John A. Eddy: Quotes about the sun

“Regarding the claims of Maunder and Sporer: "I started by trying to make it go away, mostly because of a prejudice about sun-weather relationships, and what I thought was true about the sun. In time I realized that there was a more profound and philosophical message in the Maunder Minimum: that people want the Sun to be more constant and regular than perhaps it is."”

John A. Eddy

Source: Interview with Jack Eddy, April 21, 1999: In Michigan by phone, conducted by Spencer Weart http://www.agu.org/history/sv/solar/eddy_int.html

People , Time , Sun , Weather

“I have reexamined the contemporary reports and new evidence which has come to light since Maunder's time and conclude that this 70-year period was indeed a time when solar activity all but stopped. This behavior is wholly unlike the modern behavior of the sun which we have come to accept as normal, and the consequences for solar and terrestrial physics seem to me profound.”

John A. Eddy

Behavior , Light , Time , Sun

“The reality of the 'Maunder Minimum' and its implications of basic solar change may be but one more defeat in our long and losing battle to keep the sun perfect, or, if not perfect, constant, and if inconstant, regular. Why we think that sun should be any of these when other stars are not is more a question for social than for physical science.”

John A. Eddy

Star , Question , Thinking , Reality

“I had been taught that while the Sun indeed affects the upper and outer atmosphere of the Earth, purported connections with the troposphere and weather and climate were uniformly wacky and to be distrusted. I still believe that to some extent, for there is a hypnotism about cycles that seems to attract people. It draws all kinds of creatures out of the woodwork. The claims that were made for associations between weather events and the Sun I thought were pretty preposterous. One of those that turned up was this notion that Gene told me about. About the work of Walter Maunder 100 years before, when he had thought that there was a prolonged period of time in the 1600s when the Sun wasn’t so active.”

John A. Eddy

People , Time , Sun , Drawing

“It has long been though that the sun is a constant star of regular and repeatable behavior. Measurements of the radiative output, or solar constant, seem to justify the first assumption, and the record of periodicity in sunspot numbers is taken as evidence of the second. Both records, however, sample only the most recent history of the sun.”

John A. Eddy

Source: Eddy, J.A., "The Maunder Minimum", Science 18 June 1976: Vol. 192. no. 4245, pp. 1189 - 1202 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/192/4245/1189, PDF Copy http://bill.srnr.arizona.edu/classes/182h/Climate/Solar/Maunder%20Minimum.pdf

Behavior , History , Star , Sun

“We had adopted a kind of solar uniformitarianism," solar physicist John (Jack) Eddy suggested in retrospect. "As people and as scientists we have always wanted the Sun to be better than other stars and better than it really is.”

John A. Eddy

Source: Changing Sun, Changing Climate? by Spencer Weart http://www.aip.org/history/climate/solar.htm#M_27_

People , Star , Sun

“It would seem that Maunder and Sporer were right and that most of the rest of us have been wrong. As is often the case in the onrush of modern science, we had too quickly forgotten the past, forgotten the less-than-perfect pedigree of the sunspot cycle and the fact that it too once came as a surprise. We had adopted a kind of solar uniformitarianism, contending that the modern behavior of the sun represented the normal behavior of the sun over a much longer span of time.”

John A. Eddy

Source: "The Case of the Missing Sunspots"; Scientific American, May 1977, volume 236, issue 5, pages 80-92

Behavior , Science , Time , Sun

“Were God to give us, at last, the cable, or patch-cord that links the Sun to the Climate System it would have on the solar end a banana plug, and on the other, where it hooks into the Earth—in ways we don’t yet know—a Hydra-like tangle of multiple 24-pin parallel computer connectors. It is surely at this end of the problem where the greatest challenges lie.”

John A. Eddy

Source: NASA EOS Project Science Office: The Earth Observer January/February 2004, Vol. 16, No. 1 http://eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/eos_observ/pdf/Jan-Feb04.pdf, Page 4

God , Lie , Way , Problem

“When we have observed the Sun most intensively, its behavior may have been unusually regular and benign.”

John A. Eddy

Source: The Sun: A Biography by David Whitehouse, page 225.

Behavior , Sun