Spin of the earth's core

Based on earthquake waves bouncing off and passing through the outer regions of earth's core, scientists have refined their model of the core. The core starts about 1625 down from the surface of the earth. Below that there seems to be a shell of liquid iron and inside that is a solid sphere, believed to consist of iron, which is about three-quarters the size of the moon. Now X. Song and P. G. Richards report in the July 18 issue of Nature that the solid core rotates with a speed of about 1 or 2 degrees per year (east-to-west). This is 100,000 times faster than the types of motions theory expects.

How did the theorists arrive at that conclusion? About ten years ago scientists discovered that the speed of a shock wave through the core depended on the direction it entered the core. Waves travel fastest pole-to-pole and slowest along the equator. Scientists speculate that this is due to crystal orientations in the core. Four years ago it was discovered that the crystals are not aligned north-south but are skewed about 10 degrees, presently pointing to the Arctic ocean north of Siberia. This skewness enables the rotation of the core to be detected by looking at southern earthquakes from observatories in Alaska.

The question arises, does this have any implications for geocentricity? The core of the earth is its deepest known foundation. It is spinning slightly faster than the firmament which seems to be slowing down at roughly half a second per century, as evidenced by the introduction of a leap second every year or two. If the core of the earth were not subject to that slowing down, then in about 6,000 years, it would spin about 30 seconds per year faster. The observed rate is about 240 seconds per year faster. This is much higher than the expected 30 seconds but that is not an insurmountable problem for geocentricity. It is worse for evolutionists for that gives an age of only 48,000 years.

Of course, evolutionists can postulate that the fluid friction of the
outer core speeds up the solid core, and that this differential rotation generates the earth's magnetic field, but for it to lag by only 240 seconds per year takes a lot of faith. On the other hand, Biblicists can validly argue that the decay of the earth's magnetic field and earthquakes increases the spin rate of the core so that it now spins faster than at the creation 6,000 years ago. Furthermore, the firmament's period could also be altered by some minutes per year by changing the earth's crustal configurations during the flood. Thus the spin of the earth's core validates a young earth and causes a major problem for evolution.

Star factories

In September 1995, European astronomers announced the highest red-shift galaxies yet. A team working at the European Southern Observatory announced a galaxy with a red shift of 4.4. Supposedly, the light seen left the galaxy when the universe was a tenth its present ”age.” “Surprisingly,” the galaxy looks old, as if there's been one or more complete generations of stars. Its spectrum contains lines of carbon, silicon, aluminum, and sulfur. These elements “require” several generations of stars or, at least, one generation of supermassive stars. The galaxy lies in front of the quasar mentioned under the title “The first generation of stars” in last issue's “Panorama.”

The further out these objects are, the less time, according to the Big- Bang theory, there is for stars to age. If this galaxy was fully mature one or two billion years after the big bang, then the first generation of stars have to be increasingly more massive in order to produce the observed heavy elements. In situ creation is still the best model by far.

The Crystalline Universe¹

Cosmologists think in the large. Billions of stars are nothing to them. The megaparsec (3.528,000 light years) is but a hop, skip, and jump. A pressing question for these cosmologists searching for the really big picture is whether there is any order in the distribution of galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters. The scale of organization of the universe is of critical importance because it is a measure of state of the cosmos when hydrogen atoms first condense from the seething sea of ions following the Big Bang. The prevailing expectation has been that the galaxy clusters and superclusters should be distributed at random; that is,no order prevails at that scale. Recent redshift measurements, however, hint more and more forcefully that the huge superclusters of galaxies are almost as neatly arranged as the atoms in a crystal.

A recent paper in Nature by J. Einasto et al.2 Puts a number on the spacing of the superclusters:

Here, using a new compilation of available data on galaxy clusters, we present evidence for a quasiregular three-dimensional network of rich superclusters and voids, with the regions of high density separated by about 120 Mpc [megaparsecs]. If this reflects the distribution of al matter (luminous and dark), then there must exist some hitherto unknown process that produces regular structure on large scales.

