Slashdot Mirror

+1

some good threads here: http://www.bautforum.com/forumdisplay.php/17-Against-the-Mainstream

It's just an X2.2 R3 "event". Which means, in worst case: "HF Radio: Wide area blackout of HF radio communication, loss of radio contact for about an hour on sunlit side of Earth." "Navigation: Low-frequency navigation signals degraded for about an hour." In 2003 there was a solar flare at X28++ ... don't think anyone remembers that. It might however be somewhat interesting for people following cycle 24, with all the sunspot magnetic fields progressively getting weaker and all... http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php/111142-Solar-Cycle-24-Update

I keep hearing the He3 meme on Slashdot, but it sounds like just a far fetched attempt to make going to the moon financially worth while. I've read a lot about fusion attempts like ITER and the National Ignition Facility, but have yet to hear of anyone doing fusion using He3. A quick search of the web found this, which says that He3 fusion will be much harder to achieve than fusion using Tritium or Deuterium. I think the main "advantage" of He3 fusion is that it would force us to go back to the moon

Then you need to explain which channel it was:

http://www.history.com/content/ufohunters/
http://www.bautforum.com/small-media-large/85688-history-channel-program-ancient-aliens.html

You may find this informative.

The hold up? Probably the part where a base on the moon is pointless and exceedingly expensive? I mean, sure, it'd be cool... but let's be reasonable, here: there is *nothing* on the moon worth getting (and before you He3-fusion wankers chime in, go read this).

I'd like to know the relative orientations of the galactic and solar system ecliptics.

About 60 degrees.

I am seeing more and more surprises like this that are not really surprising from alternative viewpoints, such as the Electric Universe (I said those two words, so I guess that makes me automatically Flamebait eh?). The same thing can be found by regarding the solar wind as an electrical current instead of viewing it in mechanical terms. The solar wind is the flow of charged particles from the Sun. "The flow of charged particles" is the very definition of an electric current but mainstream science doesn't regard the solar wind (or any other celestial phenomena) in those terms.

As I mention here, the solar wind is electrically neutral. The Sun isn't "electric." It's a giant ball of fusing hydrogen and helium, and the solar wind is primarily thermally-driven (with exceptions due to solar flares, etc.)

You're not flamebait, just confused or seriously lacking in graduate physics education. The Electric Universe idea has been disproven for many years. It's fair to say that it isn't science, but rather a conspiracy theory promoted by people who don't understand physics (or science) very well.

In addition to my critique, Tim Thompson has rebutted the electric sun idea in depth, and W.T. Bridgman examines the idea in detail on his site "Dealing with Creationism in Astronomy." Unfortunately, my internet connection is screwed up so I can't provide direct links to these articles at the moment.

If it's a bad idea, it will die on its own merits; but if it's a good idea, killing it prematurely by putting it down simply because it goes against conventional wisdom is doing nobody any good.

He may have been overly harsh, but the Electric Universe idea has been disproven for many years. It's fair to say that it isn't science, but rather a conspiracy theory promoted by people who don't understand physics (or science) very well.

In addition to my critique, Tim Thompson has rebutted the electric sun idea in depth, and W.T. Bridgman has a lengthy critique of the same notion on his site "Dealing with Creationism in Astronomy." Unfortunately, my internet connection is screwed up so I can't provide direct links to these articles at the moment.

To back you up, let's run some numbers.

Magnitude 0 star, Vega, has a visible flux density of around 2*10^6 photons / second cm^2 in certain visible ranges. Google turned that up, so did an old BadAstronomy forum post; here.
Magnitude 6 stars are visible, flux difference between a 0 and 6 star is defined as 1/(2.512^6). Working downward, of course; as a 0 is 2.512^6 more bright that a 6.
So, a human looking up at a magnitude 6 star is seeing a flux density of (2*10^6)/(2.512^6) or around 7,960 photons / second cm^2.

I know, not good astronomy to say the star is putting all that out, the magnitude 6 object might be reflecting, emiting, what ever. Point is, 3*10^3 is only slightly dimmer than an object that the human eye can already detect, and in fact a magnitude 7 object would be the source of (2*10^6)/(2.512^7) or just 3,168.78337 photons /second cm^2. Just barely brighter than the light they say they have detected from a human.

Granted, the article says a 'red glow' which could just be the writer looking at the picture, which is using color to represent density and not color. All they mention about the spectrum of the light is that it is not infrared. Could be visible spectrum, could not be. Either way, it looks to be bright enough to detect should it be in visible spectrum. It would be the very bottom of the visible range, and possibly discarded by the brain as noise in normal photon saturation we call daylight. The brain does filter a lot of noise, but I am not going to count it out just yet.

