Anyway, I just want to point out one of the strengths of science. My moon stuff was off. Now it isn't, because someone showed otherwise. I have now adapted my worldview.

"And another thing: something I've heard evolutionists say over and over again is 'We assume that, even though it defies laws of probibility and physics, it still happened. We're here, after all.'"

Sources? Even one?

6: Let's just talk about Venus. I like it 'cause that's where the ladies and self-help authors are. Anyway, there are very few craters on the surface, and none of them appear to be older than...what, a hundred million years or so? It's hypothesized that the entire surface of the planet melts now and then. No plate tectonics means little chance for the planet's internal heat to escape normally, you see. Nothing to do with anything, of course. Just neat.

7: "Again I refer you to my point that there is no known way that the moon could exist in it's present orbit without being created there in it's present condition."

Actually, there are three. The one most supported by the evidence, such as the moon's tiny core proportional to its mass, is the fission via collision hypothesis.

Besides, define "hot". The moon is a cold, dead world. It is far from "hot". No magnetic field. Partially solid mantle.

Unfortunately, I don't have the thread in front of me, so I can't reference your specific quotes. However, some of the data used to disprove the hoax claim was: feather impressions underneath the fossil itself, ultragraphic photography indicating the surrounding rock and the fossil are identical.

There's some interesting bits on why the Noah Global-flood story isn't likely to be true at:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html

The Ark would be unstable! The Ark would leak!

And of course, the fact that the total mass of all the animals that would need to be on the Ark, even if only genuses instead of species were collected, would far exceed the Ark's maximum capacity, ESPECIALLY if saurians were aboard...

"Sorry guys, but you're too damn big and you eat too much. Try to tread water as long as possible, okay?"

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I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
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I'm terrible at remembering names, but I've remember quite distinctly hearing a quote saying "I believe in Evolution because it's the only alternative to selective creation, and that's unthinkable."

As for Venus, I wasn't too clear. I should have said mountains and craters. If I recall correctly, there's a rather large mountain on Venus. Is that right?

As for the Moon, again, the relative abundancies of the elements are too disimilar. What are the other two? OK, not the moon. Try Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Venus. They give off far more energy than they recieve. Calculations show that the energy couldn't come from fusion, radioactive decay, or gravitational colapse. Unless someone has a better theory, the only conclusion is that these planets havn't existed long enough to cool off.

The fact still remains that the fossil (at least the one in the Brittish museum of Natural History) is one of only two specimines with feathers, and the feathers are forgeries, based on the evidence I mentioned before, as is the furcula (wishbone). And the surrounding rock and the fossil would be identical. The fossil's real. The feathers and furcula, which are the only evidence of any connection with birds, are not.

Age of the Earth:

10: Since 1836, over 100 different observers have made direct visual measurements that suggest that the sun is shrinking by about .1% per century, or about five feet per hour. Solar eclipse records show that this has been going on for at least 400 years. Several indirect techniques confirm the shrinkage, only the colapse rate given is only about 1/7 as much. Using the most conservative data, the sun would have engulfed Earth less than 100,000,000 years ago, and made it uninhabitable in far less than that. It would take an incredible change to change the rate of shrinking by two or three orders of magnitude.

I say: "They took a look at the hoax claims and disproved them."

You say: "Well, yes...but it's still a hoax."

Anyway, there are a whole host of processes going on inside gas giants. They do not put out 'a great deal' more energy then they take in. They put out a BIT more.

And Venusian features are cool. *science gushing mode*

It gets so hot on the surface that a mountain's roots can literally melt, causing the whole mountain to just slide around the landscape. Despite lacking traditional Earthlike mechanisms for building up and tearing down land, Venus is pretty darned dynamic.

On the sun...

Only ONE scientific paper has made the claim that the sun is undergoing a constant rate of "shrinkage." (I'm sorry, but all I can think of when I hear that is George Costanza.)

This paper, published by a guy named Akridge in 1980. He derived his data from a summary of a paper written by an Eddy and Boornazian.

