The Faint Young Sun Paradox

Evolutionarily speaking, when the earth was a wee little baby, just collapsed from its mother cloud, the weak young sun was shining through the haze, keeping the earth very cool. In fact, the sun was so faint that the cold earth would have no liquid water on it; but there's always been liquid water on the earth. What's a good evolutionist to do? Why, postulate, of course.

In the past it has been proposed that the earth's atmosphere had 1,000 times the current carbon dioxide content leading to a super greenhouse effect. Now Gregory Jenkins of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, has proposed a new postulate: that the earth was spinning much, much more rapidly back in those good old days. The reasoning is that if the earth spins faster, that the winds circulate more efficiently and that they would distribute the sun's heat more efficiently, radiating less into space. With less land, too (before land was added due to vulcanism) there was more heat trapped into the oceans. Still, the faster spin and less land will not suffice to solve the faint young sun paradox. So, with the faster spin, we won't have to add quite so much carbon dioxide (say only 30 to 300 times the amount currently present in the atmosphere instead of the 1,000 before). Now all we have to do is find a mechanism which gets rid of the excess carbon dioxide at a rate which will match the sun's brightening…. Then, again, maybe the earth isn't that old, after all.

The LMC Moves Across the Sky

Astronomers have measured the proper motion of the Large Magellanic Cloud — that is, they've measured its motion across the line-of- sight. Comparing two plates taken 15 years apart and using an electronic scanner Douglas Lin and co-workers from the University of California at Santa Cruz detected a slight shift of the LMC's stars against the background of distant galaxies. The speed is a respectable 220 km/sec, provided that the LMC is 170,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way. As a result, the mass of the Milky Way is determined to be 600 billion suns, about 5 times the mass of the visible galaxy. (The excess mass, called the “mass anomaly,” is usually held to be due to dark matter, but other causes are also possible.) Interestingly, this figure for the mass of the galaxy is the same as determined by the orbits of the stars in the Milky Way. The 220 km/sec is also consistent with radial velocity measurements (Doppler effect), and so supports the large universe model.

Planets Which Refuse to Form

The creatures from the Moon and Mars told Immanuel Swedenborg several centuries ago that the earth, sun, moon and planets were formed by a collapsing gas cloud many eons ago. Laplace gave form(ulae) to the story and today it is the scientific gospel truth. Problem is, the gospel's vocabulary, mathematics, fails to confirm it. The young sun, then only a disk, would have lost most of its hydrogen and helium within the first 10 million years. That's too little time for ice cores to accumulate to form planets such as Uranus and Neptune.

The latest way around Laplace's old-fashioned theory is to postulate rapid growth of sticky dust and grains into planets. This requires the original cloud from which the sun formed to be turbulent. Still, such collisions of sticky grains leave a lot to be desired. Particularly, they cannot explain the formation of the giant, gaseous planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Part of the problem is that too much turbulence will disrupt the cloud before it can collapse sufficiently for gravity to take over. And, of course, when the sun starts to shine, it blows the dust and gas away from itself and its planetary entourage. This latter point has been the main sticking point for the old Laplacian scenario, and it is exacerbated for the turbulent model. But have faith! After all these fruitless centuries for the theory, scientists may yet find a way around the turbulence after all! (And they say faith in God is superstition!)

The End of Comet Shoemaker-Levy?

On 7 July, 1992, comet Shoemaker-Levy passed close enough to Jupiter to be torn into 21 pieces. The latest news is that some or all of the pieces will crash into Jupiter on 21 July, 1994. Expect a lot of comparisons and references to cometary impacts on earth, such as the Yucatan crater, the impact of which supposedly killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

More Experiments Fail to Detect the Motion of the Earth

In a paper which appeared in the November Toth-Maatian Review, Jozef Wilczynski reports on a re-examination of a set of 1927 experiments by Zeeman¹ and concludes that Zeeman's experiments fail to find the motion of the earth through space, the motion of the earth around the center of the Milky Way, the motion of the earth around the sun, and even the rotation is missing. Zeeman was looking for differences in the speed of light through different materials. Zeeman's experiments are ”first-order” experiments (meaning that they are designed to measure the earth's speed divided by the speed of light, namely, v/c). Second-order experiments (measuring v²/c²) tend to show a relative motion as in, for example, the Sagnac experiment. Wilczynski writes of Zeeman's experiments that “They are proper ones to find or test the speed V of the Earth's surface with respect to an aether. The results deny the existence of such a speed.” And there you have it: another family of experiments fail to find the motion of the earth.

