Daggah

Someone needs a nap.

KeithHarwood

The vast majority of textbooks contain the `evolutionists' view.

KeithHarwood

Tricia. How about you calculate the mass loss for yourself and show me where I am wrong (and I am wrong, so I really mean it).

Here's how you do it.

The sun-shine at the earth's orbit amounts to about 1.4 kW/m^2, that is 1,400 joules per second per square metre. The sun shines in all directions, so calculate the surface area of a sphere with radius equal to the earth's orbit. That's a radius of 161,000,000 kilometres. Multiply the sun-shine rate by the area to give the total number of joules that the sun gives of every second. You have come across Einstein's equation, E=mc^2? You have the energy, the E, to calculate the mass loss, m, of the sun divide the energy by the speed of light squared. The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometres per second.

Word of warning, though. You will be dealing with some very large numbers and it's easy to lose a factor of a thousand on the way. Hint is to convert all the numbers to the one system of units before you start. BTW, 1,000 Kg is one tonne which is pretty near a ton, so don't bother with that conversion.

PS, Can anyone give me a better value for the insolation? Mine's from 1956 and I'm pretty sure it's ground level extrapolated to the top of the atmosphere. There must be a better value now. It might even be where I am wrong.

Coragyps

Keith - you got a bad orbital radius - 149,600,000 km is the average. The energy output from the Sun is 3.827 x 10^33 ergs/sec according to the SEDS website <a href="http://www.seds.org/nineplanets/nineplanets/sol.html" target="_blank">here,</a> which comes out to 4.25 million metric tons of mass converted to energy per second. (4.67 million US short tons, for you traditionalist Luddites....) This involves 700 million tons of hydrogen going to helium, but with a total mass of 2 x 10^27 tons, it'll last a while, as you said.

Tricia

All the major Christian churches have accepted evolution and the scientific descriptions of the universe. That's Catholic, all the Orthodox churches, Anglican I think that's called Episcopalian in the US), all the main-stream Protestant churches.

There I know you are wrong. Catholics may accept evolution, but most Protestant churches do not. Speaking with knowledge, of course, because students of many different denominations attend my school and every one of them believes that God created the world without the use of evolution.

I have never met a Christian who didn't believe that and I would have to work hard to find one. (I'd probably have to go to Queensland.)

Now that I think about it, I think I misunderstood you.

There is a good description of radioactive dating, written from a Christian perspective, in another thread. In summary, radiocarbon dating is only good for animal or plant material which is less than 100,000 years old. Other dating mathods are accurate over far longer intervals and work on rocks. Some are capable of dating rocks over 100,000,000,000 years old. No such rocks have been found. The dates of rocks that are found are accurate within a couple of a percent. It's these dating methods which tell us how old the earth is, not the other way around.

Do you or anyone else recall that thread?

The red shift is the same effect, only with light.

How do you can apply the same principle you use with sound with light?

The sun is shrinking at such a pace (loses 5 million tons every second) that if it lasted supposedly billions of years, it would have been gone many years ago. What about that?
Short answer. It's not true. The sun is not appreciably shrinking, and the rate of mass loss by the sun due to fusion is well consistent with a multi-billion year existence (and in fact, in the standard solar model, most of the mass of the sun will never undergo fusion and will still be present…..

So then why was this posted:

The sun has a mass of about 2.2x10^27 tons. At 4 (not 5) million tons per second, that's 1.3x10^14 tons per year. If it keeps it up at the same rate that's 1.7x10^13 years, or 17,000,000,000,000 years. That's over three thousand times as long as it has lasted so far. 4 million tons per second is a drop in the ocean.
Perusing through this thread, I don't see anywhere where anyone has pointed you to the Talk.Origins archive.

Thank you, I will go there.

~Tricia

KeithHarwood

Bum. Where did I get my daft value from then? I thought I knew these off by heart. It looks as if I forgot to do the multiplication and all I saw was the conversion factor from miles to km. Or something.

So, Tricia, it looks as if my 4 million tons per second is about right after all, but see if you can do the arithmetic to check up on me.

Tricia

Sorry, I'm losing it.

