Rethink Relativity with Pete Moore Part III - July 11, 2025

[Sherman]

Rethink Relativity with Pete Moore Part III

* A Whole Lot Moore: Peter W. Moor, ThD is a Christian master metallurgist listed as "inventor" in patents held by U.S. Steel. Pete began speaking to Churches on Science and Evolution in 1970. His more recent work has been to help fund organizations that do scientific creation research and those who present that evidence to the public.

* Aether or: ...relative nonsense. Hear a brief history, and then, not only criticisms of, but an alternate theory to Einstein's rather ridiculous postulates regarding time and space. Hear how Einstein not only dethroned Newtonian physics, but how his relativistic thinking has infected the minds of otherwise relatively smart creationists!

* E-PLat - (The Simhony/EPOLA): RSR is suggesting a name for the E-PLat!! Hear how Menahem Simhony is the father of a scientifically satisfactory description of what "space" is likely made of. Originally called the EPOLA, for the "Electron/Positron Lattice," we're suggesting E-PLat to avoid confusion with a certain virus! You'll have to listen to all 4 parts of the interview to form your opinion on whether or not the EPOLA/E-PLat makes more sense to you than Einstein's "purely mathematical" description of a relativistic universe.

* Deriving $10,000.00: ... and quite possibly a Nobel Prize! RSR and Dr. Moore are offering a prize of $10,000.00 to the first person to submit an acceptable technical derivation of the Gravitational Constatn "G" based on the Natural Physics and Structure of the Simhony/EPOLA Model of the Space Vaccuum. (Pre-register this prize right here)

 

[JudgeRightly]

Fascinating stuff!

(and yes, this is how far behind I am watching the shows...)

 

[JudgeRightly]

@Clete

Maybe an answer to the starlight and time problem?

 

[Clete]

@Clete

Maybe an answer to the starlight and time problem?

I don't have a direct answer, but I think any serious attempt at one has to start by pointing out the hard epistemological break in how distance measurements are made once you reach the limit of what direct trigonometric parallax can tell us. Trigonometric parallax requires no assumptions. It is as ironclad as it gets. All you have to know is the distance across Earth's orbit, which is very well known, and be able to measure tiny angular differences in the apparent position of the object in the sky. That got dramatically better with the Gaia satellite. From there, it is straightforward math that most any middle school aged child could do.

With good data, trigonometric parallax can measure out to about 30,000 light years with strong confidence. With truly exceptional data, it might stretch to 60 or 65 thousand light years, but even then the error bars are wide and the edge of reliability starts to fray pretty badly.

Young Earth creationists consistently put the age of creation at far less than even the 30,000 years that those more reliable parallax measurements would indicate it took light to reach us. So brushing off the other measurement methods, such as redshift and so on, does not do much good. Even if you throw all of those out, you are still left with a problem.
I know that what doesn't help is for our side to pick up and run with ad-hoc "explanations" that have no scientific value whatsoever. If we are given a scientifically based challenge, we should offer one of kinds of answers...

1. A scientifically based explanation.
2. "I don't know."

The bottom line is that the start light distance problem is a problem but it is not hard proof that the creation is far older than YECist suppose. Nor would actual proof that creation must be far older than the bible seems to imply falsify the whole of the Christian worldview. In other words, it is not a hill we have to die on.

The thing that bother me is when people on our side paper over the difficulty with speculative or ad hoc explanations. Suggesting a variable speed of light, for example, is not illegitimate in principle, but at present it both lacks physical evidence and would have far-reaching consequences for other areas of physics that we do not observe. It remains, at best, a possibility rather than a real explanation.

Likewise, appeals to a “mature creation” may resolve the tension at a theological level, but they do not function as scientific answers, nor is it clear why God would create a universe that appears to record a detailed history of events that never occurred. Where, for example, is the need to make it look as if a star exploded in the far distant past or that two galaxies collided in the super far distant past or that galaxies existed at all in the super-duper far distance past? When we are faced with a genuine scientific challenge, the honest options are to offer a scientifically grounded explanation or to admit that we simply don't know.

