Chapter 12: What is Light Energy, Photons or Electromagnetic Waves? And What is the Speed of Light?
Intelligent Design Theory explains the extraordinary nature of light, the speed of light, light energy and whether light is photons or electromagnetic waves.
What is light energy, photons, electrons or electromagnetic waves? It cannot be any two of these three totally different phenomena. And what is the real speed of light in a perfect vacuum? You are about to learn (1) that there is no such thing as a photon, and (2) that the speed of light in a perfect vacuum is infinite. Can you believe this?
Evidence of God as Creator is everywhere. The theory of evolution discredits God as Creator. If evolution is true, life is an accident, and there is no God. The existence of God can only be proven to scientists scientifically.
Anyone can observe that dead plants and animals quickly return to the dust from which they were formed (Gen. 2: 7; 3: 19). Creation scientists argue that evidence of a catastrophic flood is everywhere. The fossil records contain considerable evidence that all creatures coexisted before the flood. All species are intermixed in the Grand Canyon, with a petrified tree extending from the bottom to the top of the plant and animal deposit. Several other places on earth have scrambled fossil species, while in other places, they are compacted in the vertical plane in which they lived in the water, or drowned. Footprints of man and dinosaurs are found together in an ancient bed of the Paluxy River in Glen Rose, Texas.
Other evidence shows a catastrophic flood occurred about 4500 years ago. The frozen mammoths in the Arctic regions that were flash frozen with tropical vegetation half masticated, still fresh in their mouths is one example. The craters from meteors, the sedimentary rock that is found abundantly all over the earth, loaded with fossils are a few of the hundreds of examples. The erosion of Niagara Falls ties the Ice Age back to the time of the flood 4500 to 10,000 years ago.
The fossil record was almost entirely produced by one, or at most a few discrete catastrophic flood events. Dead plants and animals decay quickly unless they are instantly covered with muck or sediment. The fossil record cannot possibly show, and does not show that one species evolved into another over billions of years. The missing links between species remain missing, except in the imaginations of evolutionists. Evolution does not occur today, and cannot be duplicated. All efforts to mutate one kind of plant or animal into another have failed. The progeny have always reverted back to the original.
Evolutionists have one theory that used to stop Creation Scientists cold. That is the speed of light. All other theoretical imaginations of evolutionists are not supported by one iota of evidence, and are easily disproved. The speed of light is so important that God's first statement in Genesis 1:3 is, "Let there be light." Since light travels about 186,000 miles per second, it could take millions, or billions of years for the light of a star to reach us. Therefore, evolutionists say the age of the Universe must be billions of years old or the light from most of the stars would not be here yet. If the Universe is six to ten thousand years old as the Bible, historical, and geological evidence show it is, and if that was when the stars were created, we would not see many stars when the earth was created..
The only other argument for evolution is carbon dating. Since radioactive carbon is a transient element, evolutionists cannot prove that it existed when the earth was created. It is produced daily by the decomposition of heavier radioactive elements, and could be much greater today than it was six thousand years ago. It may be increasing as the earth ages. This could produce enormous errors in carbon dating. Results of such errors have continuously showed up in carbon dating, where fresh specimens were dated at thousands of years age. Creation Scientists have proven that there was a rapid decay of Carbon 14 at the time of the flood.
In Newton's theory, if a pulse of light is sent from one place to another, different observers at different places would agree on the time it took, and the distance it travelled. The speed of light is calculated as c=d/t, speed of light equals distance divided by the time it took to travel. But the time it took and the velocity would depend on the velocity of the object from which the light was emitted relative to the object receiving the light. If both objects were travelling at the same velocity in the same direction, the speed of light would always be the same. If one object were moving, and the other stationery, the time it took would be different, due to Doppler effect. Doppler effect means the light travels at its regular speed, plus or minus the speed of the object from which it was sent.
Einstein said the speed of light is constant, despite the speed of the object from which it was sent. He said there is no Doppler effect with light. To justify the inconsistency with Newton's theory of gravity, Einstein developed the general theory of relativity, where space is warped. This enables distance to change, depending on the direction you are headed. In this way, we can call the speed of light constant, instead of having the Doppler effect that I, among many others believe that it really has. By warping space, Einstein justified his theory that the speed of light is constant.
According to Einstein, gravity does not exist. It is just a curved bump in space. The earth does not really circle the sun. It travels in a straight line, but appears to circle the sun because we cannot see the fourth dimension, time, which also varies whichever way Einstein wanted to prove his wild theories. It does not explain why we see the stars and planets change position as we orbit the sun. We simply have to accept with blind faith that space warps our vision. Mercury orbits the sun once every 3,650,000 years, according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, instead of the 88 days that we observe.
