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Gravitational time dilation made distant clocks run faster (Talk.Origins)

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Response Article
This article (Gravitational time dilation made distant clocks run faster (Talk.Origins)) is a response to a rebuttal of a creationist claim published by Talk.Origins Archive under the title Index to Creationist Claims.


Claim CE412:

The Earth is near the center of the universe, at the bottom of a deep gravitational well. Relativistic effects result in billions of years passing in the rest of the universe while only thousands pass near the Earth. This explains how multi-billion-year-old stars and galaxies can exist in a universe only a few thousand years old.

Source:


CreationWiki response:

This is a misrepresentation of Dr. Humphreys' White Hole Cosmology. It shows that Talk Origins did not read the cited sources, did not understand them, or is deliberately misrepresenting them.

According to Russell Humphreys' cosmology, today this gravitational well is quite shallow such that what little time dilation there is more than offset by the expansion of space. The time dilation would have been significantly greater in the past when the universe was smaller. This is actually an oversimplification of the White Hole Cosmology, but it shows Talk.Origins main error of assuming that the time dilation effect still exists to any significant degree.


(Talk.Origins quotes in blue)

1. Gravitational time dilation, if it existed, should be observable. On the contrary, we observe (from the periods of Cepheid variable stars, from orbital rates of binary stars, from supernova extinction rates, from light frequencies, etc.) that such time dilation does not exist. There is some time dilation corresponding with Hubble's Law (further objects have greater red shifts), but this is due to the well-understood expansion of the universe, and it is not nearly extreme enough to fit more than 10 billion years into less than 10,000.

Talk Origins clearly does not understand Dr. Humphreys' White Hole Cosmology. They seem to think that the gravitational time dilation is still significant. The fact is that according to the White Hole Cosmology the white hole and its gravity well no longer exist. The little gravitational time dilation that today would result from the Earth being near the center is so small that it would be completely offset by the opposite time dilation caused by the expansion of space. The large amount of gravitational time dilation in the White Hole Cosmology no longer exists, therefore Talk.Origins' objection is erroneous.


2. Humphreys tries to use clocks in the earth's frame of reference. But the cosmos is much older than the earth. Judging from the heavy elements in the Sun and rest of the solar system, our sun is a second generation star at least. Billions of years must have passed for the first stars to have formed, shone, and novaed, for the gasses from those novas to have gathered into new star systems, and for the earth to form and cool in one such system. The billions of years before the earth are not accounted for in Humphreys' model.

This objection is based entirely on conclusions of the Big Bang Cosmology, and the White Hole Cosmology is a totally different cosmological model. You cannot use conclusions of one cosmology to disprove an opposing cosmology. This objection is just another case of a logical fallacy, which could be called "your theory does not work under my theory, so your theory must be wrong".

3. Humphreys' theory assumes that the earth is in a huge gravity well. The evidence contradicts this assumption. If the earth were in such a gravity well, light from distant galaxies should be blue-shifted. Instead, it is red-shifted.

Talk Origins seem to have a problem with the tenses of the verb "to be," so lets outline it for them.

Third person singular tense of the verb "to be."

Past Present Future
was is will be

Okay, now that we have our verb tenses worked out, let's spell it out as simply as possible. Humphreys' theory assumes that the earth was (past tense) in a huge gravity well, not is (present tense). So any objection to the White Hole Cosmology based on comparing present observations to a past state is erroneous.


4. See Conner and Page [1998] and Conner and Ross [1999] for several other technical objections.

Which Dr. Humphreys has responded to, a fact conveniently omitted by Talk Origins. Russell Humphreys answers Various Critics

5. There is a great deal of other independent evidence that the earth is very old.

All of which assume uniformitarianism and are highly questionable. Furthermore, this is evidence against the Earth being very old and there is evidence that points to the Earth being only 6,000-8000 years old.

If there were any substance to Humphreys' proposal, at least some competent cosmologists would build on it and share in the Nobel Prize. Instead, they dismiss it as worthless.

Actually, it is this objection that lacks substance. The simple fact is that the Big Bang is so entrenched that at least at this time, any alternative cosmology probably has a snowball's chance in a supernova of getting a fair hearing in the general scientific community. Besides that, the White Hole Cosmology is not a totally naturalistic theory so as such it would be considered dead on arrival to some one that Talk.Origins would consider a competent cosmologist.

However despite this, at least some aspects of the White Hole Cosmology have been proposed be someone that Talk.Origins might consider a competent cosmologist.

Reference: New Theory: Universe Born in a Black Hole


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