There are many extant copies; not just one! Some are better quality than others. The one in the NASA archives is perhaps one of the worst, because of the way it was achieved. TCN-9 in Australia, for example, has a better copy which was taken directly from Honeysuckle Creek, which apparently is similar in appearance to the stills taken from the SSTV monitor: http://www.bautforum.com/conspiracy-theories/84874-apollo-slow-scan-tv-tapes-panorama-photographs-2.html#post1437117

Many small vs. one large makes good sense in case of failure(s). Either way, why not blast the dust away as the preparation stage?

Because the dust is deep... several meters IIRC.

No, 10 centimeters at best. See http://www.bautforum.com/conspiracy-theories/5770-lunar-dust.html for calculation and reference as well as some other points relevant to my statements.

Ok, well circumnavigated is a bit of an odd term ill admit, but its to do with the fact that the visible universe was much smaller in the past, and space itself has expanded. When the light was emitted originally, the universe was only 40million light years across. The space has expanded to its current size.

baut forums info on this
ned wright info

Both diminish the same way[...]

No, they don't diminish the same way in non-ideal settings, like the real universe. "gravity is important at long distances is because all masses are positive and therefore gravity's interaction cannot be screened like in electromagnetism." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction )

if black holes existed, we should be able to see a black, lightless area around them.

We have observed massive sources of gravity (affecting visible neighboring bodies) which are not emitting light, which appears to confirm the presence of the event horizon shielding a large object with a ton of gravity from direct observation.

When an electric field gets intense enough, it also affects light, which is after all an electromagnetic wave which travels throughout the immense distance of space just fine.

Light can't be attractive & repulsive which is why it has range. Like how gravity can't be attractive & repulsive. It doesn't get cancelled out over long ranges. Electromagnetic forces can be attractive or repulsive, and over long distances are balanced out by multiple sources of electromagnetic force. This is analogous to why my hands doesn't have noticeable magnetic interactions with each other, the charged particles in each are balancing each other out.

The so called "event horizon" has to be reworked, if, as is now theorized, black holes can "evaporate".

Please don't tell me you're taking a word out of context to mislead people with it. Black holes don't evaporate in the sense that they lose mass by emitting particles (in a classical sense). They lose mass due to particle/anti-particles pairs generated spontaneously by quantum-fluctuations in otherwise empty space, are torn apart from eachother near the event horizon, (more anti-particles fall inward than normal-particles). Being 'eroded' by antimatter is not the same thing as actually shooting off bits of mass.

This can easily explain the so called "gravitational" lensing also.

Except for the fact there are visible things in space (with estimable masses) that we observe cause this lensing. And it appears that gravity alone explains it just fine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lensing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Gravitational_Lensing_Experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDSSJ0946%2B1006

The mass of a star is only a secondary effect.

Effect? huh? I'm not even sure that makes sense.

When any star, regardless of mass gets under sufficient electrical stress, it may explode. We call this a nova or even if it's a really big explosion a supernova.

You're claiming that stars can't lose internal pressure and undergo gravitational collapse? They just always get electrically unstable and blow up? And that it actually has absolutely nothing to do with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-degenerate_matter ?

There are plenty of people who debunked this crap. Here's a starting point:
http://www.tim-thompson.com/electric-sun.html
http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/28596-electric-universe-model.html

I too made a copy of the Alexander Mayer PDFs. I'm also very curious as to how that turned out. It sure did sound good, and had the nerve to make testable predictions.

I found this http://www.debunkers.org/ubb/Forum21/HTML/000228.html where someone named Kent Budge takes a shot at it, but doesn't really deflate it. So far as I could tell the Mayer presentations didn't claim that time goes backwards, so Budge's efforts sound like missing the point. The thread died very early, with zero mention of testing the predictions of the paper, so that's a dead end.

Threads here http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-110528.html and here http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/37859-truth-hoax.html went on for quite some time and hammered around on it quite a bit. Both appear to have gotten hung up in Einstein-style thought experiments, with a smattering of people attempting to brand it a hoax. I notice one of those claiming hoax is now banned from the bautforum.com forum. Two physicists chimed in, one stating he was approached by Mayer in person at the AAAP in 2006 and Mayer appears to believe what he says, and one who identified himself as the experimenter who gathered some of the data Mayer references in his papers. Neither expressed an opinion on the papers. Other contributors to those threads seem to have gotten some teeth into the papers, poking holes in the thought experiment. It was esoteric enough that I'm not even sure the adversarial comments got it right. I sincerely wish that physicists would spend less time indulging in oxymoronic "thought experiments" and more time working to explain experimental data, especially when there's apparently relevant experimental data to be had in this case. An independent assessment of the alleged anomalous data and how well Mayer's theory explains it would have been nice. Wishful thinking, I suppose.

Mayer posted a statement about the revocation of his visiting scholar status at Stanford which has since dropped off the net. The Wayback Machine managed to retain a copy: http://web.archive.org/web/20060322165859/http://www.afmayer.net/pages/StanfordStory.html The statement unfortunately indulges in some paranoid remarks about established interests being threatened by his work, which puts a serious dent in his credibility. The very short Wayback Machine archive coupled with the disappearance of afmayer.net leads me to believe somebody noticed what he was up to and got him back on his meds.

