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God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser - Religion - Nairaland

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God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by DoctorAlien(m): 6:55pm On Sep 29, 2019
by Carl Wieland and Jonathan Sarfati

Dr Keith Wanser, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. is Professor of Physics at California State University, Fullerton. His research interests lie in fibre-optic sensing techniques, experimental and theoretical condensed matter physics, and basic theories of matter.

With over 30 refereed and 18 other technical papers and seven U.S. patents in his track record, Keith Wanser would be justified in chuckling at the common accusation that ‘creationists don’t publish’, or ‘creationists don’t do real science’ [see Do Creationists Publish in Notable Refereed Journals?—Ed.]. A full Professor at a major U.S. university, we were immediately struck by his warmth and humility.

In this age of physics superstars writing bestsellers, claiming to know the precise state of the universe billions of years ago, and even saying that physicists will soon know ‘the mind of God’, it was refreshing to hear Prof. Wanser bring things back to reality. ‘We don’t even know how to calculate, from first principles, something as basic as the speed of light, or Planck’s constant, the mass of the electron — things like that,’ he said. ‘These seem to just be “givens” from a Lawgiver. It was thought there should be only two or three such “basics” from which we could derive the rest, but it appears that there are vastly more — something like 28 at least.1

‘For every spectacular leap forward, like finding new particles,’ he continued, ‘there’s usually been a price to pay —more and more unknown parameters, with unknown relationships between them. It seems the more we find out, the more we realize how little we really know. Like Ecclesiastes 3:11 and 8:17 say, we can never find out all that God has done. I like what Einstein said, that it would be enough if we just understood the electron. In fact, when I get to Heaven, I’d like to get the chance to ask the Lord to tell me how the electron is held together.’ (Keith told us that, given our current understanding, there is nothing to hold the electron together. It should fly apart under its own electrostatic self repulsion).

Keith Wanser doesn’t talk of Heaven in some vague metaphorical way; for him it is a sure and certain hope. His trust is not in his intellect, nor in his good deeds, but in the shed blood of God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Having received God’s forgiveness of his sins, Keith knows he can anticipate joy and peace with God throughout eternity.

The conservative church in which Keith grew up believed in a literal, six-day creation — and so did he until he went to college. ‘All those professors, who seemed to know so much, told me it couldn’t be that way. So I gradually became a theistic evolutionist. That led to my becoming morally adrift for some years, till I recommitted my life to Jesus Christ in 1976. Since then, I have studied a great deal of scientific evidence, and I am convinced there is far more evidence for a recent, six-day creation and a global Flood than there is for an old earth and evolution.’

Keith Wanser knows how vitally important this issue is. ‘The foundation for the whole Gospel is in Genesis — the Lord Jesus Christ clearly believed in a young earth, a literal Genesis,’ he said. ‘If we mess with these foundational truths, when do we start taking the words of Jesus seriously? Recently someone said to me, “I believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, but I don’t believe it can be taken literally.” I was shocked. Maybe we can have a non-literal Virginal Conception, or a non-literal Resurrection, or … where does it end?2

‘It’s desperately sad,’ Keith went on, ‘that so many church leaders have given their flocks a false sense of security, either by downplaying the issue, or by unscriptural dead-ends such as “progressive creation”.3 I believe the Lord will bring these leaders to account. Even churches that believe in Genesis often don’t equip their people with the answers available through ministries such as yours. They don’t understand that kids today are being hit by these supposedly “scientific” beliefs that totally undermine Christianity.’

What did he see as the biggest difficulty for promoting creation today? ‘Because the church in general failed to understand and confront this huge issue, it helped these beliefs to “take over”,’ said Keith. ‘So there is now such a bias against literal Genesis and for evolution/old earth, that people have stopped thinking for themselves. Phrases like “evolution is fact” or “everybody knows the world is old” are repeated like mantras — it’s like a mindless thing that people have had beaten into their heads, so one has to undo years of conditioning by our culture.’

A father of two young children, Keith sees it as crucial to shield them from the anti-biblical conditioning coming from TV and elsewhere. Referring to a popular new ‘cute monsters’ game, he said, ‘Even there, you have this insidious evolutionary brainwashing going on all the time — “Look how this one can evolve into something else”, and the like.’ But he also thinks it is vital to give them positive creation materials like A is for Adam, to train them in thinking in a biblical framework from the earliest age.

