ATTENTION! YOUNG COSMOS HAS MOVED!

Salvador

First, thank-you for the excellent link and tutorial on modern methods for estimating distances in astronomy. I found it quite enlightening.

My comment is simply that I found the entire piece a remarkable confirmation of the “Privileged Planet” hypothesis, that this universe has been set up to aid in discovery. What an amazing wealth of different tools for estimating the distances to stars and galaxies that God has provided for our use! I must gently chide Salvador for writing as if trigonometric parallax is the only method we can really rely on. The other methods, though lacking in exactitude of geometry, are overlapping and rely on behaviours and physics we can generally duplicate in laboratories or model on computers. Is there so little faith in “general” physics and astronomy in the YEC community that all of these techniques are discounted? I hope not, and I can’t really believe it. Together, these “other” methods (and I counted at least 12 of them) provide consistency and check and balance each other. The distances calculated using these scales are in general not likely off by more than a factor of 2, and certainly not by a factor of 10.

It appears that, given the choice of a 10,000 light-year universe or a 10 billion light-year universe, we almost certainly find ourselves in the latter.

“’Why would God create stars in collections such as galaxies in first place’, since a young universe has no need to confine stars in galaxies (remember galaxies serve as star nurseries in an old universe).”

I think part of the answer is directly related to an even more fundamental question contained in yours, i.e. Why would God create? Why did God do anything other than just be “YHWH” (the Being One) - eternal, omniscient, immutable, at peace…?

But create He did! And looking at creation around us we often see created things unconfined to a strict utilitarian function. Go to the fruit section of your supermarket and marvel at the created treats, pleasant to eye and tongue. They are usually nutritional as well. We humans didn’t need all of them but God did give them to us. Maybe the stellar wonders are similar to the many kinds of created fruits. Not strictly necessary, but succulent for the thoughtful.

Secondly, if we affirm the existence of sentient servants of God in the form of messengers (angels) then perhaps cosmic wonders were for their amazement and edification as well. Presumably they apprehend the heavens more directly than we do.

And just maybe the stellar wonders of the universe are a kind of Cosmic fireworks display. Almighty God chose to create. Maybe it was impossible but that billions and billions of cosmic fireworks would go off at the instant of Creation! And you’ve GOT to admit that spiral arm galaxies are amazing and wondrous to behold. In John’s gospel one of the first miracles of Christ is turning water into wine at a wedding party. Maybe God Himself is less an austere Astrophysicist and more the gracious Host of what was intended to be an amazing and enjoyable Creation.

Even so this still doesn’t solve the distant light issue of an immense universe. But as I mentioned in a different post, it appears that many quantum physicists (so Brian Greene in The Fabric of the Cosmos) accept non-locality as a real phenomenon of entangled particles. Non-locality means that two entangled particles, say photons, on opposite sides of the universe act as a single entity (somehow) so that if some aspect of the state of one photon is changed, the other photon “instantly” expresses this change (instantly meaning much faster than c, though it is still being debated whether it is absolutely instantaneous). Brian Greene cites Alain Aspect’s experiment as a robust indication that quantum entanglement is real. See the box at the bottom of the page at this link.

http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/447.htm

Since God created the universe, it is highly plausible to me that there is (or at least was) a fundamental unity to its elements. I would not be surprised that the pristine Creation was so fundamentally unified that local photons were entangled with photons of distant stellar objects. That means, as far as distant light goes, we aren’t really so concerned with the actual photons of distant stars, but of the information they bear, since local photons would express that information. Highly speculative for sure. Maybe Salvador’s Spam filter is trying to say something, lol.

By the way Salvador, could you expand a little more on the five reasons that James Trefil says preclude galaxy existence. Or perhaps you have a link to more on that from Dr. Trefil.

Best Regards

Perhaps we might be able to improve our angular measuring devices, but at some point they will be limited in accuracy because of Heisenberg uncertainty.

