Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
"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...
So just keep in mind, what's written does not necessarily represent the scientific consensus, but the opinion of an enthusiastic amateur.
That said, given the explanation of the conservation of energy in the opening paragraphs, I wonder if this the original purpose was actually partly to convince the readers of The Presbyterian, presumably religious people familiar with the Genesis accounts of creation, that "young earth" creationist theories are incorrect: i.e.:
1. If the sun were burning a fuel -- even coal, one of the highest-energy fuels we know* -- it would be less than 5000 years old.
2. If rather the sun is incandescent, then it is at minimum 100 million years old.
3. Either way, 6000 years old doesn't fit.
(* I have no idea if this would have been true in 1863 or not)
There are long chronologies in Genesis that include, "A lived for X years and begat B. B lived for Z years and at C." If you assume these are contiguous and precise, and that the meaning of "year" hasn't changed, and that Adam was "born" on day 6 of creation, and the universe was created 6*24 hours before that, then you can calculate when various Biblical events happened -- including when the world was made. Ussher made his estimate in the 1600s; according to that Wikipedia article, Rabbi Jose ben Halfata made an estimate as far back as the 2nd century AD.
But I'm pretty sure even in Ussher's time, there were lots of Christians who said that those kinds of calculations weren't necessarily useful or accurate: that the book of Genesis wasn't trying to teach people Geology, but Theology.
Read through the Babylonian creation myth [1], in which the Earth is created by the carcass of a murdered god ripped in half and humans are made from the droplets of blood of another god "to serve the gods", and ask yourself: "What is the world like? What is my place in it as a normal human being?" Then read Genesis 1 and ask yourself the same questions. You'd reach quite different conclusions.
No, 6000 years had lots of belief before that. It's just that it had nothing to do with YEC, i.e. a 6000 year figure and YEC are not the same thing.
Prior to the modern YEC people believed that just like Adam was created as an adult, the earth was created already "old".
https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/jewish-calendar.html
This may have had some influence on western thinking. I don't know.
"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 progress or decay has been detected ; and it has been thought that nothing but the fiat of the Almighty can quench his rays. Principles have now been recognized, however, which enable us to assign limits, and to show that he has not shone from a past eternity, and that he has a limited existence as an incandescent body. This limit assigned to the solar system forces us to recognize the hand of a Creator."
"The meteoric stones that sometimes fall to our earth may be regarded as balls, but moving with much greater velocity. They strike against our atmosphere with so much force that the force is converted into heat, so intense that they glow or become incandescent. .... Assuming that the heat of the sun has been kept up by meteoric bodies falling into it, and proof has been given of such fall, it is possible from the mass of the solar system to determine approximately the period during which the sun has shone as a luminary"
"Limits can be set to the fuel of the solar system, and therefore limits can also be assigned to the existence of the sun as our luminary. The limits lie between 100 millions and 400 millions of years. These are enormous periods, but still they are definite. The mass is so great,and the cooling is so slow, that, even on the supposition that no fuel was added, it might be five or six thousand years before the sun cooled down a single degree."
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.
It seems more likely to me that people just kept using the latin genres since old scientific literature was in latin.
One place you see this is in terms relating to food. Words relating to rustic activities like agriculture and raising animals such as "cow" tend to have German roots. While culinary words like beef and veal tend to have french roots.
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".
"sun (n.) [...] Old English sunne was feminine (as generally in Germanic), and the fem. pronoun was used in English until 16c.; since then masc. has prevailed." [1]
"moon (n.) [...] A masculine noun in Old English." [2]
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=sun [2] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=moon
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").
In languages with gendered nouns, objects which can have humans inside of them (e.g. cars, boats, houses) are almost universally female (presumably because females have wombs), and this leaks into English pronouns as well.
In Brazilian Portuguese, we use masculine pronouns for cars ("o carro"). Same goes for boat ("o barco") and plane ("o avião"). This can also be seen in Spanish ("el coche", "el barco", "el avión").
I believe that the gender these things are referred to in languages with gendered nouns is more linked to the etymology and development of linguistics than psychology, although it is very likely that the later has some influence as well.
