# Tag Info

1

As you probably already know, the sky is blue due to scattering of light. Blue gets scattered the most1. The light which "comes" from the horizon has to travel the largest distance (compared to the light which comes from points in the sky closer to the sun), so the light is scattered more. As a consequence, some of the blue light is "removed&...

2

When you look in different directions you look through different amounts of air (and different layers): the total distance scales as $\approx 1+\tan^2(\theta)$ where $\theta$ is the zenith angle. That means that besides the Rayleigh light scattering that makes the sky blue, there will also be more Mie scattering along the path. This is amplified by the ...

1

It depends how accurate you need the answer to be... What you can do is use the mass density of the Sun as a function of radius and combine that with what we know about $\mu_e$, the number of mass units per electron in the solar interior. The Sun will be reasonably modelled by two zones. The convective core where nuclear fusion is occurring is about 36% H, ...

-1

Actually, both the other answer and Veritasium himself are wrong. The shape shown is not due to the pinhole effect (the holes are way too large for that). In fact, the resulting image isn't even a circle! If the sun were a point source - an infinitesimally small source of light - the triangle hole would indeed result in a triangular image. (Projection of a ...

4

The answer to Q1 is that there is little of anything else being produced in the Sun. Deuterium is produced as part of the p-p chain, but is destroyed again. Similarly, there is a little bit of lithium, beryllium and boron produced in the so-called p-p II and p-p III chains, but the temperatures are so high that these nuclei are also destroyed as soon as they ...

1

Is there any evidence in support of the specific claim about the complexity of structures within our sun? Complexity of a physical structure is unfortunately a vague concept; it depends on our model of the structure, and the resolution scale we use to sample it. The sun is very complex when we try to describe it with resolution of 1 meter - there are many ...

2

I would like to mention something the other answers do not address, and that is predictability and higher level internal structure. Fortunately, from our perspective, the Sun is (relatively, compared to the human brain) predictable. Its internal structure can be modeled with a high enough precision (thanks to quantum mechanics (QM)) that predicts its effects ...

5

Memory When we think about what it means to be "conscious", I hope we agree that memory is an essential element. "Information processing" is also an essential element, but many artifacts possess this capability without any long-term memory. For instance, the read/write head of a hard disk may be managed by a PID controller, which ...

3

It has recently been shown that the Navier-Stokes equation (the equation governing the flow of a continuous fluid) has global solutions computationally equivalent to a finite number of steps run on a Universal Turing Machine, and thus can implement any finite computational process that a general-purpose computer can. Presuming intelligence to be Turing-...

7

This answer started as a comment to @Wolphramjonny who remarked that life emerged from evolution which the sun does not undergo. My first objection is that the universe as a whole, and thus the stars in it, could conceivably be subject to some kind of cosmological evolution, as proposed by Lee Smolin. My second objection is that the Sun and its internal ...

0

The suns rays here on earth are only approximately parallel due to the angular extent of the sun. Light coming from opposite limbs of the sun will be about half a degree from parallel. For some purposes, that's close enough and we consider them parallel. For other purposes it isn't. The atmospheric distortion isn't going to add much more than the half ...

12

We cannot compare the complexity of objects; we can only compare the complexity of our models for these objects. And when we talk about models, the complexity of a model increases when our understanding of the object increases. Given enough resources and motivation, we can research an object forever. Observations and research of the human brain predates the ...

2

We have a decent model of how the sun works. What I mean by decent is that it is accurate enough to predict 5 billion years into the future that the sun will become a red giant, and then ultimately a white dwarf. The model is based on well-understood concepts of gravity, strong nuclear force, buoyancy, and electromagnetic radiation, and its explanation ...

2

Niels Nielsen's answer is excellent when it comes to applying the scientific method to the question. I'd like to add more to the discussion, when it comes to how we might try to quantify these things. "Complexity" is a difficult think to define or measure. As you point out, the core of the question concerns the ability for celestial bodies to be ...

56

The structure of the interior of the sun has been extensively studied by the technique of helioseismology and the findings are consistent with a model in which that structure is relatively simple. Helioseismology yields structural information on length scales of order ~tens of thousands of kilometers and thus cannot reveal any fine structure which might be ...

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