Are there any scientific citations proving that the speed of light is slowing down and therefore that the world is only thousands and not billions of years old that are not by Creationists?

Answer 1

Two points of view are offerred by our Contributors in to this Question. The first is in the affirmative; the second is a Response and is the negative.

Following the Discussion on the Question "How much time has elapsed since Creation?" (How much time has elapsed since Creation I received the following request:-

"I wonder if you would mind providing a reliable citation that the rate of time has changed (or may have changed) in such a way as to deceive scientists into believing that the world is billions of years old, but is really only thousands of years old."

As all scientific citations are verifiable [eg peer review, experiment duplication] , by "reliable citation" he really meant "non-creationist-worldview scientific citation" [personal communication].

This information is readily available to all via the internet.

(Part 1).

Background:-

For an overview of the scientific discovery that the speed of Light is not constant but has slowed down, see the articles:-

-"History of the Light-Speed Debate" ( at http://www.khouse.org/articles/2002/423/)

-"Speed of Light Slowing Down? [by Missler] (at http://khouse.org/articles/1999/225/)

(Part 2).

Summary:-

For example, quoting from (another) article 'Speed of Light Slowing Down?" [by Bennett] (at http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39733):- ...[It] is deceptively simple: The speed of light is not constant, as we've been taught since the early 1930s, but has been steadily slowing since the first instance of time. ... [V]irtually all aspects of traditional physics are affected, including the presumed steady state of radioactive decay used to measure geologic time. [It] begins with observations that just don't fit currently accepted scientific dogma. ... Barry Setterfield and Trevor Norman published their results at SRI in July 1987 after extensive peer review. It would be easy to dismiss two relatively unknown researchers if theirs were the only voices in this wilderness and the historic data was the only anomaly. They are not. Since the SRI publication in 1987, forefront researchers from Russia, Australia, Great Britain and the United States have published papers in prestigious journals questioning the constancy of the speed of light. Within the last 24 months -, Dr. Joao Magueijo, a physicist at Imperial College in London, - Dr. John Barrow of Cambridge, -Dr. Andy Albrecht of the University of California at Davis -Dr. John Moffat of the University of Toronto (It's important to note that none of these researchers have expressed any bias toward a predetermined , biblical or otherwise. If anything, they are antagonistic toward a biblical worldview.) Dr. Magueijo believes that light speed was faster only in the instants following the beginning of time. Dr. Barrow, Barry Setterfield and others believe that light speed has been declining from the beginning of time to the historic near past. Dr. Magueijo recently stated that the debate should not be why and how could the speed of light could vary, but what combination of irrefutable theories demands that it be constant at all. ... It's important to recognize the resistance that the current hierarchy of science has to the possibility that light speed may not be constant. Dr. Joao Magueijo was forced to wait for over a year between submission of his initial work on varying light speed and publication. Setterfield, Dr. Tifft, Dr. Paul Davis, Dr. John Barrow and others have been subjected to peer review which borders on ridicule. Dr. Tifft's discussion of red-shift anomalies was published with seeming reluctance in the Astrophysical Journal in the mid 1980s with a rare editorial note pointing out that the referees "neither could find obvious errors with the analysis nor felt that they could enthusiastically endorse publication." After Dr. Tifft's initial publication, several astronomers devised extensive experiments in attempts to prove him wrong. Among them two Scottish astronomers, Bruce Gutherie and William Napier from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh observed approximately 300 galaxies in the mid 1990s. They found to their surprise confirmation of quantum banding of red-shift data. They also had difficulty publishing their data. It has been reported that the prestigious Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics refused publication until an additional set of observations from 97 other spiral galaxies was included. A Fourier analysis of the 302 early data points, and the subsequent total of 399 data points strongly confirmed the quantum shifts. Despite this - and additional observations by Bell in 2003 - many scientists ... have continued to claim that the ... results by Tifft and others are due to sloppy research or insufficient data. It's intriguing to note that the first measurement of light speed by Olaf Roemer in the late 17th century was an attempt to disprove the Aristotelian belief that light speed was infinite. Despite overwhelming and repeatable evidence, over 50 years passed before the scientific hierarchy of the time accepted evidence which, in retrospect was clear, compelling and unimpeachable....

(Part 3)

. News sites ( young-earth creation)

This information is easily available to all. For example,

No 3 (i):-

[From World Net Daily, http://evolution-facts.org/New-material/Speed%20of%20Light.htm)

This article was updated 5 years later:- Speed of light slowing down?Posted: July 31, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Chris Bennett

2004 WorldNetDaily.com

...Since the SRI publication in 1987, forefront researchers from Russia, Australia, Great Britain and the United States have published papers in prestigious journals questioning the constancy of the speed of light.

