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I'm sorry but roughly 200 years of data is not nearly enough to begin to predict any sort of cycles the 4.5 billion year old Sun has. The article mentions 11 y

I'm sorry but roughly 200 years of data is not nearly enough to begin to predict any sort of cycles the 4.5 billion year old Sun has. The article mentions 11 year cycles between polar changes... since it hasn't happened this year, this article is based around 19 data points... That's the last 19 data points of the available 409,090,909 11-year increments...

phaemon 13y ago
Science doesn't work like that. We've only observed a tiny proportion of the Moon's orbits around the Earth, but we can still predict an eclipse of the Sun and we know that it's not going to crash into the Earth tomorrow. Why not learn a bit about the subject? Stars really are fascinating!
- 300bps 13y ago
  I think your example is not a good one and the premise you meant to have it support is flawed. Calculating the orbit of an object in space is well understood and several orders of magnitude less complicated than the relatively poorly understood processes that occur in the sun. As the person you replied to said, it is hubris to think that after a few hundred years of studying a 4 billion year old dynamic object that we can make such precise predictions about it. The fact that scientists seem to be baffled by the sun's current behavior should make this point obvious.
  - mhurron 13y ago
    > The fact that scientists seem to be baffled You might be reading more into science reporting than you should. 'Hm, that's odd' is reported as 'baffled'. People that actually work in the field do not believe they know it all as you suggest.
    - 300bps 13y ago
      I think you may have missed my point. The comment I was replying to essentially said, "If we can predict A with little information then we can predict B with little information". My point was that this is not necessarily true and certainly not true in this instance. After all, scientists are frequently wrong about sunspot activity predictions and rarely wrong about where the moon will be at any particular time of the day / year. The comment I responded to also had a needlessly condescending tone to the OP of "Science doesn't work like that...Why not learn a bit about the subject?" which I also objected to.
  - phaemon 13y ago
    > it is hubris to think that after a few hundred years of studying a 4 billion year old dynamic object I'm afraid you missed my point: the age of the object is irrelevant. That's why I was talking about the Moon which is also billions of years old. We don't predict how things will behave, simply based on a number of observations and then extrapolating (well, not if we have any choice). Instead we try to understand the underlying physical principles that cause the behaviour in the first place and make predictions based on that. The hubris is from you assuming you have a better understanding of the state of knowledge of the Sun than the people who actually study it. They know far better than you what we do and do not know.

phaemon 13y ago

Science doesn't work like that. We've only observed a tiny proportion of the Moon's orbits around the Earth, but we can still predict an eclipse of the Sun and we know that it's not going to crash into the Earth tomorrow. Why not learn a bit about the subject? Stars really are fascinating!

300bps 13y ago
I think your example is not a good one and the premise you meant to have it support is flawed. Calculating the orbit of an object in space is well understood and several orders of magnitude less complicated than the relatively poorly understood processes that occur in the sun. As the person you replied to said, it is hubris to think that after a few hundred years of studying a 4 billion year old dynamic object that we can make such precise predictions about it. The fact that scientists seem to be baffled by the sun's current behavior should make this point obvious.
- mhurron 13y ago
  > The fact that scientists seem to be baffled You might be reading more into science reporting than you should. 'Hm, that's odd' is reported as 'baffled'. People that actually work in the field do not believe they know it all as you suggest.
  - 300bps 13y ago
    I think you may have missed my point. The comment I was replying to essentially said, "If we can predict A with little information then we can predict B with little information". My point was that this is not necessarily true and certainly not true in this instance. After all, scientists are frequently wrong about sunspot activity predictions and rarely wrong about where the moon will be at any particular time of the day / year. The comment I responded to also had a needlessly condescending tone to the OP of "Science doesn't work like that...Why not learn a bit about the subject?" which I also objected to.
- phaemon 13y ago
  > it is hubris to think that after a few hundred years of studying a 4 billion year old dynamic object I'm afraid you missed my point: the age of the object is irrelevant. That's why I was talking about the Moon which is also billions of years old. We don't predict how things will behave, simply based on a number of observations and then extrapolating (well, not if we have any choice). Instead we try to understand the underlying physical principles that cause the behaviour in the first place and make predictions based on that. The hubris is from you assuming you have a better understanding of the state of knowledge of the Sun than the people who actually study it. They know far better than you what we do and do not know.