
Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863) - AareyBaba
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-doubt-the-sun-is-actually-burning-coal/
======
philipkglass
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...](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x001601382&view=1up&seq=104)

~~~
AareyBaba
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 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."

~~~
ardy42
> 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](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.

~~~
riffraff
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.

~~~
guerrilla
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.

~~~
flohofwoe
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?

~~~
ghaff
Old English, i.e. the language of Beowulf, is a Germanic language. With the
Norman invasion, English became heavily influenced by the Romance languages.
So English has roots in both both old German and old French.

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.

------
gerdesj
I had absolutely no idea that SA is so old. New Scientist -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Scientist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Scientist)
is a mere whippersnapper.

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

~~~
tialaramex
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 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.

~~~
ufo
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.

~~~
adrianN
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.

~~~
jaggederest
Faster cooling, but smoother gradients. It means that if you go down a hundred
miles, it will be warmer, but the entire center of the earth will be closer to
the same temperature. If you assume a solid, you assume a certain constant
thermal conductivity, as Kelvin did, even though with a liquid, that's not
true. Basically, he assumed that the heat was diffusing slowly, and that it
couldn't go above a certain temperature at the core (i.e. not a gas or
liquid), and so you had hard limits on the total reservoir of heat in the
planet and could calculate a linear fit on it. It turns out the effective
thermal conductivity of the center of the earth is much higher than the
thermal conductivity of e.g. continental crust.

~~~
im3w1l
> If you assume a solid, you assume a certain constant thermal conductivity,
> as Kelvin did, even though with a liquid, that's not true

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.

------
tlb
Just checkin' the math:

    
    
      >>> 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
    

So (assuming a magical supply of oxygen) a lump of coal the mass of the sun
could burn with the brightness of the sun for 4970 years

Numbers from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun) and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density)

~~~
ukoki
Thanks! — Any idea how they worked this one out?

> 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.

~~~
tlb
I don't know how the mass of the solar system figures in their calculation,
but you can say that the total mass of meteorites so far must be less than the
current mass of the sun.

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
    

(This is a loose upper bound, because I'm assuming the same escape velocity
the whole time but the sun would have started at lower mass.)

So mass falling into the sun could sustain its output for 31 million years.

------
robotbikes
In fact when Cecilia Payne proposed that the Sun and other stars were composed
of Hydrogen and Helium in her Doctoral thesis in 1925 the conclusion was
rejected by her advisor because of the conventional wisdom of the time that
the earth and the sun were composed of the same elements.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-
Gaposchkin](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin)

~~~
asveikau
I thought helium was named for the sun (Helios), by spectral analysis of
sunlight. In hindsight it's weird that they can know that in the 19th century
(per Wikipedia of Helium) and the next conclusion has to wait until 1925, with
controversy.

~~~
pishpash
They probably thought it was an inert atmosphere found on the Sun but having
nothing to do with the operation of the Sun. Without nuclear physics, it
wouldn't be an unreasonable conclusion.

~~~
pfdietz
And the helium that can be "seen" on the Sun is not due to fusion IN the Sun,
but rather is from the gas cloud from which the Sun formed. The solar core and
the surface are not connected by convection.

------
ufo
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
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth#Early_calculations)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation)

~~~
pfdietz
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.

~~~
ufo
Thanks for clearing that up.

------
jaggederest
This is really interesting, because we had a lot of the machinery in place to
make accurate observations, but not a lot of the theory to link them together.
We've known about sunspots since the Han dynasty and had accurate measurements
of its size, distance, and temperature since the mid-1800s when spectroscopy
became available.

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.

~~~
archgoon
Einstein did not determine that the sun was nuclear powered. That was Hans
Bethe in 1939 (based on data produced by Bengt Strömgren).

~~~
jaggederest
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?"

~~~
archgoon
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 Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn when
they discovered fission, where a mass loss does occur. However, they didn't
publish their discovery until January 1939; and Hans Bethe had already been
working on the Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen Cycle, and didn't need fission to
account for the Sun's processes (neutron + proton mass is conserved in the
relevant reactions). He was just working off of observed empirical data to
make his conclusions.

~~~
the8472
> 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.

------
_bxg1
My personal favorite "old science" theory:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether)

> 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-...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22929563-the-watchmaker-
of-filigree-street)

~~~
empath75
It’s not all _that_ far off from the electromagnetic field.