In so doing, he made several misinterpretations of the data Eddy and Boornazian had presented. For starters, the 400 year figure was simple fiction. The paper only dealt with observations gathered from 1863 to 1953. Also, this original paper made no claims that the witnessed measurements were representative of a constant rate. Plus, not all the data from that time period records any shrinkage at all.

One reason for all this confusion is that the sun has no definite surface. Where do you measure the diameter from? One hundred years ago, accurate judgements on where the surface of the sun was were not available. Hence, different observers calculated from different starting points.

Data gathered since Akridge published his paper do not show any shrinkage in line with his calculations. We do know that the sun changes constantly, and is home to many great cyclic patterns.

Back to Archie...the entire skeletal structure is unique. The wings are fused where bird wings aren't, and unfused where reptile limbs are.

And the feather imprints could not have been faked as is claimed. For that to be possible, the rock would have had to have been much, much different from the fossil, unless the fossil is made out of concrete. (The claim being that the feather imprints were made by pressing chicken feathers into a thin layer of cement surrounding a reptile fossil. Unfortunately, the feathers don't have much resembelance to chicken feathers at all.)

Furthermore, Archie isn't even the only example anymore. There are, I think, two other species of similar animals. Even more importantly, the recent discover in China of a dinosaur species that, while not resembling a bird at all, appears to have had a coat or fringe of featherlike structures.

Sinosauropteryx had feathery filaments.
Unenlagia had flapping ability and feathers.
Caudipteryx had primitive featers, although it couldn't fly.
Protoarchaeopteryx resembles Archaeopteryx but is more primitive. It has asymmetrical feathers. It is, essentially, the "missing link" between Caudipteryx and Archaeopteryx.

The arm 'wingbones' on these creatures become progressively more birdlike and less reptilian.

Also, if the Archaeopteryx feathers were only "impressions," why are they ANCHORED in the bones of the skeleton? And in fact, a glance at the fosil shows the feathers not as impressions, but as a raised area, exactly what you'd see if the feathers had fossilized.
Plus, feathers can't be that hard to fossilize, since numerous single feathers have been found in places like Bavaria.
secondary impressions? Not in MY full color actual sized photograph, and if there were, so what? You've never seen a bird flop around as it died?
Also, did someone say Archaeopteryx was discovered in the fifties? Nope. The first was found in 1855, the most developed in 1861. The one found in 1956 was the least-perfect and worst-preserved specimen. (So of course, that's the one the Creationists pick to study)

"I say: "They took a look at the hoax claims and disproved them.

You say: "Well, yes...but it's still a hoax.""

Maybe if you were more specific about how it was disprooven? And who said chicken feathers?

"Anyway, there are a whole host of processes going on inside gas giants. They do not put out 'a great deal' more energy then they take in. They put out a BIT more."

Over twice as much sounds like a great deal to me. And here are some of those referneces I was talking about: H.H. Aumann and C.M. Gillespie, Jr., "The Internal Powers and Effective Temperatures of Jupiter and Saturn," The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 157, July 1969, pp. L69-L72; M. Mitchell Waldrop, "The Puzzle that is Saturn," Science, 18 September 1981, p. 1351.; Jonathan Eberhart, "Neptune's Inner Warmth," Science News, Vol. 112, 12 November 1977, p. 316.

I've got references to the paper by Eddy and Boornazian, "Secular Decrease in Solar Diameter, 1863-1953", Buletin of the American Asteronomical Society, Vol. 11, No. 2, 1979, p. 437. There are also at least two others: G.B. Lubkin, "Analyses of Historical Data Suggest Sun is Shrinking", Physics Today, September 1979, pp. 17-19; David W. Dunham et al., "Observations of a Probable Change in the Solar Radius between 1715 and 1979", Science, Vol. 210, 12 December 1980, pp. 1243-1245. The basic explaination is this: if the sun's heat is generated by nuclear fusion, scientists should be detecting at least three times the number of nutrinos as they consistantly do. If, however, the sun's heat is generated mostly by gravitational colapse, the lack of nutrino's AND the shrinkage would be explained. See Carl A. Rouse's "Gravitational Energy Release Induced by the Nuclear Energy Generation Process: The Resolution of the Solar Nutrino Delema", Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol. 102, No. 1, September 1981, pp. 8-11.