- earth, sun and time are feminine words and can to this day still be referred to as 'she'
- heaven, road and stone were referred to as 'he', although this has disappeared from modern Swedish.
Because, as a native English speaker, this seems like misinformation to me, perhaps partly influenced by your teacher having a first language where nouns do still have gender.
Oh, you weren't joking?
It doesn't matter that the article is bollocks. It is reasoned bollocks. That is basically what science is all about! I would prefer if there was some more working shown to back up the article but it seems to imply that some might be available rather than just simple assertions.
We live in a world where some people genuinely seem to think that a newer version of a mobile phone comms medium can cause a disease that we know is caused by a virus. These same people seem to be aware of other viruses and bacteria and their effects just as well as any other layman. It is only this particular combination that is the current "conspiracy".
We need the likes of Scientific American to carry on their work of delivering the best descriptions of the rather odd workings of the world and the universe. They are what the rest of the media turn to when they need to cover something they don't understand.
The sun does not burn coal but frankly that is less embarrassing than admitting that our best theories can't explain where most of the sodding universe actually is. We are so advanced that we do not know where 85% of matter is hiding out. lol
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 just the Sun pointed at it. Kelvin supposes 100 million is an upper limit, and in later life committed to 20-40 million with 20 more likely. Biologists spluttered because Evolution can't explain cells to chimpanzees in 20 million years, it's not long enough. But they did not have a coherent explanation for why Kelvin might be wrong...
Radioactivity is the answer, something that would not be found until the end of the century, and it would take until the start of the 20th century for somebody to realise that this makes Kelvin's age-of-the-planet calculation hopeless, if you assume the planet is slightly radioactive (which it is) then it can easily be billions of years old and the biologists are right.
This is somewhat misleading because the Sun is pretty much the sole energy source for keeping the surface of the Earth warm:
> Despite its geological significance, this heat energy coming from Earth's interior is actually only 0.03% of Earth's total energy budget at the surface, which is dominated by 173,000 TW of incoming solar radiation. [1]
The problem posed by Kelvin was the the interior of the Earth was too warm, which may affect long-term habitability because plate tectonics plays a role in regulating the atmosphere's CO2 levels (or so I've heard), but of course nobody at Kelvin's time knew that. Kelvin wasn't asking "Why isn't the Earth a dead planet?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget
because it's warm underground
> if it was just down to the Sun this place would be uninhabitable
which implies surface.
Unlike radioactivity, Kelvin could have considered convection and so that's his fault.
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.
I think the liquid is a red herring here. The important thing is a that there are two layers with different properties. Would work just as well with an inner highly conductive solid.
This article helped me understand that back in the day: www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/449/England%20-%20Perrys%20Neglected%20Critique.pdf
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 engine (1925):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_R-790_Whirlwind
For millennia, the pursuit of flying was about as successful as perpetual motion or alchemy.
What's interesting is that it was possible to make gliders for thousands of years. The secret ingredient is to glue fabric along the frame, not sew.
Now assume Lord Kelvin is talking bollocks. Just because you invent "really cold, bordering on quite nippy" doesn't mean you can overlook things like half lives and red shift. If Lord Kelvin lived now I suspect he might have other conclusions - he evaluated the evidence available at the time.
I was deliberately provocative and I'm glad I was. I've got far better responses as a result. I never thought to mention Kelvin and you have dived in and filled in that gap.
The article in SA was and is absolute bollocks. Bear in mind that your and my definition of bollocks may be dissimilar and I am not being disrespectful. The article is very short and does not provide working. It is of its time and I suspect the working is available somewhere else. It gives us a short glimpse of popular science writing 150 odd years ago.
I would tend to argue that this isn’t something we need on Hacker News. (Also, it’s “oblate”. To “ablate” is to erode.)
I mean, it's a ablate sphereoid too, thanks to rainfall, but that's clearly not what they meant.
The logic behind the sun not burning a fuel like coal is entirely sound. From there an alternate theory is proposed based on the limits of understanding of the time. Not as fact, but as a best guess theory that fits the evidence at that point. The theory was wrong of course, but it was a step in the right direction.
That is precisely why I called it "reasoned bollocks" - perhaps a bit colourful for HN. As you say the theory was wrong but the article was describing current theory at the time and is of course ... science.