~~~
DiabloD3
Not only that, cosmic plasma filaments carrying charged dust around is the
most likely explanation for the "missing" matter and energy that two Nobels
were handed out for the, continued, non-discovery.

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.

~~~
QuesnayJr
It's wrong to ridicule aether. It was a theory, the theory was tested, and it
turned out to be wrong. Lots of theories are wrong. It's not like scientists
at the time were _stupid_. James Clerk Maxwell believed that an aether was
required, and he was literally the first person to write down the full set of
equations for electromagnetism. Occam's razor doesn't tell us that aether is
less parsimonious than "Literally, time slows down when you go faster. Also,
light is a particle and a wave at the same time. Kind of."

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.

------
jolmg
That passage really brings into perspective how old Scientific American is, or
maybe how little ago it must've been that the composition of the sun was
discovered. This was during the American Civil War.

~~~
QuesnayJr
It's shocking how in a century (say from 1850 to 1950) we went from basically
knowing nothing to basically knowing everything.

~~~
haunter
>basically knowing everything

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

~~~
pfdietz
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.

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

~~~
pfdietz
Any exponential growth process runs into fundamental limits soon enough. This
is as true in physics as it is in any other field. Accelerators are close to
their practical limits, for example.

------
cft
Apparently it was Darwin developing his theory of evolution, who first
realized that the Earth and thus the Sun must be much older than a chemical
burning process would support. That left him very puzzled since there was no
physics theory that could support that.

~~~
perilunar
Although Charles Lyell had already suggested the Earth was much older than
6000 years in _Principles of Geology_ in 1830. Darwin took the first volume of
Lyell's book with him on the Beagle.

------
Aeolun
I... never considered how inexplicable the sun must have been until we knew
about nuclear fusion. I’ve just always taken it for granted.

------
gojomo
When I was a child, my father had a 'Scientific American' monthly magazine
subscription for our household.

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.)

------
empath75
To me, I think what this demonstrates more than anything else is that the
human mind is limited by the metaphors it has access to.

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.

~~~
jeremyjh
I don't think it is a matter of metaphors at all, but simply a limited
understanding of laws and forces. There wasn't a force known at the time that
could produce so much light and heat for so long with the mass of the sun. The
only conceivable way to produce light and heat like that was to burn vast
quantities of fuels.

------
jecel
They were right! The Sun would have to be more than 8 times more massive to be
burning coal: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-
burning_process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-burning_process)

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

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

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

~~~
detritus
It might be a bit too hot to smell bad...

------
kristianp
(1863)

~~~
dang
I added it. In a way it's dodgy though, because SA isn't providing the
original article or even a photo of it. This is just a single-paragraph quote,
and they've milked that cow before:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jym5d/in_the_s...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jym5d/in_the_scientific_american_of_1863_its_claimed/),
which I ran across while failing to track down the original article.

~~~
ars
Perhaps use the link posted by:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23075544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23075544)
instead.

~~~
dang
Thanks! That's maybe not readable enough to be the primary URL but I've pinned
that comment to the top.

------
CapriciousCptl
There’s nothing quite like reading old periodicals. Really puts a lot into
perspective, no matter what your interests or expertise are.

~~~
macintux
I love advertising from the first half of the 20th century. I recently
stumbled upon Willys-Overland’s WWII ads featuring artwork by James Sessions:
[https://oppositelock.kinja.com/willys-ads-
wwii-1841716141](https://oppositelock.kinja.com/willys-ads-wwii-1841716141)

------
hutzlibu
Articles like this, are a good reminder, to maybe not be tooo hard with the
anti-science crowd. Or the ignorant about science crowd.

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.

~~~
mrguyorama
Nope, that's not even close.
[https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht...](https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm)

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"

------
jonplackett
Pop quiz - what do you think people will be laughing this hard about from our
time in 150 years?

~~~
JackFr
A decent amount of our stuff. It’s important to read stuff like this to
encourage a little humility. These guys were no less smart than we are.