1of2:

Sorry. Didn't mean to ignore it. I'm just having trouble getting my hands on that particular issue of "Geographic". Should be around here somewhere, unless my mom cut it up to get pictures for her toddler class at church, or threw it away. Do you think you could give me an online source?

And I've been talking about the one in the Brittish Museum of Natural Science, which was the one found in 1861.

The operative word being "single". The chances of multiple, whole, flat feathers just happening to be at the slab-counterslab interface is incredibly slim.

The test performed in '86 involved a milligram sample from a "feather" region, and one from a control sapmle from a non-feathered region. The Museum contends that the amorphous nature of the feathered region is an artifact explainable by preservatives that they have put on the fossil. If this excuse were correct, there would also be preservatives on the control sample. That's why control samples are tested to begin with: to dispel last minute excuses. The Brittish museum refused to allow further testing. Strange, for a scientific institute, wouldn't you say?

And the double strikes are very small. You couldn't see them without a closeup picture, which this book just happens to contain. The "echos" are just slightly off, not unidentafiable, as you would expect if the "bird" had flopped around.

And you still can't explain why the furcula is cracked, the wrong size, the wrong shape, the wrong orentation, and the indentation in the counterslab is rough, not smooth like the bone itself. Unless, of course, it doesn't belong there. Check out Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, "Archaeopteryx, the Primordal Bird: A Case of Fossil Forgery".

And am I correct in saying that there's no sternum, which is prerequisite for flight?

Age of the Universe:

11: The sun's radiation applies an outward force on extremely small particles orbiting the sun. Particles less than a tenth of a micron in diameter should have been "blown away" by now, if the system was billions of years old. Yet, these particles still orbit.

12: The rings of the gas giants are being rapidly bombarded by meteroids. Saturn's should be pulverized within 10,000 years. Most of the material is just deposited elsewhere in the rings, but if even a tiny fraction is lost, the rings could not exist much longer than that 10,000 years. Thus, the rings must be young. And before anyone mentions it, yes, I know the usual theory is that a moon was torn apart and the debris became the rings. Even then, it's an amazing coincidence that such a thing should happen just as we gained the ability to watch. See Jeffrey N. Cuzzi "Ringed Planets: Still Mysterious - II", Sky & Telescope, Vol. 69, Jan. 1985, p. 22

The half-life of a scientific article is about 5 years today. They taught us this in Database searching in Library Science school. What it means, essentially, is that papers are usually cited (50% or higher) most within 5 years of their writing.

paper published 1980
citations 1980 ***
citations 1981 ***
citations 1982 ***
citations 1983 **
citations 1984 **
citations 1985 **
citations 1986 *
citations 1987 **
citations 1988 *
citations 1989
citations 1990 *
citations 1991 *
citations 1992
citations 1993 *
citations 1994 *
citations 1995 *
citations 1996
citations 1997
citations 1998
citations 1999

This is largely due to the fact that rapid increases in scientific knowledge and refinements of that knowledge tend to render papers (at least, ones that don't represent giant turning points) obsolete within a very short time.

Nobody reputable today would cite a scientific paper older than 1993 if there were anything else extant.

Interestingly, subjects like history, psychology, and sociology half much longer half-lives. Probably because they're less exact sciences.

Jupiter has a "surface" temperature of 124 K. That's 15 K hotter than would be expected from simple blackbody radiation. But those fifteen degrees fall rather easily under the amounts of energy the planet would be producing due to gravitational contraction.

(Jupiter is also a loud radio source, but that's due to its strong magnetic field.)

The sun: Gravitational contraction is an unacceptable answer to the question of Why Does The Sun Shine? (The answer of course being that The Sun Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas.) It has nothing to do with creationism. The problem is, if the sun radiates via gravitational contraction, the same must hold true for all the other suns. Or, every star would evolve along the same pattern, from birth to death. However, that isn't what a real star's lifecycle looks like. As observed by Hertzsprung and Russell, those H-R Diagram guys, the lifecycle of stars lays along a pattern gravitational contraction cannot provide for.

