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

[Optimistic Mysanthrope]

Such as?

Well if it really is dependent upon how long the clock is at the different position then your experiment would not detect a difference between the two systems.

Well, this is exactly what would be tested.

Not only this, but the dilation could be due to the changing of initial frames rather than velocity or position.

True, but the level of disparity between the clocks (if any) should give a good starting point for further investigation.

Yeah, I get that. But it doesn't change the fact that if the world is less then 2.6 million years old, then Lisle's model predicts we should still be able to witness these "peekaboo" galaxies (not to mention seasonal doppler shifts, etc..) that are the very reason that he rejects ESC in the first place. It appears to be a necessary consequence of his argument (whether he realises it or not) that the accuracy of the biblical depiction of creation is subject to convention and can be stipulated. That would amount to saying that Genesis 1 is absolutely accurate - as long as you interpret it correctly.

At the same time, if the Universe is 14 billion years old we should be seeing anything that is farther than 14.026 billion light years away pop in and out of view every six months if ESC is stipulated and we do not observe this to happen to the best of my knowledge. It really is the conventionality of simultaneity; we stipulate how we consider events to be simultaneous.

AFAIK, the oldest known galaxy dates from 700 million years after the big bang and stars aren't estimated to have formed until about 200 million years after the big bang, so I'm not sure we can even expect to witness such a phenomena under ESC.

On the contrary, the over-riding factor is still the duration of the alternate reference frame. Unless you're saying the positional time dilation is also subject to the rate of change, but that sounds rather like a change in relative velocity

No I am saying that since the second clock is taking more time the duration that it undergoes positional dilation is greater than the first clock’s duration. I may try to write AIG and ask them this question because I am intrigued now.

In the example given, Clock 2 is travelling at half the speed of Clock 1, but the RTF experienced by Clock 2 is qpprox. a quarter of that experienced by clock 1. So even though Clock 2 is travelling for twice as long, it still only suffers approx. half the time dilation overall. Obviously, Clock 2 travelling for twice as long and suffering half the time dilation is just a quirk of the example given - at higher speeds the difference is much more pronounced.

E.g. If clock 1 travels at .96 c and Clock 2 travels at 0.48 c, Clock 2 still has twice the travel time but Clock 1 experiences more than 3x the RTF (Clock 1 = 3.5714 and Clock 2 = 1.1399)

Sorry, I was referring to unbelievers, not believers. Nobody would be persuaded by it is what I meant.

Ah, that makes much more sense Well, it might not necessarily be a slam dunk, but it would certainly be worthy of note!

I’ll give you an example. If you had argued in the late 1980s that it would be possible to find soft tissue and proteins in dinosaur fossils you would have been laughed out of the room. The fact that we had never found any such thing was considered strong evidence supporting the notion that dinosaur fossils were millions of years old. Based on the empirical evidence such tissue degraded far too quickly to ever be found in fossils older than a million years. Then in the mid-1990s surprise! Soft tissue and proteins were found in dinosaur fossils. Not only this, but now it seems that they are found whenever we actually look for them. Rather than arriving at the obvious conclusion (such fossils must be younger than a million years old) the old Earth community simply said, “Well I guess DNA can last for 65 million years.” They can always come up with an ad hoc means of saving their paradigm.

But is that the obvious conclusion? Would it really be rational to discard all the other data which has been repeatedly and independently verified? Is it more likely that everything science has learned about the relevant the disciplines, or that current scientific knowledge of cellular degradation is incomplete? If dinosaur fossils were less than 10,000 years old than obtaining tissue samples would be relatively common rather than a revolutionary discovery.

Actually, my work doesn't say anything at all about the age of the Earth. As a scientist I can only speak to the data that exist. Having reviewed a great deal of data from many different disciplines, I see no reason at all to doubt the general scientific consensus that the Earth is about five or six billion years old. We deal with testable hypotheses in science, and many of the arguments made for a young Earth are not testable, nor is there any valid data to support a young Earth that stands up to peer review or scientific scrutiny. However, the fields of geology, nuclear physics, astronomy, paleontology, genetics, and evolutionary biology all speak to an ancient Earth. Our discoveries may make people reevaluate the longevity of molecules and the presumed pathways of molecular degradation, but they do not really deal at all with the age of the Earth.

(Source: http://http://www.pbs.org/wg...ml)

Until further investigation has been completed it's premature to make assumptions one way or the other, but the other data certainly seems to support current thinking.

These people are all descendants of the eight survivors of the Genesis flood. What you are seeing are corrupted accounts of the same event. Since these accounts were not divinely preserved unlike the account in Genesis we would expect differences because people change stories as they pass them down. I will give you an example. After the Titanic incident there were people who swore the boat broke into two pieces while in the process of sinking. There were other people who swore that the boat stayed intact all the way down (we know the ship broke we just do not know when). Now this is a huge discrepancy seen in people who experienced the event themselves. Now compare this with people 20 generations out from an event and you’d expect great differences in the stories. There are some very significant similarities in the flood accounts though. One of the Australian accounts is very similar to the Genesis account (Gajara was told to build a vessel for himself, his wife, his sons and their wives. The flood covered the highest mountain tops. He released birds to see when land was available. They made an offering to God after the flood. God placed a rainbow in the sky to prevent future flooding.); yet aborigines are supposed to have been isolated as a people group for a very long period of time.

I agree that stories get distorted over time. The example flood myth you gave is interesting, mainly because I can't seem to find any reference to it other than creationist websites. A lot of the myths involves survivors reaching high ground rather using a boat or raft. The only that these multiple myths really show is that many areas have been flooded.

OM,

I submitted a letter to AIG asking about your proposed experiment. I have had very good luck in the past getting responses from them so let's hope!

-SW

Cool, it'd be interesting to know what they say