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.

~~~
jonplackett
I'll check that out. I read somewhere that there's a bias where we all believe
we are living somehow at the end of history, and that surly this time we have
everything right.

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.

------
gorgoiler
I was once at a tech conference for high schoolers in London where one of the
distinguished speakers (others included Vint Cerf, and a UK government
minister) told us that the primary reason the sun is hot was because it was
still glowing with heat from the pressure of gravitational collapse.

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?

~~~
wwwater
A star like Sun is in a state of an equilibrium between gravitational forces
that want to collapse the star and the fusion energy. Gravitational pressure
helps atoms to collide and fusion takes place. But it doesn't sound right to
say that the heat is from the pressure.

Once the fusion energy isn't enough to counteract the gravity, the star
collapses into a white dwarf (or a super-nova later).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_sequence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_sequence)

------
mmaunder
Before Einstein it must have been maddening to estimate the mass of the sun
and ponder why its energy output was so high.

------
bArray
I hope they are able to figure this out, I would be interested to know how
long the sun could burn on oil or kerosene. /s

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](https://www.space.com/5191-smallest-black-hole.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_known_stars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_known_stars)

~~~
thombat
Possible problem with pointing lights at planets is that eventually they'll
notice the moving beams from the faint zodiacal light. Of course they won't
immediately conclude "the sun is a giant planetarium projector" but it will
likely spur greater curiosity in observing the sun from different viewpoints.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_light)

------
SturgeonsLaw
Remarkable to think that less than 150 years after that publication humanity
was building supercolliders

------
vmception
This is precious lol! The 6000 year old earth theory would be a lot less
arbitrary in this light, for that time period. I can see how that theory would
become relegated to vestigial religious groups.

------
avmich
Interesting that Sun burning coal age is well under billion years, while white
dwarfs - which don't have corresponding reactions supporting the light
emission - can live a trillion years.

~~~
saagarjha
White dwarfs are quite small, making their heat loss to radiation fairly low.

~~~
Gibbon1
Not to mention insanely dense and hot, so there is a lot of heat reserves.

~~~
wolfram74
And unless I'm misremembering my stat mech, the heat capacity of fermi gases
is pretty high.

------
maitredusoi
I would really like to be in 150 years in the future to see what assumptions
we are making today are totally foolish like that was the case is sun as coal
;)

~~~
Ididntdothis
It’s pretty much guaranteed that we currently have a lot of beliefs that will
look completely ridiculous in a few hundred years. I am also curious which
ones...

------
dsign
It's curious how in less than two hundred years our world-view has changed so
drastically. Of course, scientific advances compound. But so do ways of
thinking. Anybody who is lucky enough to get the word "Almighty" in a Science
paper these days is just cracking a very good joke that made it through a lot
of reviewers. But less than two hundred years ago people still felt they had
to acknowledge His existence in words while undoing Him in facts.

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lihaciudaniel
We ought to do another sacrifice of a random poor person's heart to the sun I
guess

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amelius
The amount of heat generated by the Sun per volume is much less than a typical
pile of burning coal.

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mirimir
So did some argue that 5000 years was consistent with the Bible?

[I did search, but DDG found nada.]

~~~
Damorian
No, this article predates young Earth creationism, which is fairly modern, by
50-100 years.

~~~
mirimir
No, such Bible-based estimates are far older. I found a review that seems
comprehensive, albeit reaching an incomprehensible (to me, anyway)
conclusion.[0]

0) [https://answersingenesis.org/age-of-the-earth/how-old-is-
the...](https://answersingenesis.org/age-of-the-earth/how-old-is-the-earth/)

~~~
Damorian
To clarify, the modern young Earth creationism that formed as an alternative
to scientific consensus. We've had strong evidence that the Earth is very,
very old for hundreds of years, which was the scientific and religiously
backed conclusion in the early 1800s. At the time this article was written, it
would have been well understood and accepted, with no religiously driven
explanation counter to scientific evidence. Any explanation put forth for an
old or young Earth prior to scientific evidence for it is just blind guessing
by philosophers.

~~~
mirimir
> We've had strong evidence that the Earth is very, very old for hundreds of
> years, which was the scientific and religiously backed conclusion in the
> early 1800s.

Sure, among experts. But what about popular opinion? And did the Scopes trial
(1925) mark a resurgence in creationism?

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a3n
Well, I'm glad that's settled.

~~~
hedora
Teach the controversy.

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starpilot
The scientific consensus was wrong? How is this possible?

