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Appendix A - Problems with Starlight and Time Humphreys speculates that the problem of an old looking Universe coexisting with a young earth can be explained through General Relativity. His idea is that God created a bounded universe. He does not state what the boundary conditions are but infers that a boundary implies a centre and that a centre would imply a black hole if the density of matter were great enough. This he says would allow time dilation at the bottom of the black-hole to allow the earth to experience six days of creation while the rest of the universe had billions of years. Humphreys claims that the latest work on space-time metrics supports his theory. However, he is ignorant of some very basic Relativity and Astronomy concepts and facts. Firstly he states that the starting material is water. He offers no explanation of why the observed universe is made of 80% Hydrogen 20% Helium and very little Oxygen (or any other heavy elements). In fact he does not mention this fact. The nearest he comes is to suggest that the gravitational collapse of his initial sphere of water will be broken down into constituent nucleons as it heats to temperatures suitable for fusion. The fact is that fusion creates heavier elements. If the temperature does rise to the point where nuclei are dissociated it will be past the point of the formation of iron, which has the highest binding energy per nucleon, from fusing sulphur nuclei. To get what we see now the matter at the centre of the black hole has to heat up to enormous temperatures and then he has to arrange for the black hole to be switched off allowing the hot fireball to expand just like the current model of the expanding universe (see point two below). Which means you need 15 billion years of cooling time to get to the state we have now. Not only has Humphreys lost the time factor he was also hoping to have some unchanged water on the surface of his sphere to be the Biblical waters above the firmament. The gravitation at the surface of a neutron star is enough to heat a drop of water on it to fusion temperatures so an ultra-mega-black-hole would have no trouble raising the surface to temperatures way above dissociating water into its elements. Secondly to pick up on his idea that the expansion could be mediated by God causing a change in the Hubble constant, or the rate of expansion of the universe. Einstein’s Equivalence Principle means that any acceleration due to a field or acceleration other than gravity is still equivalent to gravity in its effect on everything including time dilation. By un-warping space to produce an expansion Humphreys cancels his black-hole and there is no time dilation. What Humphreys is referring to is that Einstein inserted an adjustment term into his state equation for the universe. Einstein put it in to allow the universe to be stable and not collapse due to self-gravitation. When Hubble demonstrated from observation an expanding universe Einstein declared the term to be his greatest mistake. He and everyone else thought that it was unnecessary and that there was no need of a balancing force. Whether or not there is a longer range force operating to expand the universe is another issue, the fact is that the Hubble constant is just a measure of rate of expansion it is no more a measure of an anti-gravity force than the speed of a thrown ball is a measure of the Gravitational Constant. Here is another point at which Humphreys, who claims a PhD in physics, gaffes. The biggest problem he introduces for himself is the intervention of God is required to make the thing work. That’s OK says the believer, but is it? The whole point of this exercise was to prove that the findings of physics are adequate to explain the present universe appearing as it does with a lifetime as perceived from the Earth of 6000 years. But here Humphreys has to inject a miracle to negate all the physics so far in order to get there. Thirdly Humphreys misses the fact that a black-hole depends on mass density and ceases to be once it falls below this, it does not collapse down like a punctured balloon as Humprhreys thinks. For Humphreys idea of a shrinking white hole(black hole leaking matter rather then absorbing it) to work there cannot be the uniform expansion he needs to produce the observed universe. The matter has to remain centralised with small amounts boiling off the event horizon. This means he really needs a mechanism that allows the outer layers of the huge mass he has at the centre of his universe to float off non-linearly with the inner layers holding back to ensure the mass density remains high enough for a black-hole. Finally he completely ignores the fact that the Earth at the centre of all this superheated material / white hole has to cool down instantly and be formed into a planet in the solar system etc.. So he needs divine intervention to produce the world we see anyway. Why not just say the Universe is really old but God just popped this bit in 6000 years ago. Well then there is the problem that the heavens and the Earth were created at the same time according to Genesis. So I have demonstrated that you can have either a miracle covering everything to produce a biblically young universe with a fictitious past, or the non-miraculous old earth that does not accord with the Bible, but not a mixture. So what is the problem here? Why have I gone to the bother of rebutting Humphreys' ideas? Well we are back to having two main alternatives which are mutually exclusive. the first is that the universe came about through a miracle, but that miracle left a phoney history of events that appear to us on Earth but never happened when our understanding of how the universe works says they did. Or, it came about through natural causes, which took a long time to happen, and the evidence we see is real. But that leaves the idea that the accounts in Genesis tie the God there to a God who works through history to get to Jesus and the resurrection impossible. The creationist approach has been like this all the way Humphreys' failure to demonstrate that the Universe could be 6000 years old by suitable application of know scientific information is typical of them all. The point is that there is no way to reconcile the Bible with the universe as we see it. Even though there is still a lot to discover and science does not have all the answers it has enough to demonstrate that the creation story does not correspond to the development of the universe or life on this planet except in a fairly superficial way. The follow-on from this is that the rest of the Bible's claim to be the Word of God rests on this. http://www.trueorigin.org/ca_rh_03.asp gives a list with downloadable copies of letters and papers produced by Humphreys and his critics. Note that this is an internecine war between Young and Old Earth creationists. To be fair to the Old Earthers they are well qualified from Universities, which actually do real research into Cosmology and Astronomy. Humphreys also gives the game away when he states in his rebuttal of Conner and Page that the peer reviews he has submitted his work to up until that time (1998, Starlight and Time was published in 1994) were unqualified creationists from a Creation ex nihlo conference. The references if you want to look them up are : 1. Conner, S.R. and Page, D.N., Starlight and time is the big bang, CEN Tech. J. 12(2):177Œ179, 1998. 2. Conner, S.R. and Page, D.N., The Big Bang Cosmology of Starlight and Time, unpublished manuscript, ~ 200 pages, 1997. Readers interested in obtaining this document may contact Mr Conner by mail at 10 Elmwood Avenue, Vineland, N.J. 08360, USA or by email at CERS_corresp@hotmail.com. 3. Humphreys, D.R., New vistas of spacetime rebut the critics, CEN Tech. J. 12(2):203Œ205, 1998. |