A reading of Rovelli's paper "Quantum spacetime: what do we know?" which may be found at http://xxx.lanl.gov/ as preprint gr-qc/9903045 suggests that solutions of the equations of general relativity are independent of the time variable. Picking a particular time variation is equivalent to picking a gauge in field theory. That is, many different time variations yield the same solutions. So a possible conclusion is that the evolution of the universe is not a unique function of time.

Even when a particular gauge is chosen, the dependence is on the product of time and the speed of light, and not on each individually. Therefore, it is possible to pick an explicit variation of the speed of light and adjust the evolution of the earth as a function of time accordingly.

For example, previously in this forum I have indicated that an exponential dependence of the speed of light on time with a ten-folding time of one thousand years makes the resulting 8,000 year old universe equivalent to a 100 billion year old universe in which the speed of light is held constant at its presently measured rate of 186,000 miles per second. Since the number of degrees of freedom in the universe depends on the exponential of entropy integrated over time, an exponential dependence for the speed of light is reasonable.

The point is that according to currently accepted astronomical physics, the speed of light is not determined to be a constant. It is just assumed to be one. Measurements of the speed of light indicate that it has been roughly constant for 100 years on one small planet in the universe.

Scripture, the only universal and timeless source of information, actually suggests that the rate variation of time was different in the past. Old testament scripture indicates that humans lived ten times longer in the past than now; and Hindu scripture indicates that god's day is orders of magnitude longer than ours. So from scripture it seems that time is clearly variable; and from general relativity we deduce that the speed of light must also be variable. So the universe can easily be about "8,000 biblical" years old. It all depends on the interpretation of the word "year". Scientists assume that all years are alike. But that does not have to be true in the bible. The bible may be literally true, but we do not know if what was true thousands of years ago, like the length of a day, is still the same today.

• Re: No Time for General Relativity - daViper - July 22, 1999 - 00:51 UTC
  • Re: No Time for General Relativity - richard_david/">richard david - July 22, 1999 - 12:32 UTC
    • Re: No Time for General Relativity - daViper - July 22, 1999 - 20:02 UTC
  • Re: No Time for General Relativity - bzrd - July 22, 1999 - 13:25 UTC
    • Re: No Time for General Relativity - daViper - July 22, 1999 - 19:39 UTC