In this gripping episode of Real Science Radio, hosts Fred Williams and Dr. Pete Moore delve into the controversial world of relativity. From discussing the practical implications of relativity in industry to exploring the historical Michelson-Morley experiment, Dr. Moore argues for alternative models that could reshape our understanding of time and space. Tune in to explore these thought-provoking ideas and learn how faith-driven science offers a different perspective on the universe.
Most people think E equals MC squared proves relativity. Exactly. But there’s something else about E equals MC squared that maybe even you don’t know, and that’s this.
SPEAKER 05 :
and DNA Scholars can’t explain it all away Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin’ it real
SPEAKER 06 :
Welcome back to Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams, and joining me today in studio is Dr. Pete Moore. Dr. Moore was a metallurgist, an engineer, and a researcher who’s worked extensively in the oil and gas industry, including the Director of Industry Standards and R&D for U.S. Steel Tubular Products. He’s also a longtime member of the Greater Houston Creation Association, deeply interested in how faith and science interact. So, Dr. Moore, it’s great to have you on the show and in studio at Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, thanks, Fred and Doug, for having me here. I’m glad to be here.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, Dr. Moore, I’m glad to have you here because today we’re going to dive into one of the most, well, two of the most interesting, That’s the thing, Dr. Moore. I’m glad you’re here because relativity has always confused me. But let me just say it’s controversial. It’s one or two or maybe more of one of the most controversial areas of modern physics. Einstein’s special and general relativity. These ideas have reshaped the way the whole world thinks about time and space. But you, Dr. Moore, you spent decades in the steel industry working in precision environments. How did relativity come into play in your professional world?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, fortunately, in the steel industry, we have to depend on facts. and we didn’t have to have a theory of relativity that might be so abstract we wouldn’t be able to melt steel. However, I would say the biggest impact that relativity had on me was when I would converse with others at creation conferences and others, I began to realize how many people within the creation movement accept the Einstein theory of general relativity. And of course, I was a critic of those. And so sometimes there were some strained conversations back and forth. And I guess that impacted me more. But I never heard a good answer. And over the decades, I got stronger and stronger that there is a better model than the theory of relativity and something that could take its place.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, wow. So it wasn’t in metallurgical work that you found relativity necessary or unnecessary or where you kind of learned or figured out that maybe you had some disagreements. It was more on the creationist side?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, I found that so many creationists over the years have been adopting the theory of relativity to explain starlight and time and other things. And once you do that, then you’ve pretty much embraced it. But if you go further back several more decades in time, that was not the case. We had Dr. Thomas Barnes, the past president of the Creation Research Society, and others were fierce critics of the theory of evolution. But those men have passed on, and the people that are now going to these conferences have slowly accepted, at least for the most part, the theory of relativity. So I think it’s time to get back to basics, and I’m glad that this program will give us an opportunity to at least explore, at least talk about a possible alternative.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, and Dr. Thomas Barnes, he was a critic of special relativity, not just of evolution. And it’s how things have changed, Dr. Moore. We were both at the ICC conference, and if you were to present a paper, you’re not allowed to present a paper against special relativity. So it’s really ingrained the creation movement. I, for years personally, have opposed the idea that time is relative. not just scripturally, but over time, even scientifically. And that’s what we’re gonna get into in this show. So Dr. Moore has this presentation on the theory of relativity from the Einstein point of view, and we’re gonna dive into that. But before we get started, I wanted to play a brief clip from the Dialect channel. I highly recommend that channel on YouTube. They’ve got a lot of great material on the physics of why special relativity and general relativity have serious problems. And we’re going to play a clip right now on just what special relativity is for those who are wondering. And it’s not an easy thing, but this gives you a general idea.
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Let us consider a classic relativity scenario. Your friend gets on a rocket ship and blasts off towards Mars at nearly the speed of light. During this journey, his clocks tick slower, his lengths contract, and when he arrives to his destination, he has aged less than everyone back on Earth. But that’s not the only side to this story. Because from your friend’s perspective, events transpired somewhat differently. His clocks actually ticked at a normal rate. And it was, in fact, the distance between Earth and Mars that, in contracting, allowed him to reach his destination in a shorter time. Meanwhile, before he reaches Mars, he perceives that less time has actually elapsed on your clocks, since you were traveling at near the speed of light relative to him. Only once he decelerates to land on Mars will his and your perception of time and space once more be reconciled. This is the theory of relativity in a nutshell, a theory often described by the average person as totally trippy.
