• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Speed of Light and the Age of the Universe

ecco

Veteran Member
Gerald Schroeder held Doctorates in both Earth Sciences and Physics from MIT (where he also taught Physics) and was on the Board of the Atomic Energy Commission. And, yes, he also happened to be a Jew. That doesn’t make him or his ideas wrong.

He is an ultra-conservative Jew among a much broader population of moderate Jews. Just like there are Christians and Fundamentalist Christians. He and other fundamentalists, of any religion, bend their views to reconcile them with their holy scripture.


If you can’t refute the soundness of his work through actual proof, then why comment at all?

If you want to play that silly game: In your own words, prove the accuracy and soundness of his theories. If you can't, then you shouldn't have posted a link to his work.

Being capriciously dismissive and committing ad hominem is wrong.

I didn't attack Schroeder personally. I attacked his views and pointed out why he held those views and pointed out that his views have virtually no acceptance among his peers.

If you have followed any of my posts on similar woo, then you would know that my comments are not impulsive at all. I have had years to consider woo and have responded similarly for years.
 

ecco

Veteran Member
Schroeder is a solid scientist with superb credentials. As you have learned, this is irrelevant to the atheist crowd.

He, like many other scientists is immediately dismissed, and ridiculed because he doesn't toe their line.

Wrong, again. His findings are dismissed when they have no support among his peers. His findings are dismissed when they so obviously are based on bending science to somehow be in agreement with nonsense written four thousand years ago.

The pocket scientists in this forum are big on dogma, sans any objectivity. No one can be a "real" scientist unless he/she pimps their beliefs.

It's not just us "pocket scientists" (whatever the heck that is supposed to mean) who dismiss his nonsense. It is the general population of people in related fields. These people are Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindi, and atheists. Don't you know that?




They comment because they feel threatened, they employ childish methods because at heart many are children.

The only threat that woosters pose is the dumbing down of true knowledge.
 

Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
There is no contradiction between an Earth and other parts of the cosmos being billions of years old and a Biblical creation taking place in six days. Both can be true simultaneously as shown by Einstein’s relativity theory.

Explore this for more,
Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery Of Harmony Between Modern Science And The Bible | Gerald Schroeder


Um, no. He may be a PhD in physics, but his understanding of special and general relativity is poor.

To begin with, to get a time dilation of the type he needs to reconcile the BB and the Bible would require a scaling factor of around a trillion. There are two ways to get such a scaling factor. One is to have a very high relative velocity. But what does it mean for God to have a velocity at all? If God is supernatural, then it is meaningless for God to have a relative velocity with respect to the Earth. So that scenario is silly and not very conducive to his goal.

The alternative is to have time dilation from gravitational effects. But to get a relative dilation requires a *huge* mass density produce the dilation factor required. No such mass density exists *and* this ignores that in general relativity there *is* a preferred reference frame for each point: that in which the universe is expanding evenly in all directions. And in *that* frame, the universe is 13.8 billion years. Any other frame is, at best, unnatural, and at worst downright strange.

In any case, the physics of this view is so outlandish that it can be summarily dismissed.
 

dad

Undefeated
There would be no light pollution back then...but even then, you won’t even come close to seeing 1 million stars in the Milky Way, let alone 100+ billion of stars that’s in the Milky Way alone.
We would declare the points of light stars based on the distances from us and other things that are belief based. No distances can be known since we do not know time exists out there. They may not really be stars for all we know. So why would the bible talk about them unless they were? And if they are stars, then great, God made all the stars and named each one! In all ways it is covered.

The only other 4 galaxies that are visible to the naked eye (Large Magellanic Cloud, Small Magellanic Cloud, Andromeda Galaxy and Triangulum Galaxy). If you want to see more stars or galaxies, then you would either get a powerful telescope or visit one of the observatories.
You don't know what you are looking at or how big or far etc. Therefore using the word galaxy loses meaning.
After all if the heavens we see out there are going to roll up up and away forever in a day, they probably were not what you thought anyhow
 
Last edited:

Astrophile

Active Member
Let me clarify. current life forms are still DNA based, as are the earliest fossils. The form of these creatures fits into the Linnaean classification system. In other words an ancient extinct sponge, is still a sponge. An ancient extinct vertebrate is still a vertebrate with all the basic characteristics of vertebrates living today.

Are you saying that an extinct species of Ordovician fish has all the basic characteristics of modern vertebrates, such as human beings?
 

Shaul

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
Um, no. He may be a PhD in physics, but his understanding of special and general relativity is poor.