‘Parents who ignore the extreme importance of this issue are often taken by surprise when their children grow up and abandon their faith — I see it often and it grieves me that so many people are unaware of the sad consequences of evolutionary thoughts and beliefs.’

Was it tough being a creationist at a secular university? Dr Wanser said, ‘Well, now that I’ve got tenure, that means I can’t be fired for simply believing in recent six-day creation and the world-wide Noahic Flood. If I had been outspoken on the issue before, I doubt I would have obtained tenure. But if you’re doing good science, it makes it harder for your critics.’

Radiometric ‘ages’

Knowing that Keith was part of the creationist RATE4 group, we asked him about radiometric dating. He said, ‘There’s been some good work done by creationists lately, like revealing a fatal flaw in the assumptions behind K-Ar dating.5 I’m currently working on some very interesting stuff involving radiometric decay being non-exponential —at the level of things like quantum tunnelling. It’s still in the early stages, but already I can say that over time periods that are short compared to the half life, the decay is not exponential, despite what is taught.6 This decay thing is actually very complex; there’ve been all sorts of assumptions made to keep it simple, some of which may not be valid.’

What arguments did evolutionists have with his work, we asked? ‘Well, it’s very hard to argue when the maths is there, and it comes out right,’ he said. ‘Actually,’ he went on, ‘it turns out that when you get the nucleus “excited”, decay is going to be much quicker, making things look vastly “older”. People have been talking recently about magnetic stars giving off big bursts of gamma rays; there are all sorts of ways that radiometric “clocks” could have been reset catastrophically, during the Flood for example.’

Professor Wanser made frequent reference to the work of the creationist physicist Dr Russell Humphreys, of Sandia National Laboratories, for examples of fruitful creationist science. An example is Humphreys’ fulfilled written prediction, based on his model of the earth’s magnetic field, that volcanic rock would be found showing that past reversals of the field occurred extremely rapidly.7 He was also very impressed by the way in which Humphreys’ creationist model of planetary formation predicted the strengths of the planets’ magnetic fields.8 He said, ‘There’s no evolutionary model that has come anywhere close in that department.’

Keith Wanser also pointed to Russ Humphreys’ creationist alternative to ‘big bang’ cosmology (explained for the layman in the book Starlight and Time, which also has a technical appendix) as a good example of productive creationist thought. (Humphreys uses the distortion of time in general relativity theory to explain how light could have reached the earth from distant stars in a young universe.)

Changing light speed

Actually, light is a major specialist area for Dr Wanser. So what did he think of proposals that the speed of light has changed, affecting radiometric dating as well as starlight travel-time? He replied, ‘It’s not really widely known that standard quantum electrodynamics predicts that the speed of light (c) is a function of the field strength, thus changeable in principle. I’ve been playing around with this for years, and while it’s still heretical, some are starting to accept that c may not be some eternally immutable thing.’9

Keith was familiar with the theories (including recent work) of Australian creationist Barry Setterfield, which have c declining from a huge initial value. He said, ‘I don’t go along with Barry’s statements on this; he’s well-meaning, but in my opinion he’s made a lot of rash assumptions. For instance, he has a whole sequence of things that have to be held constant just because his theory needs it, and he’s certainly not come up with any real equations explaining anything. There is not a lot of mathematical and physical theory in his work, and there’s a misunderstanding of many of the things that would have happened if c had been 1010 higher than what it is today.’10

From what Keith told us in more detail, it appeared that the vocal humanist/sceptic critics of the Setterfield theory also needed some lessons in high-level physics. He went on to say, ‘There are other reasons to believe that the speed of light is changing, or has changed in the past, that have nothing to do with the Setterfield theory. It’s an exciting field — a very bright colleague of mine at the University of Colorado in Boulder has just completed some little-known but fascinating work in this area.’11

Keith affirmed that the confident public image of the ‘certainty’ of the latest physical theories was a far cry from reality. He cited the ‘big bang’ as an example, particularly lately with ‘quantum cosmology’. ‘They have to get matter out of energy,’ he said. An experimentally established physical principle12 shows that the only way you can do that is to end up with equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But all around us in the universe there is a huge preponderance of matter over antimatter. Instead of abandoning the “big bang”, they conveniently hypothesized a way to violate scientific law, a fudge factor if you like. But this would make protons unstable, so for years they’ve been looking in vain for even one proton to decay. They haven’t found it, and all indications are that the proton must be stable for a period of time much larger than previously thought possible, more than 1,000 billion billion times the assumed evolutionary age of the universe.13 This makes it completely impossible for the “big bang” to work.

