I won’t bother disclaiming myself as not intelligent 'cuz it seems that no matter how much one tries to present himself as humble, this guy seems to zing 'em every time…
About the sun ‘blinking out’ at 5AM… although ‘blinking out’ is vague and I might be responding to a straw man-like thingy over here… but if the sun ‘went out’ (here’s the straw man: I’m assuming you mean disappear since that kind of heat can’t be generated without light, right? [uh-oh, another normative/scientific statement succeptible to attack!]), we’d know about it instantly through death, no? Even though the light would still shine on us for another 8 minutes we’d all inexplicably freeze/disintegrate/whatever is the scientific explanation for something like that happening to us… we wouldn’t know ‘hit us’ and die… I guess…
Maybe that’s the case and maybe it isn’t since I never took ‘the speed of heat’ into account, eh? (phfft)
No. If anything happens to the sun, the quickest we would know about it would be eight minutes later (eight minutes, more or less, being the time it takes light to reach the Earth from the sun). That’s because nothing travels faster than the speed of light: neither light itself, nor some imaginary “sun-snuffing” ray, nor even the information that the sun has gone out.
I figured that already at the end of my post… Just a hunch from the top of my head… didn’t realize how shallow it was till I ‘put it on paper’, so to ‘speak’… heheh.
Even if this MB suppported HTML, I doubt that it would allow interposing tags like that. BTW, the mailbag column implies that there is a universal “now”, but relativity says that there’s no non-arbitrary simutaneity.
The heat that reaches the Earth from the sun is light. The energy transfer is EM radiation. Some is infrared (IR), which we humans feel as heat, but all EM is energy, and some is converted to heat. So there’s no way the lack of heat could reach us faster than the light itself.
Just because the Earth stopped receiving solar energy, it would not instantaneously be cold. The Earth is a large thermal mass. It is at a temperature, and would take a while to radiate that heat energy even if not receiving more from the Sun. So we wouldn’t freeze immediately, but would have some time for the atmosphere to cool off.
The Earth is also generating internal heat via tidal stresses on the molten core. That molten core would take a long time to cool. This would probably keep the Earth’s surface “warm” longer than without the tidal forces of the moon. However, that is probably not that great an effect vs. global radiative cooling in absence of the Sun.