Within the last 24 months, Dr. Joao Magueijo, a physicist at Imperial College in London, Dr. John Barrow of Cambridge, Dr. Andy Albrecht of the University of California at Davis and Dr. John Moffat of the University of Toronto have all published work advocating their belief that light speed was much higher - as much as 10 to the 10th power faster - in the early stages of the "Big Bang" than it is today. (It's important to note that none of these researchers have expressed any bias toward a predetermined. , biblical or otherwise. If anything, they are antagonistic toward a biblical worldview.) "

.No. 3 (ii):-

(Note: updated March 11th 2009, originally published 2004 )

[From World Net Daily,

( http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39733 ]

Speed of light slowing down?

Posted: July 31, 2004

1:00 am Eastern By Chris Bennett © 2009 WorldNetDaily.com

...Setterfield and Norman published their results at SRI in July 1987 after extensive peer review. It would be easy to dismiss two relatively unknown researchers if theirs were the only voices in this wilderness and the historic data was the only anomaly. They are not. Since the SRI publication in 1987, forefront researchers from Russia, Australia, Great Britain and the United States have published papers in prestigious journals questioning the constancy of the speed of light. Within the last 24 months, Dr. Joao Magueijo, a physicist at Imperial College in London, Dr. John Barrow of Cambridge, Dr. Andy Albrecht of the University of California at Davis and Dr. John Moffat of the University of Toronto have all published work advocating their belief that light speed was much higher - as much as 10 to the 10th power faster - in the early stages of the "Big Bang" than it is today. (It's important to note that none of these researchers have expressed any bias toward a predetermined , biblical or otherwise. If anything, they are antagonistic toward a biblical worldview.) Dr. Magueijo believes that light speed was faster only in the instants following the beginning of time. Dr. Barrow, Barry Setterfield and others believe that light speed has been declining from the beginning of time to the historic near past. Dr. Magueijo recently stated that the debate should not be why and how could the speed of light could vary, but what combination of irrefutable theories demands that it be constant at all......

(4). News sites ( secular)

However, this same information is also readily available on many secular non-creationist news sites, for example:-

No. 4 (i):-

[Live Science -Technology ,

From http://www.livescience.com/technology/050819_fastlight.html ]

"Technology Scientists Mess with the Speed of Light By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 19 August, 2005 3:41 pm ET Researchers in Switzerland have succeeded in breaking the cosmic speed limit by getting light to go faster than, well, light. Or is it all an illusion? Scientists have recently succeeded in doing all sorts of fancy things with light, including slowing it down and even stopping it all together. Now a team at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland is controlling the speed of light using simple off-the-shelf optical fibers, without the aid of special media such as cold gases or crystalline solids like in other experiments. "This has the enormous advantage of being a simple, inexpensive procedure that works at any wavelength," said Luc Thevenaz, lead author of the study detailing the research. Using a technique called Stimulated Brillouin Scattering, the researchers were able to slow down or ratchet up the speed of light like the gas pedal on a car. They succeeded in reducing the speed of light by almost a factor of 4 (although that's still plenty fast at 46,500 miles per second), but even more dramatically, the team was also able to speed up the speed of light........

No. 4 (ii):-

( http://www.livescience.com/technology/041112_slow_light.html )

Technology Light Packets Slow to Jet SpeedBy Michael Schirber, LiveScience Staff Writer

posted: 12 November, 2004 6:30 a.m. ET

...But if the signal can be converted into a soliton it should maintain its shape. Deng and Wu have shown, in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, how this soliton transformation can be done theoretically. They are now gearing up to prove their calculations in an experiment.

No. 4 (iii):-

(From Associated Press, http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/lightstop_010119.html )

"Physicists Bring Light to a Stop

By Joseph B. Verrengia

The Associated Press

posted: 11:48 am ET

19 January 2001 Physicists say they have brought light particles to a screeching halt, then revved them up again so that they could continue their journey at a blistering 186,000 miles (299,330 kilometers) per second. The results are the latest in a growing number of experiments that manipulate light -- the fastest and most ephemeral form of energy in the universe. Eventually, researchers hope to harness its speedy properties in the development of more powerful computers and other technologies that store information in light particles rather than electrons. The experiments were conducted in separate laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts by groups led by Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard and the Rowland Institute of Science, and Ronald L. Waldsworth and Mikhail D. Lukin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics. The results will be published in upcoming issues of the journals Natureand American Physical Letters. Physicists who did not participate in the experiments said the two research papers make an important contribution to understanding the properties of light."

