Physics proves the earth is only thousands of years old.
- Thread starter peilthetraveler
- Start date
Expert? No, actually I am quite ignorant as I never made it past 10th grade.
However, I would cite an example of a very smart individual:
Mr. Walt Brown, who has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT (and while there, was a Fellow of the National Science Foundation).
Mr. Brown authored a book titled "In The Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood". In his book, he has a very well documented / defended theory called Hydroplates.
Mr. Brown could not get a peer review.
I guess it would be similar if a left wing liberal was hauled into court, and the judge required all members of the jury to be right wing zealots.
Just curious vhehn, are there groups of people other than the "religious" who you feel empowered to lay a blanket claim of being a "moron" ?
Here is a review from the amazon.com website.
19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Wrong, and I can prove it, December 27, 2009
By Gerard Jellison - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
As a physicist with an interest in investigating creationist claims, I've spent some time studying Dr. Walt Brown's "In the Beginning..." I've found "compelling evidence" for creation and a flood - but I mean the creation of phony arguments and a flood of incorrect claims. The book is filled with quote-mining, misused evidence, and elementary scientific errors. Since I can't discuss the whole book here, I'll concentrate on selected portions, and document just some of the errors and misrepresentations I've found.
To evaluate the quality of the information in Dr. Brown's book, let's look at his section on "out-of-place fossils." Brown gives a list of fossils that allegedly occur in the "wrong" geological strata, in violation of the accepted evolutionary sequence. Of course, he doesn't mention the enormous number of sites that show billions of fossils in the accepted evolutionary order. But what about his examples of paleontological discrepancies? (All quotes are from the 8th online edition.)
Brown says, "Frequently fossils are not vertically sequenced in the assumed evolutionary order." Two of his references are from mainstream journals - one from Science, and one from Nature. I looked up these two references, and found that neither contains any mention whatsoever of out-of-place fossils.
Brown says, "In Uzbekistan, 86 consecutive hoofprints of horses were found in rocks dating back to the dinosaurs." His reference is an article in Moskovskaya Pravda - hardly a credible scientific reference!
Brown says, "Dinosaur and humanlike footprints were found together in Turkmenistan and Arizona." His references include an article in Moscow News (!) and two articles in Creation Research Society Quarterly. I checked this with Glen J. Kuban, an experienced investigator of creationist paleontology claims. (Mr. Kuban's published research, accepted as valid even by creationist organizations, demonstrated that tracks of carnivorous dinosaurs sometimes resemble human prints.) He told me that nothing approaching a clear human print, let alone a striding sequence of distinct human prints, was found in Arizona. He noted that two experienced paleontologists who studied the Turkmenistan dinosaur trackways found nothing of a "humanlike" nature. For more information, see his website "The Paluxy Dinosaur/'Man Track' Controversy" (a great source of information on "anomalous" fossil reports).
Brown says, "Dinosaur, whale, elephant, horse, and other fossils, plus crude human tools, have reportedly been found in phosphate beds in South Carolina." He cites two articles from the 1870s, plus a personal communication. Glen Kuban is familiar with the 19th century reports. He says they provide no substantial documentation for mingling of fossils from different geological eras. Along with other fossil collectors and paleontologists, Mr. Kuban has been to Carolina phosphate mines, and observed their fossils. He told me there are large numbers of Tertiary fossils, both vertebrate and invertebrate, but no out-of-place fossils and certainly no dinosaurs. If dinosaur fossils did occur there, at some time during the last 140 years they would have been collected and reported in the scientific literature (not to mention documented in detail by young-Earth creationists).
Brown says, "No transitional forms of life have been found in amber." In reality, in the 1960s several scientists hypothesized that ants evolved from wasp ancestors, and predicted what features the transitional insects should have had. Several years after this prediction was made, Cretaceous ants in amber were discovered that showed almost all of the predicted transitional features.
Prior to November 2009, Brown's book said, "In Virginia, alongside 1,000 dinosaur footprints, are other tracks described as hoofprints of some unknown quadruped." In truth, these prints were initially described as those of a brontosaurus-like dinosaur, not a hoofed mammal, by R. E. Weems (U. S. Geological Survey) in 1987. Even the popularized version of this research cited by Brown (a Science News article) should have made it clear to him that this was not an out-of-place fossil. But it gets worse - subsequent excavation showed that the "hooflike" features of the prints were caused by an algal mat that the animal was traversing. When the trackmaker moved onto a bare surface, the shape of the prints changed, and they were identified with a known animal - an aetosaur, something like an armored crocodile. Dr. Weems withdrew his earlier announcement of a new sauropod species in 2006. There are no hoofprints, and the maker of the tracks is not "unknown" (it is called Brachychirotherium parvum).
