Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 244 posts

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#161

Post by coldtea »

AareyBaba wrote: post #90
philipkglass wrote: post #60

Here is the longer original article, scanned by Google Books and hosted by the HathiTrust project: "Age of the Sun -- Force and Heat" Scientific American Vol IX -- No. 7 August 15 1863 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x001601382&view=1...

Interesting to read. The Sun is referred to as 'he' and people were just beginning to understand how heat energy and mechanical energy could be transformed into one another. "He has enlightened our globe from one generation to another without any apparent diminution of strength, and we have formed the instinctive belief that no limit in the past or any in the future can be assigned to his functions. No proof of progr…

>Interesting to read. The Sun is referred to as 'he'

Many languages have gendered nouns. In mine sun is also a "he".

It's also common to gender objects when talking about them affectionately or poetically (e.g. talking about a motorcycle as a "she" or a "he").

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#162

Post by coldtea »

garmaine wrote: post #158
redis_mlc wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to Kelvin, it was a reasonable opinion at the time: 1) Half of the aviation pioneers died trying. 2) The Wright brothers were truly overachievers, devising a control system, early aviation engine (1903) and wind tunnel. 3) Producing light-weight, reliable and powerful aviation engines took over 20 years. The Atlantic crossing only became survivable after the Wright Brothers made the Whirlwind J-5 radial en…

To be fair to his critics: birds, bats, and bees exist.

He didn't say things heavier than air can't fly. Just that we can't make them... (and at the time, we didn't have any success making them - we did however had great success with "lighter than air" air displacement vehicles, namely hot air balloons).

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#163

Post by mudita »

hansbo wrote: post #131
yongjik wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't that far-fetched as it sounds now: using Maxwell's equation, one can easily derive the speed of light, c. But then the question is: speed relative to what ? Because Maxwell's equation doesn't tell exactly what it is relative to. But, as we all know, speed is relative, so it must be relative to something - then the something ought to be the medium for light. So people started looking for it - and it refused…

I always found this fascinating. The enormous shift in physics that occurred in the early 20th century must have been so exciting to experience first hand.

It seems like it had a lasting psychological impact on the thinking of the generation of scientists, who lived through this radical revolution .

I found very interesting this moment in an interview with Freeman Dyson, where he describes the difference in thinking between two generations of scientists around 1950 (Oppenheimer, Bohr, Heisenberg… vs. Feynman, Schwinger…):

"they lived through this radical revolution of quantum electrodynamics, which was so successful, they wanted to have something like that again"

"each of them had radical proposals, which turned out to be totally useless and in the meantime it was the young people who actually were the conservatives"

https://youtu.be/N44DZJW4LSw?t=67

The whole interview is very much worth watching, also from a historical perspective.

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#164

Post by coldtea »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #96
saagarjha wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was deliberately provocative and I'm glad I was. I've got far better responses as a result. I would tend to argue that this isn’t something we need on Hacker News. (Also, it’s “oblate”. To “ablate” is to erode.)

> (Also, it’s “oblate”. To “ablate” is to erode.) Perhaps, but the item "ablate" in "an ablate spheroid" is obviously not a verb, so it's hard to see how that's relevant. "Ablate" isn't really well-formed for a verb, and indeed I see that the modern verb is a back-formation from the better-formed "ablation". If it had started as a verb, you'd expect "aufer", in the same way that we have the verb "offer" rather than "…

You appear to paint yourself in a corner and then try to talk your way out of it with irrelevant arguments nobody cares about.

Just admit that "ablate" was a mistake and be done with it.

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#165

Post by flohofwoe »

guerrilla wrote: post #149
riffraff wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latin has grammatical genres, "Sol, Solis" is masculine and "Luna, Lunae" is female. It seems more likely to me that people just kept using the latin genres since old scientific literature was in latin.

Germanic languages, of which English was one, have this too and "sun" is Germanic in etymology. Most PIE-derived languages had this at one point but some, including English, lost it.

