The universe appears "old", but it is still less than 10,000 years old

[Statler Waldorf]

Um, because the people doing the review are still people? This is so typical of theists, this mistake that, for something to be sufficient it needs to be perfect, and if it's not perfect, it's insufficient and a failure. Mistakes happen, but the important part, the thing that separates science from religion- in every respect- is that those mistakes are found out and corrected.

It’s a bit troubling that you idolize the peer-review system as the gold standard of science but then when something like this happens you merely waive it off. This was not a simple mistake that snuck by the reviewers this was an egregious (and rather obvious) fraud that snuck by for 40 years. The reason this happened is because the reviewers wanted the Piltdown man to be genuine because it fit their narrative and theory. This proves my point perfectly, if you are trying to capsize the boat your research will never get published no matter how solid it is and if your research supports the Darwinian model it will get published no matter how fraudulent it is.

Did you happen to look into who made the findings that Time published, incidentally? It was a trio of scientists, which plays into my wider point: you don't understand peer review, which is why you believe I've overplayed my hand.

Time Magazine is not a peer-reviewed journal which proves my point. The peer-reviewed journal published the hoax and never caught it; it took a simple news magazine to catch the hoax.

So, what you're saying is that scientific peers went out and reviewed the findings, and corrected them?

Nope, I am saying that the institution he worked for caught the hoax, his peers approved the work to be published in Science.

Could you do me a favor and make sure you know what you're talking about before you seek to correct me? Peer review is a continuous process by the scientific community, and not one that's finished upon publication.

Could you do me a favor and stop committing the fallacy of equivocation? We are clearly talking about the peer-review journal system (which published all of these hoaxes and caught none of them) and not peer review in the general sense of the term. By your new usage of the term all creation science is therefore “peer-reviewed” because it is reviewed by other creationists (peers) after it is released. Now you have really painted yourself into a corner.

The whole idea is to root out mistakes; one of the reasons Piltdown Man stands out is because it did take so long to discover it was a hoax, and that's unusual.

We do not know whether it is unusual or not, who knows how many hoaxes have gone unexposed in such a corrupt system.

Peersi, review... peer review!

Fallacy of equivocation again.

Scientists were the ones that corrected those mistakes, while the apparent guardians of an omnipotent being's words... did what? Disagreed? Where were their facts? Nowhere to be found. When these hoaxes are found out, it's never priests that do the finding.

What on Earth are you talking about? I am arguing against the adequacy of the peer-review journal system and advocating for a system more akin to what Darwin and Newton participated in and you’re tossing in red herrings about priests? You also seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that there are theological peer-reviewed journals; so not only was your point irrelevant but it was wrong.

That's the difference: science corrects itself, discovers things, makes itself better. Creationism is exactly as wrong as it'll ever be, and that's substantially wrong.

Wrong again, using your new usage of the term “peer review”, creationism is just as peer-reviewed as any other science because it is reviewed by other creationists (peers). You’ve tied yourself in all sorts of knots now.

All very nice and all entirely beside the point.

I thought that it proved my point that you do not have a clue about what you are talking about rather nicely.

The core of Lisles [sic] "theory" is that the speed of light coming towards Earth is instantaneous(in a pathetic attempt to make YEC credible).

Yup, and if you use an anisotropic-synchrony convention light does travel to the Earth instantaneously.

Romers [sic] discovery showed that it isn't. It's the very discovery that showed that contrary to then current belief light had finite velocity.

Light does have a finite velocity; just not when moving towards the observer. Romer did not measure the one way speed of light [“The "one-way" speed of light from a source to a detector, cannot be measured independently of a convention as to how to synchronize the clocks at the source and the detector.”], nor did he prove that it was finite. I will repeat what I posted because apparently you did not read it.

“So the average speed for the round trip remains the experimentally verifiable two-way speed, whereas the one-way speed of light is allowed to take the form in opposite directions:

κ can have values between 0 and 1. In the extreme as κ approaches 1, light might propagate in one direction instantaneously, provided it takes the entire round-trip time to travel in the opposite direction”

And you can crap on about conventions as much as you like.

