Setterfield and the variable speed of light model

Helen wrote (after consulting with Setterfield???):

No, Helen. While it is true that if you have exactly two distinct points there is a unique line fitting them, and that if you add a third point you will not in general be able to fit a line to all three points, it is not true that if you have three points and you add a fourth that the line fitting the four points will fit less well than the line fitting the three. Nor is it true that if you have a line fitting (imperfectly) through n points and you add m more points, that the line of best fit through the n + m points will in general fit the m + n points more poorly than the line fitting the n points.

And the latter is a fair statement of Setterfield's situation as you describe it in 1981. He had n data points, where n < 163 that he has had since 1987. Also, in 1981 his n >> 2! It is true that if it were given that you had n (n > 2) points fitting a curve perfectly, and you added m more points, then the probability of those m + n points fitting the curve perfectly is very small (unless the m points were chosen in advance to perfectly fit the curve.)

However, one seldom, if ever, has n (n > 2) EXPERIMENTAL points that perfectly or near perfectly fit a curve. EVERY scientist knows this--good, bad, and ugly. But Setterfield didn't. He had some large number of experimental measurements of c (2 << n < 163) in 1981, he KNEW that they didn't all lie on the same curve, and yet he believed his computer when it told him that their r value was .99999999+. That was unreasonable. That was his blunder. With many more than two points which he KNEW did not all lie upon his fitting curve, he still failed to immediately see that his r value could not possibly be .99999999+.

Sure, any programmer could have made the programming mistake that caused his computer to calculate r at the wrong place in his analysis algorithm. It is Setterfield's unique shame to have failed to cach such egregious an error prior to its publication. The only pre-publication pressure that might justify such a blunder might be that of standing in front of a firing squad with the alternatives "publish or perish!"

 

Helen wrote:

I know no such thing, and it isn't true, nor has any reputable physicist said so. Permeability is just an arbitrary unit conversion factor. It's a number. If you say the permeability of free space is changing with time it makes about as much sense as saying that the number 5 changes with time.

I know that explaining electromagnetism can be a little bit subtle. Remember your earlier concern that the speed of light was suddenly "defined" to be constant, so why can't mu be so "undefined"? Well the reason is that it is possible to define fundamental units of measurement so that c is or is not defined to be constant. One cannot do so with mu. While it is possible, given fundamental units of length, time and mass, to measure c in terms of those quantities, it is NOT possible so to measure mu in terms of those fundamental units plus electrical charge. .

But if Setterfield thinks that it is meaningful to talk about time-vary8ing mu (for the vacuum--time-varying relative permeabilities within matter are perfectly OK), then it is incumbent upon HIM to define his putative time-variation in a physically-meaningful way.

As for you, Helen, I want to say this as politely as I can. You are out of your league here. You are employing verbal arguments and verbal analogies (comparing constant permeability, constant speed of light) without taking into account or even understanding the essential physical differences.

Without that text I cannot say what those authors were trying to do or what pedagogical purpose they may have had in doing it. However, as the term "permeability of free space" is used, and has been used by physicists for about a century, permeability is a defined constant. If Setterfield wishes to use it otherwise, then let him carefully define its use.

 

Helen wrote:

That is correct. One is allowed a time-dependent permitivity, although for Lorentz invariance (for Special Relativity to hold) one would also need spatial variation of permitivity (and the speed of light) in all except possibly one inertial frame of reference.

It is meaningful to have time-dependent permitivity because there is such a thing as electrical charge. If you have isolated charges, which you either can presume to have fixed charges, or else have some previously accepted time=dependence, thenif the force between two such charges separated by a fixed distance were to change with time, then since permitivity is a proportionality constant between that force between them and the products of the two charges, and the inverse of the square of the distance separating them, a change in that force would, in principle, allow us to infer a change in permitivity. There is no analogous experiment for permeability.

Duh. I don't know of a physicist who thinks SPACE-TIME variation of c could be reasonable. It's a little bit more dicey for just time-variation, since that implies a perferred frame of reference where c depends only upon time. In general for c(x,y,z,t), the 4-gradient of c will not lie along a time-like vector, so 3-surfaces of constant c cannot be 3-surfaces of constant t globally.

Really, Helen, if you ask a typical physicist whether or not special relativity can be simply augmented to accomodate nonconstant c, few will intuitively think it a difficult problem, although few have actually tried to work out details. If you or Setterfield have been finding yourselves confronting physicists raising that objection, that should tell you something about the quality of physicists with whome you've beem smoozing. (Although physicists talking about special relativity do speak about the speed of light being a constant in all frames of reference, they mean that it is the same for all local observers in inertial frames. Most physicists also think that the speed of light is everywhere and always invariant, but there is not confusion among the experienced concerning the two senses of "constant."

