Starlight and Time

[dad1]

Does science know what time, specifically time in the distant universe is? If you claim it does, then be prepared to support that claim.

If science does not know that time exists out there in a way we know it here, then one implication is that no distances are knowable to distant stars.

Why? Because distances depend on the uniform existence of time. If time (in this example 4 billion light years from earth) did not exist the same as time near earth, then what might take a billion years (of time as we know it here) for light to travel a certain distance in space might, for all we know, take minutes weeks or seconds of time as it exists out THERE!

So what methods does science have to measure time there? I am not aware of any. Movements observed at a great distance and observed from OUR time and space would not qualify. Such observations would only tell us how much time as seen here it would take if time were the same there.

How this relates to religion is that a six day creation thousands of years ago cannot be questioned using cosmology if it really did not take light that reaches us on earth and area a lot of time to get here.

[dad1]

What point are you trying to make with "here" vs. "there" comments? Do you have any justification ... any at all ... for claiming that physical constants, time, etc. are or might be different far away from our solar system or galaxy than they are here?

You have apparently claimed here that time is a physical constant. Proof? Says...who? You can't just make stuff up.

Or is it just an idea you had that you think might discredit our present methods for determining the distance to distant stars and galaxies and cast doubt on their results?

That would be a bonus prize.

You don't seem to have any reasons for why you believe your idea should be taken seriously

The thread is not about ideas I have. The thread is about time itself and how science doesn't know what it is like out in the unknown where no observation ever happened.

... it seems to be just offered up with no justification whatsoever.

That is the problem about offering a belief that time is the same everywhere. That is based on nothing. Your only recourse here is to admit neither you nor science know.

More of the same. Where is your cutoff for what is "here" and what is "there"?

Very simple. The furthest man has ever been.In this thread I even allowed for the furthest probe man has out there. Remember, less than one little light day away still?

If you don't think the stars we see in the night sky are tens, hundreds, thousands, millions and even billions of light years away, how far away are they?

Why does it matter? What is important is that the distances science claims are wrong and faith based and unsupportable.
From a biblical perspective, the whole universe will be rolled up like a curtain one day anyhow and a new heavens created.

How big are they?

That is also unknown since calculations of mass and sizes involve distance and time!

What would happen to temperatures on Earth if alpha centauri were not as far away as we think it is and was much closer?

You tell us? How much of our weather depends on a distant star?

If you don't believe the 4.37 light year number, what do you think is the correct number, and why?

I have no reason to believe your number. Unless time existed all the way uniformly, and space, the distances are based on nothing but belief. You would get more accuracy picking a number out of a hat probably!

Do you not believe that there even are stars millions of light years away from Earth, or just that we can't measure their distances so are clueless as to how far away they are, or how big they are?

Correct. I do not believe a word of it. I chose to believe God. After all, the creator knows.

[dad1]

Because we can observe it and see that it is identical to the hydrogen we have here on Earth (same for other atoms and molecules), which has implications given that the light we are measuring here in Earth either came from those distant H atoms, or was absorbed by them as light from a source "behind" them passed through.

Why would we care that there is actually some of the same materials in far parts of creation as there are here? That does not tell us what time there is like. No relation.

The important thing the spectra show is that the distant atoms and molecules are identical to the ones we have here on Earth, so they react chemically the same way, they absorb and emit light the same way, etc.

So what? If you don't know how far they are who really cares? Not only that but you only see light from there with traces of elements in it, and see that here anyhow. In no way does any of that help you.

Light is an oscillating electric and magnetic field that propogates through space at a given velocity (the speed of light, c).

Says who? No one was ever out there to check outside of one light day away! In OUT TIME and SPACE HERE the speed of light is known and observed. Nowhere else. You cannot say light moves through the universe at the same speed.

The wavelength of the light is inversely proportional to the frequency of the light, and the product of wavelength (λ) and frequency (ν) equals the speed of light (λ * ν = c).

That is observed where? Here! Nowhere else. That is a fishbowl formula. You cannot apply that to deep space.

Molecules absorb light mainly through electric dipole transitions (electric field of the light wave interacts with the electric dipole moment of the molecule). This is what creates the characteristic "fingerprint" absorption patterns in the (mainly) infrared used to identify different molecules because every molecule has its own specific "spectrum" in different wavelength regions.

What has that got to do with telling us about the nature of time and space in the universe far far away?

The reason for going into this is because if light had a different speed in a vacuum "out there" than it does here on Earth, this would result in different absorption or emission spectra as it interacted with atoms and molecules along its path. The rates of absorption and emission are described using the Einstein A and B coefficients, for example:

No. The speed of light is determined by the space and time it is in. It is not light that goes faster or slower itself. It is probably more like all things, including light moving must exist a certain way when time and space are a certain way. So if light took less time to move in distant space, it is not because light sped up. It would be more like there was not the same time existing for light to take as much time to...do anything.

