Originally posted by Helen:
As far as the insect thing, why does it bother you that I was interested to see if there was an idiom involved? There was.
Oh, not bothered. First time I have even mentioned it. Simple point that it is necessary to bring in outside information to understand the passage. If you didn't know about the idiom you would think the passage was wrong. Same thing. If you do not know or do not think that the earth is old, you can read Genesis 1 & 2 as a literal narrative. (In fact, this is what you do.) If you look at the other evidence God has given us and accept that evidence as indicating and old earth you read the same passages in a diferent context but just as valid. But I know we will disagree with what the evidence shows. And I respect that you try and show how the evidence supports you.
The whole point of the slippery slope objection is that the assumption is that there is nothing to stop one from going from the earth is old to the miracles and such didn't happen. But there is a line. And that is why it is a logical fallacy. In this case some things could not have any evidence and some could. In areas, such as science, different scenerios would leave evidence to what happened. If the earth is 4.5 billion years old and if evolution happened we can find evidence and since the Bible cannot contradict it Genesis must be understood in that context. And I do not think that God would lie to us either in his Word or in his creation. The miracles of Jesus, for example, would leave nothing that could be tested. We cannot prove or disprove them. We accept them on faith. If we did not have faith we would not be here talking to each other about it.
Yes, Barry would like to see your calculations on the quasar light.
Let's see here.
First let's go to
http://www.seds.org/~spider/spider/Misc/3c273.html
Where the text shows that the brightest known quasar is 10^12 times the brightness of the sun. The astronomers also calculate for themselves that
So from a distance of 10 parsecs, this object would shine in the sky about as bright as our sun !
1 parces = 3.26 light years therfore 10 parsecs = 32.6 light years. So at about 30 light years, this quasar, the most luminous known, would be as bright as the sun.
I got the brightness from a different source previously but had the same value.
Now according to the inverse square law the Brightness of an object is related to the distance and luminosity as such.
B = L / (4 * PI * D^2)
Now B1 = apparent brightness Sun and B2 = quasar.
L1 = actual luminosity sun and L2 = luminosity of quasar. L2 = 10^12 * L1.
B1 / B2 is how much brighter the sun is than the quasar. Now if you divide out the other side of the equation the 4 and the PI cancel out along with the L1 once you substitute the relationship between the two. Reducing you get
B1 / B2 = D2^2 / ( (10^12) * D1^2 )
Where
D1 = distance to sun = 93,000,000 miles
D2 = Distance to center of the galaxy = 28000 light years = 1.6*10^17 miles
Multiplying every thing out you get the sun as about 3 million times the brightness of 3C 273 if placed at the center of our galaxy. Turning this into a magnitude difference you get
2.51 ^x = 3100000
gives 16.3 magnitudes difference.
So you get sun = -26. Full moon = -13. Our example = -9.7. Venus (max) = -4.0. Sirius (brightest star) = -1.
Now, in looking the information back up I realized that the wording seems to indicate that 3C 273 is the brightest quasar visually. Its absolute brightness is -26.1. A little digging produced a histogram from a survey of quasars showing most to be in the -24 to -28 range. The very brightest I could find was about -29. So, adding the extra three magnitudes gives -12.7, just a touch dimmer than the full moon.
As a check, I solved for the distance to get the same brightness as the sun and got a little less than 6 parsecs rather than 10. Close enough for me. It confirms that I am not off by orders of magnitude. Solving the other direction yields that an object ould have to be another 3 million times brighter than 3C 273 to have the same visual brightness as the sun if placed at the center of the galaxy. That is to say it would need an absolute brightness of -42.3!
The final point has to be how much more massive most quasars are than our supermassive black hole. At least three orders of magnitude (1000 fold) larger.
I hope you don't find any major errors now that I have put this in public.
[ May 08, 2003, 08:59 PM: Message edited by: UTEOTW ]