Perihelion Precession of Mercury and Newtonian Gravitation

I have, in my grubby little paws, a paper by Rudolf Nedvd of Czechoslovakia entitled “Mercury's Anomaly and the Stability of Newtonian Bisystems.” I presume the paper has been submitted for publication somewhere, but there is no indication of where. Anyhow, before I relate the findings of the paper some explanation of terms is in order.

The “perihelion precession” of a planet refers to a rotation of the planet's orbit as a whole. Planetary orbits are ellipses, and it turns out that the entire ellipse turns as a unit about the sun. Relativity's ability to account for the perihelion precession of the planet Mercury has long been held as proof-positive of relativity even though Gerber derived it back in 1898.2 One may well wonder why the hoopla is exclusively about Mercury's perihelion precession, but wonder no more: the reason is simply that relativity cannot account for the rotation of any of the other planets' orbits. By contrast, the geocentric model of Barbour and Bertotti does account for more of the planets.3

The second term which needs explanation is the term “bisystem.” By ”bisystem,” Nedvd means the sun-Jupiter system. This is so because Jupiter and the sun overwhelm the effects of the other planets.

Nedvd's starting point is to tie the orbits to the barycenter of the sun- Jupiter system. The “barycenter” is the point at which two objects balance each other. Particularly, this means is that Jupiter and the sun ”balance” about 460,000 miles away from the center of the sun. In other words, The sun orbits around the sun-Jupiter barycenter once in 11.8 years while Jupiter traces its regular orbit about 530 million miles away from the barycenter. Nedvd's conclusion is that if the orbits are computed from the sun-Jupiter barycenter instead of the very center of the sun, Mercury's perihelion precession is accounted for using strictly Newtonian theory.

Unfortunately, Nedvd's theory doesn't work quite so well for the other planets. For Venus he derives +6.8 seconds of arc per century whereas the observed value is -7.3. For earth he obtains 2.63 versus 5.9, and Mars is said to be negligible whereas the observed value is 8.1. By comparison, relativity predicts 8.6, 3.8 and 1.3 respectively for Venus, earth and Mars.

This brings up a perennial problem. Relativity can explain the perihelion precession of Mercury, but so can Newtonian mechanics (as per this paper); and the geocentric model nicely accounts for the perihelion precession of Mercury as well.4 How can one claim one is better than the rest? or what is the true state of affairs? We have a similar dilemma in connection with explanations for aberration. Which of the rivals is correct?

It seems that much of physics is nothing more than a judgment call: a personal preference, an eclectic decision, or a theological point of view. Just think of all the people who are going to hell because they actually believe that science yields objective truth.

C₁₄ and U-Th Dating Discrepancy

In an article entitled “Latest Pleistocene and Holocene Geomagnetic Paleointensity on Hawaii,”5 Mankinen and Champion report that there is a discrepancy between the C₁₄ (carbon-14) and U-Th (uranium-thorium) dating system between samples dated by both methods. The U-Th is consistently older than radio-carbon dates above 9,000 years. For example, at a C₁₄ age of 20,000 years (2300 B.C. when corrected for the observed weakening of the earth's magnetic field and radio-carbon dates for articles of known age such as bones and coal deposits from the flood)6 the U-Th age is 3500 years older.

Miranda's Faults

For 17 years I have been contending that most of the craters observed on the planets and their satellites could not be the result of collisions with clouds of asteroids or other particles. I claim that they are features formed during the creation when the object was very hot, and froze into place during a rapid nuclear cooling process which worked its way from the body's core outward. Now confirmation of that hypothesis comes from a study of Uranus' moon, Miranda.

At 470 kilometers across (280 miles) Miranda is barely large enough to be spherical in shape, yet it is littered with craters suggesting that it was a much larger body with much larger gravitational field than it actually has. Even some text books have reported the craters of Miranda as due to a collision with a comet which disrupted the satellite which subsequently reassembled in its orbit about Uranus. But now a deeper study has repudiated that notion.

Tobert Pappalardo, Ronald Greeley, and Stephen Reynolds of Arizona State University at Tempe noted that if the satellite were reassembled, then the denser chunks of the moon would have settled at its core. As they settled, currents would have formed crown-like compression features on its surface, but none are found.

”Instead, says Pappalardo, the coronas [crown-like rings—Ed.] appear to have formed atop giant upwellings of material from the moon's interior. The alternating ridges and troughs were created when internal forces pulled the surface apart — in much the same way that such features were formed in the American South-West and on Jupiter's moon Ganymede, he notes.”7

The latest suggestion is that tidal stretching and distortion are responsible for the features on Miranda.