‘The problem hasn’t been pointed out much; it’s there, but it’s ignored in the hope that it will go away. The sad thing is that the public is so overawed by these things, just because there is complex maths involved. They don’t realize how much philosophical speculation and imagination is injected along with the maths — these are really stories that are made up.’

Professor Wanser continued, ‘People look at the sort of science that put men on the moon, and they put these “big bang” theories in the same basket. They’re unaware of all the speculation and uncertainty (even rule-bending) there is in physical theories of origins. It’s a tragedy that evangelicals are being urged to “re-interpret” the Bible because of the so-called “certain facts of science” in this area. It is even more tragic that there are professing Christians who are promoting evolutionary notions of the “big bang” and galactic and stellar evolution as supporting the Bible and belief in God, while at the same time denying literal six-day creation and the global nature of the Genesis Flood.’

Source: https://creation.com/god-and-the-electron

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Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by DoctorAlien(m): 6:59pm On Sep 29, 2019
Johnydon22
Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by DoctorAlien(m): 12:24am On Sep 30, 2019
According to some people, Prof. Keith Wanser is apparently not doing science simply because he doesn't acknowledge that the Earth is millions of years old.
Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by DoctorAlien(m): 4:33pm On Sep 30, 2019
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Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by DoctorAlien(m): 8:54pm On Sep 30, 2019
,,
Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by budaatum: 9:13pm On Sep 30, 2019
DoctorAlien:
According to some people, Prof. Keith Wanser is apparently not doing science simply because he doesn't acknowledge that the Earth is millions of years old.
Not true, doc. We are saying the age of the earth has absolutely no bearing on the science he might be doing.

The Apollo 8 Crew were all scientists. Listen to what they read on the moon.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEmn0uaQCYc

Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by DoctorAlien(m): 9:35pm On Sep 30, 2019
budaatum:

Not true, doc. We are saying the age of the earth has absolutely no bearing on the science he might be doing.
budaatum:

Anyone doing science cannot refuse to acknowledge earth has been in existence for a very very long time.
Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by budaatum: 9:53pm On Sep 30, 2019
DoctorAlien:

Doing science where the age of the earth matters doc!

By the way, you never did tell me if you are a medical doctor, this is my third time of asking, because if you are, you must have done some science and you do seem to be a young earth antievolutionist, so unless you are asking me to say you can't be a doctor and still be ignorant about certain matters, I really do not get your point.

https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/01/why-do-so-many.html

Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by LordReed(m): 10:00am On Oct 01, 2019
Ok so where is his peer reviewed published work on evidence for a 6 day creation?

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Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by DoctorAlien(m): 10:58am On Oct 01, 2019
LordReed:
Ok so where is his peer reviewed published work on evidence for a 6 day creation?

This is an excerpt from a post I made on this board some time ago. But if you had cared to read it carefully, you would not be here asking this ridiculous question.

Creationists who publish scientific research in mainstream journals have found that they can publish articles with data having creationist implications, but will not get articles with openly creationist conclusions published. When they attempt to do this, their articles are usually rejected. Those who are well-known to evolutionists as creationists have more difficulty even with articles which do not have obvious creationist implications.

In the summer of 1985 Humphreys wrote to the journal Science pointing out that openly creationist articles are suppressed by most journals. He asked if Science had ‘a hidden policy of suppressing creationist letters.’ Christine Gilbert, the letters editor, replied and admitted, ‘It is true that we are not likely to publish letters supporting creationism.’ This admission is particularly significant since Science’s official letters policy is that they represent ‘the range of opinions ’. e.g., letters must be representative of part of the spectrum of opinions. Yet of all the opinions they receive, Science does not print the creationist ones.

Humphreys’ letter and Ms Gilbert’s reply are reprinted in the book, Creation’s Tiny Mystery, by physicist Robert V. Gentry (Earth Science Associates, Knoxville, Tennessee, 2nd edition, 1988.)