I really am praising a long running science magazine as best I can. I am a massive fan.
And it remained an open question until at least 1920:[0]
> Around 1920, [Arthur Eddington] anticipated the discovery and mechanism of nuclear fusion processes in stars, in his paper The Internal Constitution of the Stars. At that time, the source of stellar energy was a complete mystery; Eddington correctly speculated that the source was fusion of hydrogen into helium, liberating enormous energy according to Einstein's equation E = mc2. This was a particularly remarkable development since at that time fusion and thermonuclear energy, and even the fact that stars are largely composed of hydrogen (see metallicity), had not yet been discovered.
More generally, probably a useful distinction to keep in mind, between when science is offering us a direction and a theory vs when we really do have the evidence required to be fairly confident we're at the destination.
Of course even then there are often deeper layers—floors within the destination building say, to torture the analogy. But that kind of distinction is different from the one between a guess that fits the evidence so far and something that is reasonably known.
Actually, the headline is not bollocks, but 100% correct. It is NOT a giant lump of burning coal!
You forgot the conclusion. The prevailing opinion about the world's age is not 6000 years. I think some fundamentalist Christians might try for 4004 BC so 6000 years ... ish but I don't even know anyone who subscribes to that nonsense. I'm sure there are some who do but they are not my mates. They are certainly not general population.
It wasn't really a controversy or dogmatic issue to average Christians until the early 20th century. Trying to argue with a Young Earth Creationist on scientific grounds is super pointless - literally everything can be either dismissed because you weren't present, or reinterpreted to fit the viewpoint. I would know because that used to be me.
It's also highly unlikely that you'll successfully argue with them from a theological/hermeneutical perspective either. If you'll forgive me entering into a major time controversy here: a young earth creationist, and many evangelicals, place the original Biblical text as penned by the human author at a nearly deified level. Unless the text is blatantly poetic, even in translation, or explicitly labelled a parable the text is assumed to be literal.
The human author of scripture is basically assumed to be, more-or-less, possessed by the deity lending only their authorial voice to the literally word-for-word transcript given to them by God. (For support they quote scripture, of course, "All Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness" (II Timothy 3:16). Believing that, the stakes become incredibly high for a biblical literalist, many/most of whom are also YEC. If any scripture is found to be "false" by modern standards, it basically invalidates the whole thing.
I say this having believed this version of Biblical inspiration and knowing I'd have been given permission to teach it in church once upon a time.
The tricky bit is that modern standards aren't an appropriate measure to hold an ancient document with different goals, but that's literally a books worth of argument and background to dive into.
Regardless I think the comment was about applying current "solutions" to prior times and seeing if agrees with what we'd call a good solution in retrospective, not what people believe currently.
He believes the Earth is 6000 years old, though. He rationalizes the science he works on as (the biblical) God testing his faith. My father, who works at his C-14 company, also believes this. I will never understand.
In this moral framework, I wonder what the right ethical thing to do when another creationist is the customer? Do they both accept the lie^H^H^Htest of faith?
It depends on how they interpret the results to the customer. They might show the data and say that "it seems that this rock is million years old". They don't have to believe it themselves.
If the customer is another creationist, they probably marvel the perfection of God's creation and how impeccably he has been able to fake the age of the universe. You know, they probably see it as an evidence of God's omnipotence.
Whether you ever get to the bottom of this, keep loving them both. That is something that does not need a god or science or even a capital letter - I'll assert: Love is the fundamental thing that transcends any ideology.
I have some pretty odd ideas myself and I trained as a Civ Engr, run an IT company and have subscribed to New Scientist for about 30 years.
Sometimes I notice aspects of my own woolly thinking and sort them out but I've no doubt that many remain. The funny thing is that "woolly" is in the eye of the beholder or something.
I'm not daft enough to have misplaced 85% of the entire universe unlike the entirety of physicists and their "science" 8)
I'm going by anecdote to denote the general population's opinion, ie what people have said to me.
I do agree with you that people attenuate their espoused beliefs based on perceived popularity and that is why I put the comment in [] above. Sometimes I think we need to affirm our own beliefs sometimes and that is what I've done by asking for dialogue and not downvotes.