Einstein predicted that light would be attracted to the sun. This was tested, and of course the light from the star was diffracted by the sun's atmosphere, similar to a prism. So his theory was "proven" correct. I suppose if I postulated that a prism attracts light because of the warp a prism makes in space, some scientists would jump on the ridiculous idea and accept it.
The speed of clocks has been measured to be faster in space than on the surface of the earth. Is it because of the "warped" theory, or is it because the gravitational force at the earth is much more intense than in space? If the apparent mass is greater because of the greater gravitational force, is it plausible that this would cause a clock to move minutely slower? Both the increased mass allocated to Einstein's theory and the increased mass due to gravity is consistent. Einstein's theory had to test out against known phenomena, or be thrown out. So which came first, the truth or the theory? Because of the many unproven wild speculations given above, I suggest that Einstein may have been a better mail clerk than a scientist. But the whole world has gobbled up his gobbledygook. The Doppler effect of the speed of light is consistent with the Newtonian theory of gravity.
Light is one of the strangest expressions of energy. Light does not physically pass through a vacuum. We see no beam of light going from the sun to the moon. We only see the light of the sun, and the light reflected from the sun by the moon. But we have all seen beams of light from searchlights and lasers passing through our atmosphere.
Any time an electron vibrates, or moves from one energy level to another, it causes an electron in another atom somewhere in the Universe to vibrate, or change energy level. The other atom can be across a room, as in a light bulb shining on a book, or in a star shining on the earth a billion miles away. The exchange of its energy from one atom to another is without energy loss, whatever the distance. When light strikes an object and is not reflected, its energy converts to heat energy.
Light reflects from a roomful of people, or a mountain scene. We can look at it and behold it. Or we can point a television camera at it, record it on a magnetic tape, pass it through electronic circuitry, and make it appear on a television screen. We can view it repeatedly, causing it to stimulate nerves in our eyes and brain cells.
In an atmosphere, light passes from one gas molecule to another. An electron on an atom on the filament of a light bulb, or in an electric arc in a searchlight, vibrates with a frequency and causes the electrons on adjacent atoms to vibrate at the same frequency. This causes an electron on the first atom of gas it encounters in the atmosphere to vibrate. This in turn causes another electron on another atom of gas to vibrate. No energy is lost. There is no change in color, unless some energy is transformed to heat. With no color change, the energy level of the receiving electron is the same as the energy level of the source.
If there were a perfect vacuum between the sun and the moon, an electron vibrating on the sun would cause an electron on the surface of the moon to vibrate. A perfect vacuum is a lack of all matter. It has no substance. If one were to measure the amount of substance in a vacuum, whether it is an inch or a million miles, the amount is zero in both cases.
The only effect of distance across a perfect vacuum is the atomic surface areas on each side of the vacuum that are exposed to each other. Since energy radiates out spherically from a light source, its radiated energy forms a larger and larger sphere as the distance increases. A moon closer to the sun would be exposed to a larger surface of the sun. This would expose it to more vibrating electrons than a moon farther from the sun. The light reflected from a moon closer to the sun would have the same color, but greater intensity, or greater number of electrons jumping orbit. Light from a star millions of miles away excites our retina the same as light from a star billions of miles away. The only difference is the intensity of light due to the smaller cone of influence from the furthest star. Perfect vacuum is vacuum, whether an inch or a billion miles. Vacuum is still nothing, a lack of matter.
"Whoa!", you say, "I thought light comprised particles called photons." Oh? If an atom emits photons, how many photons are in an atom? How long can an atom emit photons before it runs out of photons? The photon theory of light is inconsistent with the wave theory of light. One of them must be wrong. I intend to convince you in the section to follow that there is no such thing as a photon. To begin, Charles Lane Poor, an astronomer at Columbia University disproved Eddington's claim that the gravity of the moon bent the light rays from the sun during the solar eclipse of 1919.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1927JRASC..21..225L This astounding discovery has been suppressed by the scientific community.
We know that light travels through the atmosphere at about 186,000 miles per second. It travels about 25 percent slower in water, and 33 - 45 percent slower in glass. Sound travels faster in water than in the atmosphere. Because sound is one molecule bumping another, the denser the medium, the faster the sound. Light must travel in a different way than sound. The sparser the atmosphere, the faster the speed of light. With no atmosphere, the speed of light may be instantaneous. Let us pursue this idea.
Space today is not a perfect vacuum. Space is filled with atoms of gas and dust particles, however sparse. Many enormous clouds of dust are so dense that they completely obscure the light from the universe behind them. As light approaches us from a star, the energy from one electron vibrating on the star transfers from one gas atom or molecule to another, without losing energy in the process. Since each atom of gas in space has mass, and therefore inertia, does this account for the delay in the light reaching us from a star? If so, this could invalidate the only argument that evolutionists have against the Creation account. Light energy is real, as are electromagnetic waves. There is no such thing as a photon. And the speed of light varies according to the medium it is passing through.
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