On May 19, 1992 Humphreys submitted his article ‘Compton scattering and the cosmic microwave background bumps’ to the Scientific Correspondence section of the British journal Nature. The editorial staff knew Humphreys was a creationist and didn’t want to publish it (even though the article did not contain any glaring creationist implications). The editorial staff didn’t even want to send it through official peer review. Six months later Nature published an article by someone else on the same topic, having the same conclusions. Thus, most creationist researchers realize it is simply a waste of time to send journal editors openly creationist articles. To say that a ‘slight bias’ exists on the part of journal editors would be an understatement.

The Institute for Creation Research published a laymanized version of Humphreys’ article in their Impact series [No. 233, 'Bumps in the Big Bang’, November 1992]. Reference 5 of that article contains information about the Nature submission.

In the 70s and early 80s, physicist Robert Gentry had several articles with very significant creationist data published in mainstream journals (Science, Nature, Journal of Geophysical Research, etc.), but found he couldn’t publish openly creationist conclusions. Gentry had discovered that granites contain microscopic coloration halos produced by the radioactive decay of primordial polonium. According to evolutionary theory, polonium halos should not be there. Some believe that the existence of polonium halos is scientific evidence that the Earth was created instantaneously.

When Oak Ridge National Laboratories terminated Gentry’s connection with them as a visiting professor (shortly after it became nationally known he is a creationist) the number of his articles slowed down, but he continues to publish.

Another example of blatant discrimination is Scientific American’s refusal to hire Forrest Mims as their ‘Amateur Scientist’ columnist when they found out that he was a creationist, although they admitted that his work was ‘fabulous’, ‘great’ and ‘first rate’. Subsequently Mims invented a new haze detector praised in the ‘Amateur Scientist’ column, without mentioning that Mims was rejected for this very column purely because of religious discimination. So it’s hardly surprising that some creationists write creationist papers under pseudonyms to avoid being victimised by the bigoted establishment.


Cc: johnydon22
Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by LordReed(m): 11:09am On Oct 01, 2019
DoctorAlien:


This is an excerpt from a post I made on this board some time ago. But if you had cared to read it carefully, you would not be here asking this ridiculous question.

And you are a dumbfuck for suggesting I have to follow you about reading everything you post. You see how you guys start the insults then when I get into it with you, you turn on the crocodile tears.

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Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by LordReed(m): 12:08pm On Oct 01, 2019
DoctorAlien:


Creationists who publish scientific research in mainstream journals have found that they can publish articles with data having creationist implications, but will not get articles with openly creationist conclusions published. When they attempt to do this, their articles are usually rejected. Those who are well-known to evolutionists as creationists have more difficulty even with articles which do not have obvious creationist implications.

In the summer of 1985 Humphreys wrote to the journal Science pointing out that openly creationist articles are suppressed by most journals. He asked if Science had ‘a hidden policy of suppressing creationist letters.’ Christine Gilbert, the letters editor, replied and admitted, ‘It is true that we are not likely to publish letters supporting creationism.’ This admission is particularly significant since Science’s official letters policy is that they represent ‘the range of opinions ’. e.g., letters must be representative of part of the spectrum of opinions. Yet of all the opinions they receive, Science does not print the creationist ones.

Humphreys’ letter and Ms Gilbert’s reply are reprinted in the book, Creation’s Tiny Mystery, by physicist Robert V. Gentry (Earth Science Associates, Knoxville, Tennessee, 2nd edition, 1988.)

On May 19, 1992 Humphreys submitted his article ‘Compton scattering and the cosmic microwave background bumps’ to the Scientific Correspondence section of the British journal Nature. The editorial staff knew Humphreys was a creationist and didn’t want to publish it (even though the article did not contain any glaring creationist implications). The editorial staff didn’t even want to send it through official peer review. Six months later Nature published an article by someone else on the same topic, having the same conclusions. Thus, most creationist researchers realize it is simply a waste of time to send journal editors openly creationist articles. To say that a ‘slight bias’ exists on the part of journal editors would be an understatement.

The Institute for Creation Research published a laymanized version of Humphreys’ article in their Impact series [No. 233, 'Bumps in the Big Bang’, November 1992]. Reference 5 of that article contains information about the Nature submission.

