The Only Constant

 And so today we’re talking about those five properties of light again. Remember the first three? Light is the source of all life, the source of all power, and it’s everywhere. Keep in mind that coincidentally (Not!), GOD is the source of all life, and power, and He is everywhere. Do we see a pattern? This time, I want us to think about the 4th property of light, which is that it’s CONSTANT.

I hadn’t given much thought to this, but did you know that light is ALWAYS the same?  Light cannot be heated or cooled, sped up or slowed down.  Doing those things can result is MORE light, but the light itself will stay the same.

Now here’s where it gets amazing: all material things, all matter, even time, changes in relation to the speed of light, not the other way around.  That may be hard to take on board, but Albert Einstein, back in 1938, demonstrated conclusively that every thing, even time, will change in relation to light. 

The atomic clock, without dispute the most accurate time piece in existence uses what they call the ‘resonant frequency’ of atoms in order to tell time.  That’s why we call it the ‘atomic clock’.  How accurate is it, you ask? I’m glad you asked. We’re told that, well, it’s not absolutely perfect. Although it hasn’t been proven yet, scientists will concede that the atomic clock will probably lose about one second every hundred million years. Not a big loss, for sure, but enough to take it out of the “constant” category. , 

In 1971 Joseph Hafele, a physicist,  and Richard Keating, an astronomer, took four Cesium Beam atomic clocks and put two each aboard two specially outfitted commercial airliners.  One flew east, with the earth’s rotation, and the other flew west, against it. Before taking off, they were all confirmed to be set to the time standard atomic clock, located in Washington, DC.  

Refueling in flight, they went, not once but twice around the entire globe, landed, and checked the time. Turns out the clocks on the plane now disagreed with the clock in Washington. They were only off by .59 nanoseconds, but that was exactly the difference predicted by Einstein.  

How does that affect us?  Today there are countless satellites  orbiting around the earth, and each one is targeted by a system of antennas so that they can communicate with each other.  You will be receiving this missive today by machines with more science involved than this mortal can imagine.  IF Einstein’s time difference was not taken into account, the signals would miss the satellites by miles, with no chance of connecting.  

But it almost seems I’m talking more about time than light.  Let me direct you to a couple of verses.

Malachi 3:6  “For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, or children of Jacob, have not perished.”  (that’s in the Old Testament) 

… and then there’s Hebrews 13:8,  “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”  

In this world God is the ONLY constant.

Next time I’ll finish this thread and move on. But until then, every time you turn on a light switch, think about God.

I’m sending this a little early because we, not being scientists with miles of calculations at our fingertips, are going to try to ‘link up’ with a group of campers from church….but only after we do the Japanese worship later today.  We hope to ‘camp’ for about 3 days down on the beach,  should be fun although it’s pretty hot……….thanks to all that ‘light’!

Till next week, Marsha