Posted on 10/26/2011 8:44:02 AM PDT by fishtank
Mercury's Fading Magnetic Field Fits Creation Model
by Brian Thomas, M.S. | Oct. 26, 2011
Planets, including the earth, generate magnetic fields that encompass the space around them. Observations have shown that, like earth's, the planet Mercury's magnetic field is rapidly breaking down, and NASA's Messenger spacecraft confirmed that again earlier this year.
If the planets in the solar system are billions of years old, why do these magnetic fields still exist?
In 1974 and 1975, the Mariner 10 spacecraft measured Mercury's magnetic field strength with its onboard magnetometer and sent the data to earth. The astronomers analyzing the data at the time found that the average field strength was 4.8 x 1022 gauss cm3, which "is about 1% that of the Earth."1
A decade later, creation physicist D. Russell Humphreys published a magnetic field model based on clues from the Bible. He reasoned that earth and the planets all shared a watery beginning, in accord with Genesis 1 and 2 Peter 3:5.2 He calculated what the magnetic field strength would have been at the creation by using a mass of aligned water molecules equal to the masses of each planet.
Then, he plotted the rate at which the magnetic fields would have diminished over the roughly 6,000 years since. Humphreys wrote, "Electrical resistance in a planet's core will decrease the electrical current causing the magnetic field, just as friction slows down a flywheel."3 The resulting model accurately predicted the magnetic field strengths of Uranus and Neptune, as well as the declining strength of Mercury's field.4
In 2008, Messenger flew past Mercury and captured a magnetic field measurement, and Humphreys compared it with the decaying slope generated by his creation model. Sure enough, Mercury's magnetic field strength had diminished since 1974, right in line with the predicted value of the creation magnetic field model.
If Mercury's magnetic field is supposed to have lasted for many millions of years, then it should be very stable over vast time periods. But as Messenger's data show, researchers can measure its decay within a person's lifetime.
Humphreys wrote, "My predicted 4% decrease in only 33 years would be very hard for evolutionary theories of planetary magnetic fields to explain, but a greater decrease would be even harder on the theories."3 He anticipated more accurate 2011 measurements, which Science published on September 30.
The Science authors wrote that the field strength for Mercury is "~27% lower in magnitude than the centered-dipole estimate implied by the polar Mariner 10 flyby."5 This confirms that Mercury's magnetic field is rapidly diminishing, which in turn confirms that the field must only be thousands of years old—just as the creation model predicts.
References
Ness, N. F. 1979. The magnetic field of Mercury. Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors. 20 (2-4): 209-217.
Humphreys, D. R. 1984. The Creation of Planetary Magnetic Fields. Creation Research Society Quarterly. 21 (3): 140-149.
Humphreys, D. R. 2008. Mercury's magnetic field is young! Journal of Creation. 22 (3): 8-9.
Humphreys, D. R. 1990. Beyond Neptune: Voyager II Supports Creation. Acts & Facts. 19 (5).
Anderson, B. J. et al. 2011. The Global Magnetic Field of Mercury from MESSENGER Orbital Observations. Science. 333 (6051): 1859-1862.
* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.
*ouch*
“Young earth creationists damage the Christian witness, in my opinion.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
It’s clear that there’s a lot of genetic information in all creatures and that their attributes can change based on the environments they find themselves living in. Adaptability by life to live under different conditions is not something anyone rejects.
However just because life adapts and you get more specialized animals that can live in a certain environment better than their predecessors, that doesn’t mean they ever had the genetic information to change from bird to lizard, or from one type of animal to another. Instead we see more specialized animals of the same kind being generated. And we also know from genetics that this specialization actually decreases the amount of genetic diversity in those animals than their former predecessors. So the variation you are celebrating as evolution is giving us less genetically robust, specialized species. They get to a point where a mutt can give you many different types of dogs (but they are all dogs) but if you get to a certain purebred and that’s the only kind of dog you’re going to get.
The evolutionists have yet to show one species (macro-evolution) coming from another. And having a second one that exists at the same time that the new species can mate with. Variation within a species nobody disputes because no matter what attributes vary, you still get a bird, or pig, or cat. If macro-evolution was true, we’d have seen it by now, and we’d also never be able to be sure that our animals would give birth to the same kind of animal they are. We don’t sit around and think the cat may have something other than kittens THIS time. We occasionally get an animal with two heads or an extra leg, but in all those cases the animal is not better off and the extra appendage is useless - a defect rather than a benefit. The mutation never creates a part that wasn’t already in the genetic code of the animal - the cow doesn’t get a wing, or scales, or a thumb. They get another part they already had the information to build. Their code contains information to adapt to be different types of cows, but not different types of animals. They will always be a cow because their genetic information does not and never had the information to become a bird. If you never had that information to begin with, there’s now way you’re going to develop it because life requires stability and our chromosomes and the cellular replication processes are designed to maintain that life form. We know what happens to life forms when that mechanism gets damaged - ever hear of cancer?
No one has ever seen macro-evolution (new species from existing species, ex. no bird from lizard), never recorded, some say some theories say you can’t ever see it because everything is now too specialized, some say it happens too gradual, some say it happens extremely fast when it does but the gaps it occurs at are wide apart, yet we’re told this is evolutionary gospel.
NV, I held the same view as you concerning the age of the earth at one time. (I took a lot of geology) It now seems to me that a young earth is just as probable. There is no way to prove either.
It would take approximately twice the volume of water we see today to cover the highest mountains. Where did it all go?
You’re making an assumption that the mass these equally-massed planets have is composed of the same materials, dispersed around each in the same way.
You’d have to in order to say they should have the same magnetic field. I don’t have evidence to say that assumption is valid.
Well DUH! The Earth was flat during the flood *eye roll*
What a silly question.
Why, we drank it, of course.
Where did you study geology?
Mt St. Helens eruption in 1980 showed us how things that look really old can happen in days. The carved canyons with the super heated ash/snow mud carving through rocks, the hydrological sorting that layers sediments. If we had never seen it happen geologists would have looked at these layers and said “millions of years” to carve these canyons.
So only the Earth started out as pure water globe? Is that what you get from the article?
Why didn't I think of that?
You were drunk?
Nah, still at work. Too early for beer thirty.
You mean the same way they figured out the Scablands were formed in days when Lake Missoula drained?
Univ of South Alabama. I do not have a degree in geology, I took 4 or 5 courses because I liked the subject. My degree is in Electronics.
I thought maybe you were water drunk from consuming your share of The Deluge...
Thanks.
Nah, I peed that out a long time ago. Although, sometimes after a few beers and a ride on the scooter, I feel like I need to release the deluge itself.
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