Briefly hopeful, I ask astrollama-7b-chat-alpha[1] "What color is the Sun?". It replies "The Sun has no color as it emits radiation across all wavelengths from ultraviolet to infrared. [...] there isn't an answer for what color the Sun truly is since it doesn't have one but rather produces every visible spectrum imaginable!". Sigh. Hmm, I wonder if LLM replies might be usefully mined to generate misconception lists?
Oof, yeah that's not a very good response. But I guess color is actually a technical term in research astronomy: it refers to the difference in two specified magnitudes (usually photometric filters). There's also the question of whether the sun is being viewed from the Earth or from space, since those will change the effective "transmission curve" of the detector system.
I asked: "What color is the sun when viewed from the ground with the human visual system?"
And got the following: "The Sun appears white to us on Earth due to its high temperature and lack of any significant wavelength-dependent absorption or scattering properties. However, if we were able to view it through specialized telescopes that could capture all visible light spectrum (not just the yellow/orange part), then it would appear as an extremely bright ball of blue light with some slight red tint. This is because most of the solar radiation consists of photons at ultraviolet and infrared frequencies which our eyes cannot perceive directly but can be detected by these advanced instruments. [...]"
An overall better response, but still not exactly right. Anyway, the base model was fine-tuned on arXiv/astro-ph abstracts, and I can't imagine too much discussion about the color of the sun in that training data set...
Nod. Though briefly asking E&M questions a few days ago made me think the "not exactly right"-but-seemingly-closer may be stopped-clock-ish. Very not at the point where latents are seemingly encoding deep structure about the world.
