Hovind: "The sun is burning! How many of you knew that already? As the sun burns, the sun is shrinking. Boyle Observatory in England has been keeping careful records of the suns diameter for 300 years. It oscillates a little bit, but the general trend is that the sun is shrinking 5 feet every hour."
"Lie #15. The sun is in no way, shape, or form 'burning'. It is undergoing nuclear fusion.
I wrote to David Hathaway, a scientist who works for NASA. He said that if the sun had been shrinking at the rate Hovind claims, ancient reports of solar eclipses would not have described them the way they did. The sun would have been significantly larger and descriptions of the eclipse would have made this obvious.
I wrote Tim Brown, an authority on solar activity at the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado. He had never heard of Boyle Observatory (neither have I, neither has the Internet), but he guessed that Hovind was referring to the solar transit measurements made at the Royal Greenwich Observatory between 1836 and 1953 (so Hovind is only 170 years out).
They thought that the Sun was shrinking at a rate of about 2 arc seconds per century, which works out to about 5.5 feet per hour. In the usual scientific fashion, others spent some considerable time investigating this, and by the early 1980s, nobody believed that the Sun was shrinking, certainly not at the rate claimed, and possibly not at all. The best of the modern measurements, although conducted over a time span that did not allow great precision, showed the same thing. Hovind has precisely the same access to this information that I do. Why did he dishonestly withhold it?
From "300 Creationist Lies" of Kent Hovind