The solar neutrino problem is just that, a problem. To cite a paper of my own, Hata & Langacker (1997) show that removing nuclear fusion as the sun's primary source of energy does not remove the neutrino problem.

There are a few possibilites.

1.) Our model of the sun is flawed. However, large amounts of research has gone into this one since the neutrino thing was discovered, only to find that the current solar model fits everything but neutrino emissions extraordinarily well. Were our model of the sun so deeply flawed as to include fusion where none, or rather very little, exists, there would be many more problems. There aren't. Which leaves us with...

2.) Our model of neutrinos is flawed. Given how little we know of them, this seems likely. The disparity between theory and observation can lay in one of three areas. A.) Fusion does not produce neutrinos at the rates we think it does. This seems unlikely, as experiments done in the lab agree with particle physics on this one. B.) Neutrinos are interacting with the detectors in odd and unknown ways. This is more likely, but there are a varity of neutrino detectors set up independantly, and none of them find anything that would satisfy the solar neutrino problem. C.) Something unknown is happening to the neutrinos between the core of the sun and the surface of the Earth. This is the position most scientists are leaning towards. Recent studies show a few anomalies in neutrinos traveling terrestrial distances, for instance, and the effects might be greater inside the sun or between there and here.

There are some quantum mechanical things which could explain the behavior of neutrinos, but they involve concepts that might make my head explode. Suffice it to say, they postulate that neutrinos are transforming themselves into different particles, a not uncommon occurance within the world of quantum effects.

Back to Archie...(Hey, it's cute and it stops me from having to look up the spelling every time, ok?)

First of all, the furcula isn't the only birdlike feature on the fossil. The pelvis is positioned like that of a bird's. (So is that of some dinosaurs.) The "opposable hallux is also an avian feature". I had to quote that one, because my knowledge of the internal structure of birds is rather limited.

Second, the crux of Spetner, Hoyle, Wickramasinghe and Magarits' second argument, published in '88, was that the feather impressions were forged onto the skeleton of a flying reptile. In other words, Archie is really just a pterosaur. But fossils of pterosaurs include the thin membrane they used for wings. No such membrane is present on Archie's fossils. It cannot be a pterosaur with faked feathers. It has to be an animal built to fly in a way wholly unlike them, based on the other observed skeletal structures.

I'm afraid the rest of this is starting to make my eyes bleed. I'm not really a paleontologist, by study or inclination. Lots of technical wrangling over directions of fracture propagation and the like. I will say this, Hoyle and company make no claims in their papers of falsified skeletal structure. I have not read the book you mention. Either they don't make that claim or they don't make it in a scholarly setting. If the second, why not?

Finally, you've said that we shouldn't be arguing over the scientists themselves, and you're quite right to say so. However, in the case of Hoyle, I feel I have to mention that he's well known for various "extreme" theories that are unsupported by the evidence. He believes that the Earth was seeded by extraterrestrials, for instance, and that insects are more intelligent than man but conspire to keep that knowledge away from us. (No, really.) This doesn't and shouldn't effect the accuracy of the paper in question, but in this case I think it's important to know where it's coming from.

Now, your other two points.

11: I'm going to have to work out the calculations and get back to you. Just for clarification, you're taking about particles larger than the atomic scale, yes? I'll go out on another limb and probably fall again here, but the solar wind blows particles our way all the time, yes, but more particles come up from the sun to replace them. Unless you're talking about the pressure of light, in which case I'm going to hazard a guess and say that your particles are too small to be hit by enough photons to move them very far, and too large to let the photons that do hit them have much of an effect.

12: Rings are indeed a transitory wonder. But I don't fully understand your argument. Constantly bombarded by meteoroids? Constant as measured how? Most of the free junk in the solar system has been swept up by now.

But you're right, the rings are a wonderful marvel, not so much that they exist (Every Jovian has them.), but that Saturn's are so brilliant. It is a unique and wonderful coincidence. But that doesn't imply any special meaning beyond that.

