Bible Science Forum

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Do Distant Light Emissions Prove a Finite One-Way Speed of Light?

Does the fact that we see light from very distant galaxies prove that the one-way speed of light is finite? Dr. Jason Lisle responds to this question. The conventionality thesis plays a critical role in understanding the issue, suggesting that measurements usually assume an isotropic light speed.

John Gideon Hartnett
5–7 minutes
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Meteor streaking across the star-filled Milky Way galaxy above an observatory dome silhouette
Figure 1: A light ray emitted by atoms in a distant galaxy seen by a large Earth telescope.

Recently I was discussing the one-way and two-way speed of light with a professional physicist friend of mine. The discussion revolved around how to measure the incoming one-way speed wherein I tried to stress the conventionality thesis.

The discussion started after he asked me about how do I resolve the young universe biblical timescale (less than 10,000 years) with measurements of galaxy light and their spectra seen in Earth telescopes from sources in the very distant universe, meaning billions of light-years away. Surely billions of light-years must mean billions of years of travel time. But of course that includes the inherit and usually unstated assumption that the light travelled at the canonical two-way speed of light c = 299,792.458 km/s. That means it is assumed to be isotropic, which means the same speed in all directions, because that is all that has ever been measured experimentally.

Watch this pretty good video explanation of why it is impossible to measure the one-way speed of light. And why it must be chosen by convention in order to calculate any physics.

Now back to the question my friend posed.

Imagine a ray of light coming from a distant source. The oscillations in the atoms produce radiation which we observe on Earth. Imagine that ray full of wave crests and troughs as the source atoms oscillate. They fill the space from the source to the observer with a contiguous stream. So that proves the one-way speed incoming to the observer is finite, otherwise if it was infinite (i.e. no travel time) there would be no time for those wave crests and troughs to accumulate. But we see the galaxies and see their spectra.

At the time we had the discussion I could not quickly see where the assumption was, and there always is one, so I asked Dr. Jason Lisle, who should be given all credit for introducing these concepts to the creationist community back in 2003. As an aside, I was the only referee on his original paper at that time, who saw the merit in it as a valid solution to the biblical creationist light-travel time problem. So his paper was published and the rest is history, but we are still arguing over it. It even gets a mention on rationalwiki.org.

Jason wrote the following:

I’m not sure why your friend is assuming that our ability to detect the oscillations of light waves proves that the speed is finite. Imagine a straight line connected from that galaxy to us – the line moves up and down simultaneously at both ends. That essentially represents light with an instant speed and thus an infinite wavelength. We would detect the oscillations simultaneously with their emission. What we actually measure is frequency of the oscillations – the wavelength is conceptually inferred from our stipulated one-way speed of light.

Jason Lisle

Figure 2: ASC — At the source galaxy the atoms emit light illustrated by these sinusoidal oscillations which are received at an Earth telescope without any time delay for the travel time through space. The x-axis here is time and the y-axis is amplitude of the oscillation.

Fig. 2 illustrates this issue. Assuming the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention (ASC) the black arrow indicates the instantaneous transmission of the beginning of the light emission from the distant source. As the atoms oscillate in the source they produce the same light signal that is received by the receiver. The rise and fall to the crests and trough represents the frequency of the emission. The instantaneous travel time means infinite speed and therefore infinite wavelength.

To say space fills with crests and troughs of the oscillating wave along the path of the black arrow is an a priori assumption of a finite light speed. In the usual case the assumption is choosing the Einstein Synchrony Convention (ESC). Therefore that is begging the question, even though the person may not realise that assumption was made.

For those interested in this topic you might find the following from Dr Lisle also interesting and relevant.

Phillip Dennis tried to disprove ASC (really, the conventionality thesis) in a paper he published at the ARJ. But I showed that he had begged the question by assuming equations that tacitly stipulate the one-way speed of light at the start. My response is here:
https://biblicalscienceinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Dennis_Refutation.pdf

He then replied, but it was very clear that he hasn’t researched this topic because his arguments are already refuted in the literature – one of them in 1923! Anyway, I wrote a series of responses you might enjoy reading starting here:

https://biblicalscienceinstitute.com/refuting-the-critics/refuting-phillip-denniss-errors-in-physics-asc-and-philosophy-part-1

Parts 3 and 4 of the series refute Dennis’s failed attempts to refute the conventionality thesis from observations/experiments.

I strongly recommend Dr Lisle’s website: biblicalscienceinstitute.com

I also recommend you read the book by Max Jammer, Concepts of Simultaneity, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. The book is expensive so I would suggest you find it in a library if you plan on reading it.

It is amazing how much our thinking is conditioned by the worldview we have soaked in during our lifetimes.

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Comments Welcome Below

2 responses to “Do Distant Light Emissions Prove a Finite One-Way Speed of Light?”

  1. John Avatar
    John

    I suggest that the thrust of the argument your physicist friend mentioned was not the speed of travel of the light waves as such, but rather the *number* of valleys and crests that must exist between two cosmically remote points, and the fact that electrons in atoms or whatever must have oscillated sequentially this number of times in order to create these valleys and crests regardless of which direction the light travels away from the oscillation. The fact that much the same valleys and crests that we detect here on earth must fill all of space is evident because we see that light which left a galaxy say 10 billion light years away has interacted (creating absorbtion lines) with galactic gas that it passed through that was say 5 billion light years away. This effect would not not only be happening and apparent at our location but must also be happening in all other locations – the vast majority of which we can only view somewhat perpendicular to the light travel direction. Thus the universe is full from edge to edge in every direction with crests and troughs, each one of which must have taken a finite time for an electron oscillation to generate. Thus at least 20 billion years worth of oscillations (and thus of universe history) is recorded in these crests and troughs.

    Suppose, by some miracle, we remained “frozen in time” with respect to the rest of the universe until ~6k years ago, while all these oscillations were occurring and filling the universe all around us with waves. This miracle does not mean that the universe is not billions of years old as its entire history is recorded and fills space in the form of valleys and crests. It simply means that we were frozen for 99.9999% of the universe’s external existence and have so recently just “woken up” to find ourselves in the middle of an already very old universe. In case you would like there to be no evidence that light has travelled in *both* directions perpendicular to our line of view for much longer than 6k years – you must realise that the evidence for that is overwhelming (including gas travel in the form of AGN jets such as Porphyrion or Alcyoneus >16Mly).

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    1. John Gideon Hartnett Avatar
      John Gideon Hartnett

      On the first point of the intervening gas clouds, and light with the crests and troughs filling all space, from those intervening clouds, the exact same argument can be applied. The absorption or emission spectra result from the interaction with those gases in the cloud. Instantaneous travel to intervening cloud 1 or as many as you like and instantaneous transmission from cloud 1 or how ever many there are to Earth does not change the argument.

      Your second point, which is an age issue or how much process has occurred in the available Earth time since creation is different. If you argue that 10 billion years of process has occurred or for example AGN jets longer than 16Mly then you are right. They do not fit into a young universe. As is usually assumed the speed of light is isotropic and the measured round-trip speed there could not be 16 million years available. But no one-way speed of light advocate is suggesting that that is the case. More to follow…..

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