If you go through these equations you'll see "c" (speed of light) all over the place.

That is meaningless almost, and simply means light existing and moving in our time! That speed is known. So C is basically the speed limit for light when passing through our time and space area.

If that were different it would impact the rates of absorption and emission and cause changes in the observed spectra (especially the relative intensities).

As explained that is not what is different. (light changing speed) Light cannnot change speed while in a time and space zone. It must exist a certain way there.

This interaction between light and the molecules present near a distant star (or between a star and Earth) happens "out there", so if the spectrum were changed "there" you'd need some process to convert it back to what we see "here" when we measure it.

Perhaps it would be better to say that 'This interaction between light and the molecules present near a distant star as seen from here....'
How would we know what happened before the light got here so we could see it? The spectra is seen here. Would it not therefore have to exist that way here?

What process could possibly do that? If the spectra were changed a million light years away because the speed of light was different, then we'd measure that change here ... not the identical spectrum we'd get here with no such change.

You have never been a million light years away so you cannot know. Man has been a few light seconds or minutes away from earth. And if our fishbowl, or time and space zone included the solar system and area, man has been nowhere at all outside of our area! So all we can say is that when the light is IN our time and space already, we see remnants of elements in that light here! That light is here and existing as it does and must here. That tells us NOTHING about what time (or space, or space and time together) is like out THERE!

[dad1]

<bolding mine>

For any observers of this thread, consider how we might try to establish the likelihood of that ‘if’ statement.

Believing the cosmological constant assumption is based on the fact that it has an implicit empirical basis,

False, it has fishbowl basis. Nothing else. Name any evidence that is empirical for what time is like in deep space?

and makes future predictions which are testable in many different ways for independent observers (think GPS satellites and emission spectra as already stated upthread). Furthermore, this shows consistency with a large swathe of scientific evidence in unrelated fields such as radioactive decay, genetics, etc.

The thread is not about earth time and space. And I just dealt with fishbowl spectra in the last post.

Believing that time and light behave so differently in other parts of the universe as to make the actual measured age of Earth only 6,000 years old, yet appear to make it look billions of years old would need an entirely new set of physical laws.

Are you seriously claiming time is a physical law!?

[dad1]

[Replying to dad1 in post #33]

Science needs to evidence and support it's <sic> claims.

Plenty of posters here have put up such evidence, but you choose to ignore it. Saying “I see no evidence” is (as I’m sure you know), an argument from ignorance.

Try to be truthful. No evidence for time existing the same in all the universe was given. You sound like a religious cultist that doesn't care about facts, but wants to prop up your religion.

[Inquirer]

[Replying to dad1 in post #27]

There is and never was and almost certainly never will be human observers in deep space. You have no observers, period.

You have no idea how far humans may be able to travel far into the future ... we already have two spacecraft that have travelled past the heliopause (so they are in "deep space", technically). But we can observe photons from other stars and galaxies, as well as see all kinds of physical structures millions and billions of light years away. These photons, the telescopes that better capture them for magnification, and the dispersive spectrometers that show emission and absorption (by distant light passing through things between the light source and the telescope and spectrometers) are the "observers." We also have several LIGO experiments now to measure gravity waves which are incredible instruments.

You can't deny that light from the stars we can see is being emitted from that star, regardless of the distance it is away from Earth. The question is how we know the distance to the stars, and there are multiple methods to estimate distance (eg. parallax, red shifts, Cepheids). Spend some time on this site:

https://sci.esa.int/web/gaia/-/27100-ga ... -astronomy

and you might get an idea of how accurate some of this can be done these days.

So when science gets in the way lets adopt science fiction? The speed of light is reality, travelling anywhere outside of the solar system will never happen unless the laws of physics change, like jumping off a skyscraper unaided, we know the outcome, no matter that "You have no idea how far humans may be able to...".

[Jose Fly]

Your question implies that the thousands, or millions, of individuals whose expertise is in cosmology and physics and other related areas of study have somehow been wrong in their conclusions

In general, that's effectively the implication of and assumption behind just about every internet creationist's position. They truly believe they know more about the fossil record than paleontologists, more about genetics than geneticists, more about cosmology than cosmologists, more about physics than physicists, more about biology than biologists, more about taxonomy than taxonomists, more about evolution than evolutionary biologists, more about geology than geologists.....

So either they are among the most widely knowledgeable people in the world, or the most self-delusional.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to dad1 in post #41]

You have apparently claimed here that time is a physical constant. Proof? Says...who? You can't just make stuff up.

I made no such claim. See the comma between physical constants and time, which separates them in a list. It does not imply that time is a physical constant (you just made that up).

The thread is not about ideas I have. The thread is about time itself and how science doesn't know what it is like out in the unknown where no observation ever happened.

This is where you're wrong. We DO have observations from "out there" via photons that travel across space to us from "there." There is a great deal of information in these photons that you are ignoring.

