The great breadths of time.

Wow, not so easy to stay on topic as I thought, I guess... I'll be more careful from here on.

A deep problem is that everything is related to everything else. There is only one topic: the Universe!However, just like science is divided into many disciplines and text books have chapters it is useful to organize things.For example, you were interested in the supernova distance measurements. If that hadn't been kept to (nearly ) the one topic and if it hadn't been kept out of others then we'd have to go over it all again for you.For yourself when you are learning a LOT of new things it might be best to do the same. Stick to something long enough to "get it" well enough to remember it then move on.To speed things up you can try trusting people too. When someone says that such-and-such has been measured you can take it at face value at first. If you then decide that particular item is very important to any conclusions you might draw then you should come back and dig a bit deeper.Not all the answers that people will post here are correct. However, there are others watching over their shoulders and if someone does make a mistake they will be corrected in a day or so.Sometimes you may want to be careful about asking for too many details. You will, in the end, get references to the actual published scientific papers. You will be YEARS in working through this if not DECADES if you go to that level everywhere.

I'm not sure what your point is here. There are often, but not always, folds within layers. That is sometimes taken (by Young Earth Creationists, AKA YECs) as evidence that they folded before they turned into stone. That's incorrect,; we know both theoretically and experimentally that solid rock can and does fold and "flow" under high pressures and temperatures as found inside the Earth. Rock Deformation Laboratory, High Temperature Deformation and Plasticity.If Ned will allow me, in addition to the Supernova 1987A thread to which someone referred you, see also Hipparcos Satellite Data and How can we measure distances to more stars?.

Although we are dealing with rocks here, in Message 1 we also dealt with some of the issues of galaxy and universe size.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

What does ^ mean?Is it denoting a power such that:
3(2^3)=24?

yes

Yes, ^ means raise to the power of, so 3^3 = 27. Sorry for not making that clear!Let me clarify one more thing: x^2 / K is equal to (x^2) / K, so K is not part of the exponent.Edited by Matt P, : No reason given.

Superscripts and subscripts are also supported here. Use the peek button on the lower right of this post to see how.3²4₁₀

Woohoo! I can now bore you all to tears with chemistry!Al₂(SO₄)₃!!!!!!

Edited and changed. Thanks for the info!

The math below makes sense, however, isn't this the same thought process that creationists use when describing the weakening of the magnetic field or the distancing of the moon? Your example shows that if a small rock cools at a specific rate, then a larger rock should follow the same rules with exponential results.

As I understand Yellowstone, it is a fairly active region and the dome is actually rising and could quite possibly erupt into a super-volcano. Is the rock underneath the region hot because of past activity and is in the process of cooling, or is the region still active and thus currently recieving heat/energy from the depths?

The difference is that Fick's law of cooling has been verified both theoretically (from extremely fundamental principles) and experimentally over incredibly wide ranges. Obviously we haven't done experiments on cooling of bodies of many-kilometer size, but if they cool differently than smaller bodies then all that we think we know about physics is really, really wrong, and a lot of our other predictions wouldn't work s well as they do. We have done measurements of chemical composition in such large bodies, and they follow Fick's law as expected (diffusion of atoms is the same thing as heat transfer, deep down). And, as I said in my first post in this thread, heat transfer is not a complex process.The typical creationist extrapolation involves a very complex process, data taken over a very short time relative even to the creationist's 6000-year-old world, and extrapolating an overly-simplistic and purely empirical (no theoretical foundation) model over many orders of magnitude.I've never seen a creationist seriously propose that Fick's law doesn't apply to large plutons. They have proposed that plutons were cooled quickly by flood waters and "expulsion" of water from inside the pluton, and they've produced some pretty incoherent 'explanations" of why grain sizes in plutons are so large (ignoring the fact that a pluton cooled rapidly by floodwater would have to be very fine-grained at the surface with larger grains inside, which we don't see); but even they don't deny Fick's law.

And a large rock does follow the same rules - a favorite of young-earth creationists is Lord Kelvin, who calculated cooling of the whole Earth using this sort of math back in the late 1800's. YEC's typically don't quote his minimum age of 20,000,000 years, though, for some reason.And, of course, radioactivity wasn't known of until 1896, so Kelvin couldn't have known that Earth has an internal heat source that slows his cooloff rates tremendously.

Hi Gigahound, you have some good questions!JonF and Coragyps both provide good responses, and my response will build slightly on theirs.Fundamentally, this specific application of Fick's Law is a simple conservation of energy relation (energy is conserved during physical processes) coupled with the second law of thermodynamics (the spreading-out of energy through time). These relations are very well known and tested through and through.Compare this to the magnetic field argument: the origin of the Earth's magnetic field is still incompletely understood, the time evolution of the magnetic field is unclear, and there are no small scale tests that can be done with the Earth's field. Unlike the rock-cooling example, we can't simulate the origin and change of the Earth's magnetic field using smaller models (having a gravitationally bound sphere with a silicate shell containing a molten iron shell surrounding an iron-nickel core is not possible with modern technology). With all that's unclear creationists perform a definite disservice by attempting to back-extrapolate the modern data.I will be gone for the next week, so I'll leave others to answer your questions.