Talk:Age of the Earth

My take

I think Brx is right: we need an article with this title. The question of how old the Earth is is central to our mission; hell, that's why they talk about "old earth" and "young earth" creationism. That said, this article is a fuckin' piece of crap and needs some serious work. Let's put the work in and make it worthy of the centrality of the issue to our purpose. B♭maj7 (talk) Member of the Kara Duhe fan club since 2010 14:18, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

I was ready to work on it but today I look at it and I do not quite understand what the big deal is. I guess I'll put some stuff down about helioseismology, and maybe some sections on YEC and OEC measurements.--User:Brxbrx/sig 14:24, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

maybe a history of estimates of AotE? the last time I did a history section, though, I got carried away... see the uspolitics WiP on my userpage--User:Brxbrx/sig 14:26, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

I thought OEC estimates were 144k... Oh well. I'm going to play battefield now, and I'll come back and do some stuff later. For those of you who are skeptical, I added a bunch of sourced good stuff (according to me at least) to the wiki4CAM myths about homosexuality article [1] err homeopathy. but yeah. I'm totally doing stuff, and I'll come back later and do more stuff--User:Brxbrx/sig 14:33, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

I think you need to be far more clear about your breakdown of who says what, and why. Also, buddhhis --oops, that should be hinduism--- and zoroastrianism are really fun, as both posit the physical earth to be millions if not billions of years old. If it were me, I would really take some time to clairify how old the earth is scientifically, and why we think that way. --GodotTue pour toujours, et tu veux vivre aussi. 14:50, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Keep an Eye on the Hinduism Section

The Hinduism section gives the impression that Hindu cosmology has some sort of relevance to scientific discoveries. It doesn't. Some of the sources seem to be cut whole cloth from the kind of "Hinduism's amazing scientific accuracy" quote collections that parallels similar Christian and Muslim ones. The fact is that several of these Hindu claims are either way too old or, like the Dick Teresi quote that I'm still uncomfortable with, very vague general claims. For instance, depending on where you check, it would appear that the claim Teresi makes for a Hindu chronology for the age of the Earth being 4.3 billion years is actually the Hindu chronology of the universe (though such concepts may be difficult to apply at all, given the problem of comparing Hindu religious terminology to modern scientific ditto). Likewise, a Hindu claim for a round Earth is only "better" than a Greek flat one, if the Hindu claim was based off some sort of observation. That the Hindu claim inadvertently turned out to be closer to the mark is no more than a lucky guess. It also ignores the World Turtle idea which is also found in (some forms of?) Hinduism and which seems to necessitate a flat Earth. This is yet another reason why I'm sceptical about Teresi's accuracy and/or cherry-picking as it sounds far too much like the claims for Biblical scientific foreknowledge. ScepticWombat (talk) 11:34, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

History

Do people think that we should include brief discussion on early scientific attempts at determining the age of the Earth? Nerd (talk) 16:14, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

Since I thought this could suit our purposes here, I will take the liberty to do it myself. Hopefully we can sort out differences, if such exists here. Nerd (talk) 23:35, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

It has been done. Nerd (talk) 03:41, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Question - how accurate were the early scientific calculations using their assumptions (eg Earth-sized iron balls and gravitational collapse)? Anna Livia (talk) 16:01, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

@Anna Livia As you might have guessed, these early calculations were not particularly accurate, but they were perfectly reasonable given the knowledge at the time. We did not know much about the structure of the Earth back then. Nor did we know any nuclear physics. Nerd (talk) 18:06, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Is there a 'Category 'Evolving scientific theory (right concepts/logic, insufficient information)' - which could include eg 'the steady state universe' when the various models were being discussed and some of the initial models of the atom. Anna Livia (talk) 23:44, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

@Anna Livia I don't think there is, nor do I think one should exist. Such a category is applicable to all scientific hypotheses, theories, and models, including current ones. Science is a dynamic field. Nerd (talk) 23:49, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

A distinction should be made between 'old theories which are logically based and which made sense at the time based on information available at the time but are now superseded' and 'bad science, failed science, not even wrong and similar.' Having 'zillions of epicycles' probably falls into the latter category (unless you are using it to test your computer's relevant programming, or distracting 'the malicious mind in the machine' by making it construct mathematical model centred on one of the sub-moons of a satellite in a retrograde eccentric orbit round its main planet or similar). Anna Livia (talk) 12:53, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Actually, that's not correct. Epicycles were considered valid because they produced results that agreed well with observations. In fact, Ptolemy's system worked better than that of Copernicus, which postulated perfectly circular orbits. Conventional thinking has it that the Copernican model overthrew the geocentric model, which is wrong. It did not do so immediately. It was not until Johannes Kepler deduced that laws of orbital mechanics named after him using astronomical data painstakingly obtained by Tycho Brahe that heliocentric thinking became mainstream.

It might interest you that epicycles were a forerunner to modern Fourier analysis, which allows us to construct any piece-wise continuous functions using an infinite trigonometric series. The more terms you take, the more accurate the representation. Furthermore, if you have ever wondered how your calculators compute values for special functions, such as $\sin(x)$, $\cos(x)$, or $e^{x}$, they use a truncated infinite series. Fourier analysis is also used in, among many other things, audiovisual compression algorithms. For an audio or video file, the higher the bit rate, the more terms you retain, and the higher the quality. If you have taken calculus before, think about what you are actually doing when you evaluate an integral. Nerd (talk) 15:15, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Ancient stardust

Would this (or other equally reputable source) be worth mentioning here or somewhere else? Anna Livia (talk) 19:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Categories

I notice this talk page is 'Category: Talk pages for deleted articles' while the article is 'Category: Science'. As the article has been 'reincarnated' can the categories be aligned. Anna Livia (talk) 19:27, 14 January 2020 (UTC)