Universe 14 billion years old and seing stars???

[britz]

I realize this is just a little off the topic of long range hunting but I can't help myself. Lots of people here with real scientific minds so I'm gunna go ahead and try to start something up.

I do not intend for this to be a religious debate or anything like that. No offence intended.

So, anyway I'm a bit of a science channel watcher and have always been amaized by the big bang and other stuff surounding it.

A lightyear is a measure of distance - the distance light will travel in one year.

now they are able to see stars that are estimated to be about almost 14 billion light years away... these same scientists also estimate that the universe is only about 14 billion years old.

Here is the question that has been eating at me since I first heard these findings: How are we are able to see so far away. In order to see that far, we or they had to have either traveled much faster than the speed of light for a fair amount of time inorder to get that far apart. The universe is still expanding but not anything close to the speed of light. Or am I missing something here??? I'm getting a headach thinking about it

Sorry if this isn't the kind of stuff you guys talk about, but I couldn't help myself lol!

Later, Mark.

 

[MontanaRifleman]

I dont mind getting into this discussion. However, from my perspective, you cant keep God (religon) out of it.

When you obsreve the stars, you are not looking at the starts themselves but their images so to speak. If a star 100 light years away goes out tomorrow, you will not know it for 100 yrs. That's how we are able to see stars 14 bllion light years away. We see light that is 14 billion years old. When you see the red fireball of the sun halfway behind the horizon. you are not seeing the sun because it has already set. It takes about 9 minutes for the sun's light to travel to earth.

Now having said that, I believe that God created the universe about 6000 yrs ago. So that light is really not 14 billion years old. How do we see it then? There are several theories on that. One I have heard is that when God created the stars He cuased a Big Bang like event. Only He did it in one day and not over 14 billion years. He basically hyper expanded the universe in one day. Another theory is that He created the stars basically where they are with light in place, so-to-speak, through out the universe. I've heard another explanation, but it is very technical and I wouldn't be able to repeat it.

It's all kind of mind blowin g when you really start thinking about it.

 

[jmden]

Does Distant Starlight Prove the Universe Is Old? - Answers in Genesis

Try this site to get a very different perspective, yet equally scientific approach to what we all see all the time on the TV and in the press. AIG has dozens of PhD's on staff researching for them.

Some at LRH, more likely than other places, might be aware of the decidely left-leaning media machine in western nations. Well...that very much applies to the issue of origins as well. Where are we getting our information? And, is a true discussion of all the perspectives even allowed? Even though I don't agree ultimately with his conclusion on origins, Ben Stein's recent movie 'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed' is a great starting place to start to decide if we are even being fed fair and balanced information on this most important dicussion. What you believe about origins of the universe, if you are knowledgably consistent with your thinking and philosophy throughout life, is exceedingly important.

Like Montana said above, I believe the earth to be not more than a few thousand years old and that it is impossible to have a discussion like this without mentioning the God of the Bible--just to be clear what 'God' I'm talking about. There is a tremendous amount of evidence to prove a young earth, most of us have just never been 'fed' anything but the contrary and so the idea of a young earth becomes ridiculous.

The website linked above has many other answers to questions concerning origins. Once you start getting different information than what is typically 'fed' to us and start contemplating it and realizing the incredible assumptions undergirding the mainstream origins and 'old-earth' arguments, it really makes you think, if you are willing to keep an open mind in the process.

 

[britz]

THanks for the replies guys! Ya it would be pretty hard to leave God out of it if you believe in the 6000 year old earth. No problem here, I hope this is a clasic case of agreeing to disagree.

 

[britz]

I dont mind getting into this discussion. However, from my perspective, you cant keep God (religon) out of it.

When you obsreve the stars, you are not looking at the starts themselves but their images so to speak. If a star 100 light years away goes out tomorrow, you will not know it for 100 yrs. That's how we are able to see stars 14 bllion light years away. We see light that is 14 billion years old. When you see the red fireball of the sun halfway behind the horizon. you are not seeing the sun because it has already set. It takes about 9 minutes for the sun's light to travel to earth.

D

I understand that looking at distant stars you are actually seeing an image of what it looked like 13.5 billion years ago (for a star 13.5 billion light years away). My problem is that if it is that far away, then the universe had to expand at an average speed of just short of the speed of light inorder for us to see that far. ... getting a headach again lol

 

[whitely]

As long as we are off topic ...

I had this discussion in graduate school with a professor in theoretical physics. The question is that, before the big bang, where energy was transformed into matter, how could one measure time? Time can be thought of as a measure of disorder in the universe, but before the universe was filled with matter there would be no way to measure time (as we imagined it), since there would be no disorder relative to a given state of the system. This being the case, we have no idea how "old" the universe really is, if you consider events preceding the big bang.

Along these lines, if one assumes that the universe will at some point in the future contract, and collapse on itself, reforming this pre big bang energy state, time will at that point end, as will all traces of events before that point.

The interesting question then becomes, how many times has this cycle repeated? Everyone assumes that we are in the first cycle, but this could be the 3,988,776,232 rd cycle of the expansion and contraction events that form and then destroy the known universe.

 

[britz]

I've wondered about which cycle we are in too... Next thing you know we will be talking about live on other planets lol!

 

[Buffalobob]

Interestingly enough the foundations for quantum mechanics were developed by Max Planck who specialized in the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics is why a bullet is not like a drill bit, so I doubt you would find Max shopping for bullets in the Craftsman section of Sears.

 

[whitely]

Interestingly enough the foundations for quantum mechanics were developed by Max Planck who specialized in the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics is why a bullet is not like a drill bit, so I doubt you would find Max shopping for bullets in the Craftsman section of Sears.

Planck, Boltzmann, Schrodinger, Bohr, Dirac, those were the good old days. I was going to get H<Y>=e<Y> tatooted on my arm during grad school!

So, two years ago I was driving up to Douglas, Wyoming to go PD hunting, and was way "out there", when I turned on the AM stations. I hit the seek button, and a talk radio station popped up and the first words I heard were quantum mechanics. I had to listen, and it was absolutely the most intelligent conversation I have ever listened to on a radio. They were discussing something known as quantum feedback, where in observation of events, causes the realization of those events (out of the many possible events that exist), which in turn selects for various past events in history. In effect, the things we do today, affects events that have occurred in the past , thus creating our own history in the present. It was the most fascinating 1 1/2 hours of radio I have ever listened to, bar none.