One of my favorite sections of SA back when I read the dead tree version is they would have a page near the front of the journal that highlighted what was the top news in the issues 50, 100 & 150 years prior.
No, it isn't. It's correct in the basic claim of the title. Scientists in 1863 who believed that no known source of energy was capable of powering the Sun were right. The Sun is not powered by any source of energy that was known in 1863.
> I would prefer if there was some more working shown to back up the article
Scientific American wasn't the place to show the details then any more than it is today. But the calculations are simple to do, and plenty of physicists had done them at the time of the article.
A summary of the calculations:
Chemical reactions, which is what burning coal is an example of, produce an energy per unit mass of fuel on the order of 10^8 Joules per kilogram. (That's actually on the high end, but it's fine for a rough calculation.) The Sun's mass is about 2 x 10^30 kilograms today; if we assume that half of that is burned as fuel, we get a total energy of 10^38 Joules. The Sun's power output is about 4 x 10^26 Watts, so 10^38 Joules will supply the Sun's power output for about 2 x 10^11 seconds, which is pretty close to 5,000 years (a year is about 3 x 10^7 seconds).
Meteorite impacts essentially convert gravitational potential energy to heat, so the energy per unit mass available is the change in gravitational potential energy from the average distance of a meteorite from the Sun when it starts falling in, to the radius of the Sun. That difference is GM/R - GM/r, where R is the Sun's radius and r is the distance from which the meteorite starts falling in. If we take the maximum possible change, that will be for r -> infinity, in which case our potential energy gain is just GM/R. G is about 7 x 10^-11, M we have from above, and R is about 7 x 10^8 meters. This works out to 2 x 10^11 Joules per kilogram. At that rate, to supply the Sun's power output for 100 million years (about 3 x 10^15 seconds) would take about 6 x 10^30 kilograms, or 3 times the Sun's mass.
That tells me that the article greatly overestimated the potential mass of meteorites available, since the Sun is something like 99 percent of the mass of the solar system, and even counting in the Oort cloud doesn't change that number appreciably. An optimistic upper limit based on current knowledge would be something like 0.1 percent of the Sun's mass (since most of the 1 percent of mass that is not the Sun is the planets, not meteorites), and even that is probably much too large. But taking that value gives an time of 1e12 seconds, or about 30,000 years.
(Note that later in the 1800s, someone--I think it was Lord Kelvin--calculated how long the Sun could be kept shining by gravitational contraction--i.e, by just contracting its own mass to a smaller radius and converting gravitational potential energy into radiation. He came up with a figure of something like 10 million years, which is about what you get if you take the potential energy change formula I gave above and plug in an r--the distance from which "falling in" starts--of something like twice the Sun's radius, and then multiply by the entire mass of the Sun. That's basically what Kelvin's calculation did.)
What's interesting is that the power available from solar fusion is of a similar order of magnitude to that available from gravitational contraction. But of course it must be, because if fusion was too powerful medium-mass stars wouldn't be able to form to provide light and heat to habitable worlds, and if it was too weak then giant stars wouldn't be able to overcome their gravitational binding energy in supernovae to disperse the elements that form habitable worlds.
No, it isn't; fusion provides much more energy per unit mass than gravitational contraction would for the Sun. As I calculated, gravitational contraction falling in from infinity to the current radius of the Sun provides about 2 x 10^11 Joules per kilogram. Fusion provides about 5 x 10^14 Joules per kilogram (the exact number depends on the particular fusion reaction).
>>> sun_output = 3.828e26 # watts
>>> sun_mass = 2e30 # kg
>>> coal_energy_density = 30e6 # W*s/kg
>>> year = 365*86400
>>> sun_mass * coal_energy_density / sun_output / year
4970.1868313110635
Numbers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
> Assuming that the heat of the sun has been kept up by meteoric bodies falling into it, it is possible from the mass of the solar system to determine approximately the period during which the sun has shone. The limits lie between 100 millions and 400 millions of years.
The energy of a meteorite falling into the sun should be about 1/2 its escape velocity squared.