In short, intellectual dishonesty remains dishonesty regardless of who is guilty of it. I'd rather be wrong honestly than to be accidentally correct dishonestly. Besides, it makes no sense to be intellectually dishonest anyway. The truth is the truth and it's going to get figured out eventually and there's no point in being scared of it. If anything offering ad hoc explanations only adds fuel to the skeptics ability to say that Christians are anti-science.

That's one of the best things about the Real Science Radio programs, by the way. The things they present are presented honestly. They make every effort not to say more than they have good reason to say. As McBurney points out in the video, Christian scientists ask the best questions. I just wish there were more Christian science commentators who did not overstate the case, who did not say things they do not know for a fact are true, and who were not so corny that they are almost unwatchable on YouTube or X. The Answers in Genesis folks, even when they are presenting factual material, which is not always the case, their videos are so heavily scripted and the presentation so awkwardly delivered that they are nearly unwatchable. The smug certainty in their delivery is made all the worse when you discover that the scientific material they are discussing has been cartoonishly oversimplified to the point of being either intentionally patronizing or deliberately evasive.

That turned into more of a rant than I intended!

 

[Clete]

Rethink Relativity with Pete Moore Part III

* A Whole Lot Moore: Peter W. Moor, ThD is a Christian master metallurgist listed as "inventor" in patents held by U.S. Steel. Pete began speaking to Churches on Science and Evolution in 1970. His more recent work has been to help fund organizations that do scientific creation research and those who present that evidence to the public.

* Aether or: ...relative nonsense. Hear a brief history, and then, not only criticisms of, but an alternate theory to Einstein's rather ridiculous postulates regarding time and space. Hear how Einstein not only dethroned Newtonian physics, but how his relativistic thinking has infected the minds of otherwise relatively smart creationists!

* E-PLat - (The Simhony/EPOLA): RSR is suggesting a name for the E-PLat!! Hear how Menahem Simhony is the father of a scientifically satisfactory description of what "space" is likely made of. Originally called the EPOLA, for the "Electron/Positron Lattice," we're suggesting E-PLat to avoid confusion with a certain virus! You'll have to listen to all 4 parts of the interview to form your opinion on whether or not the EPOLA/E-PLat makes more sense to you than Einstein's "purely mathematical" description of a relativistic universe.

* Deriving $10,000.00: ... and quite possibly a Nobel Prize! RSR and Dr. Moore are offering a prize of $10,000.00 to the first person to submit an acceptable technical derivation of the Gravitational Constatn "G" based on the Natural Physics and Structure of the Simhony/EPOLA Model of the Space Vaccuum. (Pre-register this prize right here)

Did I miss something or does the video sort of ignore the fact that the measured speed of light is, IN FACT, always the same.

If the light is moving at 670 million miles per hour in your direction, and you’re already going 60 toward the light source, then you might expect the light be measured to be going 670 million + 60 miles per hour but that isn't what happens. No matter how fast you're going or in what direction, the measured speed of light remains the same.

I mean, they mention the issue but I saw nothing in the theory itself that would explain what would cause clocks to run faster in denser ether.

 

[JudgeRightly]

Did I miss something or does the video sort of ignore the fact that the measured speed of light is, IN FACT, always the same.

Only because they "fixed" the definition of the speed of light.

In other words, as stated in the following video, in 1972 they redefined the meter "in terms of the speed of light so that the units would change with it."

 

[Clete]

Only because they "fixed" the definition of the speed of light.

In other words, as stated in the following video, in 1972 they redefined the meter "in terms of the speed of light so that the units would change with it."

No. That doesn't work because they noticed the signals coming in from the space probe arriving too early.

Also, this observation has nothing to do with the way the meter is defined. Einstein used this constancy of the speed of light as the genesis of his special theory of relativity several decades before 1972 and the effect has been experimentally measured many many times and to a ridiculously high degree of precision. It is a real phenomenon and is not merely an artifact of the definition of the meter.

Now, if light were slowing down over a long period of time then defining the meter in terms of the speed of light would make that unobservable because the meter would change in length in lock step with the changing speed of light but that's quite a different issue.