Why does it matter? What is important is that the distances science claims are wrong and faith based and unsupportable.
From a biblical perspective, the whole universe will be rolled up like a curtain one day anyhow and a new heavens created.

Why are they wrong? You've made that claim, but so far you haven't presented anything to support it other than biblical references, or a long shot guess that somehow time could be "different" beyond the Voyager probe distances. Why would it be different? If you have no idea then the distances we derive to stars could just as easily be much longer than we think, or much shorter. You seem to think the distances are too long, but have no reason (apart from compatibility with biblical stories) for believing that ... ie. no science reasons.

You tell us? How much of our weather depends on a distant star?

None if it is far enough away, as all are but one (the sun). We also know that there is a rough minimum size for a main sequence star to form and remain stable via nuclear fusion at its core balancing gravitational collapse. This is in the ballpark of around 8% of the sun's diameter, which is 830,000 miles. So about 66,000 miles in diameter for a small star (I believe the smallest diameter main sequence star we've seen directly is 2MASS J0523-1403 at 8.6% of the sun's diameter). This is not from any time or distance measurements ... just from the physics of how stars work. For something this size to appear as a tiny dot in a large telescope (it is not visible to the naked eye) it has to be a certain distance away, and that distance is far beyond where the Voyager spacecraft have travelled. Just another example of how we know stars are very far away, and very big.

I have no reason to believe your number. Unless time existed all the way uniformly, and space, the distances are based on nothing but belief. You would get more accuracy picking a number out of a hat probably!

So random guessing is better than applying proper science. Got it. That pretty much torpedoes your argument in the OP.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to dad1 in post #43]

No. The speed of light is determined by the space and time it is in. It is not light that goes faster or slower itself. It is probably more like all things, including light moving must exist a certain way when time and space are a certain way. So if light took less time to move in distant space, it is not because light sped up. It would be more like there was not the same time existing for light to take as much time to...do anything.

The speed of light in a material does vary, and we quantify this using the index of refraction, n. This is the ratio of the speed of light in a vacuum, to the (slower) speed of light in the material. For typical glass n ~ 1.5, so the speed of light would be 2/3 of the value in a vacuum. But interstellar space is very nearly a vacuum, so c (speed of light in vacuum) is used for distant objects.

How would we know what happened before the light got here so we could see it? The spectra is seen here. Would it not therefore have to exist that way here?

Because absorption (or emission) of the light happened "there", which is the whole point. That light then travels here through the vacuum of space (the photons that actually make it here and are not scattered or absorbed in between). If an H atom in the corona of a star 100 million light years away emits photons in a specific line pattern (based on the energy level distribution of the atom, as usual), and the lucky photons make it to a telescope on Earth, we'll see a redshifted version of the spectrum to know the H atoms were emitted from far away. We measure the spectrum "here", but the photons came from "there." What could possibly transform these photons between there and hear to cause only a redshift in the spectrum, but no change in the spacing of the spectral lines? Do you know anything about spectroscopy?

You have never been a million light years away so you cannot know.

This is a silly argument. I wasn't alive 100 million years ago to see dinosaurs (nor was any human), but we know they existed from their fossils (regardless of how old you think they are).

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to Inquirer in post #45]

So when science gets in the way lets adopt science fiction? The speed of light is reality, travelling anywhere outside of the solar system will never happen unless the laws of physics change, like jumping off a skyscraper unaided, we know the outcome, no matter that "You have no idea how far humans may be able to...".

Has science fiction never become science fact? Of course it has. The Parker Solar Probe is the fastest craft we've made (430,000 MPH, getting gravitational boosts from Venus to reach those speeds). This is only 0.0064% of the speed of light but more than 10x faster than the Voyager probes are travelling (which long ago left our solar system, which you seem to think is impossible). If we slingshot a similar probe using the sun and can direct it to alpha centauri, it would take 5,800 years to get there. At 100x that speed we're there in 58 years and still at only 0.64% the speed of light.

We have no way to get to those speeds now, but if we don't extinct ourselves we have no idea what technoligies may exist in 1000 years. Progressively accelerating technologies like ion propulsion and others are being developed now, and just look at what we didn't know a mere 500 years ago compared to what we know now. I doubt we can even imagine what may be possible 1000 years from now, all perfectly within the laws of physics.

https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/ultra- ... or-mission

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to Jose Fly in post #46]

So either they are among the most widely knowledgeable people in the world, or the most self-delusional.

And they desperately need some new material if they are going to be taken seriously at their science debunking efforts. The common argument dad1 is presenting (ie. we can't know anything about space or an environment unless we've physically been there or put a probe there) is old and tired, and completely devoid of any supporting rationale. But if you buy it, it can explain why the bible is right and science is wrong because virtually anything can be made to fit.

I've never understood why they bother trying to justify a young Earth via these very poor attempts to debunk science, and can't be happy to simply believe it on faith alone because the bible says so and leave it at that.