 

>>>>>>>Mark, if you draw a line between two points, you have a perfect fit for those two points. The more points you have, the less likely you are to have a perfect fit for a line or a curve or any function you like. It was a simple logical statement. Please don't take it to be something it was not meant to be. <<<<<<<<<<
.......................................
No, your thinking is wrong. If there is reason for a strong correlation between two parameters, then a larger number of points will not lead to a worse fit. It is the underlying relationship that will determine the goodness of fit, not the number of points. For instance if income of individuals is plotted against taxes paid to the government by those same individuals, there would be a reasonably good correlation and the line would likely fit the points better than for example, personal income plotted against shoe size of the taxpayer.

[ May 02, 2003, 02:24 AM: Message edited by: Peter101 ]

 

Helen wrote:

It is inappropriate for you on this Christian formum (or any other forum for that matter) to baselessly insinuate that I have or may have called someone a liar. Please stop and think. I'm sure you did so only because you're frustrated and it's late at night.

Without the book in front of me I cannot be absolutely sure, but dollars to donuts the author writes one of Maxwell's Equations something like:

curl B = (4*pi/c)J + 1/(4*Pi)(dE/dt)?

The key is the factor of 1/c in front of J. For a long wire carrying a steady current this eventually becomes B = (4*pi/c)I/(2*pi*r), where I is the total current in the wire, and r is distance from the wire, and B is magnetic induction.

The point is that the definition of B is a bit loosey-goosey. It is physically defined only up to a multiplicative parameter. One can choose whatever value one wants here, provided one adjusts a parameter in Faraday's Law of Induction. One can even give the parameter the value of 4*pi/c or 4*pi/c(t), provided the proportionality parameter in Faraday's law is also suitably adjusted. The physical requirement (and I suspect this is where you think that permeability is defined in terms of c) is that the product of the two parameters must be equal to 1/c^2 (so that the wave wquation gives the right velocity!)

The only thing you are doing, however, is defining the scale for magnetic field. If you want a time-dependent scale, then you can have time-dependent parameters. You can even call one of them the permeability of free space if you want to. It doesn't matter because your choice of parameter has no physical meaning.

Perhaps I should have been clearer at the outset. The problem isn't with having or defining a time-dependent permeability of free space per se. The problem is that there is no physical different between a physics having a time-dependent permeability and one with constant permeability. such a definition has no physical meaning.

To put it more simply, yes, in Maxwell's electrodynamics it is possible for the speed of electromagnetic radiation to be time-dependent. That speed is equal to the product of two parameters of the theory (c^2 = 1/(mu * epsilon)). You can have either or both mu and epsilon time-dependent, but it turns out that you get no new physics from going from one of them being time-dependent to both of them being time-dependent, provided that their product comes out right. Underline that, Helen. Make it bold. PROVIDED THEIR PRODUCT IS RIGHT.

To make that clearer, recall the time-rescaling we did a few of my posts ago? Well, in that case both mu and epsilon had proportional time-dependences, so we could rescale time to make both constants. In general, however, if epsilon and mu had different time dependences (subject to their product always being equal to the inverse square of c(t)), then time-rescaling can remove either of them, but not both. So there is no new physics in Maxwell's Equations with time-varyng permitivity and permeability than in the case where only one of them is time-varying. (And in the case where they both have the same time-variation, there is no new physics introduced above the case of constant permitivity and permeability.)

 

Helen, in my post of April 30th at 5:10 p.m. in this thread I only assume two things about Barry's position:

a) That he holds the earth to have orbited the sun about 8000 times since creation in accordance with laws of gravity and orbits that applied universally the same at any given time - and

b) We observe the Andromeda Galaxy today by means of light that traveled very much faster in earlier years than today, which is why we can see it now even though it is 2.8 million light years away.

I then sought to show these two notions are inconsistent with astronomical observation.

What is it about Barry's theory that I have misstated here? Are these statements as I have them considered true or false by Barry? Please don't ask me to just read his material again, that's what I did to form this impression you say shows misunderstanding of his theory. Just tell me which one of these is considered false by Barry. If you could say why he considers it false, also, that would be even better, but just saying which one would be a start.

