Science, Creation & EvolutionThe Biochemical Challenge to EvolutionTook a while before I replied here, but I have been doing a little research on virtual particles and their effect on light speed.
Well actually I didn't research it myself, quantum mechanics isn't that easy to understand, but I checked the theory of the virtual particles on the physicsforum.com
You might be surprised but the general opinion on the theory is that it is completely rubbish.
I will quote some replies.
OK, I think I can't take this much longer without sticking my nose into this.
The question here isn't what occurs, the question is HOW LIKELY is this to occur? If I have a vase that has been broken into a thousand pieces, and I throw these onto the floor, what is the likelyhood that it will recombine back into that vase? If you asked this person on that other silly forum this, he/she would not hesitate to say that this isn't likely to happen. Well then, how likely does he/she thinks a photon, in the visible range, would collide with a zero-point field that created a virtual particle? If it is THAT likely that it has cause a significant slow-down in light that the age of the universe has changed from 15 billion to tens of thousand of year, then guess what? Our universe would be OPAQUE! It will be filled with a continual collision of photons with virtual particles!
Again, as in the bastardization of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, this is a bastardization of basic QED/QFT by people who are simply taking a superficial idea of it and applying it blindly to suit their cause. Considering that no physicist in their right mind would give the seal of approval for their use of such basic physics principle should immediately rings warning bells.
This is rubbish in QED and QFT in general. Virtual particles are a mathematical artifact that allow us to do computations to high accuracies. They have no physical existence, and they can only appear in a Feynamn diagram that represents an interaction. The movement of a free particle is not affected by these vaccum fluctuations.
Don't worry about the explanations they can claim to have to backup their philosophy. It is either simply wrong, or the entire physics community is. Even if such an effect could exist, it would have to be very tiny. The vacuum fluctuations can only induce small corrections.
Also, the far cosmos looks younger. They can certainly not account for three major achievements of the Big Bang theory : the Cosmological Microwave Background, the relative abundance of elements, and the Hubble law. See here for instance.
This sounds very, eeuuhh, strange
Let me explain these virtual particles (photons can also be virtual).These particles are NOT real and you will never observe them. Then why do they "exist"? Well, they were invented by great minds in order to describe interactions between real physical particles like protons or neutrons...
The theory in which they were implemented was the Quantum-Electro-Dynamics or QED.
You also need to know that sometimes virtual particles can become real when there is enough energy available to give them "some reason to exist". The uncertainty-principle of Heisenberg states that when there is a lot of energy, they can become real for a very short while. In Quantummechanics the principle of energy-conservation can be violated for a very short while and this gives you also the reason why you need a lot of "external" energy in order to make virtual particles real. In classical physics this is not possible because energy must be conserved when a specific kind of forces are considered (like gravity)
Virtual particles are not "built" out of zero-point energy, they are just a way of describing interactions and that is all. And a photon itself will not interact with a virtual particle unless this photon is considered to be the virtual particle itself. i mean this : the attraction between an electron and a proton for example can be described in terms of virtual photons. It is them virtual photons that are the force-carries that mediate this Electromagnetic interaction. Two virtual photons can interact via the socalled polarization-insertion of QFT. But let's not get into that.
Is that enough for you to throw it in the rubbish basket? In addition I would like to give twohumble's post in the Age of the Earth topic.
http://www.jesus-christ-forums.com/home/viewtopic.php?p=41740#41740
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