Stars Older Than the Universe

According to the expansion rate of the universe (called the “Hubble constant,”) the universe is 8 to 15 billion years old. Stellar evolutionists, on the other hand, claim that the oldest stars are much older than that, about 16 to 19 billion years old.8 Two possible solutions have been offered. First, the expansion rate is slower than the extrapolated values of the Hubble constant, and second, the physics of how stars age is incorrect. A slower expansion rate for the universe would make it appear older than 15 billion years. Actually, the “oldest” indicators for the age of the universe is found in the rotations of clusters of galaxies. The typical relaxation time for such a cluster is 30 to 70 billion years. Since they appear “relaxed,”9 one could argue that the universe must be at least 70 billion years old. The problem with that is that the material composition of the universe (the amount of helium, iron, etc.) doesn't allow for such an age.

To confound the problem, the expansion of the universe is itself a misnomer. When we talk about expansion, we think in terms of something increasing in size by “gobbling up” territory, but the Bible and astronomers agree that the universe is stretching, not gobbling up more space. So what's the “big deal” about stretching? Well, expansion is subject to the speed limit of light, but stretching not necessarily so. Particularly, if the stretching is due to a change in the basic properties of space or matter (called a phase change; the melting of ice to water is an example of a phase change) the rate could well exceed the speed of light. Such is at the heart of the inflationary universe model. Inflation, however, decreases the age of the universe while making it look older! The first version of the inflationary universe gave an age under 100,000 years! In this case the Hubble constant is only a very local measure of the stretching rate.

As for our physics of stellar aging, we know that the sun is not producing nearly enough neutrinos so that the theory is overestimating the rate of nuclear fusion at the sun's core. It could well be that the sun is much younger, still not gravitationally “relaxed” enough to burn hydrogen all the time.

There is a third possible explanation for the “age paradox” which is anathema to modern cosmology (and thus never mentioned) and that is that the speed of light may not be constant in time. This could make stars look much older than they actually are as well as making the universe large for its age (thus making it look older than it actually is).

In conclusion, the age paradox indicates that there are flaws in the current, evolutionary theories for the aging of stars and the universe. At present, such problems are acknowledged but no solutions are forthcoming from the evolutionary school. There are additional possible explanations for the paradox, but since they demand a much younger universe than evolutionists are willing to accept, they are never mentioned in the literature.
Dark Matter10

Observations of visible matter, the only kind we can see directly, suggest that most of the universe is, in fact, composed of dark matter. This conclusion comes mainly from the belief that something unseen (dark matter) is tugging on visible matter, making it do things the laws of motion say it should not do. All visible bodies, therefore, seem to be careening about in a dense cloud of unseen, unknown masses. These might be dark, Jupiter-sized objects, black holes, and/or some exotic forms of matter. We must choose between the reality of dark matter or admit that something is awry with our laws of gravitation and motion when they are applied on a cosmological scale.

Now, let us examine four dark-matter items from the recent literature:

D. Lin, a University of California astronomer, has shown that the Large Magellanic Cloud that orbits around our own galaxy (the Milky Way) us being torn apart (”cannibalized”) by the powerful gravitational pull of a dense cloud of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way (see figure below). This dismemberment of the Large Magellanic Cloud cannot be explained by the stars in our galaxy that we can see. Lin calculates that our halo of dark matter is equivalent to 600-800 billion solar masses, compared to only 100 billion solar masses of visible matter. (Flam, Faye; ”Spinning in the Dark,” Science, 260:1593, 1993. Also: Anonymous; ”'Dark Matter' Is Observed 'Cannibalizing' a Galaxy,” Baltimore Sun, p. 8A, June 8, 1993.)

The dark matter surrounding a galaxy will, according to the Theory of Relativity, act as a gravitational lens that will deflect light rays passing near it. This dark matter, acting like a telescope, should increase the number of quasars counted in the sky near galaxy clusters. Such larger quasar counts are indeed observed, but these increases are much larger than expected. The implication is that there is much more dark matter in the universe than previously thought. (Cowen, Ron; “Quasar Count Poses Dark-Matter Puzzle,” Science News, 143:397, 1993.)

Finally, dark matter is forcing scientists to re-examine the Equivalence Principle, which asserts that gravitational mass (as in Newton's Law of Gravitation) is identical to inertial mass (as in Newton's Force = Mass X Acceleration). In terrestrial experiments, the two kinds of mass are equal, but on a cosmological scale, they may not be. There could be a small (10%), long-range, non-gravitational force exerted between mas sive objects. (Frieman, Joshua A., and Gradwohl, Ben-Ami; “Dark Matter and the Equivalence Principle,” Science, 260:1441, 1993.)