In the section just before the summary, we shall discuss how experiments that were designed to test the theory of nuclear energy generation in stars revealed a new mystery, the Mystery of the Missing Neutrinos. In later sections, we shall see how seemingly unrelated discoveries in fundamental physics led to a theory of nuclear energy generation in stars that resolved the controversy over the age of the sun and explained the origin of solar radiation. In this essay, we shall review from an historical perspective the development of our understanding of how the sun (the nearest star) shines, beginning in the following section with the nineteenth-century controversy over the age of the sun.
By its heat are produced all winds … By their vivifying action vegetables are elaborated from inorganic matter, and become, in their turn, the support of animals and of man, and the sources of those great deposits of dynamical efficiency which are laid up for human use in our coal strata. The sun’s rays are the ultimate source of almost every motion which takes place on the surface of the earth. Why was there so much fuss about this scientific puzzle? The nineteenth-century astronomer John Herschel described eloquently the fundamental role of sunshine in all of human life in his 1833 Treatise on Astronomy: Theoretical physicists battled geologists and evolutionary biologists in a heated controversy over who had the correct answer. What makes the sun shine? How does the sun produce the vast amount of energy necessary to support life on earth? These questions challenged scientists for a hundred and fifty years, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century.
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