From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Wed Oct 06 1999 - 10:12:06 MDT
On Wed, Oct 06, 1999 at 09:28:46AM -0400, Joseph 1 wrote:
> > nothing has, or can, travel faster. John Moffat of the physics department
> > disagrees - light once travelled much faster than it does today,
> > he believes.
>
> This canard has been around for years. It's an old Creationist doohickey to
> try to explain the "Young Earth Theory" (that the Earth is actually only
> 6000+ years old). I don't know if Moffat is a Creationist for sure, but I
> wouldn't be at all surprised if he was getting a stipend from the Institute
> of Creation Science.
He probably isn't. I've seen it proposed by someone else recently (can't
remember who; was written up in New Scientist earlier this year). The
reasion is that the Standard Model has just been chucked out of the window
because it's incompatible with measurements of the Hubble Constant,
based on Type 1A supernova light curves. Inflation just doesn't work,
and the cosmologists are rather upset. Either they need to reintroduce
a non-zero cosmological constant, or dink with the speed of light,
or convert some other constant into a variable ... or come up with a new
theory of how the universe evolved.
(Why does it all remind me of the state of physics in 1895 or thereabouts?
All pinned down, except for one or two threads around the edges which
suddenly begin to unravel ... )
Caveat: I am not an astrophysicist! Any mutilations of fact in this
posting are purely unintentional.
-- Charlie
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