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Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

scientificamerican.com

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

#201

Post by kaoD »

ardy42 wrote: post #124
AareyBaba wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The Sun is referred to as 'he' I wonder if they picked pronouns for the planets in accordance with the associated gods of Greco-Roman mythology? IIRC, the Greco-Roman sun gods were all male (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios ). If I'm correct they'd use male pronouns for the sun, Mars, and Jupiter; and female pronouns for Earth, the Moon (Luna), and Venus.

In spanish only the Earth (f), the Sun (m), and the Moon (f) kept the pronouns (and the definite article).

Mars, Jupiter, etc. are used as proper nouns, without a definite article nor a gender. If any, we use the male gender, as in "the (m) planet Venus".

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

#202

Post by thaumasiotes »

coldtea wrote: post #166
thaumasiotes wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

> 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 is a pretty stunning thing to write after I've already had to point out to someone else that I didn't write the sentence in question. Did you read my comment before responding to it?

Now consider this sentence:

> "Ablate" was the wrong word for your intended meaning

If I respond "but this makes no sense; to 'wrong' is to unfairly cause harm", would that be a good argument? Would it constitute any evidence of any kind about your usage of the word "wrong"?

Obviously not, but it's exactly the same as the original argument I responded to, "to 'ablate' is to erode".

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

#203

Post by weregiraffe »

pfdietz wrote: post #176
haunter wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>basically knowing everything How bold! I'm pretty sure someone make a comment like yours too in ~2150 reading articles from today.

He's incorrect in that the Standard Model firmed up in the 1970s. But since then, fundamental physics has been nearly stagnant. More broadly, the era of exponentially growing knowledge of the basic foundations of the universe cannot last long. Historically it will be seen as highly anomalous. Most of history will be one of scientific stagnation.

Why not? You don't know how much knowledge the universe contains.

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

#204

Post by lebuffon »

whatshisface wrote: post #185
gwd wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth noting that this is not an extract from a technical paper, but from the "Canadian Presbyterian", apparently a Christian journal; and not written by a professional scientist, but "Principal Leich". Someone feels the need to justify including information from such a source by prefacing it with: "Principal Leich seems to be perfectly familiar with mechanical science." So just keep in mind, what's written…

The 6000 year claim does not appear in Genesis, I do not know enough history to say but it's possible that YEC-ism is based on a modern invention of interpretation.

"According to Hebrew time reckoning we are now in the 6th millennium. The Hebrew year count starts in year 3761 BCE, which the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides established as the biblical date of Creation."

https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/jewish-calendar.html

This may have had some influence on western thinking. I don't know.

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

#205

Post by LeifCarrotson »

whatshisface wrote: post #185
gwd wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth noting that this is not an extract from a technical paper, but from the "Canadian Presbyterian", apparently a Christian journal; and not written by a professional scientist, but "Principal Leich". Someone feels the need to justify including information from such a source by prefacing it with: "Principal Leich seems to be perfectly familiar with mechanical science." So just keep in mind, what's written…

The 6000 year claim does not appear in Genesis, I do not know enough history to say but it's possible that YEC-ism is based on a modern invention of interpretation.

Having grown out of a young-earth Creationist religion, I can say that the 6000 year claim is based on a rather fanatically literal interpretation of Genesis and the surrounding histories. Reading the genealogy of Genesis 5 and trusting that the ages are accurate, that they skip no one, and that Adam was literally created by God in year 0. With some simple addition, that genealogy gives a birth date for Abraham of about 2000 years after Adam. From there, a literal/historical/grammatical hermeneutic brings you to the Exodus and iron age histories that can pretty confidently assign real dates. Maybe it's just the indoctrination I grew up in that still empathizes with the ability to read "After Noah was 500 years old, he became the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth" and say "yep, there's another 500 years on the chronology" and imagine that Christians have always done that.

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

#206

Post by GurnBlandston »

colinmhayes wrote: post #85
amadio wrote: post #32

I highly recommend this related article: "How the Sun Shines", by John Bahcall https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0009259

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas. A gigantic nuclear furnace.

The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma. The sun's not simply made out of gas, no, no, no.

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

#207

Post by philwelch »

whatshisface wrote: post #188
philwelch wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if God created the universe 6,000 years ago and made everything seem as if it were older—I mean, that’s just a fundamentally unfalsifiable metaphysical hypothesis. For all we know, God did that last week or maybe 5 seconds ago. There’s nothing stopping that hypothesis from being true, it just makes, by definition, no measurable or practical difference and is hence irrelevant to scientific inquiry.

But that would go against how things are supposed to work according to the Bible: would God really be playing a big trick, aiming to deceive? A philosophically motivated abstract godlike being might be expected do that, but the Bible is a lot more specific than that about what God's like...

Yeah but at that point you’re arguing theology.

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

#208

Post by throw_away »

Geee wrote: post #84
throw_away wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they reconcile when they give customers answers > 6000 years and the whole "thou shalt not lie" bit?

It's not a lie. When God created everything, he made it seem it was older.

Perpetuating known lies seems like lying. Is it ok because it's God's lie?

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

#209

Post by ufo »

adrianN wrote: post #112
ufo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand how convection can increase the time to cool down. It seems to me that the higher temperatures closer to the surface facilitated by convection would lead to faster cooling.

WIthout convection the earth as a whole takes longer to cool down but the surface layer cools faster. In an earth with a convective mantle the earth as a whole cools faster but the surface layer cools slower (because it is receiving more heat from the core).

This article helped me understand that back in the day: www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/449/England%20-%20Perrys%20Neglected%20Critique.pdf

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

#210

Post by ufo »

pfdietz wrote: post #174
ufo wrote: post #50

This slots into the wider story about how science found out about the age of the earth, which is fascinating! In the 1860s Lord Kelvin presented[1] one of the first physical arguments in favor of the earth being millions of years old. His argument was that we could predict the age of the earth by measuring the temperature gradient at the surface of the planet (which is related to the amount of heat that is being radi…

The key is not the liquid core, but the convective mantle. The mantle is solid, but still convects by plastic deformation. It was this ignoring of solid deformation that got Kelvin in trouble. He reasoned that since the mantle transmits shear waves, it cannot be liquid, and (hence, incorrectly) cannot convect. This despite clear evidence from geology that hot rocks under strain can become highly deformed.

Thanks for clearing that up.
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