Back in 1862, a chap named William Thomson (though you'd better know him as Lord Kelvin) estimated the age of the sun.
Back in then, we didn't know about stars produced energy via fusion (that would have to wait until the 1930s). So Kelvin (and, independantly, another chap named Hermann von Helmholtz) estimated a timsescale for the sun, based on how long the sun would last if it shined light at the same level all during its lifetime, slowly contracting as it slowly but surely lost more and more energy to the dark and empty space around it.
The number they got out was about 30 million years.
Now, the problem was that another chap by the name of Charles Darwin had presented a new theory, a couple of years earlier. His theory required a much longer timescale, so as to account for the slow evolution of various plants and animals (both living and fossilised) by natural selection. 30 million years, even assuming life popped up the moment the sun started shining, just wasn't long enough. So somebody was wrong.
They argued.
Darwin remained utterly convinced, even to the end, that one day physicists would change their minds.
Slowly, but surely, physicists did. In the 1930s, quantum and nuclear physics solved the puzzle of where stars get their energy from. We now know it's due to fusion of hydrogen into helium, which turns mass into energy. When we take this into account, the lifetime of the sun is far above any beyond the requirements for Darwin's theory.
In other words, guys, theory of evolution predicted we didn't know all there was to know about stars, and that the sun had to have been around much longer than we thought. Darwin realised Kelvin's calculations were wrong. And you know what?
The biologists kicked the hell out of the physicists. Theory of evolution got it right.
Back in then, we didn't know about stars produced energy via fusion (that would have to wait until the 1930s). So Kelvin (and, independantly, another chap named Hermann von Helmholtz) estimated a timsescale for the sun, based on how long the sun would last if it shined light at the same level all during its lifetime, slowly contracting as it slowly but surely lost more and more energy to the dark and empty space around it.
The number they got out was about 30 million years.
Now, the problem was that another chap by the name of Charles Darwin had presented a new theory, a couple of years earlier. His theory required a much longer timescale, so as to account for the slow evolution of various plants and animals (both living and fossilised) by natural selection. 30 million years, even assuming life popped up the moment the sun started shining, just wasn't long enough. So somebody was wrong.
They argued.
Darwin remained utterly convinced, even to the end, that one day physicists would change their minds.
Slowly, but surely, physicists did. In the 1930s, quantum and nuclear physics solved the puzzle of where stars get their energy from. We now know it's due to fusion of hydrogen into helium, which turns mass into energy. When we take this into account, the lifetime of the sun is far above any beyond the requirements for Darwin's theory.
In other words, guys, theory of evolution predicted we didn't know all there was to know about stars, and that the sun had to have been around much longer than we thought. Darwin realised Kelvin's calculations were wrong. And you know what?
The biologists kicked the hell out of the physicists. Theory of evolution got it right.
