Just a thought, but since the Big Bang was a sphere...wouldn't that mean that points on opposite sides of the sphere would effectively be moving away from each other at much faster than the speed of light?  I mean, if Point A is moving at nearly the speed of light in the direction of x, and Point B is moving at nearly the speed of light in the direction of -x, then there is no way that light can ever get from Point A to Point B.

In other words, it's all relative.  An object doesn't have to be literally moving faster than the speed of light for it to effectively be doing so; if each were moving at .51c, then they'd be moving apart at faster than the speed of light, and a signal between the two could never catch up.

[Graybeard]

Yes, I suppose it would but they would only be moving at 2c relative to each other rather than to an observer at an arbitrary at a midway point considered to be stationary. But this is no more amazing than getting 2 flashlights and shining them in opposite directions.

The problem my brain is grappling with is how it would be possible for there to be an initial expansion so rapid that it exceeded the speed of light, even by a very small margin.

All other things being equal, for anything to be travelling faster than light, and having no motive force of its own, it would have to have started off faster than light, as deceleration (through the strong and/or weak forces) is the only possible change.

[Grogs]

Just a thought, but since the Big Bang was a sphere...wouldn't that mean that points on opposite sides of the sphere would effectively be moving away from each other at much faster than the speed of light?  I mean, if Point A is moving at nearly the speed of light in the direction of x, and Point B is moving at nearly the speed of light in the direction of -x, then there is no way that light can ever get from Point A to Point B.

In other words, it's all relative.  An object doesn't have to be literally moving faster than the speed of light for it to effectively be doing so; if each were moving at .51c, then they'd be moving apart at faster than the speed of light, and a signal between the two could never catch up.

You're thinking too classically. If you do the Lorentz transforms (special relativity,) you'll find that even if two astronauts take off at 0.51 c in opposite directions, the light still catches up. The apparent speed difference between them would be something like 0.7c. What you would see instead is that there would be a fairly large difference between the clocks of the two astronauts and the light would be heavily red-shifted.

With general relativity, it's basically linear, but it only applies to objects that are being dragged along through space, not movement through space itself (which falls under special relativity.) It's like riding on one of those moving sidewalks at the airport. You can only run at maybe 20 mph relative to the sidewalk, but the sidewalk can move much faster if they're using a souped up engine on it. If two giants grabbed the sidewalk and started running at 50 mph in opposite directions, points at the ends would appear to recede at 100 mph relative to one another. Points closer together would recede more slowly. If you were at one end of the sidewalk and started running as fast as you could, you'd never reach the other end unless the giants slowed down. ON the other hand, the rider right beside you when they started pulling would recede more slowly, and you might be able to stay beside him with just a fast walk or a slow jog.