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

[orogenicman]

So, warped one. Even if the measurement of the speed of light was off by the tiny amount shown (and even if that tiny difference was not measurement error), you still cannot get a 10,000 year old universe. What you would have to argue is that the speed of light was vastly different up until the time we first started measuring it. And I must say, if that is your argument, it fails miserably.

That isn't his argument. You seem to have confused ASC with C-Decay.

What is the experimental basis of Special Relativity?

Note that while these experiments clearly use a one-way light path and find isotropy, they are inherently unable to rule out a large class of theories in which the one-way speed of light is anisotropic. These theories share the property that the round-trip speed of light is isotropic in any inertial frame, but the one-way speed is isotropic only in an aether frame. In all of these theories the effects of slow clock transport exactly offset the effects of the anisotropic one-way speed of light (in any inertial frame), and all are experimentally indistinguishable from SR.

(emphasis added)


As crazy as it seems, ASC does actually appear to be viable. The accuracy with which we can measure the speed of light has absolutely nothing to do with synchrony conventions.

I'm not saying it's correct, far from it. But if there is a flaw in ASC, then it lies within the implications and consequences of such a convention.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light

When using the term 'the speed of light' it is sometimes necessary to make the distinction between its one-way speed and its two-way speed. 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. What can however be experimentally measured is the round-trip speed (or "two-way" speed of light) from the source to the detector and back again. Albert Einstein chose a synchronization convention (see Einstein synchronization) that made the one-way speed equal to the two-way speed. The constancy of the one-way speed in any given inertial frame, is the basis of his special theory of relativity although all experimentally verifiable predictions of this theory do not depend on that convention.[1][2]

Experiments that attempted to directly probe the one-way speed of light independent of synchronization have been proposed, but none has succeeded in doing so.[3] Those experiments directly establish that synchronization with slow clock-transport is equivalent to Einstein synchronization, which is an important feature of special relativity. Though those experiments don't directly establish the isotropy of the one-way speed of light, because it was shown that slow clock-transport, the laws of motion, and the way inertial reference frames are defined, already involve the assumption of isotropic one-way speeds and thus are conventional as well.[4] In general, it was shown that these experiments are consistent with anisotropic one-way light speed as long as the two-way light speed is isotropic.[1][5]

And at any rate, we are still talking about tiny variations, none of which will get you to a 10,000 year old universe.