Wrong Ideas Infinite Speed of Light

 

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For many moons, astronomers and cosmologists believed the universe was filled with a material called the aether. Light was understood to be a wave, which meant it needed a medium through which it could travel, like waves on a cosmological pond. Aether was considered the pond through which light traveled across the universe. The aether was seen as an absolute reference frame in respect to the rest of the universe; everything had its speed in reference to the aether.

In 1887, the Michelson-Morley experiment attempted to measure the speed of aether itself. Michelson and Morley expected that as light traveled with the aether, it would race along faster, and as it traveled against the aether, it would move slower. They set up a detection device with a light source, mirrors and a telescope, and they found that no matter where the Earth was in its rotation around the Sun, the light always traveled at the same speed. This was an early experiment that demonstrated that light travels at the same speed in all inertial reference frames — and it all but disproved the existence of “aether.”

Wrong Ideas – Infinite Speed of Light

The speed of light itself has been a matter of confusion and controversy. Philosophers and scientists including Kepler, Descartes and Galileo used reasoned arguments that the speed of light was instantaneous. In 1676, Danish astronomer Ole Rømer made observations about the orbit of Jupiter’s moon Io, however, that led him to conclude the speed of light had a finite measurement. Io’s whirling spin around Jupiter takes just 42 ½ hours per revolution, and the precise time Io disappears behind Jupiter can be measured. Rømer found that it took longer for the reflective light from Io to reach the Earth when Jupiter was far away from Earth than it took when Jupiter was near. This meant the light couldn’t be arriving to the Earth instantaneously; it took a few minutes. Rømer sent his data to his friend Dutch astronomer and mathematician Christiaan Huygens, who calculated that light sped along at 16 2⁄3 Earth-diameters per second — about 132,000 miles per second. This value was off by about 1/3 of the correct value of 186,000 mps, because the exact distance of the planets wasn’t known at that time, but Huygens got into the right ballpark.

In 1728 James Bradley noticed that the positions of stars seemed to change over the course of a year. He carefully watched a star in the constellation Draco, then other stars as well, and he used his knowledge of the Earth’s speed around the Sun to calculate the speed of light as 301,000 km/s. In 1849, Armand Fizeau used mirrors and a spinning wheel setup to measure the speed of light at 315,000 km/s and Leon Foucault tried a similar experiment with rotating mirrors, narrowing the speed of light to 298,000 km/s.

Light is known as one of the fundamental constants of nature. Yet, we’ve learned in recent years that the constants of nature aren’t so constant. The speed of light in a vacuum appears to have slowed down over the centuries, as documented by Barry Setterfield and Trevor Norman.[1] John Webb in Sydney has spent years determining that the fine structure constant “alpha” fluctuates depending on which direction researchers look into the heavens. In January of 2006, Webb and fellow physicist John D. Barrow published an article in Scientific American with the astonishing title: “Inconstant Constants.”[2] Barrow and Webb make the case that physical “constants” like the speed of light can fluctuate after all. The article declares:

…One implication is that the constants we observe may not, in fact, be the truly fundamental ones. Those live in the full higher-dimensional space, and we see only their three-dimensional shadows.[3]

That’s exciting. The observable physical universe is apparently just a mask that hides a deeper reality.

We need to be careful to follow the evidence. We should never jump to conclusions based on only a few facts, of course. We should investigate things thoroughly, and we should be open to embrace the reality of the situation, whatever it is.

The important take away from all of this — beyond the brief astronomy history lesson — is that it can take the world 50 years or more to embrace the truth behind the meaning of empirical data. People have a tendency to cling to their favorite belief systems long after experimental evidence requires the contrary. As humans, we have this tendency to throw out the information that doesn’t fit with our pet theories. We shouldn’t do that; we should listen to whatever is true.

Today, the prevailing scientific theory about our origins states that we evolved from amino acids in an ancient sea. This is probably not true. The evidence doesn’t support biogenesis — the development of life from non-life. In fact, every observation we have made declares that new life only comes from existing life.

Michael Denton, Philip Johnson, Michael Behe and an ever-growing number of scientists and researchers have written on the problems with a theory of undirected evolution. It has become increasingly clear that the complex organization of biological life requires engineering. It’s ridiculous to think that the life we see around us designed itself through natural processes, yet that’s precisely what is still taught in our schools. Our whole society presumes it to be true, contrary to the observed facts. Physics students are still taught that the constants are constant, despite the growing collection of data that say otherwise. Human beings don’t like change. It takes a long time for the myths of any culture to give way to reality.