To begin with, to get a time dilation of the type he needs to reconcile the BB and the Bible would require a scaling factor of around a trillion. There are two ways to get such a scaling factor. One is to have a very high relative velocity. But what does it mean for God to have a velocity at all? If God is supernatural, then it is meaningless for God to have a relative velocity with respect to the Earth. So that scenario is silly and not very conducive to his goal.

The alternative is to have time dilation from gravitational effects. But to get a relative dilation requires a *huge* mass density produce the dilation factor required. No such mass density exists *and* this ignores that in general relativity there *is* a preferred reference frame for each point: that in which the universe is expanding evenly in all directions. And in *that* frame, the universe is 13.8 billion years. Any other frame is, at best, unnatural, and at worst downright strange.

In any case, the physics of this view is so outlandish that it can be summarily dismissed.
You seem to misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent Dr. Schroeder’s position. He doesn’t give the time of creation as relative to Earth.

You also don’t seem to understand that all the laws of physics breakdown when applied to the first instants of the Big Bang.

Sorry. You don’t know what you are talking about. Dr. Schroeder does.
 

ChristineM

"Be strong", I whispered to my coffee.
Premium Member
You also don’t seem to understand that all the laws of physics breakdown when applied to the first instants of the Big Bang.


That instant is something less than 10^-43 of a second. Do you have any idea of the duration? As a guide it is trillions of times faster than the fastest clock tick of the fastest computer.
 

gnostic

The Lost One
Gerald Schroeder held Doctorates in both Earth Sciences and Physics from MIT (where he also taught Physics) and was on the Board of the Atomic Energy Commission. And, yes, he also happened to be a Jew. That doesn’t make him or his ideas wrong. If you can’t refute the soundness of his work through actual proof, then why comment at all? Being capriciously dismissive and committing ad hominem is wrong.

I have not read Schroeder, nor heard anything about him, until here.

There are several things “wrong” here with your comments.

For one a concept or model is tested - verified or refuted - by the number of EVIDENCE, not proof.

Proof is some sorts of mathematical models or mathematical statements, that often appeared in the forms of equations.

A concept or model is only determined to be “science” or “scientific”, if you have evidence to support it, not proofs (equations).

Like the explanatory model, the mathematical model (hence proof) needs to be tested. And tests can only be performed through observations or acquiring evidence. These observations/evidence are then compared to the models of the hypothesis.

This is problem I find most people have with science, they don’t understand the proper terminology, so they often misuse the terms, or worse, they make up something, which is dishonest.

Second.

No ideas, no concepts, no models (that would include all hypotheses, theories, equations) ARE NEVER CONSIDERED TRUE-BY-DEFAULT, without ever being tested...EVER.

All concepts and models have to be tested first, before it can be considered true.

So, when you wrote :

“And, yes, he also happened to be a Jew. That doesn’t make him or his ideas wrong.”

No, it doesn’t make his idea, “wrong”, nor does it make his idea, “right”...regardless if he is theist or non-theist.

Being “theist” or “atheist”, isn’t the point, Shaul.

Even if Schroeder was an atheist, and if he came up with untested idea, then it still wouldn’t be true. Being atheist doesn’t give you special privileges of being right when it comes to science.

It is evidence that are essential to any model being “scientific”, not about being theists or atheists, or being followers of any sorts of “-ism”.

The point is - Does Schroeder have EVIDENCE to support his idea or not.

(A) If the answer is “yes”, then his idea could be “probable”.

(B) But if the answer is “no”, then his idea could be “improbable”, therefore mostly likely false.​

If he has no evidence that support his idea, then he isn’t right...even if Schroeder is an atheist.

Science isn’t about theism or atheism or agnosticism. None of these -ism have anything to do with science.

There are no conspiracy against Schroeder being Jews. There are many other scientists who are Christians and Jews, who don’t accept Schroeder’s claim.
 

Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
You seem to misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent Dr. Schroeder’s position. He doesn’t give the time of creation as relative to Earth.

The exact point I was addressing.

You also don’t seem to understand that all the laws of physics breakdown when applied to the first instants of the Big Bang.

Sorry. You don’t know what you are talking about. Dr. Schroeder does.

But once you get an instant away from the BB, the laws work perfectly well and Schoeder's statements are simply wrong.
 

gnostic

The Lost One
You also don’t seem to understand that all the laws of physics breakdown when applied to the first instants of the Big Bang.

Actually, Polymath267 does understand this, a lot more than you and I.

