Jason Lisle's Anisotropic Synchrony Convention (ASC) and the Speed of Gravity

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Jason Lisle's Anisotropic Synchrony Convention (ASC) is a proposed solution to the "distant starlight problem" within young-earth creationism, which posits a universe only six thousand years old. The problem is that light from distant galaxies appears to take millions or billions of years to reach Earth, contradicting the young-age model under the standard assumption of the Einstein Synchrony Convention (ESC).

The ESC, commonly used in physics, assumes the one-way speed of light is constant and equal to the measured two-way (round-trip) speed of light (c) in all directions. However, the one-way speed of light cannot be directly measured without already having a convention for synchronizing separated clocks. Since the two-way speed of light is the only objectively measurable quantity, physicists are technically free to choose a convention for the one-way speed of light.

ASC's Account for the Speed of Light

Lisle's ASC exploits this conventionality of simultaneity, choosing a convention where light travels at an infinite speed toward an observer (specifically, the Earth) and at c/2 away from the observer. The crucial point is that this anisotropic (direction-dependent) convention preserves the measurable two-way speed of light as c.

  • Solving the Starlight Problem: By defining the speed of light directed toward Earth as infinite, Lisle argues that starlight from even the most distant galaxies arrives instantaneously in the Earth's reference frame. This eliminates the vast light-travel time, making the distant stars visible from Earth on the fourth day of creation, consistent with the Genesis account in a young-age context.

  • A Convention, Not a Testable Hypothesis: Lisle asserts that ASC is a convention, a coordinate choice for time-stamping events and is thus mathematically equivalent to ESC for all observable, two-way measurements. He argues it cannot be empirically "falsified" any more than the choice between metric and imperial units can be.

The Challenge of the Speed of Gravity

The significant issue that challenges or is argued to falsify the ASC comes from the observed speed of gravity, specifically from the detection of gravitational waves.

  • Gravitational Wave Observations: In 2017, the LIGO and Virgo collaborations, along with numerous telescopes, detected a gravitational wave event (GW170817) caused by the merger of two neutron stars. Crucially, this was followed almost immediately by the detection of a burst of light (gamma-rays and later, other electromagnetic radiation) from the same location.

  • Simultaneity of Light and Gravity: The difference in arrival time between the gravitational waves and the light was measured to be only about 1.7 seconds over a distance of approximately 130 million light-years. This observation demonstrates that the one-way speed of gravitational waves is equal to the one-way speed of light to an extremely high degree of accuracy.

  • The ASC Problem: General Relativity predicts that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, c. Since ASC defines the speed of incoming light as infinite and the speed of gravity must be the same as the speed of light, the ASC would imply that gravitational waves should also travel at an infinite speed toward Earth.

  • Falsification Argument: The observation of a slight delay (1.7 seconds) between the gravitational waves and the light, over vast cosmic distances, is extremely close to what is predicted by the standard ESC where both travel at the finite speed c. The measured speeds are finite and virtually identical, not infinite. Critics argue that because the finite and equal one-way speeds of light and gravity were successfully measured and localized using synchronized clocks, the ASC is falsified by an observable physical phenomenon. Gravity waves act as a "time signal" that travels alongside light, effectively allowing an independent (non-light-based) way to measure the one-way speed of the effect, demonstrating it to be finite and equal to c (the ESC assumption). The ASC is designed specifically to account for the speed of light by convention, but it does not independently explain why the speed of a separate physical phenomenon,gravity, should follow the same anisotropic, observer-centric, infinite-inward-speed convention.

Conclusion

Lisle's Anisotropic Synchrony Convention is a mathematical convention that successfully accounts for the speed of light by arbitrarily defining the inward speed as infinite, solving the distant starlight problem for a young-earth model while remaining mathematically consistent with the measurable two-way speed c. However, the observation that the speed of gravity (gravitational waves) is also finite and virtually identical to the one-way speed of light strongly confirms that the actual physical speed of both phenomena is the same finite speed, c, thus undermining the physical plausibility and utility of the ASC.



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