"He believes ... ...that insects are more intelligent than man but conspire to keep that knowledge away from us."

Oh.

Really?

What makes you so certain this is not just disinformation fed to him by the cats to throw him off the trail?

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I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/8641/

Now that I think about it, I seem to recall a good argument somewhere that neutrinos don't even exist, which makes the entire argument about them moot. Try autodynamics.org. Of course, you also have to toss relativity out the window, but...

"I'm afraid the rest of this is starting to make my eyes bleed."

Don't drip on the keyboard.

"Just for clarification, you're taking about particles larger than the atomic scale, yes?"

Hai.

"Unless you're talking about the pressure of light..."

Which I am...

"in which case I'm going to hazard a guess and say that your particles are too small to be hit by enough photons to move them very far, and too large to let the photons that do hit them have much of an effect."

Well, considering that they're what the solar wind is composed of, they pretty much have to be affected by photons.

Which brings me to...

13: There is a large, disk-shaped cloud of dust (by which I mean particles that compose the solar wind) orbiting the sun and other stars. When the suns rays strike them, they slow down (similar to a car slowing down slightly when it hits a raindrop on it's way to the ground), eventually causing them to spiral into the sun. Thus the sun acts as a giant vacuum cleaner, pulling in about 100,000 tons of various dust per day. The highest estimate is that no more than half is supplied by the disintegration of comets and asteroids. Since there is no significant source of replenishment, the cloud should be removed or destroyed in no more than 10,000 years.

"Most of the free junk in the solar system has been swept up by now"

Considering that there's a large cloud of free junk orbiting the sun, I'd have to say that there's still quite a bit left.

And as for Archaeopteryx (took me a minute to figure out that you wern't talking about a search engine : )), the only falsified skeletal structure claim in the book is about the furcula. Which is still wrong. And there's still no sternum. Can anyone tell me if it really is prerequisite for flying? Seems like it's just a pterosaur that's designed to perch in trees, except for the membrane and feathers. That I'll need some more info on. Is the membrane present in the four fossils without feathers?

"I'm not really a paleontologist, by study or inclination."

Nor am I. I'm more of a physics and astronomy guy, as I'd imagine most Trek fans are.

As for the rings, it's just an amazing coincidence, nothing more (much like the evolution of life from non-living matter). Think about it. Saturn has supposedly been around for four or five billion years (by RC theory), and it's rings couldn't exist for more than 10,000 years. The idea that they were created just before we started looking is just incredible. I'd steal Elim's quote again, but if he's reading this, I'd get a higher ranking on his list.

But in reality, this kind of thing happens all the time (coincidences, I mean.) Like Columbus (or was it Cortez) using a Solar eclipse to frighten natives just at the right time.

You know, one of the things that holds Saturn's rings in place are its numerous "shepherd moons," which gravitationally affect the rest of the rings. It's also possible that these moons are at least partially a source of replenishment for the rings, as Jupiter's are replenished by Io and Amalthea, among others. Neptune and Uranus have similar shepherds holding their rings together.

Yeesh..."new physics"? In such a context, new is usually another word for loony. Reminds me of this site. Of course, proof is not really necessary when your argument rests with Copernicus being an evil satanist, or a variation to that effect.

But, assuming neutrinos don't exist, what exactly do neutrino detectors detect? And if relativity isn't true, why does it work so well for every calculation, and why has it been verified experimentally? (Yes, I realize it doesn't hold true for inside a black hole, but that's what quantum gravity and its brethren are for.)

Ok, so let's deal with these particles, shall we?

You've oversimplified the situation a bit. For the smallest particles, the ones we would assume to fall fastest, radiation pressures tend to balance out the effect you mentioned, which does affect things as you describe. It's just not the only process in operation. You're also leaving out the effects of other gravitational fields, which have no small effect on orbits. Finally, we know that comets spew out rather large amounts of gas and dust during the period of time when they are closest to the sun. The exact rate of such outgassing for all comets is unknown, and it cannot be definitively stated as THE source for such particles. Regardless, it is a source, and data suggests a significant one.