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

[Statler Waldorf]

Statler has a point, though. Why would a Christian reject a young earth in favor of scientific evidence that claims differently, yet accept Biblical claims that science either cannot confirm or considers impossible?

Welcome back, Stat. Glad to hear that the surgery went well.

Thanks my friend! Yes, you hit the nail on the head! I think a young-Earth Christian deserves far more kudos for at least being consistent in why they believe what they believe whether you personally agree with it or not.

I actually find it odd, but I agree with Waldorf. OEC is not substantially less ridiculous than YEC and it requires making up a lot more shit to make all the made-up shit make any sense. YECs stick rigidly to their bullshit and are much more consistent in their denial of reality.

Thanks….I think To a Christian you’re the one denying reality though, but I digress.

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Among lots of other drivel,(tl;dr)
Happens all the time. Technology has moved past the bronze age.

per google's dictionary
vir•gin
ˈvərjən/
noun
noun: virgin; plural noun: virgins
1.
a person, typically a woman, who has never had sexual intercourse.

Also from google's dictionary
ar•ti•fi•cial in•sem•i•na•tion
noun
1.
the injection of semen into the vagina or uterus other than by sexual intercourse.

Most of the milk supplied in American markets comes from virgin cows who have calved and freshened without intercourse.
Virgin birth isn't so hard to replicate [b]these days. I am interested in the semantic gymnastics you have to offer to explain how this simple and obvious fact is somehow in error. I don't expect it to change your arbitrary, axiomatic presuppositions.
Maybe no woman has ever been artificially inseminated without having somehow first been fucked?

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1. This is irrelevant because Old-Earth Christians believe the virgin birth was a result of the immaculate conception- which is a supernatural event and not some means of artificial insemination.
2. Are you really going to argue that 1st Century Jews had late 19th Century technology? Really? If not, then this was irrelevant for a second reason.

You no doubt made those responses with a straight face. (grins)

No, your ignorance on this matter makes me smirk a bit, I’ll be honest.

I (a board member of one of the oldest astronomical societies in the U.S.) don't know what I'm talking about with respect to light? (grins again).

Evidently you do not. You’ve made blunder after blunder concerning the propagation of light and synchrony conventions.

If light had no wavelength or frequency, there would be no electromagnetic spectrum, indeed there would be no universe.

Do you have any actual support for this assertion? Round-trip light does have a wavelength and frequency by the way.

If light had no wavelength or frequency, most atomic phenomenae [sic] would not occur, and we would not even exist.

Again, any actual support for this assertion?

Visually, light has to be at a specific range of frequencies and wavelengths in order to be seen by human eyes. You didn't know this? Huh.

Again, any experimental support for this assertion? Unsupported assertion followed by unsupported assertion…to say your response was intellectually unsatisfying would be quite the understatement.

You conveniently never even addressed the obvious problem with your microwave experiment, its measuring light moving at a 90 degree angle in relation to the observer.

You do realize that we’re dealing with the definition of simultaneity and definitions of time here right? Please tell me you have at least absorbed that much from this discussion.

“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).” – “Conventionality of Simultaneity”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Emphasis added by SW]

Electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between 380 nm and 760 nm (400–790 terahertz) is detected by the human eye and perceived as visible light. Other wavelengths, especially near infrared (longer than 760 nm) and ultraviolet (shorter than 380 nm) are also sometimes referred to as light, especially when the visibility to humans is not relevant. White light is a combination of lights of different wavelengths in the visible spectrum. Passing white light through a prism splits it up into the several colors of light observed in the visible spectrum between 400 nm and 780 nm.
If radiation having a frequency in the visible region of the EM spectrum reflects off an object, say, a bowl of fruit, and then strikes our eyes, this results in our visual perception of the scene. Our brain's visual system processes the multitude of reflected frequencies into different shades and hues, and through this insufficiently-understood psychophysical phenomenon, most people perceive a bowl of fruit.
At most wavelengths, however, the information carried by electromagnetic radiation is not directly detected by human senses

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagn...28light.29

For light to be perceived it must have very precise and well understood properties which would make this instantaneous movement thing so laughably stupid it if it wasn't so sad.