I confirmed all of this through correspondence with Dr. Weems, and by reading his published articles. I also informed Dr. Brown of this issue. He didn't respond to me, and the false information remained in his book. Finally, after I sent him this critique for review, and advised him that I was going to post it on Amazon, he removed the claim from the "out of place fossils" section. However, in another section ("FAQ's: What About the Dinosaurs?") he still cites the Science News article, in association with others alleging coexistence of horses and dinosaurs. Although he deserves at least a little credit for removing the most egregious statement of this ridiculous claim, his behavior in this matter reveals a cavalier attitude toward scientific truth, and a willingness to make claims without consulting the primary literature or contacting the scientists who did the work.
Finally, Brown says," Coal beds contain...flowering plants that allegedly evolved 100 million years after the coal bed was formed." His reference is a 1923 article by A. C. Noe that described one such alleged anomaly. But the claim was disputed in another 1923 article, by A. C. Steward, that identified the fossil as an archaic plant, rather than a flowering plant. This identification was confirmed by J. M. Schopf in 1946. Brown is aware of these later published articles, but he ignores them.
Walt Brown has no credibility when discussing the published scientific literature. But what can we say about his own claims?
Like many creation "scientists," Brown explains the evolutionary progressions in the fossil record by invoking hydrodynamic sorting during the Flood, along with some contribution from differential mobility (i.e., animals trying to run to higher elevation as the Flood waters rose). Incredibly, his basis for the former claim is an unpublished study in which someone at Loma Linda University placed four unspecified animals ("a dead bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian") in a water tank and observed the order in which they sank to the bottom.
The hydrodynamic sorting and differential mobility claims are easily demolished. Flowering plants, for example, grow abundantly at low elevations and can't run very fast, yet their fossils don't appear until the Cretaceous. Fossils, as well as the individual particles that make up sedimentary deposits, do not show consistent progressions on the basis of size, shape, or density, as would be expected from hydrodynamic sorting. Brown's sketchy hydrodynamic "model" cannot explain why large and small individuals, or adults and eggs, of given species are found at the same geological level. Some fossil animals are found in death poses: dinosaurs sitting on top of their nests, "fighting dinosaurs" (a Velociraptor with its arm in the jaws of a Protoceratops), etc. These creatures clearly were not tossed about and hydrodyamically sorted in liquefied sediments, nor were they running up the sides of mountains to escape a global Flood. Many dinosaur fossils show evidence of scavenging by other dinosaurs, inconsistent with "rapid burial" during the Flood. (Fossil skeletons of large mammals never include shed teeth or toothmarks from carnivorous dinosaurs, because these animals did not live at the same time.) Finally, Brown's theory cannot explain why the famous iridium layer and the sudden disappearance of dinosaur fossils coincide with a sharp, discontinuous loss of many other fossil organisms, including microscopic ones like pollen and marine plankton.
Isaiah 40:22 He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth...
Circle = Hebrew word "Chuwg" which translates as "sphere"
Also interesting to know that the bible said the earth was free floating in space back when people generally thought that there was some giant man or animal holding the earth up.
Job 26:7 He spreads out the northern skies over empty space;
he suspends the earth over nothing
the rest of the review:
Brown's unique "contribution" to creationism - the hydroplate theory - is based on an alleged underground ocean that erupted through cracks in the earth's crust and caused the Flood. These "fountains of the great deep" also supposedly shot an enormous mass of water and entrained rocks into space, forming the asteroids and comets.
As a physicist, I'm most qualified to comment on Brown's astronomical ideas. These are essential to his overall theory, because he invokes accelerated nuclear decay to explain radiometric dating results. As no creationist denies, compressing billions of years' worth of radioactive decay (at today's decay rates) into a year or less would produce enough heat to destroy the Earth. Brown has his own peculiar "solution" to this problem - he shoots the excess energy into space! Since the ejected material is not anywhere near our planet today, he needs a credible way of pushing it to the orbital locations of today's asteroids and comets. If he can't make these astronomical mechanisms work, he can't avoid melting the planet, and his theory is dead.
