Kent Hovind's debates, can someone help?

NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!!!!!The speed of light from ANY source relative to ANY observer at ANY time under ANY circumstances is the same. Hovind's wrong, and you are wrong. No, now he's making an error. The constancy of the speed of light DOES apply at the relatively low speeds we normally deal with. We typically don't see the effects because they are small for most situations ... but in the case we have been talking about, the effect is not small. The speed of the light beam leaving the car is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second (670,616,629.4 miles per hour) no matter how fast the car is traveling and no matter how the observer who is measuring the speed is moving or nor moving or where the car is relative to the observer.

While I make no claims about convictions it is clear that Hovind attempted to declare bankruptcy to get out of paying taxes - or specifically to recover property and money seized as payment. (i.e. Hovind denies that he lives in the U.S.A. and denies that he is a U.S. citizen). If Hovind is an honest tax avoider why did he lie ? Did he forget the house ?

With regard to the first point you are dead wrong. The speed of light relative to the bystander is always c (3 * 10^8 m/s). The speed of light relative to the car is always c. That is true all the time - not just at some split second.And I'm afraid that you misunderstand me. My point is that the ordinary addition of velocities works at low speeds - but light does NOT move at a low speed. Simple addition of velocities is NOT valid when dealing with light.

The bottom line and Hovind's valid point is that for a long time the fact of the total title has been withheld from the public and educational institutions all the way up the grades via edited editions.Had the public been aware of Darwin's racial ideology relative to evolution and the influence this evidently had on Hitler, likely the book would have been banned for the kids rather than promoted to the status it has enjoyed.

Do you ever consider the possibility of finding things out for yourself? Following the link that Paul provided? Hovind contends that paying taxes is voluntary, which decades of court decision denies. Taxes are not voluntary. He is not legally corect; the Supreme COurt is the final ruling on the law of the land, and they have ruled that paying taxes is not voluntary.

Perhaps you would like to support your claims about Darwin's ALLEGED "racial ideology".You could start with answering my psot 51 and supporting your assertion that Darwin favoured the extermination of other races.

You haven't proivided any evidence of an edited edition. Darwin was, for his day, notably non-racist. See the link I posted above. There's a quite a bit of evidence that the Christian Bible had a lot more effect that Darwin did on Hitler. But so what? The question is whether or not Darwin and the later modern synthesis was right .. and that question was setteld long ago. Similarly, the question of whether Kent Hovind is an honest reporter of the truth was settled long ago. He's not.

False. Let's use sound instead, the principles are the same, but it may be easier to understand (and you can do the experiment easily as well):

• A car is on a track 1.0 km from and approaching the observer (bystander) at 100 km/hr (~60 mph)
• As the car passes laser beam triggered checkpoints a firecracker is exploded simultaneously on both the car and the ground,
• This is done for 10 different locations on approach and 10 locations on departure (passes the bystander).
• The observer has a sound recorder that measures the input from these events in relation to time, accurate to 1/100 seconds.
• Repeat the experiment with the car traveling at 50 km/hr and 150 km/hr.
• If there was a difference in speed it would show up as gaps in the recordings of simultaneous sounds, with larger gaps for greater distance and greater speeds
• The sound from simultaneous explosions will not be separated in time (one no faster than the other) but there will be a difference in pitch (Doppler effect).
• The ones from the car on the approach sequence will be higher in pitch (blue-shifted)
• The ones from car on the departure sequence will be lower in pitch (red-shifted).
• The amount of the pitch shift will be directly proportional to the speed of the car, but the speed of sound will be unaffected.

The speed of sound in dry air is ~330 m/s or 1188 km/hr. From 1 km away the sound would take 3.030 seconds to reach the observer. Adding 100 km/hr to that gives a theoretical airspeed of 1288 km/hr, and from 1 km away the sound would take 2.795 seconds to reach the observer, a measurable (with a little difficulty) difference of 0.235 seconds.You could attempt the same experiment with light, but it travels so much faster than sound that it would be difficult to measure such an effect even if it were there {the speed of light is 300,000,000 m/s = 1,080,000,000 km/hr and adding or subtracting 100 to that is too insignificant a change to be noticeable - even IF it changed (and it doesn't) - which makes Hovinds example ridiculous to begin with)To put it simply, Hovind is lying to you and relying on your unknowing gullibility to take what he says without question.Enjoy.

---

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Actually, buzzsaw, Darwin was almost kicked off the Beagle because he continouly critized and berated the captain, who was a loud mouthed racist. Now, I am curious how you equate Darwin with extreme racism. Not that the man didn't have faults, but by the standards of his day, racism defintely wasnt one of them.

You might want to read up on the Michelson-Morely interferometry experiment before carrying on with this conversation Buzz...

I would like to add a small caveat to that statment. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. It is possible to travel faster than the speed of light in various materials. For example, in a nuclear reactor, there are particles ejected at near C(vacuum), which are traveling faster than light in water. The result is that they do create a shockwave of sorts, which emits a strange blue glow called chernokov radiation. Sorry for being nit picky on that one. : )

I would like to add a small caveat to that statment. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. It is possible to travel faster than the speed of light in various materials. For example, in a nuclear reactor, there are particles ejected at near C(vacuum), which are traveling faster than light in water. The result is that they do create a shockwave of sorts, which emits a strange blue glow called chernokov radiation. Sorry for being nit picky on that one. : )

I'm not that either Darwin's views on racism or Hovinds tax evasion have anything to do with how right or wrong they are on matters of science. Why do we need to go wildly off on these tangents?edited to fix some (but probably not all) of the spelling[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 04-02-2004]

Actually, its nevertheless false. The speed of light is constant for all all observers. The bystander would measure the speed of light emitted by the car as the same speed measured by those in the car. The difference would depend on if the car was moving towards or away from the obsever, which would shift the wavelength (ie redshift if moving away, blueshift if moving towards.) Of course, considering how low the velocity difference is, you would be hard pressed to measure the difference, since the realitivistic effects would be very minor. All that Hovind's statement demonstrates is a complete lack of knowledge of special or general realitivity. Of course, that isn't suprising.

Odd behavior on Hovind's part. A lot of taxes go to support people without as much as those who pay taxes (to the degree that the system is progressive). I would have thought that this is a thorougly Christian point of view.(however, this is both off topic and besides the point).Tax evader or not, Hovind is wrong.Racist or not, Darwin was right.