No. 4 (iv):-

[From ABC Science online -News in Science, http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s644831.htm ]

Shedding new light on the speed of light Monday, 12 August 2002
A team of Sydney researchers has discovered that the speed of light may have slowed since the Big Bang.

Professor Paul Davies, at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology, Macquarie University, and Drs Tamara Davis and Charles Lineweaver, from the Department of Astrophysics at the University of New South Wales, explain their theory in the latest issue of Nature.

No. 4 (v):-

[From ABC World News - Technology and Science, http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99111&page=1 ]

Scientists Slow Down Speed of Light Scientists Reduce Speed of Light to a Crawl By Tom Kirchofer

B O S T O N, Feb. 19 [2009] Scientists have managed to slow down light so much that if it were a car on a highway, it could get a ticket for not getting over to the right-hand lane. The speed of light is normally about 186,000 miles per second, or fast enough to go around the world seven times in the wink of eye. Scientists succeeded in slowing it down to 38 mph. ... Lene Vesergaard Hau, the Danish scientist who led the project,... The research, conducted at the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge and Harvard University, was described in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

No. 4 (vi):-

[ From The Harvard University Gazette http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/02.18/light.html]

[The Harvard University Gazette Feb 18th 1999] Physicists Slow Speed of Light By William J. Cromie Light, which normally travels the 240,000 miles from the Moon to Earth in less than two seconds, has been slowed to the speed of a minivan in rush-hour traffic -- 38 miles an hour. ... Hau led a team of scientists who did this experiment at the Rowland Institute for Science, a private, nonprofit research facility in Cambridge, Mass., endowed by Edwin Land, the inventor of instant photography.... Members of Hau's team included Harvard graduate students Zachary Dutton and Cyrus Behroozi. Steve Harris from Stanford University served as a long-distance collaborator. ...When everything is set up just right, the light can be slowed by a factor of 20 million. The process is described in detail in the Feb. 18 issue of the scientific journal Nature. (Warning: Don't try this at home.) Relativity and the Internet Slowing light this way doesn't violate any principle of physics. (Hau will give a lecture on her experiments at 4:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 22, at Room 250, Jefferson Laboratories.)

No. 4 (vii):-

[Press release from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-08/epfd-ltt081905.php ]

Public release date: 19-Aug-2005

[Contact: Luc Thevenaz

luc.thevenaz@epfl.ch

41-21-693-4774

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Light that travels... faster than light! This press release is also available in French. A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to control the speed of light - both slowing it down and speeding it up - in an optical fiber, using off-the-shelf instrumentation in normal environmental conditions. Their results, to be published in the August 22 issue of Applied Physics Letters, ... The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) considers it so important that it has been funnelling millions of dollars into projects such as "Applications of Slow Light in Optical Fibers" and research on all-optical routers.

No. 4 (viii):- [From University of New South Wales, http://www.unsw.edu.au/news/pad/articles/2006/jan/Speed_of_light.html ]

Speed of light is slowing down: was Einstein wrong?

18th January 2006A daring and controversial scientist who says that the speed of light is slowing down will give a public lecture on Thursday evening at UNSW.

Cosmologist Dr João Magueijo caused a scientific furore in 1999 when he published a paper claiming that light may have travelled much faster at the Big Bang than it does now.

A reader in theoretical physics at Imperial College in London, Dr Magueijo's claim also has indirect support from discoveries by John Webb, professor of astrophysics at UNSW.

... Research published by Dr Webb and his former PhD student, Dr Michael Murphy, has revealed that one of the fundamental laws of physics known as the "fine structure constant" has altered in a way suggesting the mathematical possibility that light has slowed down in the past 12 billion years.

These articles quoted above should be acceptable because: -They are reporting news and discoveries in science, (not interpreting it);

-The sites themselves wouldn't dare report it if it wasn't credible, accurate, cross-checked, and verifiable;

-of the recognized credentials and authority of the people quoted

-of the recognized credentials and authority of the institutions quoted

- Dr. Joao Magueijo, a physicist at Imperial College in London

- Dr. John Barrow of Cambridge

-Dr. Andy Albrecht of the University of California at Davis

-Dr. John Moffat of the University of Toronto

-Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard and the Rowland Institute of Science

-Ronald L. Waldsworth and Mikhail D. Lukin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics.

