This is why YEC should just stick to their erroneous interpretation of the Bible and don’t get confused by science. Why do they feel the need to be concordists. At the end of the day if they see something in science that they don’t think agrees with their young earth view, they would automatically reject it anyway. So, I wish YEC would just stay out of science and not exhibit their ignorance. It doesn’t just make them look bad but the rest of us Christians gets lumped in with them and make the job of evangelism more difficult.
In this clip, Lisle is trying to explain quantum physics to Hovind who is clueless like his father. Lisle has a Ph.D. in astrophysics but has never work a day as a professional physicist or contributed to the field of physics. He went into full-time young earth apologetics ministry right after he got his degree and only published in young earth publications, peer reviewed by…, you guessed it, young earth creationists.
In this short clip, he has already made so many factual errors on science. So, I am going to ignore the fact that he says particles behave differently depending if they are observed. I give him the excuse that he is trying to make thing easier to understand for the lay audience. But then he goes on to say, the act of observing requires light to hit the monitor and reflect off of it and hits our eyes. Is this just because he is ignorant about electronics? If you look at a monitor the light from the monitor that hits your eye is 95-99% emitted from the light generated in the monitor. It is not reflected. The remaining reflected light is dependent on the material of the screen. So, if he is saying that our observing of the monitor is affecting the image that comes to us at the quantum level that is just ignorant. It gets worse. He says “particles of light they weight almost nothing”. Almost nothing? A Ph.D. with an astrophysics degree said light weights almost nothing. A first-year physics student will learn that photon is a massless object. This have been verified by multiple lines of experiments photon has zero rest mass. How does he not know this. “light has very little effect on something as massive as my monitor”. Wow, when light hits his monitor is it interacting with it only at the macro level? If the light coming out of his monitor is still in a superposition state any light will have massive effect on that light. It would totally cause the decoherence of those quantum superposition photons. But in reality, everything he described there has nothing to do with the quantum strangeness of quantum physics. The operation of that monitor was not based on quantum coherence rather all the electronics that is use to generate that image coming out of his monitor is already in a decoherent state which makes everything he said nonsensical.
In this second clip he is describing the model of an atom like the 1911 Rutherford model. But we now know that is wrong. In quantum mechanics the electrons exists in a quantized orbital probability cloud.
Here is more misinformation from Lisle. “quantum particles also have spin … they can rotate” Please why is he doing this. In quantum mechanics the spin of an electron does not mean it is rotating. It is not like a top twist it and set it loose and it spins in a circle. No. Electron do not spin like that. It is an intrinsic property of the electron. An intrinsic property is what identifies that electron. A better analogy would be like a gender, male and female. An electron with spin up or down just mean that the intrinsic property of that electron has a spin up polarity or a spin down polarity. It is not rotating on its axis as Lisle said.
I honestly don’t know if Lisle is ignorant or just totally clueless on how to teach quantum mechanics. Either way YEC should just stay out of science and stick to their misinterpretation of the Bible and don’t get confuse by the facts.