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All right. So did he say totally trippy? OK, so that that’s always given me pause that part of it. So, Dr. Moore, maybe you can help. I need help just understanding the theory. Well, first of all, can you explain to me what is the difference between general relativity and special relativity?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, actually, that’s some of my first slides. So if we could, why don’t we kind of move through those? Because you’re kind of reading my mind. Those are the right questions to ask before we get started. So with that, we will go ahead and advance to the first slides that kind of guide us through this whole subject matter. I wanted to start with Dr. Peter Beckman. who was a professor at the University of Colorado, he had this to say toward the critics of the theory of relativity. So here’s his comment to the critics, and he was a critic, by the way. It says, “…they merely show that there may be something radically wrong with the theory of relativity, but they have no full substitute to offer.” He goes on to say, to beat the Einstein theory, it’s not good enough to provide an alternate that does equally well. You have to show that it can do better. Can it be done? And so as we go through this, I will actually try to offer one possibility, one alternate theory that I do believe does better. So in talking about the theory of relativity, I think we want to start by answering the first two questions. And it’s the one, Doug, that you asked. What is it? But I also want to go on and find out why is it weird? A lot of people are not really totally aware of the basic reasons that it is weird. Well, first of all, we go back to Albert Einstein. And he, in 1905, put forth the special theory of relativity. And this particular branch of relativity addresses objects that are going with a constant velocity and in straight lines. So that’s very simple movement. And then on the foundation of special relativity, he then, 10 years later, proposed the general theory of relativity. Now the general relativity would address not constant velocity, but accelerating velocity, and travel in curved lines, not just straight lines. And that was the basic difference between special and general. Now today we will mostly address special, that is the foundation. Because if you crack the foundation, then the other one will fall. So let’s kind of focus more today on special relativity, because it’s hard enough, and then we’ll continue on. So special relativity in 1905 was one of his postulates. He had several. But the first thing he said about his theory was that when you look at vacuum space, there is no ether foundation. In other words, vacuum space is nothing. So between, say, Earth and Mars, all that vacuum space, there’s actually nothing there.
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Zero.
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And there’s a foundation.
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Okay, and so, Dr. Moore, if I’m not mistaken, in the centuries past, in the scientific world, even going back into what’s called the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the scientific age, the theory of an ether was prevalent, right?
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dominant it was actually dominant and so that made him somewhat radical when he said it doesn’t even exist there is no ether foundation and that was his position in 1905. now his first postulate for the special relativity was that the laws of physics are the same with respect to the observer in all inertial frames of reference and what that meant was that there could be no absolute motion that you could detect. In other words, you don’t really know if you’re even moving around the sun or the sun is moving around you. There’s no absolute motion that you can detect with scientific instruments. That was his first postulate. His second postulate was the speed of light in a vacuum is constant with respect to any observer regardless of their motion or the motion of the light source and what that meant was there was no absolute length and there was no absolute time and so those are the the direct results of those two postulates No absolute motion, no absolute length, no absolute time. Everything is relative. So I went on to Google and had their AI. I asked the question, why is the theory of special relativity weird? And this was the answer. Special relativity’s strangeness stems from how it challenges our everyday intuition about space and time. Time dilates. Lengths contract. So, time passes slower for a moving object, and objects moving at high speed appear shorter, smaller. Now, Sir Isaac Newton, his thoughts of time and space were completely the opposite. He talked about in Principia, absolute time and mathematical time of itself and from its own nature flows equitably without relation to anything external. And then for absolute space in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. So Sir Isaac Newton, he was of the position that there is a foundation of time, there is a foundation of space, which is completely different than what Einstein was proposing. Let’s talk about time a little bit so you can see the weirdness of what Einstein was proposing. Here we have a stopwatch. It can do 60 seconds for one revolution. We calibrate it against a cesium clock. We verify that one 360 degree rotation happens on this clock in 60 seconds. We’re quite sure of it. We then do something to that clock. We take and we dip it in a bucket of water, we let everything come to equilibrium, get all the air bubbles out of it, and then we take that same cesium clock, and now we notice that it is not doing one rotation in 60 seconds. Strangely, it’s now doing one rotation in 120, so it’s going twice as slow. The question then, to the rational person that’s watching this, would be, did time slow down, or did the measurement of time slow down?
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So did the clock slow down or was it time itself?