-Professor Paul Davies, at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology, Macquarie University

-Dr. William Tifft

- Zachary Dutton and Cyrus Behroozi, both Harvard graduate students

- Steve Harris from Stanford University

-Bruce Gutherie and William Napier from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh

-Luc Thevenaz of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland

-Drs Tamara Davis and Charles Lineweaver, from the Department of Astrophysics at the University of New South Wales

-Dr John Webb, professor of astrophysics at UNSW.

-ABC [Australia]

-ABC [United States]

-Associated Press

-Institutions referred to

- Physical Review Letters

-Nature

- American Physical Letters

None of these would be terribly happy if their credentials and motives were impugned.

(Part 5). Scientific Papers

As various scientific peer-reviewed Papers on the subject of the changing speed of light have been available for many years no-one has any excuse for claiming reliable citations do not exist.

1927:-

M.E.J. Gheury de Bray

"The Velocity of Light"

(In the official French Astronomical Journal in Science, Vol 66, Supplement X, 30th Sept 1927)

1931:-

M.E.J. Gheury de Bray

"The Velocity of Light"

(In "Nature" 4th April 1934, p.522)

1934:-

M.E.J. Gheury de Bray

"The Velocity of Light"

(In "Nature" 24th March 1934)

1981:-

T.C. van Flandern

"Is The Gravitational Constant Changing?"

(In "The Astrophysical Journal" Vol 248, ist Sept 1981, p. 813-816)

1983:-

Harold W. Milnes

"Faster Than Light?"

(In "Radio-Electronics" Vol 54, Jan 1983, p. 55-58)

1987:-

Barry Setterfield and Trevor Norman

"the Atomic Constants, Light and Time"

(pub. by Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia Aug 1987.)

V.S. Troitskii

"Physical Constants and the Evolution of the Universe"

(In "Astrophysics and Space Science" Vol 139, No. 2, dec 1987, p. 389-411)

1988:-

P.Y. Pappas and Alexis Guy Obolensky

"Thirty Six Nanoseconds Faster Than Light"

(In "Electronics and Wireless World" Dec 1988, p. 1162-1165)

1993:-

Alan Montgomery and Lambert Dolphin

"Is The Velocity Of Light Constant In Time?"

(In "Galilean Electrodynamics" Vol 4, No. 5, Sept-Oct 1993, p. 93-97)

1995:-

Julian Brown

"Faster Than The Speed of Light?"

(In "New Scientist" 1st April 1995, p. 26-29)

1999:-

Andreas Albrecht and Joao Magueijo

"A Time varying Speed Of Light As A solution To Cosmological puzzles"

(In "Physical Review D" , 15th Feb 1999, p. 043516-9)

2000:-

Jon Marangos

"Faster Than A Speeding Photon"

(In "Nature" Vol 406, 20th July 2000, p. 243-244)

Note:-

Barry Setterfield has 377 References in his Paper "The Atomic Constants, Light and Time" mentioned above. I trust this s the gentleman's request.

_____________________________

ResponseNo. No scientific citations, as the term is normally understood, exists. There are several religious websites that make this claim, as well as pseudo-scientific websites, and an pseudo-scientific article has been written by an unqualified author, whose biography shows him to be a strongly committed Christian with no scientific degrees. These can be pointed to as religious opinions, but not as genuine scientific citations.

I have indeed checked some of the citations that are available on the word wide web. Citations are verifiable to the extent that their existence can be verified, although verification of their findings or conclusions is not always possible, certainly not by browsing the web. Given time and resource restraints, I focussed on what seemed to be the most important source(s), but this was enough to convince me that this claim is driven by a creationist agenda.

A website, khouse was cited, but I found that khouseis a religious website.

http://khouse.org/articles/1999/225/ in turn cites a number of its own sources. The most important of these seems to be a paper titled The Atomic Constants, Light, and Time, which on first inspection appears to be a genuine scientific article.

The referenced paper, titled The Atomic Constants, Light, and Time is available online as an Invited Research Report by: BARRY SETTERFIELD and TREVOR NORMAN, at: http://ldolphin.org/setterfield/report.html

Biography of BARRY SETTERFIELDI think a review of any citation must include knowing who wrote the article, what his qualifications are, and what motivation or agenda may have led him to inadvertently misinterpret information. Setterfield's biography is freely available at:

http://www.setterfield.org/000docs/bio.html. I have not found the biography of Trevor Norman, but Setterfield seems to have been the principal author.

He had commenced university studies in physics and geology but was unable to complete the degree due to health issues. Shortly afterwards, he committed his life to Christ (hisparents were Salvation Army officers). This made him hesitant to re-enter University with its "anti-Christian bias".