And I will since that is what we are talking about.

It doesn't matter that it happened before Relativity was formulated, it doesn't matter if we can't prove the velocity to the last MPH.

It does matter because not only can you not measure the speed of the light but you cannot even demonstrate its isotropy in one direction [“…those experiments don't directly establish the isotropy of the one-way speed of light.”]

All that matters is that we know that the velocity of light coming towards Earth is finite

How do we know this? This ought to be good.

Oh, and by the way..... fuck you. intellectual enough for you buddy?

Nope, but apparently it’s the best you can do.

Sorry, that wasn't very clear. I wasn't suggesting you'd need light to be created in transit. What I meant was that galaxies appear younger, the further away they are. Of course, this is all perfectly in line with the standard model, but in order for ASC to account for it, they would either have to been created in varying states of maturity (inversely proportional to distance), or have been created at different times (again, inversely proportional to distance).

Thanks for the clarification. What does a young galaxy look like compared to an old galaxy?

I believe the the approximate communication delay was approx. 2.6 seconds. I was going to say about 1.3 seconds each way, but that's kinda what's in dispute

So would that be measured by a clock in Houston or a clock on the vessel? If we are measuring the delay using one clock on Earth then it will be identical under any synchrony convention.

But as I said, a 2.5 second delay being caused by positional time dilation at a distance of 239k miles should be easily verifiable. If nothing else, any clocks should get further out of synch over time.

If I am not mistaken the clocks are out of sync after space travel, I think the question is what causes this, a change in position or a change in velocity?

That's the beauty of it, you don't need to prove the one way speed of light in order to figure it out; you test the time dilation instead. Rather than having 2 synchronised clocks, you have 3. Two of those clocks complete a large circuit (e.g. an orbit of the earth) and third stays in place. You have the two moving clocks travel at different speeds, one very slow and the other very fast. Now if ASC is correct, speed is irrelevant and the two moving clocks should be equally out of synch with the one stationary clock. If ISC is correct, the fastest moving clock should be most out of synch.

I think the problem here is that distance is a component of velocity, so it is impossible to move the clocks at different velocities without also forcing them to travel different distances. I’ll have to look more into this though. I really do not believe you are going to find anything inherently wrong with ASC (even the RationalWiki article on it states that the math does in fact work and that it is not wrong to use such a convention); the bigger question is whether or not the Bible is using this convention when it describes the events of creation week. That is the only real objection I have seen made to Lisle’s work.

I don't find it that odd, no. I mean, something has to be the oldest. We could find another life form that is double that age, you could still ask "why nothing older?" To be honest, when I first heard about those trees I was amazed that anything could live that long.

I just find it a bit odd that on an Earth that is supposedly billions of years old there are no trees older than a few thousand years old.

That's strange, Dr Ferguson did an analysis of approx. 1000 bristlecones in the same area and found traces of multiple rings in only a tiny percentage of them.

That is strange, I am not sure which study to believe.

Oh I completely agree that engineers from ancient times do not get anywhere near as much credit as they deserve. The ship that Athenaeus describes was, according to Plutarch, more of a show piece and could only be moved with great difficulty - it certainly wasn't seaworthy.

Yes, it was not a very practical vessel, but I do believe it was used on the sea some. I think the impressive thing is that they were able to build such a vessel. Give Noah and his men 100 years and I think it is very feasible that they could have built something like the ark. It’s not like the Bible says one man was able to whip it up in a week or something like that. : )

I had trouble finding reference of the Leontifera other people than citing James Ussher. It looks like it was the Leontophoros, described by Memnon of Heraclea. I was unable to find Memnon's version, but there appears to be a series of misunderstandings both in Ussher's account and of those quoting him. I was always lead to to believe that the quinquereme had 5 oarsmen on 3 oars, with a 2-2-1 pattern. You can't really judge the length of the ship unless you know the rowing pattern, though I think it's probable that it would have had 3 rows of oars. While it could have been 3-3-2, giving three banks of 100 oars, it could also have been 4-4-2, 5-3-2 or pretty much any other combination. I think it's unlikely that there would have been 3 banks of 100 oars though, as the ship apparently performed very well in combat (during an era in which ramming was a key tactic).

