Our sun

Here is an excellent question for those who believe the earth is old and evolution occurred over millions of years: Given the following quote and extrapolation, how exactly did evolution occur, when life could not have existed on the earth only 100,000 years ago?"By analyzing data from Greenwich Observatory in the period 1836-1953, John A. Eddy [Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory in Boulder] and Aram A. Boornazian [mathematician with S. Ross and Co. in Boston] have found evidence that the sun has been contracting about 0.1% per century during that time, corresponding to a shrinkage rate of about 5 feet per hour. And digging deep into historical records, Eddy has found 400-year-old eclipse observations that are consistent with such a shrinkage." *"Sun is Shrinking," Physics Today, September 1979.Extrapolating back, 100,000 years ago, the sun would have been about twice its present size, making life untenable.

I refer you to my reply to your 'Granite' topic.Seriously, nothing you mine from a creationist website has not already been refuted. Chances are you can find that refutation on TalkOrigins.org.

Hi, Badger!Did you read Mr Jack's reply to you in your Granite thread? Your posting some of the most egregiously wrong Creationist nonsense.The shrinking sun fallacy has been debunked many, many times on the web, but one more time won't hurt if anyone can muster up the interest and energy for it. It's already debunked here at EvC Forum in this thread here: The Sun is Shrinking, the Earth is Young.--Percy

The Sun is not shrinking; it is oscillating with an 80 year cycle.As already noted in the "Dates and Dating" forum, please do not post quotes from creationist web sites without checking out talkorigins.org or the old threads in this site or other reliable sources. The claim you posted is absolutely false and is one of the better known creationist frauds. Any site or person promulgating that claim loses all credibility instantly. It is so well known that Howard J. Van Till wrote a detailed paper on it, The Legend of the Shrinking Sun - A Case Study Comparing Professional Science and "Creation Science" in Action. From the abstract:

quote:

---

Within the professional scientific community, a preliminary report which suggested a long-term and rapid shrinkage of the sun presented a puzzle for solar astronomers. Consequently, additional studies were made and the credibility of the original data was re-evaluated. The result is that secular shrinkage has not been
substantiated, but an 80-year oscillatory behavior was discovered. Within the "creation-science" community, however, the response to the original report has been remarkably different. The suggestion of rapid long-term shrinkage was uncritically accepted, the evidence and conclusions drawn from subsequent studies were generally dismissed, and extrapolations of the presumed rapid solar shrinkage have been performed without restraint. Isolated from the corrective of continuing professional investigation and evaluation, the "creation-science" community continues to employ this unwarranted extrapolation of a discredited report as a scientific evidence" for a young earth. The credibility of the Christian witness to a scientifically knowledgeable world is thereby clouded.

---

More information is available at The Solar FAQ: Solar Neutrinos and Other Solar Oddities: Shrinkage.

Just for comparison to other phenomena, this is like weather here on earth. If I extrapolated the plunging temperature in the month of October here in the states, could I then extrapolate and say that in the year 2006 the average temperature will be -250 F (just a guesstimate)? The answer is no for the same reason that the sun shrinkage extrapolation is wrong, ie it is cyclical. So, if you want to hold this as proof you would also have to claim that it will be very cold in a couple years by the November tempurature shrinkage.

Thread moved here from the Geology and the Great Flood forum.

Going through this with buzsaw/whatever a couple of weeks ago was bad enough.

Just a note: I have found that many fallacious creationist arguments extrapolate linearly from a small dataset. Moon dust, the receding Moon, the shrinking Sun, etc., all take data from a short time period and extrapolate it linearly into the past.So if you hear an argument like this, ask yourself if the extrapolation they are using might just be invalid. In astronomy, and any field of science, it pays not to extend your conclusion too much beyond your data. You're likely to make am mountain out of a molehill. Or a young Universe out of an old one.

---

******************
The Bad Astronomer
http://www.badastronomy.com

So true. But once in a while they get sophisticated, as in Morris using exponential population growth to "prove" that the present population could only have come from two people about 6000 years ago. And isn't Setterfield's "curve fit" to the measurments of the speed of light exponential?

Don't forget the earth's magnetic field can only be ~10,000 years old because measurements for the last hundred and fifty years proves that...

Neatly forgetting to extrapolate how many people would be around at the time of various biblical events...

Using E. coli, the earth can't be more than a few months old because we are not swimming in a sea of bacteria. With a doubling time of only 20-30 minutes, E. coli would have swamped the earth in a very short amount of time.

Using this line of reasoning, I am suprised you believe in any science involving age... It is my understanding that most, if not all, measurments of age extrapolate linierally into the past using a tiny data set in comparison to the period of time they claim to measure.So, apparently the earth remains the same for millions/billions (I get them mixed up) of years, but the sun changes on a cycle of 80 days per
How Good are those Young-Earth Arguments: Hovind's 'Proofs', or 80 years per another response to my question, without burning up any of it's fuel or significantly changing size or affecting life on earth?

The Sun does burn up its fuel. But it does so in an incredible energy efficent manner (fussion) and is unbelievably huge, thus it will be another 4 or 5 billion years before it hits problems related to lack of fuel.The Suns cycles do effect the life on earth; its one of the major causes of really hot summers and really cold winters. What they don't do is decimate it.

Didn't somebody say in another thread that Supernova 1987A proves that radioactive decay rares haven't changed in hundreds of thousands of years? I'd say that a pretty large data set from which to extrapolate a trend.