Scientific America has an interesting article here:
The end of cosmology

The article is interesting in and of itself, but the statement

"An accelerating universe wipes out traces of its own origins"

has an obvious implication that creationists have been making for a while.

The past is not a matter of science, we can measurements and guess what happended, but that does not mean any of its true.

Even Scientfic America points this out with this question:

What knowledge has the universe already erased?

Well, that's not known is it...

Terry

The creationist belief that nothing in the past can be known for certain (at least without God's revelation) I think is more of a miniaturized postmodernist philosophy, that all knowledge is relative, and no single viewpoint is ultimately better than another. It is not a belief grounded in evidence (that would be something of a contradiction). It is a belief grounded in ultra-skepticism. If there is even just a tiny chance that things could be different from what we believe, then there is no use believing anything.

Creationists limit this philosophy to the past: things in the present we can know, but the past is inherently uncertain. This approach sort of breaks down when you consider that everything we see happened some time in the past. The image of your computer screen that your brain receives happened a few microseconds in the past, not right now. The Andromeda Galaxy that you can see in the night sky is not the Andromeda Galaxy of today. You are looking at the Andromeda Galaxy of 2.5 million years ago.

The proposition of the SciAm article has a much more limited scope: the universe is accelerating in its expansion, and eventually the universe will expand faster than the speed of light, which means that future intelligence won't be able to realize the past by examining distant galaxies, because they won't be able to ever observe them.

In our present universe, this has not happened yet. The universe is accelerating in its expansion, but it is still slower than the speed of light. We CAN look into the past by examining distant galaxies. You can see them yourself.

Distant Galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Question: Since photons is consider matter. And an exploding star would probably spew matter into space faster than the speed of light. Would not photons travel faster then normal because of the force (explosion) that was behind it?

Because if a black hole can retain light, and gravity can bend light. Then light is not a constant. Because if it can be bent from a strainght line. It can also be slowed while in forward motion. That is just a bend from the direction of travel.

Which also means that light leaving a high gravity star travels slower (bends backwards) until it escapes that star's gravity. Unless there is a law that prevents light from bending backwards?

Photons are the particle manifestation of light (light has a wave/particle duality). So photons always travel at the speed of light through empty space. They would not be affected by the propulsion of a supernova.

I think this is getting into a weirder and more mysterious area of general relativity that is beyond my own knowledge. According to any observer (moving at any speed), light is always traveling at a speed of 300000 km/s. Two spaceships may be traveling next to each other both at a speed of 0.9c (9/10 the speed of light) relative to the Earth. To observers in spaceship #1, spaceship #2 seems to be sitting still, traveling at speed 0 relative to spaceship #1. But a stream of light traveling in the same direction will zip by at 300000 km/s relative to the two spaceships, and the observers would see the light the same as if they were sitting still on Earth. Light does not compete for speed with moving objects. Nobody can ever come close to winning a race with light. If you race light, you will lose just as much traveling at 0.9999c as you will going for a stroll on the track. And, yes, it is weird.

I suspect that gravity does not slow down light. Someone on a Google search claims that, "Gravity slows light's time but not its speed." No, I do not know what that means.

What it means is that science is not racing into admitting that light is not constant because several theories are written based on this concept. Even though it can be theorized that light is not constant according to current evidence. This actually hurts science because as long as they are not willing to admit to a possible wrong in this area, no one will contemplate what that actually means to things based on light speed.

One of the major contemplations is creation. Light that is not constant opens several doors to creation knocking down several barriers. And looking more like a viable theory and possible truth. No atheist in their right atheistic minds wants to open that Pandora's box. So the current evidence showing light speed can be altered is ignored.

I don't know about that. The "holy grail" in physics right now is what they call, "the theory of everything" that unites the theory of relativity with quantum theory. As it stands now, the two theories contradict each other, which means that there is something not quite right with at least one of them. That is the riddle that is keeping the scientific field of physics alive, and so they are trying to find discrepancies with either theory. I figure that a discovery of even the slightest change in the constant c may be a key to the solution. And there are laboratories, including the National Physics Laboratory, that keep track of the speed of light and other fundamental constants. It is probably better not to think of science as an army of dogmatists who defend their ideas at any cost like you see in religion and politics. I know it is an easy perception when one is grounded in the creation vs. evolution debate. But the way that a scientist makes his name in science is to discover evidence that leads to a radically new or different theory. That is how a Nobel prize is won, and that is how names get into school textbooks.

It is important to note that a photon is non-local. Meaning it does not exist at one point at any moment in time - rather, it is sort of spread out through all space with higher probabability densities at different points in space.

A photon is not considered matter - it does carry energy however. Whenever matter undergoes some process where it emits energy it does so via electromagnetic radiation which is made up of photons.

An exploding star would not accelerate a photon beyond c because a photon is a massless and electrically neutral entity - any force created by the exploding supernova would be a mass on mass or charge on charge interacting phenomenon (ie pressure, gravitational, electromagnetic...).



A black hole does not retain light. A black hole warps space-time to such an extreme that light continues on a straight path in its own frame of reference through curved space-time and "falls" forever into the black hole. So really light is not bent - the space it travels through is bent.

The speed of light is the upper limit value through space-time. Nothing can exceed the speed of light. Light can be slowed on average - ie. absorption and emission by atoms for example, though the speed from the moment of emission to the moment of aborption is still c on average over a long path length light has been "slowed" because of the delay between the excited electron moving to a lower energy state and emitting a photon.



The star with the highest gravity (besides a black hole) would be a neutron star. A neutron star is supported only by baryonic degeneracy pressure - the last barrier before total collapse. Picture a bowling ball on a sheet of elastic - the bowling ball represents the neutron star and the elastic represents space-time. If light passed by this bowling ball from our perspective it would appear to curve but in the lights frame of reference it would be continuing on a straight path because it is unable to leave the surface of the elastic and is thus unaware of higher dimensions. Here the elastic represents a 2D projection of 3D space - picturing space warping in 3D is too difficult (and probably impossible).

Light, in a vacuum, will travel at a constant rate from point A to point B. What evidence suggest otherwise?

I suspect that the riddle maybe solved if we can view things with a multiple dimensional concept instead of a 3D concept. I suspect that the contradiction is caused by our thoughts being embedded with a 3D concept instead of a n-D concept. Yet natural space-time frame should be multiple dimensional in nature instead of 3-dimensional as what we often comprehend.

Yes, I'm curious of this too, as well as whether ike is being intentionally cryptic, or if claims such as exploding stars accelerating matter to beyond the speed of light are just indicators of sheer ignorance of Einsteinian relativity.