The Annoyance That Is Setterfield's ZPE

[Admiral Valdemar]

My first thread here on this shiny and new (to me) board, so here goes.

I was recently posting on FreeJesus.net and came along the usual c-decay argument for a young universe as posted by a member called tuppence, supposedly Setterfield's wife.

I noticed that not long ago there was a discussion on a similar topic, but I was wondering if there was anything new or any stuff I missed that may elaborate on the validity (or lack thereof) for this new ZPE or Zero-Point Energy excuse for the linear slowing of lightspeed along with decay rates e.g. for Cobalt etc.

I'm used to fighting the biology and associated fields of this debate, and although I used to be a happy physics student, this stuff is a bit beyond me without my own research eating into more pertinent things, say, my degree dissertation.

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance.

[Ponzi]

Well, here's this guy's webpage, so those of you who know more physics than I do can evaluate it.

http://www.setterfield.org/zpe.htm

I've only heard the term zero point energy being used as a new label for perpetual motion, as the latter term is hard to take seriously any more. However, it looks to me like Setterfield's is unrelated to perpetual motion, and is instead about trying to tweak modern day physics to point to a young earth.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Well, here's this guy's webpage, so those of you who know more physics than I do can evaluate it.

http://www.setterfield.org/zpe.htm

I've only heard the term zero point energy being used as a new label for perpetual motion, as the latter term is hard to take seriously any more. However, it looks to me like Setterfield's is unrelated to perpetual motion, and is instead about trying to tweak modern day physics to point to a young earth.

The gist of it can be found here (http://www.freejesus.net/home/viewtopic.php?t=6056) in terms of this debate. It's basically, as far as I can see, a way of showing lightspeed can slow downat a varying rate to allow it to fit decay rates.

[RBH]

I'm going to ship this to S&S even though it has YEC implications, 'cause there's been previous discussion of (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=109139) Setterfield's ideas there. That discussion even includes a response from Setterfield to Jesse, an S&S Mod, regarding some consequences of his 'theory'. I commend the thread to your attention.

RBH
E/C Moderator

[Schneibster]

My first thread here on this shiny and new (to me) board, so here goes.Welcome!

I was recently posting on FreeJesus.net and came along the usual c-decay argument for a young universe as posted by a member called tuppence, supposedly Setterfield's wife.

I noticed that not long ago there was a discussion on a similar topic, but I was wondering if there was anything new or any stuff I missed that may elaborate on the validity (or lack thereof) for this new ZPE or Zero-Point Energy excuse for the linear slowing of lightspeed along with decay rates e.g. for Cobalt etc.To talk meaningfully about ZPE, we have to start with vacuum fluctuations. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Uncertainty Principle says that the empty vacuum cannot have nothing going on; because we cannot measure them violating mass/energy conservation, all sorts of very fast processes that can occur and then disappear back into the vacuum can happen.

There is a proof that this is actually a description of a real process; it is called the Lamb Shift, and I encourage you to google it, and read at least the Wikipedia article on it.

So, a guy named Casimir comes up with this idea: if you put two metal plates very close together, they should exclude some types of vacuum fluctuations from in between them, because there isn't room for those types. So that means that the energy of the vacuum would be at a lower level in between those plates. There would then be a difference between open space and the space between the plates. If you measure the force for several separations of the plates, you should be able to figure out what the energy is for open space, and of course (since negative energy is meaningless) that means that open empty space has some minimum value of energy that is not zero. The amount that this minimum value represents is the ZPE.

Ponzi was correct in hir observation of cranks and con artists trying to use this in their perpetual motion machines. The problem is that work is done by tapping an energy flow, and energy only flows from places of higher energy to places of lower energy. Thus, to make use of the space between the plates as an energy sink and get free energy from the vacuum, you would need for the ZPE to flow into the space between the plates; this is ridiculous because the energy that could flow there already represents events that are not permitted in that space, and thus no energy flow is possible.

I did as good a review of ZPE in the third page or so of that thread RBH referenced as I have seen here; it might profit you to read it. I hope someone has better references on it than I do, and can give you a web link to more.

