c Decay
The concept of c-decay was first proposed by Barry Setterfield in 1981 in an article for the Australian creationist magazine, Ex Nihilo, as an alternative to physical cosmology. Setterfield's proposal was that the speed of light, was infinite in the past, but has slowed substantially over time. Setterfield argues that this resolves the so-called "starlight problem", since light may have traveled fast enough in the past to reach Earth in thousands of years, despite being billions of light years away.
Setterfield selected a number of historical measurements of starting with the original measurement by Ole Rømer in 1667, and proceeding through a series of more recent experiments, culminating in measurements taken in the 1960s. These showed a decreasing speed over time, which Setterfield claimed was in fact an exponential decay series that implied an infinite speed in the not distant past. He later expanded his claim to cover a supposed decay in several other physical constants.
Setterfield's proposal has received criticism in the scientific community, including that his data is too noisy to show any strong correlation, and his argument is based on cherry picking outlying points in order to fit his model.
Setterfield's argument is highly dependent on Rømer's original measurement, which he copied from an issue of Sky and Telescope. This value was "301,300 plus or minus 200 km/s", about 0.5% above the current value. However, the article was actually an excerpt from The Astronomical Journal, which disagrees completely, writing "The best fit occurs at zero where the light travel time is identical to the currently accepted value." In his analysis, Setterfield also left out a number of famous experiments measuring the speed of light, as well as a number of measurements in his quoted experiments. When these points are added back into the set, there is no apparent decay. More recent versions of Setterfield's paper include these figures, using adjusted mathematics to rebuild the curve. These mathematics have been the object of ridicule.
Read more about this topic: Creationist Cosmologies
Famous quotes containing the word decay:
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—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)