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That’s right. Now, Sir Isaac Newton told us that time is absolute and is outside of anything. So the water would have nothing to do with Sir Isaac Newton’s vision of absolute time. But this is exactly where we’re at when it comes to the theory of relativity. Now, Sir Isaac Newton gave us a warning. And in his warning, which you find in the definitions part of the early part of Principia, he warned about confusing, and I call it capital T-I-M-E, time, with measured time, small t-i-m-e. He said, be careful. If you are sloppy with your language… you get unusual and purely mathematical expressions. So when you confuse these things, you might come up with some stuff that doesn’t sound right. And so we have a cesium clock. Oh, and by the way, he had even… a more stern warning. People who do this, if they confuse absolute time with a measured time, they do strain the sacred scriptures or the sacred writings. So he felt that the Bible and that sacred writing, God is in control of absolute time and nothing can touch it. And people who then confuse a clock slowing down with slowing absolute time do strain the sacred writings. And you could go further. Instead of a bucket of water, I could have took a hammer and smashed that clock to where it wasn’t running at all. And now that it’s completely stopped, did time stop? Or did the measurement of time stop?
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Yeah. That’s a great analogy.
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But unfortunately, even PhDs go right over this. They don’t heed his warning. And like Einstein, they begin to come up with stuff that doesn’t sound very logical. In fact, it sounds weird, where time can slow down. Now, let’s take a cesium clock and put it on that… rocket ship or that airplane, rocket plane, and take it a 50,000 foot level of the Earth’s atmosphere and see what happens to it. And maybe we notice that that clock is going slower up there. The same question. Did time slow down or did the cesium clock itself physically slow down?
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Well, so can I jump in? Intuitively, it’s the clock. Intuitively. Yes. Right? That’s just me as a high school, barely graduated high school type of guy. I would say it’s the clock.
SPEAKER 03 :
Exactly. However, we also have a cesium clock in the orbit around Mars. And with that cesium clock, it sends a radio signal. Here it comes from the top. See that radio signal? And it gets to here on Earth. And another cesium clock measures it and says, wow. that light beam got here really fast compared to what it should have, or it got here really slow. Then the question is, well, did time slow down, or did the speed of light vary in this coming to Earth? And again, if you mix these up, then you will fall into the Isaac Newton warning. Watch out when you are looking at cesium clocks and saying things are slowing down or not. And we’ll get back into this subject about these signals coming from Mars. Indeed, how people just said, well, the light can’t do anything but one speed. Therefore, time slowed down. That was the conclusion.
SPEAKER 06 :
And you sent an interesting video to me before the show a couple of days ago, smoking to grass Tyson. Neil deGrasse Tyson, they asked him, who’s the best scientist of all time? Did he say Einstein?
SPEAKER 03 :
Absolutely not. No. It was Sir Isaac Newton. And I was surprised because I have held that view for decades. I just had no idea that Mr. Tyson would also hold that same idea. I looked at what Google’s AI says about that question, what is the space of space-time fabric? And it said, it replied, the space of space-time fabric isn’t a literal physical thing. Now isn’t that interesting? It’s like they’re falling in Isaac’s warning here. Things are starting to get unusual. It fits his warning perfectly.
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Yes. A mathematical is going to collapse into a mathematical framework.
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And Einstein used the very same words. Things can become just mathematical, not real, mathematical. AI is confirming Newton’s warning here. I’d also like to take one step back and look at what the biblical concept of time is. Time had a beginning that initiated at the first creative act of God. We all know very well that’s Genesis 1.1. One of the limitations God imposed on the creation of material objects is that those objects cannot move from one place to another instantaneously. If you could move instantaneously to any other place in the universe, then you could move to all places instantaneously. You could then be omnipresent, which is a glory attribute of God, and he reserves that only for himself. The Bible tells you, my glory I will not give to another. In the process of time is what the Bible talks about. In other words, he won’t let objects go instantaneous. So if they can’t go instantaneous, then there’s a process where energy has to be directed to an object with a vector pointing in a certain direction to make that object move. And all of that cannot happen instantaneous. And so as you go through scripture, you will see the phrase, in the process of time. Right.
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Okay. So I think, you know, we probably have a slight disagreement there, but I think we’re mostly on the same page. So… We would position it, and we’ve talked about this off and on for decades at Real Science Radio, is, you know, the thing about did God create time on Genesis 1-1? And we don’t think he did. We think time’s just an abstract notion of one moment passing to the next. So we’re kind of a little bit not quite in agreement on that, but that’s okay.
