Not hardly. In my misspent youth, I performed all the experiments in my Edmunds chemistry set. I moved on to model rocketry and then electricity/electronics. It became clear that reality works pretty much the way science says it does.
Growing up on the semi-rural coast of Florida, there's a large variety of critters. I kept tropical chiclids, snakes, and lizards. I fished and hunted.
My brother and I would help grandpa with slaughter and cleaning chickens, hogs, and the occasional beef.
I don't have any illusions about biology.
And like the physics of chemistry, aerodynamics, and electricity, biological science described what I already knew first hand.
I'm familiar with how it works, and ready to say BS on bad science.
Since you're one who mistakes philosophy for science it would be no surprise.
Ya know, Fester, the funny thing is I was a committed Southern Baptist (before it became brain dead literal fundamentalism) all that time.
Call it compartmentalization or whatever, but I could accept reality (the here and now) and religion (the spiritual later) as both being true at the same time.
Unlike you, I never felt the need to reject one to accept the other. And I was (and am) quite clear on the distinction between "philosophy" and science.
As I recall, the microwave expirement was suggested to demonstrate that the speed of light is constant.
Nope. A certain poster claimed the "unenlightened, ignorant, religious, superstitious masses" couldn't measure the speed of light. And then whined about having to take the scientists word for it.
Of course, when that certain poster was shown how, he spent the rest of the thread twisting, turning, squirming and asking bringing up silly objections on fundamental laws of physics. And most likely never attempted to cure his willful ignorance by performing the experiment.
Now did he? and why not?
Exactly how do you propose measuring the speed of light at the time of the big bang?
At the instant of the cosmic egg, there's no way of telling. Everything was in an ultra-extreme energy state, no matter, no particles, no distance, no clocks. There were no photons to go from "here" to "there".
All the laws and theories of physics have no meaning in such conditions.
Only after a small fraction (10-32) of a second into the hyper-inflation will photons start forming - and a flat space-time to measure it in. So c could have been wildly different in the first few moments of the universe, but it wouldn't mean anything, there was almost no matter to form stars yet.
Once you actually have light and distance, you can calculate the distance to various stars by triangulation and observe the redshift in the spectral lines. They should all agree with the Hubble expansion -and they do. If the SoL had changed in the past, then there's no way the measurements could agree.
Next we have millisecond pulsars. These fellows are rotating stars that have collapsed into a small spinning ball of matter that flashes (pulses) energy according to their spin rate.
But if the SoL had slowed at any point either in time or travel, we shouldn't be able to detect any pulses, they would be all "smeared" together.
And since pulsars are extremely stable we can measure their rotation rate and compare it with measurement 10 years later. If c had changed in the interval then the measurements would be different, but they're not.
Then there's SN1987a, a blue supergiant star that was observed exploding on Feb 24, 1987. The observation was confirmed by neutrino detectors in Japan, Ohio and Russia. Gamma ray emission from Co-57 and Co-56 isotopes formed in the supernova show precisely the same energy levels as Cobalt does on earth.
But the fascinating thing is that this object has a ring of gas about 0.7 light years away, and sure enough, nine months later, the ring was fully illuminated.
The Hubble spacecraft observed the first edge brighten (the top of the ring is inclined towards the earth) and then by measuring the time until the furthermost edge was illuminated tells us the ring is 1.37 light years in diameter, or just shy of our previous estimate. With that and the angular displacement across the ring, basic trigonometry shows that SN1987a is 170,000 light years away.
You'll note that any reasonable variation in c will still give the same result, 170,000 ly. Reasonable meaning a third or even a half increase in the velocity.
Creationists that want to postulate a SoL many orders of magnitude greater than the accepted rate have to explain how that the gas ring would be that much larger; yet still get the results we're observing. You'd have to conclude one of:
I think you keeping bringing it up because you want some of my chocolate.
Nah. Since going on Atkins, I've lost my craving for sweets. -- Although I'll take a small square with coffee if you're being generous.
please archive #390. good post.
Great post.
If you are so willing to extrapolate a rejection of science from a commitment to question science, who knows what other ideas you are able to extrapolate out of whole cloth.
. . . the microwave experiment . . .
Thank you for refreshing my memory about the context. That thread included not only the matter of how we can measure whether the speed of light is constant, but also the assertion on my part that most people take the word of others as true when they declare what the speed of light is. I stand by that assertion. While most people may have a magnetron in their home, they do not typically use them to measure the speed of light. Maybe they do in your neighborhood. May I ask whether science had discovered the entire electromagnetic spectrum?
All the laws and theories of physics have no meaning in such conditions.
So we've moved from a condition in which the laws of physics do not apply to a condition in which they do. Was this a transition so sudden that the speed of light instantly assumed a constant rate? It seems to me a more reasonable view is that it changed at an exponential rate from the very moment there was such a thing as light. May I ask, how long has mankind been measuring and recording the rate of pulsars? Over what percentage of the earth's history?