Brown says the total energy released during eruption of the "fountains" was equivalent to three hundred trillion H-bombs! Already, his theory is in trouble. Although he assumes that this energy went into orbital kinetic energy, it would not do so with perfect efficiency. Indeed, he needs much of the water to remain here on Earth to produce the Flood waters. If only 0.001% of the ejected material and energy had wound up in the atmosphere, the temperature would be raised by 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit! But the heat leakage would almost certainly have been much greater than this; Brown himself estimates that the total energy in the eruptions had to be ten times greater than the kinetic energy of the comets and asteroids, giving "inefficiency of the launch mechanism" as one of the reasons. Where did 90% of the energy go?
The Earth's upper atmosphere would have been contaminated with an enormous concentration of aerosols and solid particles, rendering the atmosphere almost opaque. Brown never explains how the already-stressed, genetically-depleted organisms from the Ark could have dealt with the resulting climate changes and loss of photosynthesis.
But apart from these issues, what can we say about his theory of the asteroids? He claims that a cloud of gaseous water molecules accompanied the rocks and ice into space, and that pressure differences in this cloud pushed the rocks past the orbit of Mars, allowing them to take their present positions in the asteroid belt. He says that the rotating rocks were heated by the Sun, and cooled on their "night" side. "After sunset, surface temperatures would rapidly drop." "Hot gas molecules hitting the hot side of an asteroid bounce off with much higher velocity and momentum than cold gas molecules bouncing off the cold side. Those impacts slowly expanded asteroid orbits..."
Until recently, Brown's book said that temperatures on the "night" side would "plummet toward nearly absolute zero." This is a wild exaggeration. I did calculations, using a finite-difference heat diffusion code, that showed a day/night temperature difference of only 20 to 60 degrees Kelvin (depending on rotation rate). The dark side of the asteroids would not get anywhere near absolute zero.
Recently, I sent my thermal calculations to Dr. Brown. I see that he has taken out the "absolute zero" claim, presumably because he knows he was wrong; but he has not chosen to communicate with me or to acknowledge this or any of the other errors I've identified in his book. And, of course, if his calculations formerly assumed temperature differences of hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit, the asteroid orbit perturbations he computed must be invalid. Yet, he has changed only one sentence in his book. His conclusions are apparently immune to facts.
Brown's mechanism needs to push the rocks away from the Sun. The required increase in orbital angular momentum must be provided by a torque (a sideways "push"). He says that, since asteroids spin, the hot and cold zones would rotate a bit past the boundary between the illuminated and non-illuminated sides, allowing the colliding gas molecules to exert a tiny torque. But, even in principle, this mechanism could only work for asteroids that rotate in the same direction ("prograde") as their orbital motion around the Sun. Asteroids with retrograde rotation (of which there are many) would have been pushed closer to the Sun! And rocks that happened to have little rotation would have stayed near the Earth. Since the asteroids allegedly were ejected from huge explosions on the Earth, there is no reason to think they would all be spinning in a convenient direction or at the necessary rate.
The supposed cloud of interplanetary water molecules could not exert enough unbalanced force on the asteroids to push them tens of millions of miles in a thousand years or less. To make this argument as rigorous as possible, I did calculations using elementary physics equations and a number of assumptions wildly favorable to Brown (I've put the details into the "Comments" section below). My conclusion is that Brown's mechanism would require the total mass of water expelled into space to be equal to, or greater than, the mass of the Earth! Freshman-level physics shows that his theory is utterly unworkable.
Brown says he has a computer program that validates his theory of asteroid orbital enlargement. But his book provides no details, and he says he got his results using "arbitrary" values for parameters like gas density. What we need to know are the actual values! If he won't give a straightforward listing of his assumed parameter values, the best way to evaluate his claims would be to inspect and run his computer code. Unfortunately, my polite requests to him for more information resulted only in repeated statements that he is "not an answering service," along with challenges to a "telephone debate." He said his calculations were checked and approved by "a very capable astronautics professor," but refused to give this person's name. He said it would be too difficult to print out and send me the code he used to do the calculations, even though I offered to pay him for his time.
