Gas clouds are redshifted to the same degree as nearby stars (0-14), but unlike the Hubble model the shift (from today's observed values) is instantaneous, not Doppler. There is no issue of all useful light being lost by redshift. But to correctly describe the considerations of opacity, gas, and star structure to answer your implied concerns would require more study rather than a flip answer. Thanks again for your patience.
Yes, I waved the chart away quickly because it's an old view of the data. 1) The data was shown not to fit a flatline with 99% confidence, as three data points evidence. This is sufficient for most scientists to admit a tenable start hypothesis. To dismiss some data as "horse-and-buggy" is not scientific whether you or Setterfield does it. 2) We have two modern measurements off from each other by .023 which claim to have only .0003 error; one or both was wrong. This is sufficient for most scientists to admit modern technology does not always measure up to its claims and cannot be relied on for 10 significant figures. 3) Those are just quick examples pulled from web skims. The 1993 report strengthens statistical confidence that the flatline model is, well, flatlined. Quick links:
Setterfield Papers
Response to criticism of 1987 report
Montgomery-Dolphin 1993
Alas, PatrickHenry's article from talkorigins really hurts his case. Suffice to say that if the article is copyright 1997-2003; if it includes a link to its unaddressed rebuttal copyright 2000; if article objects to early 1980s versions of a paper without once mentioning its peer-reviewed 1987 status; and if article objects because the prepublication paper abuses sources: this is what psychologists call projection, combined with inability to retract anything rebutted. There is nothing to rebut that is not rebutted by Setterfield 2000 or Setterfield-Norman 1987 or Montgomery-Dolphin 1993. Embarrassing for Bob Day.
But it also hits me I still have much of my original heartburn, even if there's a lot of new material to sift through. I'm still trying to see where I got my answers.
What were original reaction rates on Sun and Earth? How many photons and alpha particles did they respectively generate?
Never mind Setterfield's almost impenetrable paper for the moment. I spent a lot of time looking at earlier versions of it years ago but it seems mostly new and wondrous. Let's look at what I have from you.
1) Sunlight: First VR correctly observes that over time, the energy of a photon is conserved (except at quantum leaps, which can be ignored here)
I was worrying about across quantum leaps only. Because of the hc = constant balancing act, the per-photon changes are a wash. I assume that nothing happens to wavelength for in-flight photons since space is not expanding in a Setterfield universe. That's all you have to play with. E = hc / l doesn't give you anywhere much to hide anything.
The per-photon energy changes are a wash.
Again, yes. A green photon stays green forever and has the same energy forever.
Then VR correctly observes that in the past, the total energy from all photons should have been much lower: The energy of each photon has to go a lot lower or Adam is in trouble.
Only if the Sun is 6,000 years old but looks 4.5 billion because of incredibly boosted reaction rates in the past. Setterfield puts a reaction rate into several of his formulas in recognition of this change. I don't see where he puts numbers in here but the original rates have to be incredibly cranked. If you just take the two numbers 6,000 and 4.5 billion, one is 750,000 times the other one. But that's very misleading, because Setterfield's decay curve flattens dramatically early on, inverse cosecant squared or whatever. By far the lion's share of the work has to get done in the first five hundred years or so, then, because only negligle amounts of the total are getting done once the c-curve decays to the neighborhood of modern values. For that early period the ratio then looks more like nine million to one, which is why I suspect the actual multiplier will turn out to be Setterfield's c-boost of 11 million. And if the nuclear fuel burn rate is that high, there will be that many more photons and that many more alpha particles.
Here I must admit being mistaken about the cancellation coming from lower individual photon energy in the past, because I confused the present low value of old photon energy with its past high value, which does appear identical to the present high value of new photon energy.
I do not understand what you are saying you confused. What is the present value of an old photon? We agreed I think that a photon is a photon and its energy will be proportional to its wavelength, other differences cancelling.
An old photon would have much less energy now, but be emitted much more often, than a new photon, but in both cases the energy is conserved.
I think you're trying to say there were more photons then, but redder. That's what Setterfield said in at least one paper. The problem is that energy is not conserved if the redshifts are small. Vastly too many photons, only a tiny redshift. We need a factor of 11 million (only you can't do that and not go blind). We have less than two.
Where is the cancellation? The opacity computation doesn't do it for me. That hides nothing. OK, it puts in some extra redshift. But you can't do enough redshift without going blind. And the Earth becomes a red giant before you do enough.
That means the photons observed now from the remote edge of the universe have much less energy than the photons from our sun now. However, the cancellation must come from the totality of photons if it exists, rather than from individual photons.
... Setterfield's solution to this objection in 6.2 is to calculate the overall luminosity of the star to see if it is truly greater with c or if factors cancel...
And the answer is in Setterfield's luminosity calculation. I feel this to be deeply flawed, a shell game with cherry-picked formulae rather than a consistently applied model stepped through stages of time and change. In particular, he abuses stellar opacity, taking only what he wants. I assume he does the same everywhere with everything else he's doing.
You truly have 11 million times more photons back then, so far as I can still tell. They aren't very red-shifted, although yet another problem is that it's far from clear why not. The hydrogen nuclei fusing in the Sun back then have masses only a tiny fraction of the masses of modern hydrogen nuclei. A tiny fraction. That the photons emerge with a z of only 1.5 sort of beggars understanding, E = mc2, and conservation of energy in general. They have almost the same energy of modern solar photons, and where did that come from?
But take it as a gimme that they emerge with almost the same energy as now but there are 11 million of them for every single modern photon. The cancellation is the Sun's opacity, 11 million times greater then than now? Did you think about this?