How does the ether stretch out to let starlight reach Earth so quickly?
Nick asks Robert to elaborate on how the ether stretches, given that starlight reaches earth quickly through a thinning-out of the ether toward the edges of the universe.
Answer
We use the word 'stretch' because that is what Scripture uses; outside Genesis there are about ten verses in Isaiah, the Psalms, Jeremiah, and Zechariah where God says 'I stretched out the heavens,' during the creation week. So God does the stretching, and we are just filling in the material. The Planck particles are the underlying substructure of everything material, about ten to the minus thirty-five meters across, at enormous density. Even if a Planck particle could not itself stretch, a centrifugal force generated by a rotating universe would put the medium under great tension, and the more tension on the medium, the faster light passes through it. Remember there are two things here: the firmament, whose best candidate is hydrogen, which makes up about ninety percent of the universe, and this deeper Planck medium filling the spaces between the hydrogen atoms, because otherwise you have nothing, and you cannot have nothing. When I put this to ChatGPT, it agreed that if you stretched out the particles, light would go faster.