Thus he has no qualifications relevant to research into fundamental issues concerning the speed of light. In fact, his stated anti-university bias could suggest that he would be an unlikely candidate to conduct objective scientific research. It could even be argued that his main qualification was as a committed Christian and creationist.

Though often referred to as Dr. Setterfield, Barry has taken pains to point out that he has not received a Ph.D. and the term "Dr." should therefore not be used with his name. In fact, Mr Setterfield appears not to have completed his bachelor degree.

Flinders University published the "research paper" in August 1987, unaware that both authors were creationists until another creationist, then working for the Institute of Creation Research (ICR), phoned both Flinders University and SRI International and asked them if they knew that Barry Setterfield and Trevor Norman were creationists.

So, twenty-two years after publication of a paper that should have set the scientific world back on its heels, there is no controversy; in fact there is no evident interest in this paper outside creationist circles.

Even the Creation Science Foundation in Australia publicly retracted support for Setterfield's work. And if Setterfield's ideological allies fail to support his hypothesis, then it must be a very shaky hypothesis.

Paper preamble"The authors of this report discuss the possibility that the velocity of light is not a constant. " [My emphasis] ... Lambert T. Dolphin, Senior Research Physicist, SRI." This is a polite and accurate introduction, but does not suggest support by Dolphin. Non-technical summary of Report's contentsThe drop is something like 1500 kilometers per second over a period of 300 years.

Using [these] procedures indicates that c does decay with time, and that the decay does have a formal statistical significance. This suggests that the speed of light was indeed higher in the past, and that atomic processes were faster as Van Flandern indicated.

My comments on the paperThe authors do not claim proof that a change has occurred in the speed of light. They merely hypothesise some slowing down in the speed of light and in the atomic clock. Moreover, they do not anywhere in the paper suggest that this could mean that the world is only thousands of years old. They suggest a figure of ten to one over a very long period of time, not enough to change billions to thousands.

As I expected, this paper was written by a creationist without appropriate scientific qualifications. It has been used by a religious website for its own agenda, beyond the apparent scope of the paper itself. The paper and the religious website have then been quoted by others, including a Wiki s Contributor. Eventually we could be led to believe that there is overwhelming support or even evidence for what is only a speculative position.

Setterfield concedes that he initially had difficulty in having his paper published because of (i) his lack of accreditation and (ii) it was too speculative. He says that his published paper was ridiculed in reviewed, but does not provide links to those criticisms (if available online) nor does he reprint extracts of the criticisms and attempt to rebut them.

Other citations

Cosmologist Dr João Magueijo is reported to have caused a scientific furore in 1999 when he published a paper claiming that light may have travelled much faster at the Big Bang than it does now. This may be serious scientific research, but does not suggest that the universe is thousands of years old. In fact, the quote implies the opposite.

Dr Webb and his former PhD student, Dr Michael Murphy are cited for publishing research that has revealed that one of the fundamental laws of physics known as the "fine structure constant" has altered in a way suggesting the mathematical possibility that light has slowed down in the past 12 billion years. This is important: these scientists say the speed of light slowed down in the past 12 billion years. They do not support the creationist position that the universe is thousands of years old.

Some research has also been quoted, where scientists slowed down light as it passed through various materials. But it has long been known that light slows down as it passes through materials. It is only the speed of light in a vacuum that is relevant.

Conclusion

The stated objective in the first , of demonstrating that the rate of time has changed (or may have changed) in such a way as to deceive scientists into believing that the world is billions of years old but is really only thousands of years old, has not been achieved. Even the objective of citing material that has not been influenced by creationists has not been achieved.

The first also explains that various scientists are experimenting on ways to slow light in a controlled way as it passes through various materials. But this is applied science, because it has long been known that light slows down as it passes through materials.

What may have been achieved is demonstration that some scientists hypothesise that light travelled faster than what is now considered the speed of light in a vacuum, for a brief period after the Big Bang. That is interesting but irrelevant to the Question in hand. And a hypothesis is not accepted theory, nor is it evidence or proof.

In any case, the speed of light is a side issue. The issue is (i) whether the rate of time has changed dramatically; and (ii) whether this could have occurred in such a way as to deceive scientists by a factor of a million to one. This has not even been addressed.

Some research has also been quoted, where scientists slowed down light as it passed through various materials. But it has long been known that light slows down as it passes through materials. It is only the speed of light in a vacuum that is even remotely relevant.

We are left with a speculative paper from an unqualified creationist, who concedes that reviews of that paper ridiculed his hypothesis, and some minor applied science that is irrelevant to the Question in hand. No attempt has been made to demonstrate that any of this proves, or could prove, that the world is only a few thousand years old.