He claims to have made a great discovery, but refuses to disclose how he did his work. No one who acts like this deserves to be called a scientist.
Based on my study of his book, I conclude that Dr. Brown's work is without scientific merit. But I've tried to treat him fairly, and I've communicated many of my objections to him via e-mail. In some cases, as noted above, these communications caused him to quietly alter his book, although he has never admitted his errors and continues to claim, to me and to others, that I don't know what I'm talking about.
I've repeatedly told Dr. Brown that I'll be happy to engage with him if he wants to defend his book. Since a suitably detailed discussion would have to include analysis of his asteroid computer code and other mathematical matters, a telephone debate would not be appropriate. A blog capable of displaying equations would be best. If he will provide information on his calculations, at a level of detail equivalent to what a scientist expects in a standard peer-reviewed research paper, I'll be glad to discuss or "debate" his claims on his or any other website, with or without a moderator, anytime. He has made no response to this offer.
I've never met Dr. Brown, but based on material on his website, I suspect that he has many good qualities. I have no personal issues with him, but I am dismayed at his distorted presentation of science. He has misled countless people who are sincerely searching for the truth.
All of us understand the world through a combination of independent thinking and trust in others. We are impressed by people with advanced degrees, and many of us assume that a deeply religious person will behave with scrupulous integrity. Dr. Brown, with his identification as a man of science and a man of God, has inherent power and trust. His abuse of that power and trust is evident in his book, and, sadly, in the words of the good people he has misled
Brown's unique "contribution" to creationism - the hydroplate theory - is based on an alleged underground ocean that erupted through cracks in the earth's crust and caused the Flood. These "fountains of the great deep" also supposedly shot an enormous mass of water and entrained rocks into space, forming the asteroids and comets.
As a physicist, I'm most qualified to comment on Brown's astronomical ideas. These are essential to his overall theory, because he invokes accelerated nuclear decay to explain radiometric dating results. As no creationist denies, compressing billions of years' worth of radioactive decay (at today's decay rates) into a year or less would produce enough heat to destroy the Earth. Brown has his own peculiar "solution" to this problem - he shoots the excess energy into space! Since the ejected material is not anywhere near our planet today, he needs a credible way of pushing it to the orbital locations of today's asteroids and comets. If he can't make these astronomical mechanisms work, he can't avoid melting the planet, and his theory is dead.
Brown says the total energy released during eruption of the "fountains" was equivalent to three hundred trillion H-bombs! Already, his theory is in trouble. Although he assumes that this energy went into orbital kinetic energy, it would not do so with perfect efficiency. Indeed, he needs much of the water to remain here on Earth to produce the Flood waters. If only 0.001% of the ejected material and energy had wound up in the atmosphere, the temperature would be raised by 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit! But the heat leakage would almost certainly have been much greater than this; Brown himself estimates that the total energy in the eruptions had to be ten times greater than the kinetic energy of the comets and asteroids, giving "inefficiency of the launch mechanism" as one of the reasons. Where did 90% of the energy go?
The Earth's upper atmosphere would have been contaminated with an enormous concentration of aerosols and solid particles, rendering the atmosphere almost opaque. Brown never explains how the already-stressed, genetically-depleted organisms from the Ark could have dealt with the resulting climate changes and loss of photosynthesis.
But apart from these issues, what can we say about his theory of the asteroids? He claims that a cloud of gaseous water molecules accompanied the rocks and ice into space, and that pressure differences in this cloud pushed the rocks past the orbit of Mars, allowing them to take their present positions in the asteroid belt. He says that the rotating rocks were heated by the Sun, and cooled on their "night" side. "After sunset, surface temperatures would rapidly drop." "Hot gas molecules hitting the hot side of an asteroid bounce off with much higher velocity and momentum than cold gas molecules bouncing off the cold side. Those impacts slowly expanded asteroid orbits..."
Until recently, Brown's book said that temperatures on the "night" side would "plummet toward nearly absolute zero." This is a wild exaggeration. I did calculations, using a finite-difference heat diffusion code, that showed a day/night temperature difference of only 20 to 60 degrees Kelvin (depending on rotation rate). The dark side of the asteroids would not get anywhere near absolute zero.
