From:    Steve Carlip                           
To:      All                                    Msg #112, Feb-21-93 02:10PM
Subject: Re: What are the rational criteria?

Organization: Physics, UC Davis
From: carlip@landau.ucdavis.edu (Steve Carlip)
Message-ID: <22854@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Newsgroups: talk.origins

In article <1ljajt$5ho@horus.ap.mchp.sni.de> frank@D012S658.uucp (Frank 
O'Dwyer) writes:

[...]
>(b)Aren't evolutionists potentially engaged in some kind of "flat earth" 
>fallacy? By that I mean "my garden is flat, so the earth is flat". Isn't 
>any scientific theory purporting to explain the events of the distant past, 
>or future, prey to the same error in 4-space?

I'll leave it for others to address this issue in biology, and just
comment briefly on physics.  The question is a legitimate one --- the
assumption that physical laws don't change over time ought to be
tested, and a good deal of effort has gone into devising such tests.

In the physics literature, the question is usually formulated as one
of whether the "constants" of nature change over time.  A wide variety 
of very clever tests have been devised.  Let me list a few:

(1) By observing stars, we can "look back in time" --- the light from
a star a million light years away was produced by physical processes
taking place a million years ago.  Observations of spectral lines in
distant stars give very sensitive measurements of atomic physics over
extremely long periods of time.

(2) Recent observations of the 1987 supernova SN1987A have provided
very good tests of time-dependence of weak interactions (radioactive
decay).  Much of the light now emitted from the remnants of the
supernova comes from known radioactive decay processes, and by measuring
the change in luminosity with time we can determine half-lives.

(3) Observations of binary pulsars --- pairs of orbiting stars, one
of which is a pulsar --- give very accurate measurements of gravitational
physics at large distances, and therefore long times.

(4) While observation of a single form of radioactive decay on earth
doesn't tell us much about constancy of physical laws, *consistency* of
independent decay modes does.  This is particularly true because
different kinds of decay depend on different physical processes
(strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions); it would take some
fairly incredible "fine tuning" to have these interactions all change
at exactly the right rates to give consistent dating.  

(5) Correlations between ancient growth patterns (e.g., growth patterns 
in ancient coral) and predicted orbital periods (lengths of days, months,
years) give good tests of the constancy of physical laws over a large 
part of the history of the earth.

(6) Recent measurements --- for instance, radar ranging of the Viking
Mars lander --- test constancy of physical laws over only a short
period, but to an extremely high accuracy; if physical constants
changed in the past, these experiments tell us that that change must
have stopped, or at least slowed incredibly, in recent times.

(7) At the other extreme, predictions of the behavior of the universe
very soon after the big bang --- roughly 15 billion years ago --- are
also based on the assumption that laws of physics were the same then 
as now.  While these predictions are much less precise, they give
good agreement with observations (e.g., abundance of light elements,
existence and spectrum of the microwave background radiation).

This list is biased towards gravitational physics, since that's my
field; I'm sure geologists and biologists could add many tests.  The
overall result is that physical constants do not change at a rate of
more than a few parts in 10^11 per year, with slightly stronger
restrictions on some constants than on others.

The key point is that while any individual observation is bound to
have loopholes, the consistency of so many different tests, each using
different assumptions and involving different combinations of physical
interactions, is extraordinarily hard to dispute.  It would take an
incredible "conspiracy" of physical changes --- different laws
changing by different amounts in different places and times, single
laws changing differently for different physical processes, all
perfectly tuned to give the appearance of constancy --- to give any
explanation of all of the observations apart from the obvious one,
that physics really is time-independent.

Steve Carlip
carlip@dirac.ucdavis.edu