highwaystar101 said:
Haha, you don't need to tell me about this kind of stuff Kasz, I'm pretty nifty when it comes to space. Anyway, young Earth creationists assert that the actual light is slowing down. Light is a physical constant, it travels at just under 300,000Km/s through a vacuum. It always has done, we have no evidence of varying speeds at all in these conditions. Light is made up of photons, the carriers of electromagnetism, and as I'm sure you know, have no mass. A photon travels at 300,000Km/s, because it is massless the only thing that could increase that speed is if the actual laws of physics themselves have changed to allow them to move faster, a change in mass or energy wouldn't speed it up. The chances of light slowing down would be so remote that it wouldn't even register to me. As for the expansion of the Universe being faster than the speed of light, I don't think that supports their argument at all. Galaxies that move away faster than the speed of light from us do so because dark energy is adding more acceleration to the expansion of the Universe. Although we know very little about dark energy right now, in three years we should know a lot more hopefully. But I don't see how it would support the idea that light was once faster than it is today I'm afraid. |
It wouldn't completly. It really depends how the universe expands though. Like imagine the universe was a pokadotted tabelcloth... with the dots being planets.
Now lets say an ant is on one dot crawling to another at a consistant speed... but then the tablecloth is opened up more, increasing the distance between them.
That ant is still moving at the same speed, but since it takes longer to get to our dot then it did in the past.... it gives the illusion of it "slowing down".
If you thought earth was created 6,000 years ago. One could argue that we were previously caught up in such a "dark energy" wave but now are out of it... so that light that is reaching us now, that is more then 6,000 years away... used to be much closer then 6,000 years away... but the earth was caught up in a wave that moved it say 8,000 light years in what would take light to move 2,000 light years. (made up numbers for an eaxmple.)
It does seem unlikely though i mean light does "slow down" or has the illusion of slowing down I should say, but that's in a situation where space is contraced, like with strong gravity fields and the like.
If anything the speed of light might have increased if space really is like a tabelcloth and there is only so much of it. Since as space would stretch it would look as if the speed of light was increasing. Though really it would just be moving the same speed along a medium that was stretched.
Wait... how does light slowing down help their arguement again? Thinking about it logically... that light is speeding up seems like the arguement they'd want to make.
