Graeme

I don't have the scientific knowledge to properly debunk this, but I'm certain someone on here does.

Thanks in advance...

butswana

After all this a little speculation and one could assume that the earth was inside the sun between 92-113 million years ago. If it was a steady exponential rate.


speculation
assume
If

what more do you need?

ohwilleke

Sounds like a bait and switch to me. 5% a year is exponential. Five feet a year, in and of itself, is linear, not exponential. No fact presented indicates that there is an exponential decline of the size of the sun.

I honestly don't know what the real fact is, but knowing the current rate of decline in the size of the sun is not sufficient to know if a decline is linear, or if it is not linear, what the non-linear function is. There simply aren't enough data points at hand.

Some discussion of the issue is found here:
<a href="http://www.astronomytoday.com/astronomy/sun.html" target="_blank">http://www.astronomytoday.com/astronomy/sun.html</a>

The models of the life of the sun we have now are based on its size, the current ratio of helium to hydrogen, the amount of heat it emits, and what we know about nuclear reactions. Those estimates are in the billions and not hundreds of millions of years.

[ February 07, 2002: Message edited by: ohwilleke ]</p>

Asha'man

The assumption of a steady rate is the big mistake. Almost criminally stupid, in fact.

We know that the sun experiences hundreds of different cycles of different lengths. One cycle is an 11-year sunspot cycle, which is currently at a (double) peak. Other cycles can be measured in hours. Some are probably billions of years long, and therefore immeasurable with the data points available to us currently.

Trying to predict a 92-113 million year trend from one data point (5 feet/year) is an abuse of math that transcends stupid.

Whoever provided this quote also clearly knows nothing about astronomy or stellar evolution.

Corey Hammer

Worse than that...

They know nothing about the limitations of regression.

Tim Thompson

Creatious Anonymous: Brittanica claims that the current rate of shrink that the sun is undergoing is 5 feet an hour. And that the rate is slowing down. Which would indicate that it used to be faster than 5 feet an hour.

So far as I know, <a href="http://www.eb.com/" target="_blank">Britannica</a> says no such thing. So for starters, I would simply deny that the claim is in Britannica anywhere, and make your source identify specifically where Britannica says this. But even if it is in there someplace, it's still quite wrong.

The claim that the sun is shrinking is one from the old creationst graveyard of mythical science claims. It is based on an abstract submitted to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in 1979. However, the authors withdrew the paper before publication, when they discovered that they were wrong (fat chance on a creationist doing that). I have already written a detailed refuation of the claim, which includes the true background story, and a correct sampling of the literature on measurements of solar diameter: "<a href="http://www.geocities.com/Tim_J_Thompson/resp8.html" target="_blank">A Response to the Shrinking Sun Argument</a>".

It would appear that the creationist simply cut & pasted the argument from some typically sleazy creationist webpage.

Creatious Anonymous: A sphere with the Diameter of 10 decreases it self in size by 5% a year. The Decrease would be exponential. right??

Creationists seem to have as much trouble with English as they do science. What's "size"? Is it changing in radius or volume? In either case, it is not "exponentional" (which means e raised to some power, at least to me), but rather follows a shallow power law (5% of something that is always getting smaller, also gets smaller). A radial rate of 5-feet per hour would be linear (in radius), but look like r^2 in volume (V = (4/3)*pi*r^3 so dV/dt = (4/3)*pi*(3r^2)(dr/dt)).

Tell Creatious Anonymous to read my webpages, <a href="http://www.geocities.com/Tim_J_Thompson/young-earth.html" target="_blank">Is the Earth Young?</a> and <a href="http://www.geocities.com/Tim_J_Thompson/young-earth2.html" target="_blank">Is the Earth Young? II</a>", and weep.

[ February 08, 2002: Message edited by: Tim Thompson ]</p>