In the 70s and early 80s, physicist Robert Gentry had several articles with very significant creationist data published in mainstream journals (Science, Nature, Journal of Geophysical Research, etc.), but found he couldn’t publish openly creationist conclusions. Gentry had discovered that granites contain microscopic coloration halos produced by the radioactive decay of primordial polonium. According to evolutionary theory, polonium halos should not be there. Some believe that the existence of polonium halos is scientific evidence that the Earth was created instantaneously.

When Oak Ridge National Laboratories terminated Gentry’s connection with them as a visiting professor (shortly after it became nationally known he is a creationist) the number of his articles slowed down, but he continues to publish.

Another example of blatant discrimination is Scientific American’s refusal to hire Forrest Mims as their ‘Amateur Scientist’ columnist when they found out that he was a creationist, although they admitted that his work was ‘fabulous’, ‘great’ and ‘first rate’. Subsequently Mims invented a new haze detector praised in the ‘Amateur Scientist’ column, without mentioning that Mims was rejected for this very column purely because of religious discimination. So it’s hardly surprising that some creationists write creationist papers under pseudonyms to avoid being victimised by the bigoted establishment.



Scientists such as Tom Baillieul and John Brawley have done research and published articles refuting Gentry's theory of polonium halos. John Brawley is an amateur scientist who published an article about research he conducted which concludes that there are other radioactive materials that form halos which are indiscernible from polonium halos, making it impossible to tell whether or not the halos that Gentry studied are indeed formed by polonium (Brawley 1992). Baillieul refutes Gentry's claims by examining his assumptions about the halos that he observed. Baillieul claims that the assumption that the rock which these supposed polonium halos were found is primordial is not true. As Baillieul explains, Gentry is a physicist, not a geologist, and as a result he is not able to properly put the rocks being examined in their proper context. Gentry's samples were sent to him by colleagues from around the world, so he cannot be entirely sure how they fit into the geological time scale. Baillieul asserts that the types of granite that Gentry uses are not actually primordial, and that some of them are not even granite as Gentry claims. Baillieul then challenges Gentry's assumption that the particular ring-shaped halos that he observed can be positively identified as the result of alpha particle bombardment. Gentry bases this assumption on past research done at a time when the structure of the atom was just being discovered. Baillieul believes that that there are still some unanswered questions about being able to positively identify the type of radiation that caused a halo based on properties like the ring structure and color of the halos. He believes that for this reason the assumption that the observed halos are caused by alpha particle bombardment is at best speculative. Finally, Baillieul claims that even if it is assumed that the halos are cause by alpha radiation, that it seems more likely that the halos would have been caused by the decay of Radon 222. Radon 222 decays to Polonium 218, and is also part of the decay series of Uranium 238. Since Uranium 238 has half-life of approximately 4.5 billion years and can constantly supply a rock with Polonium, there is no reason to assume that the rock must have formed quickly or be "primordial." Baillieul claims that because Gentry's assumptions do not hold up to scrutiny, polonium halos do not provide adequate evidence to support the theory of a young Earth (Baillieul 2005).


Mims was not fired; he was never hired in the first place (though Piel, the editor of Scientific American, initially gave him reason to believe he would be hired). A private company does not need to have an excuse for not hiring someone they don't like.

Many, perhaps most, evolutionists agree that Piel did not act appropriately. Mims' work should be judged on its own merits.

Arguably, Mims would not have been good for the position. Creationism denies the validity of much of biology, geology, and astronomy, making a creationist's competence in those fields suspect. Piel was reportedly worried mostly about the public relations problems of involving the magazine with creationism (Piel and Mims 1991), and given subsequent events, his worries were justified. Although many people believe Piel made the wrong decision, his decision was not entirely without merit.

Mims himself did not emerge from the incident looking virtuous. He recorded one phone call with Piel without Piel's knowledge or permission (although reputedly at the advise of a lawyer friend). When Mims was not hired, he spoke harshly, publicly, and doggedly against Piel. The issue likely became such a big deal because both sides overreacted.

