Quote:
On 2002-06-27 17:42, SeanF wrote:
With all due respect to Silas, this doesn't invalidate The Curt's point. The seedling-to-redwood link is strengthened by such observations as "There was a seedling right here and now the seedling's gone and there's a redwood in the same place." I believe The Curtmudgeon is referring to this type of observed change, not "one continuous observation."
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The Curtmudgeon said (and applauded himself) that no one had ever observed stellar evolution.
I responded that no one has ever seen a Redwood seedling grow into a Redwood tree.
Both observations are true. Since it takes on the order of 200 years for a Redwood to grow to maturity, and since it takes some few billion years for a Main Sequence star to pass through its stages, no one has ever made such an observation.
The Curtmudgeon implied that this was a failure of some sort; I merely parodied it by direct analogy.
I *do* admire your counterexample about paperclips. That is a point of non-trivial profundity (although trivially dismissed in the immediate case.) For instance, we have reason to believe that the Hawaiian Island chain consists of volcanoes that rose and then gradually eroded. But the same argument, applied to other mountains, wouldn't work. Mt. Everest is *not* the result of a smaller mountain that grew over time.
All I can say is: if you read the history of the development of the H-R diagram and the mass-luminosity relationship, you will see that the pattern of deduction resembles the same pattern of deduction that allows us to claim, as a theory, that Redwoods grow from seedlings. The Curtmudgeon's somewhat pointless crowing that no one has ever seen it is the only thing that I was directly rebutting.
Silas