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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 w

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

YarickR2 7y ago
Now, 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 7y 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.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    I think you'd be surprised about how many really do believe the Earth is nearly that young https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati... "People you know" is a very unreliable way to get an idea about various populations. 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.
    - gerdesj 7y ago
      No, I would not really. 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)
      - foobar1962 7y ago
        Not misplaced, unaccounted for based on what is visible (or more accurately, detectable).
    - whymauri 7y ago
      My older brother has founded two separate isotope dating companies, one for C-14 dating and the other for rare isotopes. At this point, he has about 15 years of experience in the field and a decent clientele. 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.
      - throw_away 7y ago
        How do they reconcile when they give customers answers > 6000 years and the whole "thou shalt not lie" bit?
- wonnage 7y ago
  there are plenty of flat earth and creationism videos on youtube, find a new slant
- unholythree 7y ago
  The issue there might be more that there is a single “publisher” in that media that gets to do all the gatekeeping. I’m sure American Scientist 1863 would have declined to publish lots of ideas, but didn’t have the market cornered.
pvg 7y ago
My university library had these bound up and sitting on the regular shelves, going back to the mid 19th century. The early ones came out a couple of times a month and the format was broadsheet which is a weird way to read a popular science magazine but I suppose that's how people rolled back then. You could definitely fold a single issue into several sizable hats.
tempestn 7y ago
I wouldn't even say it's nonsense. Edit: just realized the precise word you used was in fact 'bollocks'. I wouldn't say it's that either. 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.
- gerdesj 7y ago
  "The logic behind the sun not burning a fuel like coal is entirely sound" 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.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    It seems very anachronistic to describe it like that. Like calling the Apple I a failure for selling a couple hundred and ridiculously underpowered for not even having a 1 GHz processor. People make comments like that now and then, and it's just odd.
  - tempestn 7y ago
    Yeah, makes sense. Just a different way of describing the same thing. Sound logic that led in the right direction if not (yet) to the right destination. 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.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    You're still being too hard on it. There's a clear recognition that combustion isn't sufficient. And the only other option seemed to be gravitational accretion. 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. 0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington
tialaramex 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    That's fair, a "convective mantel" model which accepts Kelvin's other assumptions gives 2-3 billion years, so it's at least ballpark compatible with biology. I think you'd have struggled to hide the mismatch eventually but it does pass a laugh test unlike 20 million years. Unlike radioactivity, Kelvin could have considered convection and so that's his fault.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    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.
burnte 7y ago
> It doesn't matter that the article is bollocks. Actually, the headline is not bollocks, but 100% correct. It is NOT a giant lump of burning coal!
pdonis 7y ago
> It doesn't matter that the article is bollocks. 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.)
dmarchand90 7y ago
I'm pretty sure then, as now, the readership of SA was not reflective of the population as a whole! I'm pretty sure you could find all kinds of bizarre conspiracies from this era as well. (e.g. all Catholics are trying to take over the United States for the Pope)
shalmanese 7y ago
> I had absolutely no idea that SA is so old. 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.

YarickR2 7y ago

Now, 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 7y 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.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  I think you'd be surprised about how many really do believe the Earth is nearly that young https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati... "People you know" is a very unreliable way to get an idea about various populations. 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.
  - gerdesj 7y ago
    No, I would not really. 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)
    - foobar1962 7y ago
      Not misplaced, unaccounted for based on what is visible (or more accurately, detectable).
  - whymauri 7y ago
    My older brother has founded two separate isotope dating companies, one for C-14 dating and the other for rare isotopes. At this point, he has about 15 years of experience in the field and a decent clientele. 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.
    - throw_away 7y ago
      How do they reconcile when they give customers answers > 6000 years and the whole "thou shalt not lie" bit?
wonnage 7y ago
there are plenty of flat earth and creationism videos on youtube, find a new slant
unholythree 7y ago
The issue there might be more that there is a single “publisher” in that media that gets to do all the gatekeeping. I’m sure American Scientist 1863 would have declined to publish lots of ideas, but didn’t have the market cornered.

pvg 7y ago

My university library had these bound up and sitting on the regular shelves, going back to the mid 19th century. The early ones came out a couple of times a month and the format was broadsheet which is a weird way to read a popular science magazine but I suppose that's how people rolled back then. You could definitely fold a single issue into several sizable hats.

tempestn 7y ago

I wouldn't even say it's nonsense. Edit: just realized the precise word you used was in fact 'bollocks'. I wouldn't say it's that either. 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.

gerdesj 7y ago
"The logic behind the sun not burning a fuel like coal is entirely sound" 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.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  It seems very anachronistic to describe it like that. Like calling the Apple I a failure for selling a couple hundred and ridiculously underpowered for not even having a 1 GHz processor. People make comments like that now and then, and it's just odd.
- tempestn 7y ago
  Yeah, makes sense. Just a different way of describing the same thing. Sound logic that led in the right direction if not (yet) to the right destination. 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.
- mirimir 7y ago
  You're still being too hard on it. There's a clear recognition that combustion isn't sufficient. And the only other option seemed to be gravitational accretion. 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. 0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington

tialaramex 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  That's fair, a "convective mantel" model which accepts Kelvin's other assumptions gives 2-3 billion years, so it's at least ballpark compatible with biology. I think you'd have struggled to hide the mismatch eventually but it does pass a laugh test unlike 20 million years. Unlike radioactivity, Kelvin could have considered convection and so that's his fault.
- adrianN 7y ago
  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.

burnte 7y ago

> It doesn't matter that the article is bollocks. Actually, the headline is not bollocks, but 100% correct. It is NOT a giant lump of burning coal!

pdonis 7y ago

> It doesn't matter that the article is bollocks. 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.)

dmarchand90 7y ago

I'm pretty sure then, as now, the readership of SA was not reflective of the population as a whole! I'm pretty sure you could find all kinds of bizarre conspiracies from this era as well. (e.g. all Catholics are trying to take over the United States for the Pope)

shalmanese 7y ago

> I had absolutely no idea that SA is so old. 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.