Title Author Date

Cesium clocks and the speed of light Bebbington, John Sep 07, 2005

Only recently come across your web page and am greatly enjoying reading it's contents.

I was watching a Hovind seminar video a few days ago (I can only watch about 5 minutes at a time without pulling out what little hair I have left). He was talking about the alleged slowing down of c. He then stated that scientists found that c stopped slowing down around 1960 which wasn't surprising since c was by that date being measured by use of cesium clocks and such clocks are dependant upon the speed of light. I could not understand this point so I have searched the web to find any rebuttals but there seem to be none. So I looked for descriptions of the workings of cesium clocks. These seem to indicate that the clocks are independant of the speed of c so I am mystified as to what Bubba Hovind was saying. I am well aware that most of what he says is worse than balderdash but am intrigued as to whether there is any truth in the allegation that c on August 31st cannot be measured against c on September 1st to find whether it is slowing down because cesium clocks depend on c for their accuracy. Can you help?

Title Author Date

Cesium clocks and the speed of light TalkReason , Sep 09, 2005

Dear John:

As you may have noticed, while there are many articles on Talk Reason arguing against
intelligent design, there are none dealing with "creation science," Hovind, Ken Ham, Sarfati, Baumgardner, and other young-earth creationists. The reason is very simple: those earlier creationists have been thoroughly
refuted and discredited to such an extent that continuing the revelation of all the balderdash they stubbornly try to disseminate would be beating a dead horse. Of course, there still are many benighted people listening to
Hovinds and Sarfatis, but likewise there are many people believing in astrology, flat earth, communication with the dead and the like, and the purveyors of all that crock even find sympathetic ears on the popular TV shows. We cannot cover every fallacy that finds its way into the mass media and is popular - perhaps such fads are inevitable even in the highly
developed societies despite the work of genuine scientists and successes of real science. Regarding the particular point about cesium clocks and speed of light, of course all that is nonsense, as is the rest of Hovind's drivel.
There is no evidence that speed of light has been changing at any time in the universe's history, and all the speculations by young-earth creationists are invented only to fit their beliefs in the literary truth of every word in the Bible. (Of course, there is no "proof" that speed of light has always
been constant, but such a "proof" is not required to sustain any theory accepted in physics; Einstein's postulate is that speed of light is the same in all frames of reference, but it does not require it being constant in the course of the university's history). Moreover, this question has nothing to
do with the working of atomic clocks. Even if speed of light were changing in the course of the universe's history, the frequencies of atomic clocks still would be the best point of reference for measuring time.

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