 

Paul of Eugene says this about Setterfield's theory:

>>>>>>>a) That he holds the earth to have orbited the sun about 8000 times since
creation in accordance with laws of gravity and orbits that applied universally
the same at any given time <<<

And of course there is much evidence that the 8,000 orbits of the sun is far too low. For instance the Greenland ice cores show more than 110,000 reliable, annual layers. And of course many other objects from the earth have been reliably dated beyond 10,000 years, hundreds in fact. The ancient age of the earth has been proven beyond reasonable doubt, even by non-radiometric dates.

 

In another thread, Helen posted this comment:

I have a theory that light has always been the same speed for that past 10 billion years. You have constantly posted to the contrary over and over again. I remain interested in why you think your contrary theory is scientifically sustainable. Your have given words in reply at times, but nothing that shows any understanding of the issues I raised. I suspect that in fact I do understand these basic idea of Setterfield theory; that Barry seeks to show light has traveled at extremely high speeds in the past as measured by such clocks as the earth orbiting the sun. It's hard to see how Barry or you could say this is false, but you say I've misunderstood and then refuse to share where.

Unfortunately, in my own mind, I cannot help but wonder if the real reason you present no cogent defense of Barry's theory relative to the thought experiment I suggested above is that there is no defense.

 

Since this Setterfield thread has been neglected as of late, and since this is the Memorial Day weekend in the USA, I thought that we might celebrate the holiday with a brief look at an aspect of his work that has not received much attention.

I direct your attention to his paper “ATOMIC QUANTUM STATES, LIGHT, AND THE REDSHIFT” at http://www.setterfield.org/quantumredshift.htm#stellarlumin. In the section entitled “Stellar Luminosities”, equation (72) Setterfield gives a formula of Chandrasekhar for stellar luminosity in terms of various properties of the star, and the some physical parameters including c and something called “G*”, which is detined elsewhere in the paper (Equation (59)), whose c-dependence is also given elsewhere (Equation (64)). (You’ll have to look them up. We don’t have typographic facilities up to the task of reproducing those equations here.)

Unsurprisingly the calculated c-dependence of stellar luminosities turn out to be just what is required. Unfortunately Equations (59) and (64) are both in a section highlighted in yellow, meaning, according to a note prior to the paper’s title, that they have been “superceded by current work”. It therefore follows that Equation (72) must also be “superceded by current work”. (Its conclusion isn’t necessarily wrong; it’s just baseless.)

(I regard this as a relatively minor flaw in Setterfield’s work. There are other bigger problems, some of which have been discussed here before, while others have not. I brought up only this trifling problem now both because it is a holiday and because I have a toothache, in consequence of which I’m feeling ornery enough not to trust my self restraint in discussing really important matters. Anyway I’m sure that this matter will be speedily resolved. All Helen has to do to improve Setterfield’s paper is to apply her yellow highlighting to the material around Equation (72). Anticipating this makes me burst out in song (to the tune of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round That Old Oak Tree”):

Write your yellow highlight
Round that old E. Q.
Number seventy-two
Do it for me and you
Write your yellow highlight
Round that old E. Q.

 

Thirteen must be Barry Setterfield's unlucky number. In his magnum opus ATOMIC QUANTUM STATES, LIGHT, AND THE REDSHIFT at http://www.setterfield.org/quantumredshift.htm he notes (correctly) in his Equation (4) that the energy of an electron in a hydrogen atom has magnitude
E = hc/lambda, where
h is Planck's constant, c the speed of light, and lambda the wavelength of light that would be emitted by an electron falling from rest at infinity into the given electron orbit.

So far so good. Unfortunately in Equation (13) Setterfield mistakenly claims that (since hc = constant)
Delta E = hc/(Delta lambda), where
Delta means "change in". Unfortunately that is wrong, wrong, wrong. He should have written:
Delta E = hc Delta (1/lambda).

As anyone with amn mathematical experience knows, Delta (1/x) is not equal to 1/ (Delta x)!

For those of you without mathematics, you can still verify this numerically. Suppose x changes from 8 to 9. Then the change in x, Delta X is equal to 9 - 8 = 1. Therefore 1/(Delta X) = 1/1 = 1.

But Delta (1/X) is the change in 1/X = (1/9 - 1/8) = (8/72 - 9/72) = - 1/72.

Obviously this is not equal to 1 as Setterfield would have you believe from his Equation (13)!

