A young sun - a response

Wow! That is an impressive thing to admit -- that ICR may not be doing as good a job as they should.I don't think, however, that you can conclude that they are doing anything deliberately misleading because they omitted some information from this particular article. It is afterall relatively obscure. It may be a simple oversight.What should worry someone is any evidence that there is a pattern of such behavior. I can't say if that is true of ICR or not. I have seen such behavior (and much worse than simple omission) in some creationist sites. That suggests that using them requires a good deal of care.

It would seem that this has been put to bed. I think Liz Breath should be the one to let ICR know so they can post a retraction to the article. If he is at all concerned about their reliability that would be part of an answer.An honest source would make it clear that they had made a mistake and leave the correction around so that others, who may be posting the same material, can get it corrected too.Would you perform the experiment, LB?

I don't think any of these questions are dumb. Well, I hope not since I sure don't know all that answers.I'm going to answer off the top of my head where I think I know the answer. At some point it takes a physicists studying the area. I guess it would be useful to know what detail you need and why.
First Post: 14
1)Fusion requires 3 conditions, enough time for the atoms to fuse, enough energy to overcome the repulsive forces and enough pressure to hold them together. Gravity supplied all of this to get the process going.2)I don't know if the fusion is uniform or not. My guess would be that it is approximately so in the volume where the conditions are met but I would be surprised if there wasn't a greater rate deeper in the core.3)Core growing? I am guessing that it is as helium piles up. As mentioned eventurally there will be layers running on different fusion processes. In a large enough star this gets all the way up to producing iron.4)Density? I don't know either, but only 14 time denser than lead sounds way to low to me. A white dwarf, crushed down by gravity with no fusion process pushing back can get to a density of about 1,000,000. Which would be somewhere near 100,000 time denser than lead. (of course that's still not a neutron star)Second Post: 15
1) I don't know how the magentic field is created in any detail. However, if you take a plasma (charged) and move it, it will create a magnetic field. At it's base it is probably that simple. A moving electric charge creates a magnetic field.2)The sun does explode!!! Big time. That is what these CME (coronal mass ejections are). Huge balls of plasma bigger than the earth spit out into space. There is a steady stream of many tons of matter racing out from the sun through the solar system as well. The "solar wind" reaches out way beyond Pluto. That is where Voyager is now, where the intersteller medium finally overpowers the solar wind.3)I don't know but I think it's all gravity to kick things off and hold things together.4)I don't know but the magnetic fields are very intense indeed. They do shape the solar flares that explode off the surface of the sun so they aren't "faint background" at all.

And that proves we are not normal folks. It is my experience that I am in a minority and by the majority definition "weird". I care about what goes on in the centre of our galaxy !

You are generally right, LB. Pretty much all of everything heavier than helium comes from fusion processes in stars. What I don't know is what conditions are requiried to produce litium etc. So I don't know if the sun can produce any, a little bit or a lot.What I do know is that as a star starts to run out of hydrogen it can start to collapse further under gravity. This produces new, higher pressures and temperatures. This allows for more fusion processes and then more again. Soon there are a number of them going on in the star in layers. IIRC the red giant phase of the sun will be produced as these other processes start to occur.If the star is big enough ( I think it is about 8 solar masses) the whole thing can get to the point of being able to force the fusion to produce iron. However, this doesn't release more energy, it requires more than it produces. The core collapses.Then the whole thing undergoes a super nova catastrophe. Elements even heavier than iron are formed in the extreme conditions and the outer part of the star is blown off. The energy output equals that of billions of sun-like stars for a very short period of time.From the blown off material we get all the elements heavier than helium that make up the earth and us.A bit more information I found with google from : http://plato.phy.ohiou.edu/...ments/stnl/stnl77/feature.htmland a page about steller evolution (which I haven't read yet)
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/textbook/se.html[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 11-21-2003]

Are they telling the same story? Well, yea, approximately.In you Dallas example, do all sources agree on the number of tires on the car? Yea. Do we agree that there was a start to the earth? Yea.But if one eye witness testifies that the car had 7 (a mystical number) of lug nuts and the blueprints for the car and the historical documents of it's conversion to the president's car all tell us that it had 5 then the witness has to agree that his/her memory might not be right.If we don't have the eye witness to talk to but have records written by others taken from an oral tradition from individuals that didn't talk to the eye witness then we can pretty much bet that the memory isn't right.However, all of that is beside the point. The point is that the Bible is NOT trying to tell us how old the earth is, how the sun shines or anything of that type or at least that is a reasonable way to accept the Bible. Even if I believed there was a God I wouldn't expect that the Bible would be worded to supply that information. I wouldn't expect it to be trying to teach nuclear physics to goat herders for pete's sake.So if there is any apparent disagreement between nuclear physics and the Bible it just doesn't matter. The physics is the best answer we have. The Bible answers other questions for those who need those answers in that way. We are, I think, in complete agreement that the Bible shouldn't contradict the evidence we have but I don't believe it should matter enough to even ask the question.Galileo pointed out that if the scriptures appeared to contradict the evidence it was the human interpretation of the scriptures that were wrong not the scriptures. I say, it doesn't matter. In that regard I would be supporting the "non overlapping magisters" that Gould talks about.

Darn! You say what I've been trying to say so eloquently! Thanks.

Every so often this idea of "appearance of age" comes up. The question that always has to be answered is: Are you saying that God made the sun (in this case), the rocks, the radioactive elements, the stars and so on so that no matter how hard you look the earth always has the "appearance" of being 4.5 Gyrs old? Is that your answer to this?

No, Buz I don't think it "has to show" age. Eta can answer better but I think that the sun could produce heat just fine without haveing just the right amounts of some elements to indicate it had been burning a long time, etc.It could also produce a lot of heat for long enough (a few 1,000's of years) without fusion taking place. Eta could tell us if there are any other things.

No, that's just what I said it didn't have to have. However, you have to start making up a whole bunch of stuff about how God can and can not behave.If he *had* to use the materials at hand (what is obviously a silly assumption since he was creating *everything*) then he had to use the local abundances of lithium for example. But the fusion process has removed much of that with the time the sun has been fusing.However, I see no reason why he would put just the right amount of lithium in there. I see no reason why he would bother with *any* at all since it is just left over from previous supernovae which he didn't need any of.As I suggested Eta will know more but the sun appears old. It appears old in ways which I ( a none expert) think it doesn't have to. So why does it appear to be old?

The real question is, Eta, does it HAVE to look old to work?With my limited understanding the answer is NO. It could work very well for a limited time without fusion. It could be made of just hydrogen and work fine with fusion. It doesn't need any other elements in specific abundances to work fine.Is that true, Eta?

It seems then we have an old looking sun, Buz and it doesn't have to look old to work. So now what?

But since the sun can work fine WITHOUT the appearance of age why would He make it look like it is old? He certainly had to do somethings so it supplied light at the right time but He did NOT have to make it look precisely right to look old. Why did He?But Buz, why are you even bothering to ask? I thought you were on "our" side on this. You think that the earth and sun are old, much older than 6,000 years.[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 11-26-2003]

No, Buz, what Mike tells you is there would be some things that would have to be set up to get the sun to be "working" right but there are a bunch more that aren't 'necessary'.Therefore I see only two conclusions:
1) The sun is as old as we measure through a bunch of different means.
2) God choose to add unnecessary extras to make it look old. Then He added a bunch of other things on earth and in the universe to make everything match up.Since others would agree that the God you worship is not a deciever then only the first choice is viable.

Helium.