Cart Before the Horse (Introduction)
Biologist are not alone in putting the cart before the horse...-http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=x49g6gsf -An undergraduate textbook on the structure and evolution of stars makes a star seem a simple thing: "A star can be defined as a body that satisfies two conditions: (a) it is bound by self-gravity; (b) it radiates energy supplied by an internal source." Buried in this definition are some critical assumptions that Sir Arthur Eddington bequeathed to us long before the space age in his 1926 opus, The Internal Constitution of the Stars. But how many students now read his original work with a critical eye? -Eddington wrote, "The problem of the source of a star's energy will be considered; by a process of exhaustion we are driven to conclude that the only possible source of a star's energy is subatomic; yet it must be confessed that the hypothesis shows little disposition to accommodate itself to the detailed requirements of observation, and a critic might count up a large number of 'fatal' objections." -A single fatal objection would suffice to falsify the hypothesis, but the apparent isolation of stars in the vacuum of space encouraged the belief that stars must consume themselves to fuel their fire. The fatal objections would be sorted out later. Two such objections are behind NASA's plan to launch a mission to the Sun in 2015. That will be 89 years of denial that there is a serious problem with our understanding of the nearest star — the Sun! - A great article! And a great website!
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- Cart Before the Horse -
Balance_Maintained,
2011-07-09, 22:49
- Cart Before the Horse -
Balance_Maintained,
2011-07-11, 00:04
- Cart Before the Horse -
Balance_Maintained,
2011-07-12, 00:10
- Cart Before the Horse -
Balance_Maintained,
2011-07-12, 15:14
- Cart Before the Horse - George Jelliss, 2011-07-12, 16:43
- Cart Before the Horse -
Balance_Maintained,
2011-07-12, 15:14
- Cart Before the Horse -
Balance_Maintained,
2011-07-12, 00:10
- Cart Before the Horse -
Balance_Maintained,
2011-07-11, 00:04