I do need a nap, but I think I will be a better "student" when school gets out on May 23rd. I take that back, I'll need a week to recover after finals.

~Tricia

Tricia

Yeah, uh, sure.

*thinks to self* oh darn...... <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

~Tricia

Dr.GH

Hi.

I have been avoiding this thread because the theme of "evolution is a religion" is boring in the weird way that fingrenails scratching a slate blackboard could become boring. My hat is off to those rational individualists who persist in such a venue.

However, in the last few messages there is an issue that I can at least provide a few web links.

To wit (on dating);

<a href="http://asa.calvin.edu/ASA/resources/Wiens.html" target="_blank">A Christian perspective on radiometric dating.</a>

<a href="http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/hiding_the_numbers_woody_henke.htm" target="_blank">Hiding the numbers.</a>

But books are better, and I recommned to all the following:

Dalrymple, G. Brent,
1991 The Age of the Earth Stanford: Stanford University Press

Dickin, Alan P.
1997 Radiogenic Isotope Geology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Dickin's book will need a bit of background study in both chenistry and geology, but I think that you should read the best before shouting about the "TRUTH."

[ May 12, 2002: Message edited by: Dr.GH ]

I should have added that this had nothing to do with creationist misrepresentations (Walter ReMine's favorite word) about stellar red shift or a shrinking Sun or any of the other bull shit that one can read at sites like:

<a href="http://www.leesville.com/grace/resources/library/martin/Youngearth/" target="_blank">this web page</a>

or,

<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/" target="_blank">This little gem</a>

[ May 12, 2002: Message edited by: Dr.GH ]</p>

KeithHarwood

That's from one small part of the United States. I'm talking about the rest of the world.

What I mean is that it would be very difficult for me to find a Christian who believed as you do about evolution. So much so that I don't think I could do it here in New South Wales (the most populous state of Australia) but would have to go to Queensland where strange religious ideas aren't as strange. Note that I called myself a Christian for over fifty years and in all my life I have never met anyone, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or, as it was put at Religious Instruction at school, `Not catered for' who did not accept that evolution was an accurate description of the living world. One of my best friends belonged to the Church of Christ (a spin-off from the Baptists, I understand). Neither he nor his family had any problems with evolution or any other aspect of science.

The creationist ideas seem to confined mostly to parts of the United States and seem to exist principally for political purposes, not religious ones. In the rest of the world they are very rare and in such small numbers that they can never get together and form a community.

Light and sound are both wave phenomena. There are minor differences. If you and the light source are coming together you see the waves closer together than they would be if you stayed the same distance from the source. That is, you would see their wavelength as shorter and shorter wavelengths look bluer. This is the blue shift. If you and the source are getting further apart the waves seem further apart and this is the red shift.

Regarding the shrinking or not shrinking sun.

Here is a potted summary of its expected life.

It started to shine brightly something like 5,000,000,000 years ago. It wasn't a bright or as hot as it is now, and not using up its hydrogen quite as fast. Over the years since then it has become a bit brighter and hotter. A lot of the hydrogen right at the centre has already been used up. In another 1,000,000,000 it will be all used up and it will start using up the hydrogen near the centre. This will increase the volume of the sun where the energy is created and so the sun will grow brighter. But the extra energy will make the outer layers of the sun expand, the surface area of the sun will become greater, it will get rid of the extra energy more easily and therefore its surface will become cooler. Over the next 1,000,000,000 years the sun will expand until it swallows up the inner planets, including earth. It won't expand enough to swallow Mars.

Eventually the hydrogen near the centre will also be used up, but no more will start to burn because the pressure of the outer layers (which are still mostly hydrogen) won't be enough to make it happen. The sun will then shrink again, very quickly (that is, a few hundred million years), blowing off some of its outer layers until it is about the size of the earth, but very, very much denser, and then it will settle down for many billions of years getting cooler and slightly smaller.

We know all this because we see stars in all these stages. If you know the mass of a star you can look at its spectrum and say where it is on the path. We know the mass of the sun, we can measure its spectrum. Bingo. 5 billion years old today, another billion before it is a red giant, another few hundred million and then a white dwarf.