 

Helen wrote:

Oops! I AM sorry for the omission, especially after your gracious wishes for my own recovery. I do wish you a speedy recovery, and wish I had said so in my previous post. This is a bit of a war zone, which ought to make it all the more imperabive that opportunities for civil exchanges be taken. I would like to think if I had been a soldier in World War I that I would have joined in the Christmas carroling of 1914 and 1915.

Thank you.

 

Greetings to Helen to whom I am responding from her comments in another thread and to all who read these words. May the Lord grant us wisdom and discernment as we consider His truths.

For every expert Helen has been able to quote saying speed of light measurements are seen to have changed, there are an equal number or more of experts who say the data are inconclusive and easily explained as being a result of increasing precision with time. The earliest measurements, after all, are from the very dawn of modern science. None of us want to be guilty of picking the expert testimony we like and ignoring all the rest, do we? Don't we want to consider all the evidence?

Astronomical observations establish two things: (a) Radioactive decay rates are directly tied to the speed of light as far as we can observe, which (in the standard interpretation of things) goes back in time for billions of years AND (b) light speed has not changed to any measureable extent IN RELATION TO GRAVITY for all that time.

Here is my reasoning for that. Radioactive decay rates are seen to occur directly in supernova decay rates, for the afterglow of supernova is due to radioactive decay of highly radiactive material created in the explosion. It is the same as we see it across the universe, once corrections are made for the red shift in distant galaxies. In the standard interpretation, the decay rates have not changed as light speed has not changed. If light speed has changed, then the decay rates would by necessity have changed in lock step with the light speed, and the fact that we see it at current rates today is proof of the link.

Now concerning the relationship between light speed and gravity: It is a very basic and straightforward thing to measure the rotation of galaxies. We compare the doppler shift between the approaching part and the receding part and we have the rate.

Now if the speed of light were very much greater in the past, and yet the grand orbits of the stars that make up the galactic rotation were not any greater, then the speed of rotation in relation to the speed of light becomes a much smaller percentage. Where it was once .05 percent of the speed of light, it becomes .000000000005 percent of the speed of light. This will of necessity reduce the doppler shift to practically nothing. Unless, in lock step with the speed of light, the galaxies also rotate faster! The only reason they would do that would be if gravity were stronger as light gets faster.

Setterfield will never accept that gravity effects become stronger and thereby provide for faster orbits when light was faster. The whole point, after all, is to be able to say that the earth only orbited the sun about 8000 times in "dynamic orbital" time while "atomic light speed" time registered several billion years. These simple, well known galactic observations show his theory can't be true.

Lets take a look:

Does anybody see anything here referring to orbital time? Yet another example of the ability of some to add to God's word without warning us it is only their interpretation.

I stated in an earlier post: "In addition, Setterfield theory requires that energy conservation be abandoned, that Einstein's theory of Relativity cannot apply, and besides he hasn't reconciled gravity with it yet anyway." Here is Helen's reply:

Note the odd use of the phrase "atomic level" here. One might pass it over, thinking he's being inclusive here. One would be wrong. In Setterfield theory he makes a distinction between atomic level and macro levels of mass, and has made the incorrect claim that atomic levels of mass do not always manifest macroscopically. Mass is a big problem for Setterfield, he must dispose of that problem somehow.

We are all familiar with e = mc^2. If C changes drastically, E changes also. Its that simple. Why doesn't Helen realize this implies non-conservation of energy? There is nothing else in the equation. Nothing about other constants. Nothing about Planck's constant. Nothing about the magnetic permeability of space. Nothing about size, whether macroscopic or microscopic. Just simple plain e=mc^2.

It is true that in some of the incarnations of Setterfield theory - he changes it often enough its hard to keep track - mass going back to the days of Adam was a little bit less. But not enough to overcome the tremendous INCREASE in energy caused by his HUGE increase in the speed of light for that time. At one time he made the decrease in mass under Adamic conditions extreme enough to allow energy to be conserved. Unfortunately, this decrease in mass also resulted in an inability to keep Adam on the planet and he had to abandon that tack. A virtually massless Adam is far to easy to accelerate to the escape velocity.

As a parenthetical note, Setterfield adamic physics will always leave Adam flying off the planet when he takes a step. Whether due to Adam's very low mass or due to Adams increasing unbounded energy or a combination of the two. He tries to get rid of the e=mc^2 problem in various ways, but never successfully. The one way to achieve success would be to INCREASE the strength of gravity, but doing that would cause earth's annual orbits of the sun to go back to the same number as real science suggests and that is the one thing Setterfield is loath to do, because then he's got the billions of years back again.

