Introduction to this series
URL to the video
Please read the introductory blog to the series (linked above) first if you haven't yet done so to get the correct context for this blog.
In this episode Dr. Humphreys proposes a biblical cosmology which should explain:
- How light got here fast
- Near/far galaxy similarity
- Red shifts
- the "Pioneer anomaly"
Dr. Humphreys claims that God made everything as water first and created an expanse in the midst of the waters. He does not explain how all other elements in the periodic system except for hydrogen and oxygen came to be, just that the water "below" the expanse was transfered into the earth. I can only assume that this is a roundabout way of supernaturally creating the elements in the periodic system.
He also claims that there is still water "above" the expanse and even quantifies it as a mass, 20 times greater than all galaxies combined. He does not provide any evidence for this notion (let alone for the quantification of its mass) and does not explain what is keeping such a large mass from crushing the universe in itself. It seems just a hypothesis to make his model work, but he does not offer a method to assert or falsify it.
His presentation is of a geocentric cosmology and even though he rushes to say that the earth is "not necessarily exactly in the center of the universe", it is claimed to be "near that". I wonder what he means with "near the center". The earth goes around the sun at appr. 150 million km and the complete solar system goes around the center of the milky way at appr. 26.000 light years (2.5 x 1017 km). Cosmologists claim that all galaxies (with the exception of close galaxies that are on a collision course) recede from each other with no apparent center, but even if we let that slide, given the place of the earth in the galaxy, we can hardly pin the earth as the center if there are around 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone, many of which have planets. Why should we single out the earth? If Dr. Humphreys wants to claim a geocentric cosmology, he should first give evidence of a center to the universe in the first place, then give evidence that our galaxy is in that center and then show the significance of the earth in that galaxy. He's done neither.
Humphreys uses the biblical verses that say that God "stretched out the heavens like a curtain" to indicate the expansion of space-time. That is a little less than honest IMO because most of those verses, including the one he presented (Isa 40:22) make the analogy with a tent. The Hebrew word used there (אהל, o'-hel) is pretty unambiguous and lines up clearly with the common cosmological idea of the bronze age, where the earth was flat and a half spherical (tent-like) dome was above that and held the heavenly bodies (think of the famous Egyptian artwork where the air-god Shu holds up the sky bu forming a dome around the earth).
His trampoline analogy is interesting, but take note that the earth crossing a "timeless zone" is because it passes a Schwarzschild radius of a black hole! All matter would collapse under those circumstances that he so conveniently calls "the timeless zone". The water, the land and the plants of the third day and earlier would not have survived this ordeal, even if all of space-time is stretched enough afterwards so matter could exist.
Humphreys talks about the farther away galaxies looking similar to the closer ones. What is he smoking? Has he actually looked at the various Hubble deep field images? The farther away galaxies are not discernible as spirals or ellipticals, quite the contrary. They are generally smaller and more often irregular. He should visit the Galaxy Zoo project which is a citizens project to morphologically classify galaxies and till now, 10 million galaxies have been classified. I think Humphreys suffers from a severe condition of confirmation bias.
His explanation of the red shift phenomenon is consistent with the science. It is indeed the expansion of space-time and not the Doppler effect that causes the red shift. He claims that this stretching of space is explaining the slowing down of the Pioneer. If the stretching would be significant enough (at these distances) to make the "trampoline dent" less shallow to explain the smaller measurement of Pioneer's distance, it would be overcome tremendously by expansion itself and the Pioneer would recede a lot faster than is currently witnessed.
Pioneer should be a good lesson for people who want to insert God in a scientific knowledge gap. The slowing down of the Pioneer has been a puzzle for decades and if we would have taken the "God did it" route, we would not be able to explain it. Luckily, we didn't so in July 2012 the anomaly has been explained completely as "radiation pressure". Pioneer is losing heat to space at the opposide side of the sun and this is causing a slight but measurable slowing down of the probe. To put it in perspective, the speed that the probe is currently traveling at is more that 43000 km/h and the slowing down rate is appr. 1 km/h over 10 years.
What did I miss?
- There was no mention of the cosmic microwave background and more specifically, his hypothesis does not explain the correlation between the cold spots in the CMB (as measured by COBE, WMAP and the Planck satellite) with the galactic super clusters. At least the data from COBE was known in the late naughts.
- He did not explain the speeding up of the space-time expansion which was a known phenomenon since the late 90s.
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