Jesse also made a very good point in that thread that I did not notice until just now, so it might be worth pointing out: for this sort of YECishness to work out properly, all sorts of physical constants must vary everywhere in the universe at the same time; and if that is the case, then the variation is happening here as well as out there, and that means that everything was happening here ten times faster just like everywhere else- and evolution and aging of rocks and everything else, although it took only a tenth as long, happened ten times faster- thus, someone living through it would have measured the same 4.5 billion years we think it took!

I dismiss this as a form of Last Thursdayism. You might want to look that up for a laugh.

[JLK]

Welcome Admiral V,
Say hello for me to Helen Penny Fryman Setterfield. A classic creationist nutcase who has been exposed to more refutations of her bogosity than more people are exposed to sunlight. Years and years on CARM and now she has her own playpen. Good luck.

Demand she reveal all the values of the contants that B.S. is now changining. Get him on record.

Just have to quote this:
Faster c and heat output
Question: Wouldn’t the earth and all life have fried to a crisp when light speed was faster?

Setterfield: As far as radioactive heating turning the earth into a plasma is concerned, this is also incorrect. First, the Genesis 1:2 record indicates that the earth started off in a cold state with an ocean covering the surface. This contrasts with current astronomical paradigms, but I consider that we have an eyewitness account here. If we that this as our starting point, plus the more rapid rate of radioactive decay. It is currently accepted that there was/is a region in the earth's mantle from about 1700 km down to a depth of 2700 km which has the radioactive elements concentrated in it.
These elements came to be incorporated in the crust by later geological processes. On this basis, calculation shows that the temperature of the core today, some 7200 years later would be about 5800 degrees with 1900 degrees now at the top of the lower mantle.Priceless.

"The Carbon-14 contents of the shells of the snails of Melanoides tuberculatus living today in artesian springs in
southern Nevada indicate an apparent age of 27,000 years."
Alan C. Riggs, Science, vol 224 (1984) 58-61

Setterfield: Although these quotes are all over a decade old, the basic meaning remains: radiocarbon dating is not reliable for purposes of historic dating. It should be noted, however, that there remains a systematic tendency toward very old dates and this must be accounted for.
BS's credibility destroyed. Well known why marine shelled organisms date old via C14.

Real physicists like Steve Carlip say BS's (then cDK) model was incompatible with the existence of stars;
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=setterfield+group:talk.origins+author:carlip&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&scoring=r&selm=9r002j%241o%241%40woodrow.ucdavis.edu&rnum=1

See also
http://homepage.mac.com/cygnusx1/

The decay of cobalt that has been observed in SN1987A is incompatible with BS's quakery
http://chem.tufts.edu/science/astronomy/SN1987A.html

Guest Comment: Oklo in the West African Republic of Gabon is a remnants of an ancient site where an accident of geology produced, the conditions suitable for a sustained chain reaction to take place - a natural nuclear reactor. This didn't last very long on a geological time scale, but the reaction results are very informative. In particular, because of the way mass and energy are related, they could not have been at variance from our present day observations by any more than one part in ten million; otherwise the natural reactor would not have functioned. And this took place 1.8 billion years ago. M. Maurette, "The Oklo Reactor", Annual Reviews of Nuclear and Particle Science, 26,319 (1976) and A.I Shylakhter, Nature, 264, 340 (1976) and F Dyson and T Damour, "The Oklo Bound on the time variation of the fine-structure constant revisited", Nuclear Physics, B480 37 (1997)
Any significant variation in the relationship between mass and energy - the only variables that determine the speed of light in Einstein's famous e = m c squared - would have to be dated prior to 1.8 billion years ago.

Setterfield responds: There is a discussion of the effects of radioactive decay and natural ore bodies in Ex Nihilo Technical Journal Vol. 1, 1984, pp. 126-129. My reply on those pages was sparked by a question about Oklo and other ore bodies by [fellow nutcase] Bob Gentry.

