Huh...

[Kiyrugoji]

Evidently the speed of light isn't constant?

I was debating against a creationist (nice guy, BTW), and made the argument that if creation was merely 6,000 years old, we wouldn't be able to see things millions of lightyears away. He brought up the above link. Now, I haven't been able to find any of the people on that list, and this is the first I've heard of it, so... well, what do you all think?  

[Redem]

Can't say much about the scientific claims, except that the source is religiously motivated and not scientific.

Their methodology is flawed though. The suggest that because greek philosophers and early scientists thought light was infinite, this somehow supports the idea of a slowing speed of light. Also the more and more precise measurements somehow support the idea that light was slowing down, as the less precise early measurements were a little higher.


EDIT: Also talkorigins.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE411.html  

[Kiyrugoji]

Thanks - I'm sorry if this seemed like a "Help me, I'm being crushed in a debate" thread - it was just slightly curious. And I can't pull the biased card - I used Skepticreport.com . Eh.  

[Redem]

Kiyrugoji

Thanks - I'm sorry if this seemed like a "Help me, I'm being crushed in a debate" thread - it was just slightly curious. And I can't pull the biased card - I used Skepticreport.com . Eh.

'Course he can, as we all know, reality has a "evolutionist" bias. twisted  

[Kiyrugoji]

Oh, come on - he's a smart guy. Maybe our views don't match, but he may be the smartest person I've ever debated with.  

[Ninyaruto]

Looking at that article...well, if it's true, we're sure in trouble. It indicated that there had been noticeable slowing of the speed of light in the last 400 years (based on only a couple examples, as far as I can tell). I'm not sure of the exact effects of light speed on physics, but such a significant change can't be good. That light could have been moving 10 million times faster in 3000 B.C...that just couldn't go by without some huge effect on us.  

[Redem]

The best argument against it that I can come up with is that the speed of light is based of various physical properties of the universe, and that it can only change if those properties changed. They have never been observed to change as far as I know, and if they had, there should be tell tale signs that they have.

Essentially we would have to compress a large amount of happenings into smaller time periods, such as the entire history of nuclear decay of atoms... which would mean that there should be traces of higher than expected radiation in history, especially considering that this should result in lethal amounts of radiation being released, and even tiny amount of uranium going nuclear.
That's the main issue with any proposed ad hoc explanations like this.

I would also point out that the source for this is a minority view, and has not been published in a peer reviewed journal, so it's reliability is questionable at best. Claims of a bias in science, or of scientific dogma, can be dealt with in the usual way.