Noah's ark questions

Thank you for your collective vote of confidence. Let me see if I can explain this (my husband's work) as simply as possible...

He started in 1979 noticing a chart which showed that the speed of light had been measured as changing for 300 years. However a prominent physicist in 1941 (Birge) had declared that all the 'constants' were constant and that any other ideas were against the 'spirit of science'. That shut down THAT series of discussions which had been going on a long time in the scientific journals.

Why is this important? Because if the speed of light is not constant, then time, as measured by atomic processes (like radiometric dating) does not 'tick' at the same rate as time as we measure it on our calendars. In Genesis 1:14, God told us to use the sun, moon and stars as our timekeepers. This is orbital, or our calendar, time. This stays steady throughout time. This we can count on.

Atomic time has been measured as changing, however. Not just in terms of the speed of light, but also as a series of direct measurements done comparing atomic time to orbital time.

This means that what shows up as, perhaps, 4 million years on the atomic time scale can be mathematically corrected to read what it corresponds to in orbital years. That would be about 2900 BC, or shortly after the time of Peleg. So that would be about right for the appearance of the Galapagos Islands.

It is not that the speed of light is so powerful. It is not. But it proved to be the key to a much larger issue. There are five things which are puzzling to physicists and astronomers which are solved by one parent cause. The five things are
1. The changing speed of light
2. The increasing mass of subatomic particles
3. The changes in something called Planck's Constant
4. The quantization (the measurements show up in groups, not as a smoothly changing series) of the redshift
5. The difference in the rate of ticking of atomic and orbital clocks.

The key to all five was actually in number 3. Planck's Constant measures something called the Zero Point Energy in space. The Zero Point Energy, or ZPE, shows up in an interesting way in the lab. If you take a vacuum bottle and suck all the particles out of it of any subatomic size, you still do not have a true vacuum. You have thermal energy. So you bring this container down to absolute zero, so you do not have any thermal energy or any particles, and there is still measureable energy there. That is why they call it the Zero Point Energy. It is homogenous throughout space. It is also gigantic in amount.

Where did it come from? The Bible tells us. Twelve times the Bible states that God stretched out the heavens. In the Bible it says it in the past completed tense, even though many scientists today think it is still expanding.

When you stretch a rubber band, you invest it with energy. Until you let it go, it is potential energy. When you let it go, there is a sudden change of potential to kinetic -- or movement -- energy and off it goes.

When God stretched out the heavens, the incredible amount of potential energy which was invested in the 'fabric of space' rapidly expressed itself in a massive influs of electro-magnetic radiation as plasma (disconnected) particles of positive and negative subatomic particles.

Now, go back to Genesis for a moment. In Genesis 1:2 we see that the earth was created without form and void. If we understand the Hebrew meaning of the word 'eretz', which is translated earth, we get a better picture. That word does not mean our planet. It means 'that which is firm.' The word for heavens means 'that which is lofty', or 'lifted up.' We also learn that this original material was water.

Science has a problem with trying to get all the elements out of hydrogen and helium, which is what they say the early universe started as. But if we pay attention to the Bible and realize God created the early universe with a water plasma, then, and this has been shown by Dr. Ed Boudreaux of one of the universities in Louisiana, ALL the known elements in their present abundances can be produced from a water plasma in less than an hour. The idea of plasma, or the disconnected atoms, is also important, for the early universe' matter was without form and void. That describes plasma -- not a nice little round ball of earth waiting to be given land and life.

But, getting back to the ZPE. Just like a rubber band, when let loose, expends most of its energy in the first moments of flight, the vast majority of the potential energy invested into the fabric of space was transformed to kinetic energy within the first weeks and years of creation.

This was the ZPE. This Zero Point Energy is responsible for all five of the listed anomalies above. Regarding simply the speed of light here, the ZPE is like a series of waves moving in every direction. When these waves cross and peak, a small virtual particle is formed for a minute amount of time. It flashes into and then out of existence. However, during that time of existence, it will absorb a traveling photon of light and then re-emit it when it flashes back out of existence. The photon goes on its way. In the beginning, there were almost no virtual particles, so light could get to its final destination with extreme speed. Through time, however, as the number of virtual particles in any given volume of space increased dramatically with the build-up of the ZPE, any given photon of light finds itself needing to 'navigate' more and more hurdles on its way and, like a runner going over hurdles, it does not matter how fast he runs in between, those hurdles are going to slow him down. So it is not a matter of 'tired light', but of impeded light.

This increasing ZPE is also responsible for the slowing of other atomic processes, which is why the 'atomic clock' is slowing.

It gets more and more involved, but that should help a little bit. Atomic time, which is what we measure with radioactive dating, is simply not the same time as the time we measure our days and years by with the earth spinning and going around the sun. Those two clocks 'tick' at different rates.

Thus, any rock which dates radiometrically at 4 million years is actually around five thousand orbital years old, or maybe a little less.

I hope that helps some. Barry's work infuriates the evolutionists, because it proves we are in a young universe, just as the Bible says. And he proves it using the work of other people and simply putting their results together and saying, in effect, "See what happens?" So I would not be surprised if this thread, like a number of others before it, turns into a fight about the Setterfield work.

You can see his material on www.setterfield.org. Please feel free to email him questions or ask them here and one or the other of us, or both, will try to answer in a timely fashion.

God bless.