Speed of Light

INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY – CREATIONISM VS. EVOLUTION AND THE WORLD'S THREE MOST IMPORTANT YET MOST DISBELIEVED EVENTS

The speed of light in space is less than the speed of light in a vacuum due to dust and gas in space. Light travels faster in space than than in air, gas, water, glass, diamonds or rubies. The undeniable fact about the speed of light is that it is not constant. Scientists have measured the speed of light in space at 186,282 miles per second (a partial vacuum, we will discover) and in the earth's atmosphere a little less, in water at 140,000 miles per second, the speed of light in glass at about 125,000 miles per second, in diamonds at 77,600 miles per second, and in rubies at only 190 feet per second. They know that the speed of light is slower in air than it is in a partial vacuum; that it is slower in water than in air, and slower in glass than in water. All their other conclusions are based on space being a perfect vacuum and light having a constant speed of 186,282 miles per second in space, or 299,792,458 meters per second.

In 1982, Dr. Barry Setterfield, an Australian astronomer, made an amazing discovery that he first presented at the 1983 National Creation Conference.¹ Dr. Setterfield tabulated all the measurements of the speed of light since 1675. The computer-generated curve showed that the speed of light was slowing at an exponential rate. Extrapolating back to 4082 BC, the approximate time of creation of the earth, the speed of light was 107 – 1011 times its present velocity. Immediately, the scientific community set out to discredit Dr. Setterfield's report, only to verify that he was indeed correct to an extremely high statistical probability. No one could explain this exponential decay.

Ten years later in 1992, I realized that the Hubble space telescope and others show space filling with gas and dust. Many enormous clouds of dust and gas in space are so dense that they completely obscure the light from any stars behind them. Hubble's Bubble is a good example. This enormous cloud of gas six light-years across is in the constellation Cassiopeia. Dust and gas decrease the speed of light. This would explain Setterfield's discovery that the speed of light was much greater at the time of creation of the earth. Light waves are the result of vibrations of electrons in matter. In my opinion, light waves are propagated instantaneously in an absolute vacuum. When a light wave strikes some matter, the infinitesimal inertia of the electrons requires an infinitesimal amount of time for the electrons in the matter to vibrate at the frequency of the light wave. This results in a delay in light passing through any medium. If this is true, light from the stars would be seen on the earth the instant the stars were created because space had no gas or dust at the time of creation.

I suggest that a simple experiment would be to measure the velocity of light in a container holding several atmospheres of air, and then measure it as a vacuum is gradually created in the container. I predict that its velovity will increase exponentially as the vacuum is created. In view of Dr, Setterfield's discovery, the earth is not 12 – 20 billion years old, but only about 6,000 years old.

The exponential decay of the velocity of light in space with time is given in Setterfield, Barry, 1983, The Velocity of Light and the Age of the Universe, National Creation Conference, Minneapolis – St. Paul. This graph shows the speed of light slowing down as space is filled with dust and gas.

Dust and gas in space not only explain red shift and the decreasing speed of light with time. It explains why quasars have vastly different velocities than the galaxies they are attached to, both in the same direction . . . away from us (Arp, H. 1966. Atlas of peculiar galaxies. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena). Evolutionists claim Markarian 205 has greater red shift than the quasar NGC 4319 because it is in a "different city . . . 14 times further away." If this were true, Markarian 205 would not be seen because it would be behind the galaxy instead of in front of it, and would be completely hidden by the galaxy. Dust and gas also explain the 2.7^o K temperature of space, which is being heated by radiation from stars (Wilson, R.W., 1979. The cosmic microwave background radiation. Science 205(4409); 866-74).

I believe the best proof of dust and gas in space is the Horsehead nebula in the constellation Orion. The dust collects in rings around planets as satellites due to gravity* Chapter 11 of my book Intelligent Design Theory). The best picture of gas in space is the Hale Bopp comet picture shown in the next section. From all these proofs, it should be obvious that red shift of stars is not from stars racing away from us, but is from a slowing of the speed of light as it passes through space, doubling the amount of red shift with double the distance.

This image of the Horsehead nebula showing red shift as a slowing of the speed of light caused by dust and gas in space was taken with the NOAO Mosaic CCD camera on the National Science Foundation's 0.9-meter telescope located at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, AZ. Located in the constellation of Orion, "The Hunter", the Horsehead is a dark nebula in front of the bright [pink] emission nebula IC 434. The Horsehead Nebula is roughly 1,600 light years away.

The speed of light in space is less than the speed of light in a vacuum due to dust and gas in space. It is greater than the velocity in air, gas, water, glass, diamonds or rubies. Dr. Barry Setterfield proved that space was a near-perfect vacuum at the time of creation of the earth and light traveled almost instantaneously in space at the time of creation about a thousand times faster than it does today. It is possible that the light from stars arrived at the earth six thousand years ago at the time of creation instead of about 8 billion years ago due to a greater vacuum in space when the universe was created and space was empty, with no gas or dust.