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Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by budaatum: 12:44pm On Oct 01, 2019
One must discriminate against ignorance and stupidity!
Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by DoctorAlien(m): 1:12pm On Oct 01, 2019
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Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by DoctorAlien(m): 1:30pm On Oct 01, 2019
LordReed:


Scientists such as Tom Baillieul and John Brawley have done research and published articles refuting Gentry's theory of polonium halos. John Brawley is an amateur scientist who published an article about research he conducted which concludes that there are other radioactive materials that form halos which are indiscernible from polonium halos, making it impossible to tell whether or not the halos that Gentry studied are indeed formed by polonium (Brawley 1992). Baillieul refutes Gentry's claims by examining his assumptions about the halos that he observed. Baillieul claims that the assumption that the rock which these supposed polonium halos were found is primordial is not true. As Baillieul explains, Gentry is a physicist, not a geologist, and as a result he is not able to properly put the rocks being examined in their proper context. Gentry's samples were sent to him by colleagues from around the world, so he cannot be entirely sure how they fit into the geological time scale. Baillieul asserts that the types of granite that Gentry uses are not actually primordial, and that some of them are not even granite as Gentry claims. Baillieul then challenges Gentry's assumption that the particular ring-shaped halos that he observed can be positively identified as the result of alpha particle bombardment. Gentry bases this assumption on past research done at a time when the structure of the atom was just being discovered. Baillieul believes that that there are still some unanswered questions about being able to positively identify the type of radiation that caused a halo based on properties like the ring structure and color of the halos. He believes that for this reason the assumption that the observed halos are caused by alpha particle bombardment is at best speculative. Finally, Baillieul claims that even if it is assumed that the halos are cause by alpha radiation, that it seems more likely that the halos would have been caused by the decay of Radon 222. Radon 222 decays to Polonium 218, and is also part of the decay series of Uranium 238. Since Uranium 238 has half-life of approximately 4.5 billion years and can constantly supply a rock with Polonium, there is no reason to assume that the rock must have formed quickly or be "primordial." Baillieul claims that because Gentry's assumptions do not hold up to scrutiny, polonium halos do not provide adequate evidence to support the theory of a young Earth (Baillieul 2005)


This is interesting for many reasons. Although he apparently mentions the radon explanation, we can clearly see the fury of Tom Baillieul's more recent (relative to Brawley's) effort directed away from the Radon explanation in particular, to surprising targets such as the processes of Gentry's experiment,
the process of identificationn of the halos, and even to Gentry's qualification (pointing out that Gentry is a Physicist, and not a geologist). Well, this may be because he understands that the Radon explanation is ridiculous.

While I can only guess which radioactive material that Brawley was talking about could produce halos indiscernible from polonium's, the Radon explanation has not escaped the notice of creationists. Responding to a feedback mentioning the Radon explanation as found in a Wikipedia article, Jonathan Sarfati put it thus: "The radon explanation is just nonsense, which shows the critics don’t understand basic chemistry. Radon is known as one of the noble gases, meaning that it has very weak interaction with other atoms because of a full valence shell. That means there would be no tendency for radon to accumulate at a given spot in the mineral crystal and decay to to produce the spherical radiohaloes. So no wonder there is the admission “This has not been proved experimentally.”"

Jonathan Sarfati pointed out though that current creationist explanation differs from Gentry's, and he directed readers to this article: https://creation.com/radiohalosstartling-evidence-of-catastrophic-geologic-processes-on-a-young-earth

All in all, the Radon explanation seems to not be satisfactory.

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Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by budaatum: 1:49pm On Oct 01, 2019

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Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by LordReed(m): 1:50pm On Oct 01, 2019
DoctorAlien:


This is interesting for many reasons. Although he apparently mentions the radon explanation, we can clearly see the fury of Tom Baillieul's more recent (relative to Brawley's) effort directed away from the Radon explanation in particular, to surprising targets such as the processes of Gentry's experiment,
the process of identificationn of the halos, and even to Gentry's qualification (pointing out that Gentry is a Physicist, and not a geologist). Well, this may be because he understands that the Radon explanation is ridiculous.

While I can only guess which radioactive material that Brawley was talking about could produce halos indiscernible from polonium's, the Radon explanation has not escaped the notice of creationists. Responding to a feedback mentioning the Radon explanation as found in a Wikipedia article, Jonathan Sarfati put it thus: "The radon explanation is just nonsense, which shows the critics don’t understand basic chemistry. Radon is known as one of the noble gases, meaning that it has very weak interaction with other atoms because of a full valence shell. That means there would be no tendency for radon to accumulate at a given spot in the mineral crystal and decay to to produce the spherical radiohaloes. So no wonder there is the admission “This has not been proved experimentally.”"