Wikipedia eh? The same Wikipedia that says in its article on “The One-way Speed of Light”…

“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.” [Emphasis added by SW]

“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.”

“Using generalizations of Lorentz transformations with anisotropic one-way speeds, Zhang and Anderson pointed out that all events and experimental results compatible with the Lorentz transformation and the isotropic one-way speed of light, must also be compatible with transformations preserving two-way light speed constancy and isotropy, while allowing anisotropic one-way speeds.” [Emphasis added by SW]

You just cannot win!

And Waldorks instantaneous light propagation is disproven by the phenomonen of red shift.( the discovery that showed the universe was expanding)

Because if it were instantaneous then red shift couldn't occur.

It’s a convention and it’s not my convention. Secondly, we are talking about conventions of simultaneity not light physically changing speeds (you’re still looking at this through Newtonian lenses) so redshifts would still be an observable property of the Universe seen from Earth.

I'm a bit late to the game, Statler Waldorf claims what exactly wrt light propagation? It's hard to infer from the discussion...

Rather than stipulating a velocity dependent system a person can stipulate a position dependent system where light propagates and a near infinite speed towards the observer and 1/2c when moving away from the observer. I am not the one postulating this, it’s an idea that has been well accepted within the literature for decades now. I merely seem to be one of the only ones who somewhat understands it in here (besides Alex).

It is the brain fart of a disingenuous liar for Jesus called Jason Lisle.

Actually it’s not. It’s been described and advocated for by many, including Anderson, Vetharaniam and Stedman (who are not creationists at all).

His claim being that light travelling towards earth has infinite velocity but light travelling away only has half c, therefore the universe could be only a few thousand years old as per the bible and not billions of years old as per reality.

Roughly stated. How do you know what reality is?

While we have repeatedly pointed out the faults with this hypothesis, this has not stopped Waldorf from claiming its validity.

Yes by simply pointing out that you either do not understand the concept or are thinking about things in non-relativistic terms. I have quoted from numerous sources that agree with this notion, including Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Wikipedia, and RationalWiki which are not sympathetic sources to creationism in the slightest. Zen and his ilk like to merely stick their fingers in their ears, close their eyes, and shout, “You’re wrong because I say you’re wrong!”

Heh, funny. So there are the RMS extension of special relativity and the Standard Model extension, which can be used to parameterize deviations from simple Lorentz invariance - but the relevant parameters are measured by different experiments and are typically to one part in a billionth within the parameters of special relativity. The ludicrous scenario which you mention is not in that range of course .

Of course you are referring to the isotropy of the round-trip speed of light which nobody here is questioning.

Accomodating [sic] instant light travel requires special pleading (it does so only where we can't measure, and the universe/God conspires to make all the thousands of observations look exactly as if the universe were billions of years old). It is, in other words, a lia [sic] that science accommodates [sic] this scenario.

It requires no special pleading, merely a synchrony convention. Secondly, age is not an empirically measurable property of matter so to say the Universe “looks” old is nonsensical.

If you wish to engage in some serious face palming here is a link to what we will laughingly call Lisles theory......

What’s laughable is the fact you do not seem to know the difference between a theory and a convention.

Prepare to lose a few IQ points.

I think you look rather foolish now that he has read the article.

[quote='Zen Badger' pid='604135' dateline='1392545895']
As for the Lisle idea, it is not his original idea, but it is a very nice intellectual puzzle. It is not entirely based on nonsense, there is such a thing as synchrony conventions, and you can go to a convention in special relativity where formally the speed of light is infinite in one direction, or towards an arbitrary observer.

Careful, they will call you an idiot if you say things like this…
You’re dealing with people like Zen who have a very basic and purely Newtonian understanding of Physics.

This is not as absurd as you would maybe think, it is basically a sophisticated and mathematically consistent way to re-parametrize the time coordinate throughout the universe such that you can get away with light of all stars coming to earth instantaneously in this position-dependent time frame. Think of it the following way: the light which arrives at earth now, you simply shift the definition of time backwards when you go away from us such that all light arriving here now has left the source at the same numerical time value in your new position dependent time definition. This is an entirely artificial construct.