I was using the Usher reference. I believe it is common to give each oarsman about 3-4 feet of space in order to row. We both agree that It was undoubtedly a huge vessel.

Another point I feel worth bearing in mind is the date. These ship are from around 400BC to 200BC and most creationist sources I've found date the flood to around 2300BC, so I think it's fair to say that there would be quite a gap in engineering between those two dates. Egyptian shipbuilders from that time period did use mortise and tenon joints, but strongly relied upon rope lashings to hold the structure together.

Yes there’d be a bit of a gap, but technology did not develop nearly as fast back then so not a huge gap. Given the time Noah was given to build the vessel I believe it is completely feasible. Most of the technology advances seem to be applying more to vessels that needed to travel great distances and navigate; the ark just needed to float and remain floating.

I recommend reading Lisle's paper on ASC. A good question would be this: If the difference Roemer recorded of 42 minutes and 10 seconds is accounted for in ASC as being due to relativistic effects, why do you assume that we're seeing distant galaxies in near real time when scaling up the time delay to match the distance of the furthest known galaxy would give a time delay in excess of 33 trillion years?

He’ll never read that article, that would require work. I am not sure that such time dilations are indeed linear in nature. I believe the time delay is what gives us the instantaneous travel. An imperfect analogy would be time zones. If I fly from Boise, Idaho to Spokane, Washington I can leave Boise at 1PM and arrive in Spokane at 1PM. According to the clocks on the ground my flight was instantaneous. All we have when measuring the speed of light are “the clocks on the ground”. I may be off with this analogy but I have heard Lisle compare ASC to time zones before.

The thesis that the choice of standard synchrony is a convention, rather than one necessitated by facts about the physical universe (within the framework of the special theory of relativity), has been argued particularly by Reichenbach (see, for example, Reichenbach 1958, 123–135) and Grünbaum (see, for example, Grünbaum 1973, 342–368). They argue that the only nonconventional basis for claiming that two distinct events are not simultaneous would be the possibility of a causal influence connecting the events. In the pre-Einsteinian view of the universe, there was no reason to rule out the possibility of arbitrarily fast causal influences, which would then be able to single out a unique event at A that would be simultaneous with E. In an Einsteinian universe, however, no causal influence can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum, so from the point of view of Reichenbach and Grünbaum, any event at A whose time of occurrence is in the open interval between t1 and t2 could be defined to be simultaneous with E. In terms of the ε-notation introduced by Reichenbach, any event at A occurring at a time t1 + ε(t2 − t1), where 0 < ε < 1, could be simultaneous with E. That is, the conventionality thesis asserts that any particular choice of ε within its stated range is a matter of convention, including the choice ε=1/2 (which corresponds to standard synchrony). If ε differs from 1/2, the one-way speeds of a light ray would differ (in an ε-dependent fashion) on the two segments of its round-trip journey between A and B. If, more generally, we consider light traveling on an arbitrary closed path in three-dimensional space, then (as shown by Minguzzi 2002, 155–156) the freedom of choice in the one-way speeds of light amounts to the choice of an arbitrary scalar field (although two scalar fields that differ only by an additive constant would give the same assignment of one-way speeds).

It might be argued that the definition of standard synchrony makes use only of the relation of equality (of the one-way speeds of light in different directions), so that simplicity dictates its choice rather than a choice that requires the specification of a particular value for a parameter. Grünbaum (1973, 356) rejects this argument on the grounds that, since the equality of the one-way speeds of light is a convention, this choice does not simplify the postulational basis of the theory but only gives a symbolically simpler representation.

[Emphasis added by SW]

- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacet...nvensimul/

As long as the round-trip speed of light remains c, we can stipulate differing one-way speeds of light.

Lisles paper starts from the proposition that the bible is unarguably true and then bends everything to fit.

You start with the proposition that the bible is unarguably false and then bend everything to fit. The difference between Lisle and you is that he is intellectually honest enough to identify his axioms.

It's not even close to being science.

Nothing in the definition of science disallows for the use of axioms.