Jonathan Sarfati pointed out though that current creationist explanation differs from Gentry's, and he directed readers to this article: https://creation.com/radiohalosstartling-evidence-of-catastrophic-geologic-processes-on-a-young-earth

All in all, the Radon explanation seems to not be satisfactory.

Completely ignoring the fact that radon is an intermediate decay step between uranium and polonium.
Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by DoctorAlien(m): 3:45pm On Oct 01, 2019
LordReed:


Completely ignoring the fact that radon is an intermediate decay step between uranium and polonium.

Red herring. We're not talking about the decay steps of Uranium. Instead, if the halos were caused by radon and not polonium, how could the radon have stayed to cause the halos?

Probably your best guess is something similar to the feedback to which Jonathan Sarfati responded. The feedback claimed that "“Critics of Gentry, including Thomas A. Baillieul (Baillieul 2005) and John Brawley (Brawley 1992), have pointed out that Po-218 is a decay product of radon, which as a gas can be given off by a grain of uranium in one part of the rock and migrate to another part of the rock to form a uraniumless halo. Apparently a large number of radon atoms are caught or adsorbed at a particular point. This has not been proved experimentally, but is supported by the fact that Gentry’s “polonium halos” are found along microscopic cracks in rocks that also contain uranium halos (Wakefield 1988).”"

Jonathan Sarfati responds that "there would be no tendency for radon to accumulate at a given spot in the mineral crystal and decay to to produce the spherical radiohaloes. So no wonder there is the admission “This has not been proved experimentally.”

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Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by LordReed(m): 4:26pm On Oct 01, 2019
DoctorAlien:


Red herring. We're not talking about the decay steps of Uranium. Instead, if the halos were caused by radon and not polonium, how could the radon have stayed to cause the halos?

Probably your best guess is something similar to the feedback to which Jonathan Sarfati responded. The feedback claimed that "“Critics of Gentry, including Thomas A. Baillieul (Baillieul 2005) and John Brawley (Brawley 1992), have pointed out that Po-218 is a decay product of radon, which as a gas can be given off by a grain of uranium in one part of the rock and migrate to another part of the rock to form a uraniumless halo. Apparently a large number of radon atoms are caught or adsorbed at a particular point. This has not been proved experimentally, but is supported by the fact that Gentry’s “polonium halos” are found along microscopic cracks in rocks that also contain uranium halos (Wakefield 1988).”"

Jonathan Sarfati responds that "there would be no tendency for radon to accumulate at a given spot in the mineral crystal and decay to to produce the spherical radiohaloes. So no wonder there is the admission “This has not been proved experimentally.”

What exactly has not been proved experimentally?

Most of the radon produced within a mineral grain remains embedded in the grain, only 10 to 50 percent escapes to enter the pore space. If water is present in the pore space, the radon atom can more easily remain in the pore space; if the pore space is dry, the radon atom may shoot across the pore and embed in another grain where it cannot move.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/7000018/report.pdf

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Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by SniperAssassin: 11:44am On Oct 06, 2019
Hello DoctorAlien.
I have read about the RATE project on Wikipedia and while it had some strong names on its team, there were still numerous issues with it that do not allow us to accept a young age of the earth.

For one, the members of that project admitted that there was evidence for an age of the earth as far back as 500 million years.

Also, the conclusions that they came to had two major problems with them

This is from the Wikipedia page
"Accelerated nuclear decay Edit
Based on these findings, the authors postulated that nuclear decay rates were accelerated by a factor of approximately 500 million during the Creation week and at the time of the Flood. Short-lived isotopes such as 14C were not affected, while long-lived isotopes such as 40K were affected by a factor of a billion or more. Stable isotopes were apparently not affected.

They identified two unresolved problems with this theory. One was excessive heat generation, which would have been sufficient to raise the temperature of the earth's surface to 22,000 °C,[3] sufficient to evaporate the earth unless some extraordinary cooling mechanism were applied. They acknowledged that neither conduction, nor convection, nor radiation could remove this heat quickly enough, and that therefore a new, esoteric solution would have to be found. They further acknowledged that this solution would also have to have cooled some material more than others to prevent the oceans from freezing over.