>>> sun_escape_vel = 617.5e3 # m/s
>>> sun_infall_energy = 0.5 * sun_escape_vel**2 * sun_mass # kg m/s^2 or J
>>> sun_infall_energy / sun_output / year
31586055.04077674
So mass falling into the sun could sustain its output for 31 million years.
Not, if you know that there was simply not even a concept of nuclear fusion in 19th century, and that the year of discovery of electron is 1897, and of the existence of atomic nucleus 1909.
Tangentially, but also interesting and illuminating how non-trivial all that was at that times, neutron was discovered as late as 1932 -- the same year that Hitler became chancellor of Germany. It is that recent, and it was that hard.
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 radiated to space). He modeled the earth as a cooling solid sphere and using the heat equation[2] he computed that if the earth started at the temperature of molten rock then it would take some tens of millions of years to cool down to the current surface temperatures. Conveniently, this estimate matched contemporaneous theories about the sun being powered by gravity. If one assumed that the sun was slowly shrinking while releasing that gravitational potential energy as light, it also ended up with an age of some tens of millions of years. (Remember: back then neither radioactive decay nor nuclear fusion had been discovered yet).
The major flaw in Lord Kelvin's calculations were only discovered in the 1890's when Irish mathematician John Perry suggested that modelling the earth as a cooling solid sphere would not be appropriate if the earth's core were actually liquid. The key difference is that a liquid core transfers heat much more efficiently, due to convection. In the presence of a liquid core the surface of the earth receives more heat from the interior and takes longer to cool down to the present temperatures, compared with an earth that has a solid core. Once Perry corrected Kelvin's model to account for convection the age of the earth jumped to the billions of years that we now know it has.
It took a while for the theory of the convective mantle to become widely accepted but it was ultimately proven correct by radiometric dating.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth#Early_calcula... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation
Like crash testing a car by using a representative model where the only commonality is the external panel dimensions and total net mass.
But it took Einstein himself and the legendary E=MC^2 equation to demonstrate a theoretical source of energy that powers the sun, well into the 20th century.
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.
> Luminiferous aether or ether[1] ("luminiferous", meaning "light-bearing") was the postulated medium for the propagation of light.[2] It was invoked to explain the ability of the apparently wave-based light to propagate through empty space, something that waves should not be able to do. The assumption of a spatial plenum of luminiferous aether, rather than a spatial vacuum, provided the theoretical medium that was required by wave theories of light.
> The aether hypothesis was the topic of considerable debate throughout its history, as it required the existence of an invisible and infinite material with no interaction with physical objects.
I found out about it by way of a novel taking place in the 1800s (written in modern times): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22929563-the-watchmaker-...
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 to show up even when it should! The famous Michelson–Morley experiment.
Of course, it was resolved by theory of relativity: it turns out the speed of light is relative to everything! You just have to slow down time itself, no big deal.
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.
Accordingly, why was Pasteur such a genius as to discern how the immune system functions to protect us against invasion by the microbial world when no one had even made the distinction between fungi, bacteria, or viruses, and no one had formulated any theories of immunity. A careful reading of Pasteur’s presentations to the Academy of Sciences reveals that Pasteur was entirely mistaken as to how immunity occurs, in that he reasoned, as a good microbiologist would, that appropriately attenuated microbes would deplete the host of vital trace nutrients absolutely required for their viability and growth, and not an active response on the part of the host. Even so, he focused attention on immunity, preparing the ground for others who followed.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3342039/
I had heard this years ago and recently was trying to place it. I finally tracked down a credible source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaosnet
Define by CHAOS ORDER:
> Data grams seem to have a bug that the two parties can never
> agree on whether they both agree that it really happened. Am I losing?
I do not understand why the Aether was ridiculed, but Dark (Matter|Energy) are not. They both depend on something we can't see or detect in any way, and Occam's Razor dictates that, without further evidence, I have to consider the least complex explanation the probably correct one: Plasma physics is a well understood field that involves the Electromagnetic force, and Cosmology has simply neglected to understand how large plasma currents can scale to.
