Жер мен ғарыш жасы туралы жаңа көзқарас: Хумфристің теориясы

American writer

In an article published in the Creation Research Society Quarterly in December 1984, Humphreys proposed a creationist model for the origin of planetary magnetic fields. According to the model, the planets were initially created as spheres of water, with the polar magnetic moments of the water molecules largely aligned. In an article, Humphreys claimed that his model had an easier time explaining their magnetic fields than the dynamo theory. According to Humphreys, his model's predictions were again verified when probes in 2008 and 2011 flew past Mercury and measured the magnetic field. Humphreys claimed that the observed decay of Mercury's magnetic field was in line with that predicted by his model.

Humphreys' book Starlight and Time presents his alternative to the Big Bang in an attempt to solve what young Earth creationists call the Distant Starlight Problem. Its thesis is that the Earth and universe are about six thousand years old when measured in Earth's reference frame, whereas the outer edge of an expanding and rotating 3 dimensional universe is billions of years old (as measured from its reference frame). It proposes, using the principles of relativity, to postulate that time ticked at different rates during the universe's origin. In other words, according to his theory, clocks on Earth registered the six days of creation, while those at the edge of the universe counted the approximately 15 billion years needed for light from the most distant galaxies to reach Earth. Humphreys' proposal has been criticized by other scientists and old Earth creationists, such as Hugh Ross and Samuel R. Conner. Humphreys has replied to Ross' and Conner's critiques. In 1998, physicist Dave Thomas wrote that in Humphreys' thousands of years old universe, he "has his astronomy backwards the Kuiper Belt contains the remains of the 'volatile' (icy) planetesimals that were left over from the formation of the Solar System numbering in the hundreds of millions. If anything, it is the Kuiper Belt that supplies the more remote hypothesized Oort Cloud, as some icy chunks are occasionally flung far away by interactions with large planets." Thomas also criticised Humphreys' idea that there is "not enough sodium in the sea" for a several billion year old sea, writing, "Humphreys finds estimates of oceanic salt accumulation and deposition that provide him the data to 'set' an upper limit of 62 million years. But modern geologists do not use erratic processes like these for clocks. It's like someone noticing that (A) it's snowing at an inch per hour, (B) the snow outside is four feet deep, and then concluding that (C) the Earth is just 48 hours, or two days, in age. Snowfall is erratic; some snow can melt; and so on. The Earth is older than two days, so there must be a flaw with the 'snow' dating method, just as there is with the 'salt' method." C. McIntosh (an expert on exact solutions to Einstein's field equations), and John Hartnett. These sources are cited approvingly by astrophysicists L. Barnes and G. Lewis in their book The cosmic revolutionary's handbook. They also stress analysing the idea, not attacking the person.

In 2008 Humphreys published a new but lesser known cosmological proposal. In it he seeks to challenge a foundational dogma of general relativity and postulates an additional spacetime dimension, one which grants God ample liberty to hold the Earth in a “timeless” region of suspended animation while the rest of the universe ages for billions of years, thus allowing very old and distant starlight to bathe a young Earth on creation day four. A critic pointed out that the well known equation for gravitational redshift/blueshift countermands his model's efforts to achieve today's observed redshift from cosmic sources, to which Humphreys countered by terming the gravitational redshift equation a “flawed equation” and became dismissive in his remarks about any potential applicability to his model. Since his new cosmology relies heavily on the observed sunward acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft as a manifestation peculiar to features of his model, his ideas were dealt a significant blow when researchers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California discovered that the apparent anomaly was due to the thermal recoil force acting on the spacecraft.