In an article entitled “Anisotropic Observations in Universes with Nonlinear Inhomogeneity,”3 three British authors attempt to explain away the apparent central position of the earth in the universe via a theoretical general relativistic analysis of observations made by considering cosmological models which are homogeneous on large scales, but which incorporate arbitrary isotropic density irregularities on scales of the order of 100 Mpc (326,000,000 light years). The authors report: “If we are located in such a region it is possible that we are not at the center. This provides a strong reason to explore the implications of an off-center location in an inhomogeneous isotropic spacetime.”

To turn this argument around, we conclude that all apparent off-center data, such as the observation that the universe appears slightly “warmer” in one direction and cooler in the opposite direction of space, is due to arbitrary isotropic (concentric) density irregularities of the order of 300 million light years across.

Age of the Moon rocks and dust

This is not exactly new news, but from time to time it behooves us to look at the total lack of evidence for the evolutionary time scale. The moon rocks brought to earth by the Apollo missions gave radiometric ”ages” ranging from 2 million to 28 billion years.4 According to evolutionists this “obviously means that the moon is 4.5 billion years old, roughly the same 'age' as the earth.” If that is obvious to you, dear reader, then heaven help you tighten all those loose screws.

In 1994, in issue No. 68 of the Biblical Astronomer (pg. 5), we flew into the faces of cautious creationists and blind evolutionists and printed an article on the dust on the moon, showing that despite the cautions by evolutionists and creationists alike, the spacecraft data still support the conclusion that if the moon were billions of years old that there would be many feet (50) of dust on the moon. Recently I came upon a report on the dust content found in the samples of lunar soil returned by the Apollo missions. It was observed that the actual amount of dust on the moon is about one inch (3 cm.). It turns out that of that dust, slightly more than 1% (1/67^th) is meteoric in origin, the rest is powdered lunar material. This is fraction agrees perfectly with the accumulation of meteoric material expected on the surface of the moon if the latter were only 6,000 years old (4.2 x 10^-2 gm/cm²).

Judgment and the light of God in physics

Romans 9:22-23 teaches us why God created man: “What if God, willing to show his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory.” That is to say, God created us in order to show both his wrath and his mercy. In order to do that, all events must be recorded (see Dan. 7:10 and Rev. 20:12). In order to be recorded, all events must be observed and measured so that judgment can be meted out.

If these things be true in human affairs, and they most certainly are, then we may expect the entire creation to participate in the recording process (Rom. 8:22). How will that process be expressed? Simply this way: an action will not be made manifest (made evident) until it is detected in some way.

Although scientists don't recognize that spiritual issue, they do recognize those principles in nature. At issue here is the Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen debate against quantum mechanics. These three men held that if an event can be predicted with certainty, that then the event is real even if it is never measured. Spiritually, the view these men espoused was that some events can happen without being recorded in God's books. In other words, if God knows ahead of time what is going to happen, he won't make an entry in his books. Opposing this view were Bohr, Heisenberg and Born who claimed that there is no reality until a measurement is made. In other words, nothing can happen until (or without being) recorded in God's books.

An experiment conducted at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York about a year ago has confirmed the latter view. Leonard Mandel conducted an experiment which shows that: “There is no reality until a measurement is made.”5 In other words, all reality is “on record.”

Mandel sent a laser beam into a crystal which, in turn, sent out two beams of lower energy. The two beams were recombined and their paths retraced. Mandel and his colleagues discovered that the beams did not always follow the paths predicted by classical physics even though those paths were predicted “with certainty.” So there is no reality without sense, both our own senses and God's. In other words, there is no reality without a record, and the record and only the record can be judged.

Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.

 — William Shakespeare
 Hamlet, Act. II, Scene 2

NOTES AND REFERENCES

¹ Quoted from William Corliss, 1997. Science Frontiers, No. 110, p. 2.

² J. Einasto, et al., 1997. “A 120-Mpc Periodicity in the Three- dimensional Distribution of Galaxy Superclusters,” Nature, 385:139.

³ Neal P. Humphreys, R. Maartens, and D. R. Matravers, 1997. Astrophysical Journal, 477:47-57 (March 1), pp. 47-58.

⁴ 1976. Creation Research Society Quarterly, 13(1):39-40.

⁵ Anon., 1996. “Photon Experiment Shows the Flaw in Classical Physics,” Rochester Review, Spring-Summer, pp. 5-6. (The work was published in an early issue of Physics Letters A that year.