February 25, 2007
The litany of errors on the Creation, Evolution, and Science Ministries FAQ page contains this little gem:
“The sun is shrinking. This causes a host of problems for old age believers. One is that as the sun shrinks, its gravity weakens. Earth’s orbit around the sun is held in place by the sun’s gravitational pull. If we were a fraction closer to, or further from, the sun, life could not exist on earth. The solar system can’t be old.”
Where to begin? Even if the Sun was shrinking, its gravitational pull on Earth would not “weaken.” This reminds me of Star Trek Season-one, Episode 7 where the ancient planet “Psi 2000″ contracts and “grabs” the Enterprise out of its orbit - quite a howler to anyone who passed high-school physics! The gravitational pull of a spherically symmetric body is equivalent to that of a point mass located at its center - its radius is irrelevant, shrunk or otherwise. But it seems this is Russ Miller’s own idiosyncratic gaff. Other creationist versions like that of ICR, make no mention of weakened gravity.
The ICR tale of the “Shrinking Sun” is more in tune with other YE arguments that use a reported measurement (often wrong), assume it’s constant, and extrapolate back in time with contradictory conclusions for an old earth. Other examples include changes in earth’s magnetic field, sea floor sediment accumulation (without plate tectonics!), and the amount of helium in the atmosphere. Not surprisingly, Russ Miller cites all of these embarassingly wrong claims in his FAQ page.
The “Shrinking Sun” was born in 1979, when astronomers John Eddy and Aram Boornazian presented an abstract at an AAS meeting called, “Secular Decrease in the Solar Diameter, 1836-1953.” This over-interpretation of historical data was subsequently withdrawn by the authors (who never imagined extrapolating their result far back in time) and never submitted to a professional journal for publication. Nevertheless, ICR picked it up immediately and naively extended the shrinkage rate into the indefinite past. This led to a Sun too bright for life sometime within the last million years. The “Shrinking Sun” thus quickly became a part of YE creationist legend under the dubious assumption that it had always been shrinking at the claimed rate. I would address the obvious flaw in this reasoning, but it’s not necessary, because:
The Sun is not shrinking. YE creationist Andrew Snelling chronicles some of the ensuing “debate” on the topic here, as does Old Earth creationist Howard J. Van Till. More important, high-precision studies of helio-seismology have weighed in on the “shrinkage” question. Sverker Johannsson looked at the Shrinking Sun in the light of these observations here. It appears that the Sun has stopped shrinking! But don’t expect YE creationists to stop preaching the Gospel of the Shrinking Sun anytime soon.
November 19, 2006
In his NAU Fifty Facts talk, Miller continued to confuse Big Bang cosmology with a theory of planetary origins by criticizing “cosmic collisions” as an explanation for things like the high density of Mercury, Venus’ retrograde rotation, and Uranus’ high obliquity. He said that the need to invoke collisions was an example of how the Big Bang theory was in trouble. But the origin of the solar system from a circumstellar disk around the early Sun has nothing to do with Big Bang theory. It is a separate theory that is strongly supported by observations of craters on planetary surfaces and disks of dust and gas around very young stars. Protoplanetary disks of gas and dust are detected around virtually all of the youngest stars. I have carried out observations of these disks myself with the Owens Valley Millimeter Array, Keck Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, and the Very Large Array. Currently I have a project to observe debris disks in the last phase of planet formation with Spitzer Space Telescope. Debris disks are composed of dust generated by the planetesimal collisions that Miller ridicules. Computational studies by George Wetherill contributed to our understanding that terrestrial planets, the presence of asteroids and comets, and crater density on old planetary surfaces like the moon are consequences of a similar period of heavy bombardment in the early solar system. For further proof of the prevalence of impacts, one need only travel about 40 miles down I-40 to see a very fresh meteor crater. Flagstaff’s own Eugene Shoemaker played a key role in its intepretation and in our understanding of the importance of impacts. Miller’s criticism of impact explanation for solar system features flies in the face of mountains of evidence. His use of this criticism to refute the Big Bang is logically absurd. His undue criticism of distinctly Flagstaff science (both Slipher and Shoemaker) strikes me as strange for a Flagstaff native! What do you think? 
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