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Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)
- kristianp 6y ago(1863)
- dang 6y agoI 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_scientific_american_of_1863_its_claimed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jym5d/in_the_s..., which I ran across while failing to track down the original article.
- _bxg1 6y agoYou mean this isn't the original web page? :)
- earthboundkid 6y agoWhen I worked for The Atlantic, I learned that Django/MySQL was not made to work for dates in the 1850s... I forget what the exact nature of the bug was, but you had to be careful which date class you were using because some can’t go past 1900.
- erik_seaberg 6y agoI'll always remember discovering that from_unixtime(-1) would crash MySQL.
- ars 6y agoPerhaps use the link posted by: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23075544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23075544 instead.
- dang 6y agoThanks! That's maybe not readable enough to be the primary URL but I've pinned that comment to the top.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 6y agoSo did some argue that 5000 years was consistent with the Bible? [I did search, but DDG found nada.]
- Damorian 6y agoNo, this article predates young Earth creationism, which is fairly modern, by 50-100 years.
- senectus1 6y agoembarrassing really isn't it.
- Damorian 6y agoNot particularly, in my opinion. Look at any group derided, not by the scientific community, but by the laymen who accept scientific consensus; Antivaxers, climate change deniers, YECs. They raise one or two, often valid, objections to the current state of affairs and rather than getting a reasonable, coherent explanation for why it's the scientific consensus, they're mocked, again, by laymen who really couldn't answer their questions anyway. They questioned the divinity of popular science, and as heretics, deserve to be burned. People are reasonable and logical by default. We form our beliefs from knowledge and experience, and these groups are no exception.
- mirimir 6y agoNo, 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-earth/ https://answersingenesis.org/age-of-the-earth/how-old-is-the...
- Damorian 6y agoTo 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.
- jolmg 6y agoThat 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.
- empath75 6y agohttps://zenodo.org/record/1429642#.XrC1NCUpDDs https://zenodo.org/record/1429642#.XrC1NCUpDDs It wasn’t until 1920 that the first paper suggesting it could be nuclear fusion was published.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoIt's shocking how in a century (say from 1850 to 1950) we went from basically knowing nothing to basically knowing everything.
- haunter 6y ago>basically knowing everything How bold! I'm pretty sure someone make a comment like yours too in ~2150 reading articles from today.
- pfdietz 6y agoHe'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 6y agoWhy not? You don't know how much knowledge the universe contains.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- a3n 6y agoWell, I'm glad that's settled.
- hedora 6y agoTeach the controversy.
- _bxg1 6y agoMy 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-of-filigree-street https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22929563-the-watchmaker-...
- empath75 6y agoIt’s not all that far off from the electromagnetic field.
- jshevek 6y agoI think it is. Electric and magnetic fields exist in relationship with the processes that create and shape them. There is no prerequisite "background electromagnetic field" that is universally necessary for all of those processes, to begin with.
- empath75 6y agoThe primary difference is that the aether was supposed to provide a universal rest frame, which we now know doesn’t exist, but quantum field theory does posit that the field is a fundamental medium and the particles exist only as perturbations in that field.
- DiabloD3 6y agoNot 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.
- jaggederest 6y agoThis 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.
- Finnucane 6y agoIt was definitely a conundrum for scientists. Throughout the 19th century, evidence kept piling up from geology supporting longer and longer time periods for the age of the earth, but there was no known source of energy that could keep the sun burning for that much time.
- Ididntdothis 6y agoSounds a little like Dark Matter and Dark Energy today. Lots of evidence for it but nobody knows what it is.
- _bxg1 6y agoI wonder if anyone became worried that the sun could burn out at any time
- archgoon 6y ago
- pleddy 6y agoI believe everything I read. This is still true. This is not a lie.
- avmich 6y agoInteresting 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 6y agoWhite dwarfs are quite small, making their heat loss to radiation fairly low.
- gerdesj 6y agoI 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
- YarickR2 6y agoNow, imagine video with the scientist narrating this new finding (Sun is 400m years old, and gives heat and light because of meteors falling on it) is being removed by youtube, because these views are so dissenting with prevailing opinion of the world being 6000 years old max, and could harm minds of a general population, turning people away from God .
- gerdesj 6y ago[Please move away from the DV button - I like to encourage discussion around here] 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.
- 6y ago
- empath75 6y agoTo 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.
- jedberg 6y agoThe metaphors are just how we explain it to people so they can understand. 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.
- jeremyjh 6y agoI 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.
- nabla9 6y agoI strongly disagree. I don't disagree that human mind is limited by metaphors. I disagree that it applies to this situation. 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- amadio 6y agoI 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 6y agoThe sun is a mass of incandescent gas. A gigantic nuclear furnace.
- GurnBlandston 6y agoThe sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma. The sun's not simply made out of gas, no, no, no.
- detritus 6y agoIt might be a bit too hot to smell bad...
- robotbikes 6y agoIn 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 6y agoI 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 6y agoThey 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 6y agoAnd 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.
- acqq 6y ago> In hindsight it's weird 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.
- CapriciousCptl 6y agoThere’s nothing quite like reading old periodicals. Really puts a lot into perspective, no matter what your interests or expertise are.
- macintux 6y agoI 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
- ufo 6y agoThis 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_calculations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth#Early_calcula... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation
- aetherspawn 6y agoI really hope this isn’t how they estimated the age of the earth. It’s so.. uncertain. Like crash testing a car by using a representative model where the only commonality is the external panel dimensions and total net mass.
- pfdietz 6y agoThe 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.
- cft 6y agoApparently 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 6y agoAlthough 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.
- philipkglass 6y agoHere 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=1up&seq=104 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x001601382&view=1...
- AareyBaba 6y agoInteresting 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 6y ago> 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.
- jecel 6y agoThey 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
- mmaunder 6y agoBefore Einstein it must have been maddening to estimate the mass of the sun and ponder why its energy output was so high.
- tlb 6y agoJust 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
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ukoki 6y agoThanks! — 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 6y agoI 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.
- gojomo 6y agoWhen 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.)
- Aeolun 6y agoI... never considered how inexplicable the sun must have been until we knew about nuclear fusion. I’ve just always taken it for granted.
- bArray 6y agoI 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
- adrianN 6y agoIf you have a small black hole, you'd rather build a dyson sphere around that. They're pretty good matter-to-energy converters: https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803 https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803
- thombat 6y agoPossible 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
- starpilot 6y agoThe scientific consensus was wrong? How is this possible?
- dsign 6y agoIt'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.
- lihaciudaniel 6y agoWe ought to do another sacrifice of a random poor person's heart to the sun I guess
- Proven 6y agoHehe... Climate change experts in the 90’s were warning about catastrophic temperatures in 2020.
- vmception 6y agoThis 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.
- amelius 6y agoThe amount of heat generated by the Sun per volume is much less than a typical pile of burning coal.
- gorgoiler 6y agoI 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 6y agoA 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
- rsynnott 6y agoNot true. Something like that is why gas giants are hotter than you'd naively expect, though.
- maitredusoi 6y agoI 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 6y agoIt’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...
- jonplackett 6y agoPop quiz - what do you think people will be laughing this hard about from our time in 150 years?
- JackFr 6y agoA 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 6y agoI'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.
- cataphract 6y agoProbably much of our understanding of biology. It seems to be in a much more incipient stage.
- SturgeonsLaw 6y agoRemarkable to think that less than 150 years after that publication humanity was building supercolliders
- hutzlibu 6y agoArticles 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 6y agoNope, that's not even close. https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht... 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"