What would be great is if we could actually see lots of binary star systems and test the time dilation equations that Dr. Cheesman derived. The problem today is that it may be possible we see a binary star system, but because of the inability to measure distances, we can’t actually affirm that they are indeed a binary star system!

I really hope we will be able to measure more than 300 light years in the not too distant future. The phenomena of interest which we can test will be within about 10,000 light years. I think that is an achievable goal.

Please accept my apologies that your comment was trapped in the spam buffer, and I was unaware of it till now.

Salvador

In the end, much of Big Bang cosmology rides on redshifts, which has been taken to indicate expansion, hence distance, and also taken as an implication of an original big bang. Halton Arp is no slouch (mentioned by David Berlinsky in the article “was there a big bang?”) and has some pointed articles that decrease confidence that we actually know what causes redshift.

Faint Quasars Give Conclusive Evidence for Non-Velocity Redshifts
http://www.haltonarp.com/articles/faint_quasars_give_conclusive_evidence_for_non_velocity_redshifts

Toward the end:
“Since, as usual, none of the above authors reference the voluminous evidence that quasars are intrinsically redshifted objects ejected from lower redshifted galaxies, there is very little chance of conventional astronomy correcting a huge error in their fundamental assumptions. The consequences for astronomy, and science in general, are discouraging to contemplate.”

For a tongue in cheek evaluation of The Shapley Supercluster see:

Fingers of God in an Expanding Universe
http://www.haltonarp.com/articles/fingers_of_god_in_an_expanding_universe

“The prevailing current assumption in astronomy today is that the amount of redshift is directly a measure of distance. So the higher redshifts in this cluster would be at a distance of the order of 20% of the radius of the Universe.

It is truly remarkable that authoritative astronomers and physicists can measure galaxies in a well defined cluster and accept without question that some of the members are 1,000 Mpc from other members (that is, over 3,000,000,000 light years distant from other members).

What do they think this cluster is? In fact they are forced to say it is a structure that I would compare to a great sausage stretching out from us toward the outer reaches of the Universe. The miraculous aspect is that this sausage is pointing directly at us, the observer.

But perhaps an even stranger aspect is that the far end would be receding from us at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Quick, the mustard!

These cluster elongations toward the observer have been noticed in other regions of the sky and, causing some inquietude, been dubbed “Fingers of God”. The reason for unease is obvious. The fingers are pointing to the conclusion that we live in some special place in the Universe. Very anti-Copernican.

Is there any way out of this embarrassing situation? Yes. As a last resort, one can look at the observations. For 40 years now evidence has been building that bright parent galaxies are surrounded by younger, companion galaxies which have higher intrinsic redshifts. When plotted in a cone diagram, as shown in Arp 1998, p.71, the younger galaxies are at higher redshift and stretch out behind the brighter, low redshift parents.”

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If Arp can be believed and we really do not know what redshift results from, then it is completely speculative to base distance and hence age on it. So it may very well be that the redshift rung of the distance ladder is actually nonexistent. Then to say the universe is 13.4 billion years old is as much an act of faith as the YEC position.

Best Regards.

The effectiveness of triangulation assumes a cosmological principle AND a euclidian geometry. The assumption of Euclidean geometry is probably false (since relativity is non-Euclidean). But I still think it ought to work for very large distances. Any one is free to weigh in on this.

To get better triangulation, we might have to build space probes which can orbit the sun from very large distances. The Earth orbits at 1 Astronomical unit (AU). We get 300 light years (I believe) via this triangulation. To get 3000 light years, we need probes out at 10 AU;

for 30,000 light years, 100 AU;

and 300,000 light years, 1000 AU

etc.

The next best is the intensity distance estimates. Brighter implies closer if we are dealing with the same class of objects.

