Ages of Time: Astronomical
Philip Stott
Astronomers have a severely restricted set of data on which to
theorize and reach conclusions. It is worth remembering what the famous
Astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington pointed out in 1926, "There are no purely
observational facts about the heavenly bodies. Astronomical measurements are,
without exception, measurements of phenomena occurring in a terrestrial
observatory or station; it is only by theory that they are translated into
knowledge of a universe outside".
Eddington said this before space probes had enabled us to
approach the planets. His remark is still true for the heavenly bodies beyond
Pluto. As noted in "Solid
Ground" many of the conclusions about the planets reached after intensive
study using the best available telescopes turned out to be wrong. The stars are
much further away than the planets, far more difficult to study, and many of the
conclusions reached by astronomical theorizing about them are likely to be at
least as wrong.
We can immediately see that something is drastically wrong in
Astronomy when we look at high energy cosmic radiation. As Soddy pointed out in
his address to
Nobel
Prizewinners some cosmic radiation is traveling so close to the speed of
light that the annihilation of a thousand uranium atoms would be needed to
accelerate them to that speed. Rather than examine the possibility that the
basis of their theorizing must be wrong astronomers have come to the conclusion
that chance interactions of electric and magnetic fields in space form
cyclotrons which accelerate cosmic particles to enormous speeds. As Soddy
pointed out, such an idea is "as fanciful as the sorting demon of Maxwell that
could upset the 2nd law of Thermodynamics.". But the astounding fact is that
astronomers actually believe that such cosmic cyclotrons really exist!
Another example concerns observations of bursts of gamma
radiation. Current theories of astronomy demand that the sources of these bursts
must be so far away that to be detected as they are they must be caused by
explosions so powerful they generate as much energy as the rest of the universe
produces altogether. At least one gamma ray burst occurs every day, so the
astronomer bound to current dogma must believe in incredible amounts of energy
daily exploding into being.
And the Big Bang theory, which John Maddox, the editor of Nature,
pointed out more than a decade ago is "thoroughly unsatisfactory" continues to
"explain everything by varying the nature of nothing".
One could almost imagine the famous conversation between Alice
and the White Queen taking place between an astronomy student and his professor
:- "one can’t believe impossible things". "I daresay you haven’t had much
practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why,
sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
There is certainly reason to suspect that not all the wisdom of
current Astronomy is correct. What of Astronomy’s pronouncements of age? Most
astronomical speculation of age comes from astronomical speculation of distance.
So what then of distances? Dr. Neville Jones noted "A very common misconception,
even amongst professional astronomers, is that telescopes provide us with a
measure of distance. They do not. Exactly as with a microscope, the telescope is
an optical instrument that simply provides an angular resolution greater than
that of the human eye. ... A telescope does not "see" more distant objects;
rather, it "sees" the same things as we do with our eyes. However, the telescope
resolves these objects, or magnifies them. Just as when using a microscope to
examine the detail of a flower, we can use a telescope to examine the detail and
structure of the firmament. What we observe is therefore not things that are
further and further away from us, but finer detail of the same thing."
Astronomical theory transforms the detail into distance, more theory transforms
the distance to age. As Dr. John A. Eddy, world renowned authority on the sun
noted "I suspect that the sun is 4.5 billion years old, however, given some new
and unexpected data to the contrary I suspect we could live with Bishop Ussher’s
value for the age of the earth and sun, I don’t think we have much in the way of
observational evidence in Astronomy to conflict with that."
There appears to be no observational evidence which conflicts
with Bishop Ussher’s age of about 6000 years. Astronomical ages are uniformly
founded on theories, many, if not most of which may be deeply flawed. There are,
however, a number of observations which present great difficulty for the
astronomical time scale of billions of years. A selection includes: short period
comets, planetary ring systems, supernova remnants, planetary details, and
rapidly changing stars. Brief descriptions are given in
Some
Difficulties for Astronomical Ages.
A major problem with all astronomical distances and ages is that
they depend on cosmology, the conception of what the form and structure of the
universe actually are. This is looked into in
Towards A
Bblical Cosmology.
Links to sites dealing
with astronomical time:
Astronomy & Origins |
True.Origin
Archive |
Answers in Genesis
Creation Discovery Project |
Midclyth |
Barry
Setterfield
Lambert Dolphin's Library |
Creation
Guy |
California
Institute of Omniology
|