The other problem is excessive radiation generation, which would have killed Noah and his passengers on the Ark by the radiation generated from ratioisotopes such as 40K in their own bodies.
"
Full link:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RATE_project?iorg_service_id_internal=1547440102204384%3BAfqFiKJD9A_en_jW

So I hope you understand why their findings cannot be accepted, as they themselves know that there are problems with their conclusions

Also, the change in the speed of light also known as c-decay, comes with some serious problems of its own, the major one being:
The mass of an object is dependent on the speed of light.

You probably already know the equation :
E=mc^2
Where
E=energy
M=mass and
C= speed of light in a vacuum

It basically states that matter and energy are two forms of the same thing and that in an object they are proportional to each other with c as their constant. So if the speed of light were to, for instance, decrease, then the amount of matter in a body would also have decreased. But we know that matter and energy can neither be created, nor destroyed, only converted to another form or energy, so it makes it impossible for the speed of light in a vacuum to change.
Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by DoctorAlien(m): 12:16pm On Oct 06, 2019
SniperAssassin:
Hello DoctorAlien.
I have read about the RATE project on Wikipedia and while it had some strong names on its team, there were still numerous issues with it that do not allow us to accept a young age of the earth.

For one, the members of that project admitted that there was evidence for an age of the earth as far back as 500 million years.

Also, the conclusions that they came to had two major problems with them

This is from the Wikipedia page
"Accelerated nuclear decay Edit
Based on these findings, the authors postulated that nuclear decay rates were accelerated by a factor of approximately 500 million during the Creation week and at the time of the Flood. Short-lived isotopes such as 14C were not affected, while long-lived isotopes such as 40K were affected by a factor of a billion or more. Stable isotopes were apparently not affected.

They identified two unresolved problems with this theory. One was excessive heat generation, which would have been sufficient to raise the temperature of the earth's surface to 22,000 °C,[3] sufficient to evaporate the earth unless some extraordinary cooling mechanism were applied. They acknowledged that neither conduction, nor convection, nor radiation could remove this heat quickly enough, and that therefore a new, esoteric solution would have to be found. They further acknowledged that this solution would also have to have cooled some material more than others to prevent the oceans from freezing over.

The other problem is excessive radiation generation, which would have killed Noah and his passengers on the Ark by the radiation generated from ratioisotopes such as 40K in their own bodies.
"
Full link:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RATE_project?iorg_service_id_internal=1547440102204384%3BAfqFiKJD9A_en_jW

So I hope you understand why their findings cannot be accepted, as they themselves know that there are problems with their conclusions

Also, the change in the speed of light also known as c-decay, comes with some serious problems of its own, the major one being:
The mass of an object is dependent on the speed of light.

You probably already know the equation :
E=mc^2
Where
E=energy
M=mass and
C= speed of light in a vacuum

It basically states that matter and energy are two forms of the same thing and that in an object they are proportional to each other with c as their constant. So if the speed of light were to, for instance, decrease, then the amount of matter in a body would also have decreased. But we know that matter and energy can neither be created, nor destroyed, only converted to another form or energy, so it makes it impossible for the speed of light in a vacuum to change.

Hello friend!

Your contributions are highly valued. Let me start by pointing out that in my own opinion, Wikipedia is the last place one should go to find information about creationists and presentations of creationist positions on some topics. Wikipedia has been shown to be deeply biased against creationism.

That said, it is no news that creationists and even the scientists on the RATE project actually acknowledge they had to make some assumptions in their research, and that potentially there are questions left unanswered in the project. However, check here for a more reliable representation of both the RATE project and the creationist position on the age of the Earth: https://creation.com/radiometric-dating-questions-and-answers

On the decay of the speed of light, it may interest you to know that creationists are not really asserting that c is decaying. Instead, their attempts at explaining the speed of light problem focuses on a different area. See the following article for some creationist attempts at the problem: https://creation.com/images/pdfs/cabook/chapter5.pdf

Cheers.
Re: God And The Electron: A Talk With Physicist Keith Wanser by DoctorAlien(m): 12:04pm On Dec 22, 2019
.

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