Finally, both in YEC CDK, Big Bang, White Hole cosmologies, the redshift implies distance. The issue is the SCALE of the shift versus distance. I think we really don’t know. It’s not so much a matter of saying more red shift means more distance, but what is in question a matter of degree.

http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/galaxies/distance.html

At the beginning, the remark is made:

“In the ladder of distance indicators, propagation of errors becomes dominant. See Rowan-Robinson, The Cosmological Distance Ladder (Cambridge 1987), for a full discussion. Modern methods are described in Galaxy Distances and Deviations from Universal Expansion, ed. B. Madore and R.B. Tully (NATO ASI 180).”

Toward the end a remark stands out under the sub heading:
“Distance estimates”

“Distances to nearby galaxies are not in serious dispute,…”

To my mind this implies two things: a) some doubt still remains about distance estimates to nearby galaxies, b) distance estimates to far distant galaxies are much less certain. What then does that imply about the certainty of a 15 billion year old universe? Such doubt of course can not prove recent creation, but it certainly leaves open such a possibility.

Best regards

http://seedmagazine.com/news/2006/08/scientists_confirm_existence_o.php

We are still learning amazing things not even suspected 50 years ago in cosmology. I would not be so certain that a physical, plausible explanation for the origin of galaxies will not be found as a direct consequence of the physics of the big bang in the next 50. (I would contrast that state with the lack of advances in the origin of life search!)

Those who see galaxies as having been directly created should ask themselves “why would God create stars in collections such as galaxies in first place”, since a young universe has no need to confine stars in galaxies (remember galaxies serve as star nurseries in an old universe). We could survive quite happily for 10,000 or even 100,000 years circling our own sun in the neighbourhood of randomly scattered stars bearing no resemblance at all to any galaxy that we can see. We would have no need of balancing gravitational forces, or providing for star formation and nucleosynthesis via supernovae, yet galaxies provide structures able to survive billions of years with these and other important functions.

The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.

Tipler writes of Weinberg:

I have now known Weinberg for over thirty years, and I know that he has always taken the equations of physics very seriously indeed. He and I are both convinced that the equations of physics are the best guide to reality, especially when the predictions of these equations are contrary to common sense. But as he himself points out in his book, the Big Bang Theory was an automatic consequence of standard thermodynamics, standard gravity theory, and standard nuclear physics. All of the basic physics one needs for the Big Bang Theory was well established in the 1930s, some two decades before the theory was worked out. Weinberg rejected this standard physics not because he didn’t take the equations of physics seriously, but because he did not like the religious implications of the laws of physics.

The 2nd law of thermodymics strongly suggests a universe with a finite life. This is inherently obvious in that the stars can’t be shining forever. This simple and obvious conclusion was resisted for metaphysical, not scientific reasons.

Some aspects of Big Bang physics are incoporated into various YEC cosmologies including Humphrey’s White Hole and YEC CDK. I think the argument for a non-eternal universe based on thermodynamics is very sound.

The Big Bang cosmology did a good job of making the climate in the physics world friendly to theists. It is not quite the godless theory that some have supposed that it is. Even the atheists have recognized the Big Bang theory would be more sympathetic to theism than atheism.

The Big Bang put a bound on the time for Darwinian evolution to take place, and thus the Big Bang has helped the case for Intelligent Design of life, which has helped the case for the special creation of life as well…

I had once accepted the Big Bang theory, and I viewed as very friendly to my personal beliefs, even though it did not quite fit the natural reading of Genesis. I was horrified to see treated with such contempt.

If YEC succeeds, one may look at the Big Bang as an important step in the progress of YEC theory. The Big Bang took us from a pantheistic type view of the unvierse being eternal and self-sufficent steady state place to a view of the universe as being created and having a finite life. That was an important step to creating a climate friendly to YEC theory.

For example, cosider what the Big Bang did the likes of Ernst Haekel:

The universe, or the cosmos, is eternal, infinite, and illimitable.

Riddle of the Universe by Haeckel

The essential elements of the Big Bang proved Haeckel wrong, and it paved the way for ID to demolish naturalistic evolution. It also was very friendly to Christian theology, which, most notably among the world religions boldly argued the universe was not eternal.