Bingo! It’s no different than leaving Boise at 1PM and arriving in Spokane at 1PM the same day; the only difference is that it is impossible to measure when light actually leaves its source. It’s no more artificial than stipulating that light travels at isotropic speeds in all directions independent of one’s own position; both are merely conventional.

Via this redefinition of how you define time throughout the universe, you have simply traded this problem for a different one: at his artificial point in time 6000 years ago (and keep in mind, the notion of what is 6000 years ago is now a very weird thing which depends on where in space you are), you have to put Stars with the appropriate apparent ages everywhere to simulate the light travel time. So in a nutshell, you simply call the time at which the light which we observe now has left the source, as being the same as the one on your clock. That this is possible mathematically has been debated by some, but has been shown by Sarkar and Stachel to work.

It’s actually far more intuitive.

Lisle's claim that the universe indeed looks the same age even far away, in order to get around putting artificially aged stars and galaxies everywhere, is of course completely absurd.

Conveniently you give no specifics.

And here we haven't even started talking about real cosmology, which is a completely different beast than dreaming about initial conditions for a static universe, which is wrong anyways. I am almost afraid to give a wrong impression of the wealth of observations which contradict this claim by mentioning just one example. We can for example indirectly measure the temperature of the cosmic microwave background as seen by gas millions - billions of lightyears away, and can directly see that the universe is warmer by the expected amount. And so on and so forth. There is no way around the big bang

More reluctance to give specifics; how is something being “warmer by the expected amount” support for the big bang? Sounds like hand waiving to me.

I think I disagree. How do you measure the time it takes light to travel from A to B, and how do you define the time interval delta T which it took? You will implicitly use the "isotropic" synchronization convention to do it. The point is not that this is a deep physical difference, it's just that light travel times for one-way trips are a convention dependent quantity.

You’re wasting your time; another atheist was already in here, read the article and came to the same conclusion as you have (there is nothing inherently wrong with using such a convention) and then these guys simply would not listen to what he was trying to tell them so he left. It’s very difficult to explain relativistic physics to people who possess a purely Newtonian understanding of it.

No, I really hate to be the devil's advocate here when it means that I am on the side of Statler, but you are simply repeating the assertion. How do you know that it takes light time to traverse a distance?

I have been trying to get this through to him for years; you may have better luck because so much of what matters to these guys is who says something not what is being said.

I think in the "geocentric" synchronization convention, Romer's measurement would simply be interpreted differently: the moon appears to be covered later by Jupiter, because they have increased their distance and have therefore gone to a distance where time is lagging behind somewhat. Remember that in this slanted "geometry", moving around in space radically changes your time frame. Romers interpretation of the delay in terms of travel time simply assumes that time on Jupiter is the same as his. This is also roughly what you get (up to time dilation due to movement of jupiter) when you use standard SRT synchronization convention. The anisotropic picture is an artificial mess, don't get me wrong.

Yes, time moves differently as the moon changes position with respect to the observer. I do not like how you use the term “artificial” here when we are dealing with synchrony conventions which all create their own sets of strangeness and counter intuitiveness. This convention does have its advantages.

To summarize the whole thing, if you strip away the mathematical shenanigans, what Waldorf wants us to do is the following: you observe light from Andromeda tonight - let's call the moment in time on Andromeda when it left there "now" rather than "3 million years ago", and act as if no further time had passed on Andromeda after the departure of this light. This is in principle a completely skewed, but consistent way to view the world because nothing that could have happened after that on Andromeda is causally connected to us yet.

This renaming of points in time at different places in space allows you to put the origin of all the astronomical light which we observe now in your newly defined "present".

Asserting that this is somehow “skewed” is committing the error that you just spent numerous posts arguing against. You are assuming that there is a correct or real manner in which to measure when the light left its source and there is not (as you have clearly already stated). It’d be like saying, “An Olympic sized swimming pool is 54.68 yards" is somehow using a “skewed” convention for length measurement.

I appreciate your thoughts on the matter though.