Recently, I sent my thermal calculations to Dr. Brown. I see that he has taken out the "absolute zero" claim, presumably because he knows he was wrong; but he has not chosen to communicate with me or to acknowledge this or any of the other errors I've identified in his book. And, of course, if his calculations formerly assumed temperature differences of hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit, the asteroid orbit perturbations he computed must be invalid. Yet, he has changed only one sentence in his book. His conclusions are apparently immune to facts.
Brown's mechanism needs to push the rocks away from the Sun. The required increase in orbital angular momentum must be provided by a torque (a sideways "push"). He says that, since asteroids spin, the hot and cold zones would rotate a bit past the boundary between the illuminated and non-illuminated sides, allowing the colliding gas molecules to exert a tiny torque. But, even in principle, this mechanism could only work for asteroids that rotate in the same direction ("prograde") as their orbital motion around the Sun. Asteroids with retrograde rotation (of which there are many) would have been pushed closer to the Sun! And rocks that happened to have little rotation would have stayed near the Earth. Since the asteroids allegedly were ejected from huge explosions on the Earth, there is no reason to think they would all be spinning in a convenient direction or at the necessary rate.
The supposed cloud of interplanetary water molecules could not exert enough unbalanced force on the asteroids to push them tens of millions of miles in a thousand years or less. To make this argument as rigorous as possible, I did calculations using elementary physics equations and a number of assumptions wildly favorable to Brown (I've put the details into the "Comments" section below). My conclusion is that Brown's mechanism would require the total mass of water expelled into space to be equal to, or greater than, the mass of the Earth! Freshman-level physics shows that his theory is utterly unworkable.
Brown says he has a computer program that validates his theory of asteroid orbital enlargement. But his book provides no details, and he says he got his results using "arbitrary" values for parameters like gas density. What we need to know are the actual values! If he won't give a straightforward listing of his assumed parameter values, the best way to evaluate his claims would be to inspect and run his computer code. Unfortunately, my polite requests to him for more information resulted only in repeated statements that he is "not an answering service," along with challenges to a "telephone debate." He said his calculations were checked and approved by "a very capable astronautics professor," but refused to give this person's name. He said it would be too difficult to print out and send me the code he used to do the calculations, even though I offered to pay him for his time.
He claims to have made a great discovery, but refuses to disclose how he did his work. No one who acts like this deserves to be called a scientist.
Based on my study of his book, I conclude that Dr. Brown's work is without scientific merit. But I've tried to treat him fairly, and I've communicated many of my objections to him via e-mail. In some cases, as noted above, these communications caused him to quietly alter his book, although he has never admitted his errors and continues to claim, to me and to others, that I don't know what I'm talking about.
I've repeatedly told Dr. Brown that I'll be happy to engage with him if he wants to defend his book. Since a suitably detailed discussion would have to include analysis of his asteroid computer code and other mathematical matters, a telephone debate would not be appropriate. A blog capable of displaying equations would be best. If he will provide information on his calculations, at a level of detail equivalent to what a scientist expects in a standard peer-reviewed research paper, I'll be glad to discuss or "debate" his claims on his or any other website, with or without a moderator, anytime. He has made no response to this offer.
I've never met Dr. Brown, but based on material on his website, I suspect that he has many good qualities. I have no personal issues with him, but I am dismayed at his distorted presentation of science. He has misled countless people who are sincerely searching for the truth.
All of us understand the world through a combination of independent thinking and trust in others. We are impressed by people with advanced degrees, and many of us assume that a deeply religious person will behave with scrupulous integrity. Dr. Brown, with his identification as a man of science and a man of God, has inherent power and trust. His abuse of that power and trust is evident in his book, and, sadly, in the words of the good people he has misled
Getting your information from the comment section at amazon.com huh? Yeah thats a pretty good authority to get your information from.
This is a peer review ? Specifically as regards his Hydroplate Thesis ?
Vhehn. Every post you make provides evidence that the atheists are morons. You will fall prey to whatever nonsense some other atheist moron says as long as he claims its scientific(even if its not). You have no ability to think for yourself. This post is a case in point.
The book of Isaiah (where God said the earth was "chuwg" the hebrew word for sphere(Isa 40:22)) was written around 742 B.C. Sorry, but looks like God had a 172 year head start on you at least. If only pythagoras had thought of it first, huh?
not many. to be a moron you have to be willing to be willfully ignorant and defiantly proud of it in the face of all scientific evidence. can you think of any other group other than the religious mind that fits that description?