The irony is, Hannes Alfvén (1970 Nobel Prize winner for his work on Magnetohydrodynamics, also had significant contributions to space science) basically stated that this is the most likely cause of coronal heating, based on the earlier work of Kristian Birkeland (nominated for the Nobel 7 times)... gigantic plasma currents slamming into the Sun at it's polar regions, much like how the Solar magnetic field slams into us at our poles and causes high energy plasma events known as the Aurora.
Aether suffered from clear problems as an idea as the long list of weird properties it had to satisfy, and the list only got longer and longer. Dark matter isn't like that at all -- it's easy to add to our theories that there's a particle that is invisible but has mass. There's no Michaelson-Morley experiment that's extremely hard to explain.
How bold! I'm pretty sure someone make a comment like yours too in ~2150 reading articles from today.
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.
I always got a kick out of the regular features, "50 years ago" and "100 years ago", where they excerpted their own actual articles from exactly that long ago. Definitely gave me a sense of perspective on the march of scientific understanding.
(By 1995, they were able to add "150 years ago", as they'd been in existence since 1845.)
Leaving astronomy out of it— just look at the how we describe the mind — it’s been variously described as breath, or hydraulics, or clockworks and now as a computer.
Probably in 100 years we’ll be looking back at our primitive understanding of how the brain works and laughing.
They thought the sun might be made of coal because they were excited by the industrial revolution and the discover of thermodynamics and the steam engine and thought it might be the same phenomenon.
We've known for a long time that brains don't work like computers. They they are analog systems with weights and thresholds.
But that is hard to describe to a layperson.
Before you know about radioactivity and nuclear reactions the only options available were:
1. Try to find reasonable explanation using scientific explanations (chemistry at that time) and try to calculate the possibilities.
2. Leave the question undetermined.
3. Wildly speculate without any constraints. (God or some magic force).
Science was limited by data and experiments.
It is all quite new, and probably take some more years, to sink in. So keep that in mind, the next time you discuss with anti-vaccers, anti climate change, ... as that level of ignorance can get depressing otherwise.
There's a HUUUUGE difference between "We have all this data and no theory to explain it all" that we had for the sun for a long time, and "I read something on twitter once that matches with an anecdote from uncle Buck that means vaccines cause autism"
When you read stuff like this from an earlier era it’s always shocking just how different their frame of reference is, what’s considered important and what’s assumed common knowledge. The book “But What if We’re Wrong?” By Chuck Klosterman really does a great job looking at this question.
Backing up your point about smartness not being the problem, there's a quote, I think from Lord Kelvin of 'the kelvin' fame, saying something like all science has basically been discovered and we just need to fill in the details. We just can't help believing we are at a somehow special point in history.
I think their claim was that the nuclear reactions in the sun contributed to the Sun’s radiation, but did not contribute to the bulk of the Sun’s temperature (heat?)
I’m a little fuzzy, but I’ve never seen this claim elsewhere. Is it true?
Once the fusion energy isn't enough to counteract the gravity, the star collapses into a white dwarf (or a super-nova later).
Legitimately though, assuming the sun is fake, how would one build an artificial sun? What could reasonably power it and give the impression to a planet within that it is real? Perhaps the problem could be even tougher if you're also trying to replicate the mass.
The plot could be some advanced civilization planning to steal a near-by star and replace it with a fake, possibly to build a Dyson sphere around it to cypher off the energy. Could you fool the less-advanced civilization into thinking they still have a real star? (Ignoring the logistics of the actual swap.)
A proposal for radiation: You could burn lots of fuel and radiate tonnes of energy out into space, but if you're only trying to fool a few planets, perhaps you could direct energy at them. I'm not entirely sure what you would have to do in order to make the light arrays appear correctly though.
A proposal for mass: It seems as though a sustainable black hole could at least be as small as 3.8 times the mass of our sun [1] and a valid star could be > 1000 times the mass of our sun [2]. There's more than enough wiggle room there that you could have a small black hole within an outer shell, so the orbits could continue as normal.
[1] https://www.space.com/5191-smallest-black-hole.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_known_stars
[I did search, but DDG found nada.]
0) https://answersingenesis.org/age-of-the-earth/how-old-is-the...
Sure, among experts. But what about popular opinion? And did the Scopes trial (1925) mark a resurgence in creationism?