SPEAKER 04 :
Very good. Yeah. Yeah, that’s assuming that the counting of something could be an abstract concept or a non-physical concept is a lot more likely than something like space is not a physical concept because I can see, touch, measure, utilize physical space. well I guess you can time too so that’s why this is such an interesting discussion and I’m open to your thoughts Dr. Moore because the one thing I’ve become more convinced of just in your few slides helping me understand relativity is that Professor Einstein and the rest of the world they don’t have it figured out
SPEAKER 03 :
And they actually begin to change their opinion. And we’ll get to that in some of these later slides where even Einstein began to change his opinion. So the question then is, how was relativity born? All of a sudden in 1905, there it was. But why? What was pressing Einstein to feel he had to make this theory? And to answer that, you have to go back to 1887, where Michelson and Morley ran an experiment called the Michelson-Morley experiment. And they did it to detect the absolute motion relative to the ether. Well, you have to remember, first of all, Einstein is later going to say the ether doesn’t even exist. But at this juncture in history, everyone felt it did exist. And then they came up with an experiment they felt would finally show that the Earth moves relative to a preferred reference frame called the ether. So if we look at the ether theory that was then in place when Michelson and Morley began their work, Vacuum space is made of something real and physical. It has measurable electric properties and it has measurable magnetic properties. And this is well known that you can take a a jar and pump out all the air, and then go in and test for electrical properties, permittivity of free space, and then you can also see that it has magnetic properties, permeability of free space. Also, they knew that Maxwell’s light equations are based on a real ether, and boy, those equations work really good. And so that made it pretty strong that the ether must exist. Maxwell proved that the speed of light was equal to a formula that involved the properties of electrical and magnetic properties of free space. So it must be something. How can nothing have those properties? Then the ether carries the light and dictates the properties of the light, like going in a straight line and things of this nature. And then it was also thought that the ether is a 3D stationary foundation that fills the entire universe. So it had a foundation. Now, from a biblical worldview, we expect the universe to have a foundation. The eternal creator, Jesus, is the foundation of all existence, 1 Corinthians 3.11. That foundation which is laid, which can be none other than Jesus Christ. Romans 1.20, it tells us that the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen In other words, when God made the universe, he put his fingerprints all over it. A physical foundation is a fingerprint of the spiritual one. David said, So he left his fingerprints there. And as you see, the attributes of the universe, they speak loudly about the attributes of God. So if the universe is… ultimately huge, that’s just the effect. The cause of it has to be bigger. If the universe has a great deal of energy in it, when you sum it all up, that’s just the effect. The cause is telling you whatever made it had to have more than that. So his fingerprints are on the universe, and we expect that. As art reveals the artist, creation reveals the creator. So, this thing of the ether being the foundation, that fits in a biblical worldview. We would expect, since God is the foundation, when he creates the universe, he’ll make a foundation for it as well. So, Michelson-Morley took that ether theory, and they decided, if we take some light beams, we could use these to prove that the ether exists. So they assume the ether is stationary and that the Earth is moving through it. They assume the Earth’s orbital speed was about 67,000 miles per hour. And they felt if we recombine light beams that we’ve split and bring them back together, they should interfere if we do it in the right way. And if the ether is real, we will see an interference and that will prove that the ether is there and that there is a preferred reference frame in the universe. So they carried out their experiment and they recombined the light memes and guess what? It did not produce interference. What? This null result is both shocking and weird. Michelson himself stated, oh no, I have created a monster. He was not expecting a null result. He knew the ether existed, and this was saying it might not exist. And so what prompted Einstein in getting his theory was this strange and weird result of the Michelson-Morley experiment. Now, to show the strangeness of the Michelson-Morley experiment, because most people don’t know that, I want to take a few diagrams here and go over the speed of sound to show you how simple that is, and then we’ll see that the same experiment can be applied to light. So if you take a 10 meter car and you set up a mechanism where you can shoot a sound beam to the reflector and back, the car standing still makes the round trip in 0.058 seconds. You can both calculate that and then when you do the experiment it is exactly that. So everything looks really good when the car is standing still. So this time we will do the same experiment but the car will be moving forward 60 miles per hour as the sound beam is progressing.
SPEAKER 02 :
Stop the tape, stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That’s Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
SPEAKER 05 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune into Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real. That’s what I’m talking about.
In this gripping episode of Real Science Radio, hosts Fred Williams and Dr. Pete Moore delve into the controversial world of relativity. From discussing the practical implications of relativity in industry to exploring the historical Michelson-Morley experiment, Dr. Moore argues for alternative models that could reshape our understanding of time and space. Tune in to explore these thought-provoking ideas and learn how faith-driven science offers a different perspective on the universe.