And the law of physics only break down in the 1st 10^-43 second, which is marked as the Planck Epoch, and this epoch is not well understood, so it is still hypothetical during this stage of the universe.

In fact, there are not much in term of "evidence" in the 1st 10^-12 second after the initial expansion: so that would include succeeding epochs after the Planck Epoch:
  • Grand Unification Epoch (GUE),
  • Electroweak Epoch,
  • Inflationary Epoch (Cosmic Inflationary)
  • and Baryongenesis period.

It is only after these epochs or after the end of Cosmic Inflation (when the universe was 10^-13 second old) that we get a better understanding of the early universe, starting with the Quark Epoch (10^-12 to 10^-6 second after the Big Bang).

The universe was still extremely hot and dense throughout the Quark Epoch (10^-12 to 10^-6 second after the Big Bang), and at that time quarks only exist as quark-gluon plasma, or what other people called the primordial soup or quark soup.

Quark is very important to the world of matters, because it is what protons and neutrons are made of. These particles are known as hadron.

Hadron didn't form until the next epoch - the Hadron Epoch (10^-6 to 1 second after the Big Bang). Leptons (eg electrons, neutrinos) didn't form until the Lepton Epoch (duration between 1 and 10 seconds after the Big Bang)...and so on.

Atoms didn't form until the Primordial Nucleosynthesis (or the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis) - between 3 minutes and 20 minutes after the Big Bang. Here, is when the nuclei formed around proton (hence ionized hydrogen atoms) and around protons and neutrons (eg deuterium, helium and lithium ionized atoms).

At this stage of the universe, it was still too hot to allow for electrons to bond with these newly formed atoms. So these ionized atoms remained in the plasma state.

Electrons didn't bond with atoms, until the Recombination Epoch, which started around 379,000 years after the Big Bang. This is when atoms for the first time, became electrically neutral and stable, and can exist molecularly without being in plasma state.

The first generation of super massive stars didn't form from hydrogen, until a couple of 100 million years after the Big Bang.

My points are that the Big Bang cosmology provided far better explanation to our universe than other proposed models, and while there are some unknown in the theory, the knowns still valid because they are based on evidence.
 

dad

Undefeated
Actually, Polymath267 does understand this, a lot more than you and I.

And the law of physics only break down in the 1st 10^-43 second, which is marked as the Planck Epoch, and this epoch is not well understood, so it is still hypothetical during this stage of the universe.

In fact, there are not much in term of "evidence" in the 1st 10^-12 second after the initial expansion: so that would include succeeding epochs after the Planck Epoch:
  • Grand Unification Epoch (GUE),
  • Electroweak Epoch,
  • Inflationary Epoch (Cosmic Inflationary)
  • and Baryongenesis period.

It is only after these epochs or after the end of Cosmic Inflation (when the universe was 10^-13 second old) that we get a better understanding of the early universe, starting with the Quark Epoch (10^-12 to 10^-6 second after the Big Bang).

The universe was still extremely hot and dense throughout the Quark Epoch (10^-12 to 10^-6 second after the Big Bang), and at that time quarks only exist as quark-gluon plasma, or what other people called the primordial soup or quark soup.

Quark is very important to the world of matters, because it is what protons and neutrons are made of. These particles are known as hadron.

Hadron didn't form until the next epoch - the Hadron Epoch (10^-6 to 1 second after the Big Bang). Leptons (eg electrons, neutrinos) didn't form until the Lepton Epoch (duration between 1 and 10 seconds after the Big Bang)...and so on.

Atoms didn't form until the Primordial Nucleosynthesis (or the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis) - between 3 minutes and 20 minutes after the Big Bang. Here, is when the nuclei formed around proton (hence ionized hydrogen atoms) and around protons and neutrons (eg deuterium, helium and lithium ionized atoms).

At this stage of the universe, it was still too hot to allow for electrons to bond with these newly formed atoms. So these ionized atoms remained in the plasma state.

Electrons didn't bond with atoms, until the Recombination Epoch, which started around 379,000 years after the Big Bang. This is when atoms for the first time, became electrically neutral and stable, and can exist molecularly without being in plasma state.

The first generation of super massive stars didn't form from hydrogen, until a couple of 100 million years after the Big Bang.

My points are that the Big Bang cosmology provided far better explanation to our universe than other proposed models, and while there are some unknown in the theory, the knowns still valid because they are based on evidence.
There is such a thing as taking religion too seriously. Those so called epochs are fantasy based on beliefs.
 
Top