In past incarnations of his theory, Setterfield attempted to relegate the mass changes and the loss of energy conservation to the changes between his quantum leaps of universal light speed change. Bear that in mind as you read his material. You'll see things like "within a quantum interval" or "for atomic mass" . . . he's trying to leave room for the places where he HAS to violate conservation of energy. I don't know how far he'll try to carry this false distinction between atomic and macro mass but it remains a false distinction.

 

That's very disturbing Paul. How many times has Setterfield changed his theory?

Helen, how many times will he change his theory before he gives up? (Presuming he will give up).

 

Originally posted by Helen above as evidence that light speed has varied in the past:

Since those days concerns about declining c have virtually disappeared. The observations have settled down to a pretty consistent value now. Scientists thinking about this consider that there is not particular reason to expect light to be especially different in its behavior just between 1800 and 1940 compared to today so they naturally lean towards interpreting the earlier values as signs of getting the information more and more accurately determined.

</font>[/QUOTE]Van Flandern's work has its own critics. He seems to have misunderstood how to properly apply Einstein's Relativity corrections to the data he analyzed.

from Barry: When the speed of light was higher, radioactive decay rates were faster, but light slowed as it came to earth. The appearance of what we were seeing in relation to light thus also slowed proportionately. Therefore we would see no difference in decay rates in distant object from what we have today. Paul has brought up this issue a dozen times before and has been answered just as many times.
</font>[/QUOTE]It seems to have utterly escaped Helen's attention that on the particular issue of stating C and decay rates are locked together I AGREED with that particular issue. As long as Helen and Barry persist in misunderstanding what I say and the strength of the objection to their theory I will continue to try to make it as clear as I can for them.

Of course, since I also hold that c has not changed, that implies radioactive decay rates have not changed.

In fact, the answers are not there. That is, the real issues I have raised, not the smoke screen issue Helen "answers" above. I am asserting that gravitational orbital results are observed moving faster than they should be observed in distant galaxies. Helen keeps posting answers about atomic processes being expected to show what they show. Rotating Galaxies are not an atomic process. Cepheid variables rise and fall in response to the tug of gravitation, except for the "bounce" at the bottom. Once again, gravitational action is involved. I havn't posted about Pulsars, maybe someone else did. I did mention x-ray binary stars in the Megellanic galaxie.

You see here an admission that Barry doesn't have an answer yet. There are not very many doppler equations and they aren't very complicated.

Why give up on a winning horse? And what reply? The only thing close to a reply consists of remarks very much like those from Helen quoted at the beginning of this post, which appear to completely miss the point.

Gravity is asserted by Barry to work on a seperate clock time from light/atomic processes. Gravity is observed by astronomers to work on the same clock time from light/atomic processes. Therefore the assertion is wrong.

Objecting to an assertion and proving it is contrary to observation is, in fact, a way of taking notice! Once again we see a complete lack of any substantive reply to the issues I have raised. Let Barry pick apart the thought experiment I raised on page 5 of this thread (middle of the page). It's a simple story, one that should be easy for the master of Setterfield Variable Light Speed theory to show exactly why and where the point is invalid. Of course, I will insist on a better understanding than was shown in Helen's initial quote above.

All we have in Genesis 1 is the statement that the lights in the sky are GOOD FOR keeping time, not THE ONLY way to keep time. Therefore one can't say this proves God likes orbits better than resonating electrons for keeping time without reading more into the verse than is there.

It is possible I completely misunderstand Setterfield theory. Perhaps if he would be so gracious as to go over the thought experiment I posted on page 5 of this thread and show how the conundrum for his theory I falsly imagine to be there is resolvable we'll get to a better understanding.

No, Paul, that was your accusation due to your ignorance of the subject. Barry never said anything like that, nor does his work in any way imply it.
</font>[/QUOTE]OH, I remember posting a long time ago that since e=mc^2 that changing c means energy isn't conserved. And the answer came back right away that it was, because mass at the same time was decreased in exact proportion as c was increased. So we went around and around about what it was like to live with such a great loss of mass. Don't you remember those posts? And we talked about how mass would affect the frequecy of sound from vocal cords, and so forth. Finally Barry agreed to calculate mass relationships in his theory in a definative fashion. He wound up with mass being reduced by about a factor of 4, as I recall, for Adam when C was well over a million fold faster. His post on that is in the archive here and maybe I'll look it up.

Strangely, he had never even considered the issue prior to that point. Well, that's one thing these debates are good for.