(January 20, 2015 at 1:27 pm)Surgenator Wrote:(January 20, 2015 at 5:12 am)Heywood Wrote: Ions give up some of their energy as light as the body moves toward thermodynamic equilibrium.
I know where you are going, but the point I am trying to make is there is a lot of stuff happening the system we call a star. It is simply inaccurate to call a star a thermonuclear reaction when there is a whole lot of other stuff going on too. Chas is conflating one process that happens within a star with the star itself. Don't make the same error he is making.
A star is a thermonuclear reactor. It takes protons and makes helium nuclei through a series of nuclear processes. Like any nuclear reactor, it also makes other stuff as well like light, neutrinos, neutrons, lithium, etc. Other stuff the sun does (like be a huge gravitational well) doesn't mean it stops being a thermonuclear reactor.
A star is much more than a thermonuclear reactor and it obviously a very different thing than a tokamak.
He should not be comparing stars with tokamaks. Instead he should be comparing these two propositions:
Processes which result in fusion always require intellect to be implemented.
Processes which result in fusion do not always require intellects to be implemented.
The fact that we have observed stars in various stages of developement without a requirement of intellect falsifies the first proposition.
