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Re: 8,000 Year Old Universe

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Posted by daViper on July 16, 1999 19:18:08 UTC

Ah, an Astronomy question for the Astronomy/God/Science board.

Lets examine.

: It is assumed that the speed of light is constant in the General Theory of Relativity. In fact, that it has been constant since it was created in the Big Bang singularity that is predicted by General Relativity. This presents a problem to those of us who prefer to think of the universe as more like 8,000 years old than 8 or more billion years old. :::::: I can see why it would.

: But suppose it was not always a constant. Suppose instead that the speed of light has been decreasing exponentially since creation so that in the last thousand years it has decreased by an order of magnitude. At that rate the change in the last 100 years, the time span over which we have actually measured the speed of light, its value would have only dropped by about 10%, hardly noticeable. Yet the size of the universe we see today would be comparable to accepted numbers. :::::::::: Quite a supposition, but OK, I'm with you.

: The universe's size is measured in time, :::::: Not really, It's measured in distance but let's proceed...

assuming a constant speed of light. The accepted size that we can see is therefore about 10 billion years. (Most people say light-years as if to make you think that the velocity of light is measured in "lights"). :::::: The term "Light Year" is simply the DISTANCE light travels, at 186,000 miles per second, in one year's time. I don't think anyone is trying to "make" anyone think otherwise.

If we use the same units, but integrate over the exponential dependence of the speed of light, ::::::: What exactly is the "exponential dependence" of light? I've never heard this term before. Could you explain what you mean by this. But onward...

so that today its speed is one, but 8,000 years ago its speed was 10**8 times today's speed, the distance to the farthest stars that we could see would be 10**11 light-years or 100 billion light-years. ::::::: Ok. A scale or chart if you will that establishes the speed of light as a baseline for comparison. If I hear you correctly, your saying today light speed = 1 and in the past it equaled something more like 10 or 11. I'd be interested in how we could ever measure that value or demonstrate the reason why we think this could ever be so in the first place, but lets run with it.

: In fact, in just one year at the beginning of time we could see a distance of 100 million light-years, more than enough to see most of the lights in the heavens. You see the universe was created in its present size, only the speed of light was not created constant. This is not so different from the theory of inflation that many scientists believe in. In that theory the size of the universe increased exponentially near the beginning of time. In the theory expounded here, the universe was created in its present size, but the speed of light has been deflating exponentially. ::::::: OK. If we assume that lightspeed has done this, you could say that.

I could also hypothesize that the speed of light has decreased even more than you hypothesize here. Lets say the ratio is now 1=35 as opposed to your 1=10 or 1=11.

At my rate of decrease, the universe was created about ten years ago, and all of us were created with memories intact that cause us to think we have been around longer than we have. Babies born since then are of course endowed with genuine memory, but the history we teach them is one that was implanted at our time of creation.

I'd have a hard time coming up with the evidence to support this hypothesis, but not really any harder than the evidence to support yours.

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