In German the sun is female though (and the moon male). In French the sun seems to be male and the moon female (I don't know the language though, just looked it up), so maybe these are traces of the French influence into the English language?

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#166

Post by coldtea »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #117
buck4roo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk about doubling down with nonsense when you've patently spelled it the wrong way. SMH.

You might want to take another look at the usernames involved. I'm not claiming that "an ablate spheroid" was correct usage. I'm pointing out that the response, "to 'ablate' is to erode", is a non sequitur. It is relevant neither to its parent comment nor to the comment in which it appears.

>I'm not claiming that "an ablate spheroid" was correct usage. I'm pointing out that the response, "to 'ablate' is to erode", is a non sequitur.

Which is still a wrong thing to say and a bad argument.

You appear to be arguing something like "I couldn't mean ablate, since it doesn't fit the context, so why mention it". Well, whether you meant it or not, you did write it, and you could very well have done it because you thought it meant "oblate".

This doesn't make the correction a "non sequitur" in any way. On the contrary, it's very relevant: it provides the actual meaning of the term used (whether it was used as a typo or because you didn't know the correct meaning).

And that's too many words for a non-issue. "Ablate" was the wrong word for your intended meaning, somebody pointed it while also explaining what it means. End of story.

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#167

Post by garmaine »

coldtea wrote: post #162
garmaine wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to his critics: birds, bats, and bees exist.

He didn't say things heavier than air can't fly. Just that we can't make them... (and at the time, we didn't have any success making them - we did however had great success with "lighter than air" air displacement vehicles, namely hot air balloons).

If nature did it 3 times (more, we now know), it’s a bit presumptuous to say humans won’t be able to.

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#168

Post by pfdietz »

ufo wrote: post #64
tialaramex wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's helpful to describe this 1863 article as "reasoned bollocks" In this same timeframe Kelvin supposes the Earth cannot possibly be billions of years old because it's warm underground. You can measure and verify that the Sun can't be keeping the Earth this warm, if it was just down to the Sun this place would be uninhabitable. Nothing could be this warm after cooling down for billions of years with jus…

Actually, main thing that kelvin got wrong is that the Earth has a liquid mantle. Convection in the mantle means that the surface receives more heat from the interior and takes longer to cool down to the present temperatures. Radioactive decay inside the earth also adds to the age of the earth but not as much as the convection in the mantle does.

The mantle is (mostly) not liquid. It can transmit shear waves, which a liquid cannot do. The convection is occurring in a solid, by plastic deformation.

What's sad is that Kelvin could have used his reasoning to determine that this convection must have been occurring, and from that inferred that continents likely drift around, driven by convection. But he was driven by religious convictions to try to demonstrate evolution couldn't have occurred because there wasn't enough time.

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#169

Post by Finnucane »

hawkice wrote: post #111
Ididntdothis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds a little like Dark Matter and Dark Energy today. Lots of evidence for it but nobody knows what it is.

To be fair, the cosmological constant is a fair stab at a guess for dark energy. Like, space has an intrinsic property N that's allowed in the equations. That's a decently shaped guess.

Where does it say the government is limited to that?

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#170

Post by the8472 »

archgoon wrote: post #141
jaggederest wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I wasn't saying he did. I was trying to say that, without a theoretical framework to hang that kind of energy generation on, there was no capacity to understand what was going on. E=MC^2 is precisely that kind of theoretical framework. Pretty amazing, to me. Being able to say "It's this far away, this hot, and this large, but why?"

I don't think thats true though. In 1903, Radioactivity had already been proposed as an explanation for the Sun's heat (2 years prior to Annus Mirabilis). The connection between E=mc^2 and nuclear reactions doesn't become clear until you start losing mass (proton + neutron) in the reactions, which doesn't happen for the reactions involved in the Sun (Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen Cycle). The connection was recognized by Lis…

> which doesn't happen for the reactions involved in the Sun

You might want to rephrase that, after all a mass loss occurs in any reaction, it's just not as significant as a whole nucleon.

Post reply on HN