With high c values, it can be shown that atomic particles moved faster, proportional to c. This included the neutrons produced at Oklo. The high-speed neutrons were not near the uranium nucleii long enough to produce any reaction, just as high-speed neutrons are today. As essentially all the neutrons were in that category when c was higher, the chance of a reaction was significantly lower. The conclusion is that neutron induced reactions in ores, though minimal now, would have been even more minimal with higher light speed, so no chain reaction would occur. For a fuller discussion, refer to the original article.The enormously studied Oklo then didn't leave all the perfectly measured decay chains resulting from fission, known with mutually confirming certainty, except for exactly the expected isotopes which would be leached away by water? Is BS advocating Omphalism?

Note Setterfield originally claimed that the correlation coefficient for his fit to cDK data was .99999999 to about 8 significant figures. Has anything ever been published in scientific literature to rival that? No author who had actually even the foggiest idea of what a correlation coefficient was, and who even eyballed the cDK data, could have thought for a second that it would be .99999…. Any competent author would have noticed that, any referee would have noticed and rejected the paper for that reason alone, a competent editor would have returned it to the author without sending it to a referee. Any journal reader who saw such a boner would immediately characterize the author as grossly incompetent, would stop reading the paper and probably anything else from that author.

Creationists are a forgiving lot. Although some creationists did finally, if belatedly, come to the conclusion that Setterfield really has no idea of what he’s writing about, he remains accepted among many. His crap keeps floating to the surface of their intellectual watering holes, to be consumed anew by the unsuspecting.

[ohwilleke]

There are legitimate physicists who tinker with ZPE and NASA even funds one.

Quantum mechanics takes the position that even a vacuum has non-zero energy. It falls right out of the equations.

Mainstream cosmology embraces a similar concept called "dark energy" which posits that the accellerating expansion of the universe is due to an evenly spread energy field and that this accounts of 70% of all matter-energy in the universe.

The problem is that the QM ZPE fields and the dark energy levels are empirically orders of magnitude apart (with the QM numbers being much larger).

ZPE folks try to use a different baseline to reconcile the two (basically arguing that it ZPEs don't count in general relativity for gravitational purposes, only their slight fluxuations do).

One of the big ZPE theory arguments is that ZPE is responsible for inertia and that perhaps it can be suppressed (this is why NASA likes it).

There are a great number of theories that propose ways that redshift relationships used to determine the distance to the stars is wrong. But, there are significant limitations on how wrong those redship relationships can be, because in our local group of stars, the redshift-distance relationship has been cross checked using paralax measurements (basically comparing the angle at which a star appears at one point in the year and hence on one side of the sun, to the angle at which a star appears six months later on the other side of the sun, and then triangulating).

There are also certain types of stars for which local experience show very predictable behavior in terms of luminosity, color, etc. (e.g. Cepheids and "standard candles") allowing quite safe extrapolation of the redshift relationship to much greater distances for certain classes of objects.

I personally wouldn't be surprised if there were some classes of objects that had "intrinsic redshift" which spoof the usual relationship from certain objects (quasars perhaps), or if the redshift relationship differed slightly from theory at distances many times in excess of what we have measured via paralax (e.g. due to slight residual gravity fields in deep space that cause time dialation not accounted for in standard measurements that become significant in the aggregate at very long distances). But, even if these alternative theories of redshift are correct (and many, like a pure version of "tired light" have been disproven) you still end up with an expanding or steady state universe that is billions and billions of years old.

[Schneibster]

ohwilleke, NASA has discovered the idea of Higgs field suppression, i.e. Lensman-style "inertialess drive?" Hey, that's pretty quick for government types- Doc Smith only released those books a blink of an eye ago, in 1935!!!

I've been waiting for someone to come up with a plausible Higgs field suppressor for quite some time now. :D

[ohwilleke]

ohwilleke, NASA has discovered the idea of Higgs field suppression, i.e. Lensman-style "inertialess drive?" Hey, that's pretty quick for government types- Doc Smith only released those books a blink of an eye ago, in 1935!!!

I've been waiting for someone to come up with a plausible Higgs field suppressor for quite some time now. :D

Discovered, no. Paid for research into, yes.

[Schneibster]

Discovered, no. Errrmmm, I said "discovered the idea of," not "discovered a way to implement." I doubt at this point that there is a possible implementation, and if there is, I doubt even more strongly that a living organism would survive that implementation.