Relativity and Young Earth Bogosity

I was forwarded a really great link to the latest "theory" being put forward by those jokers at Answers in Genesis to explain the age of the earth. Folks, this one is a real winner! It's one of the funniest things I've read in years.

The problem that these guys have is that they need to reconcile their young-earth religion with the fact that when we look into space, we see a universe that overwhelmingly appears to be incredibly old.

For years, their claim was that the speed of light used to be faster. This has gradually started to fall out of favor, mostly because it's blindingly stupid. You still see it a lot among the various low-level goons of the creationist movement, but the leaders have moved on. The problem with this "argument" is that you can't change the speed of light without changing a whole lot of other things: many of the basic constants are interrelated in various ways to make our universe behave the way it does. Put ultra-simply, alter the speed of light, and suddenly chemistry stops working. Or as the geniuses over at "Answers in Genesis" put it:

The biggest difficulty, however, is with certain physical consequences of the theory. If c has declined the way Setterfield proposed, these consequences should still be discernible in the light from distant galaxies but they are apparently not. In short, none of the theory’s defenders have been able to answer all the questions raised.

The new claim is trickier, and wiggles it's way around the fine-tuning thing. The new argument is that the earth is at the center of the universe, and that this creates a relativistic time-dilation effect around the earth which means that time on earth is dramatically slower than time in the rest of the universe - so the rest of the universe may be billions of years old, but the earth itself is only 6000 years old.

Here's how they introduce it:

Let us briefly give a hint as to how the new cosmology seems to solve the starlight problem before explaining some preliminary items in a little more detail. Consider that the time taken for something to travel a given distance is the distance divided by the speed it is traveling. That is:

Time = Distance / Speed

When this is applied to light from distant stars, the time calculates out to be millions of years. Some have sought to challenge the distances, but this is a very unlikely answer.7

Astronomers use many different methods to measure the distances, and no informed creationist astronomer would claim that any errors would be so vast that billions of light-years could be reduced to thousands, for example. There is good evidence that our own Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across!

If the speed of light (c) has not changed, the only thing left untouched in the equation is time itself. In fact, Einstein’s relativity theories have been telling the world for decades that time is not a constant.

It's a really great start. First, we jumble the dependent and independent variables, to define time as linearly dependent on speed. Then we babble a bit about Einstein to argue that time isn't constant, and so we can jiggle about this little equation. But wait - that's nothing. Really. If that was as far as they went, I wouldn't have wasted my time writing this. It gets much better.

Here's the real prize, the coup de grace. This is just magnificant stupidity:

Dr Humphreys’ new creationist cosmology literally ‘falls out’ of the equations of GR, so long as one assumes that the universe has a boundary. In other words, that it has a center and an edge—that if you were to travel off into space, you would eventually come to a place beyond which there was no more matter. In this cosmology, the earth is near the center, as it appears to be as we look out into space.

This might sound like common sense, as indeed it is, but all modern secular (big bang) cosmologies deny this. That is, they make arbitrary assumption (without any scientific necessity) that the universe has no boundaries—no edge and no center. In this assumed universe, every galaxy would be surrounded by galaxies spread evenly in all directions (on a large enough scale), and so, therefore, all the net gravitational forces cancel out.

However, if the universe has boundaries, then there is a net gravitational effect toward the center. Clocks at the edge would be running at different rates to clocks on the earth. In other words, it is no longer enough to say God made the universe in six days. He certainly did, but six days by which clock? (If we say ‘God’s time’ we miss the point that He is outside of time, seeing the end from the beginning.)10

Yes folks - if we assume that earth is at the center of the universe: the literal center of the universe; and we take the combined mass of the entire universe and treat it as a point mass at the center of the earth; and then we use that mass as the mass of the earth and plug it into the relativity equations, we get a truly amazing time-dilation effect around the earth.

That's it. That's the prize of creationist thinking. So what's wrong with it? Well, before I start, I want to say that I'm pretty sure that most of the folks reading this don't need this explained to them. I don't think you're anywhere near that stupid. But I've got to act as if I did think you were that stupid, because I couldn't write about it otherwise.

First: you can compute a pretty good approximation of instantaneous gravitational forces between bodies by treating them as point-masses at their center of gravity. But they are not point masses. And if you do anything but an instantaneous calculation, treating them as point masses will give you the wrong result. They've made a fundamental math mistake here: a simplifying assumption can only be applied in the specific type of calculation for which it was designed, in the specific situation where it was derived. They're applying it in a very different situation - they are not doing an instantaneous calculation of gravitational forces. But they've done far worse than that - they've elevated a computational shortcut to the status of a physical law! The fact that under some circumstance, you can calculate some value more easily by making a simplifying assumption does not make that simplifying assumption a physical fact!

Second: the very meaning of relativity is that there is no universal frame. This whole silly concept is based on the idea that there is a single universal frame, with earth at the center, and that this makes the location of earth fundamentally different from anywhere else in the universe.

(In an interesting connection with the recent discussion of symmetry: relativity describes a set of fundamental symmetries about the universe. This nonsense is creating a fundamental assymetric point in a bogus way, and then applying the equations that describe the symmetry at the assymetric point.)

And then they take it even further!:

It is fortunate that creationists did not invent such concepts such as gravitational time dilation, black and white holes, event horizons and so on, or we would likely be accused of manipulating the data to solve the problem. The interesting thing about this cosmology is that it is based upon mathematics and physics totally accepted by all cosmologists (general relativity), and it accepts (along with virtually all physicists) that there has been expansion in the past (though not from some imaginary tiny point). It requires no ‘massaging’—the results ‘fall out’ so long as one abandons the arbitrary starting point which the big bangers use (the unbounded cosmos idea, which could be called ‘what the experts don’t tell you about the “big bang”’).

Yes - it's lucky that they didn't invent time dilation and relativity and stuff, because we would have made fun of them. And this is all based on rock solid math and physics! No massaging of results! No special conditions! As long as you use relativity while discarding the fundamental mathematical and physical premises upon which relativity is predicated, it's all perfectly valid and obvious!