A pity...

It may take someone with the minor madness of Einstein to top Einstein, but it doesn't look like Mayer managed it.

In future, when I respond to your comments, I shall state explicitly that the intended audience does not include you.

With that preamble over ...

Down here, at the bottom of the ocean of air, distant "point sources" in the optical (or visible) and near-infrared wavebands are smeared out by what astronomers call "seeing". You notice this as the twinkling of stars in the night sky. Assuming radial symmetry*, the 1D distribution of intensity of such a seeing smeared point source looks like a Gaussian, but isn't (it's a Kolmogorov distribution, as the primary source of distortion is turbulence). Adaptive optics is a term used to describe a range of techniques to deconvolve the seeing, to recover the "beyond the atmosphere" 2D distribution of source intensity; the most ambitious of these aim to deliver diffraction limited images, using phase conjugation and laser guide beacons to "measure and compensate for turbulence-induced phase aberrations in three dimensions".

The image cited by pln2bz was taken by NaCO (NAOS-CONICA, Nasmyth Adaptive Optics System Near-Infrared Imager and Spectrograph), attached to one of the VLTs (http://www.eso.org/instruments/naco/index.html). Note the following comment: "Publications based on data obtained with the NACO instrument should quote the following reference papers: Lenzen, R. et al. 2003, SPIE 4841, 944 and Rousset, G. et al. 2003, SPIE 4839, 140." Clearly, pln2bz did not bother (perhaps he felt his SD comments did not constitute a "publication"); he's in good company, as his source was undoubtedly TPOD (or similar), which also did not bother.

Why does this matter?

Fundamentally, it goes to the issue of "evidence", which EU proponents (not only pln2bz, not only on Slashdot) get so worked up about.

As I said above, the two objects in the VLT/NACO image are statistically the same as two point sources.

One could, as pln2bz has done, claim to see something other than two point sources.

However, one could also claim that there's a face in the image (example1: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070421.html; example2: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990315.html), or a planet with rings (example: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071023.html), or even invisible pink fairies ... there is no objective method (that I know of) to choose between these claims.

Amusing aside: some of you have seen this "neutrino image" of the Sun (or similar) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980605.html, http://elvis.phys.lsu.edu/svoboda/superk/sun.gif. At least one prolific EU proponent interpreted this to show that neutrinos are emitted from the surface of the Sun, not its core! {insert ROFL smilies here}^

Concerning BAUT

There is a very long thread there, on the Electric Universe (nearly 2400 posts! http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/28596-electric-universe-model.html), as well as instructions to all those who wish to post on the topic, and links to all other EU-related threads (http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/45529-read-first-re-posting-electric-universe-ideas-here.html).

In addition, this thread may be of interest to readers of this comment: http://www.bautforum.com/about-baut/55206-reflections-year-half-s-experience-baut-s-atm-section.html.

* whic

In future, when I respond to your comments, I shall state explicitly that the intended audience does not include you.

With that preamble over ...

Down here, at the bottom of the ocean of air, distant "point sources" in the optical (or visible) and near-infrared wavebands are smeared out by what astronomers call "seeing". You notice this as the twinkling of stars in the night sky. Assuming radial symmetry*, the 1D distribution of intensity of such a seeing smeared point source looks like a Gaussian, but isn't (it's a Kolmogorov distribution, as the primary source of distortion is turbulence). Adaptive optics is a term used to describe a range of techniques to deconvolve the seeing, to recover the "beyond the atmosphere" 2D distribution of source intensity; the most ambitious of these aim to deliver diffraction limited images, using phase conjugation and laser guide beacons to "measure and compensate for turbulence-induced phase aberrations in three dimensions".

The image cited by pln2bz was taken by NaCO (NAOS-CONICA, Nasmyth Adaptive Optics System Near-Infrared Imager and Spectrograph), attached to one of the VLTs (http://www.eso.org/instruments/naco/index.html). Note the following comment: "Publications based on data obtained with the NACO instrument should quote the following reference papers: Lenzen, R. et al. 2003, SPIE 4841, 944 and Rousset, G. et al. 2003, SPIE 4839, 140." Clearly, pln2bz did not bother (perhaps he felt his SD comments did not constitute a "publication"); he's in good company, as his source was undoubtedly TPOD (or similar), which also did not bother.

Why does this matter?

Fundamentally, it goes to the issue of "evidence", which EU proponents (not only pln2bz, not only on Slashdot) get so worked up about.

As I said above, the two objects in the VLT/NACO image are statistically the same as two point sources.

One could, as pln2bz has done, claim to see something other than two point sources.

However, one could also claim that there's a face in the image (example1: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070421.html; example2: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990315.html), or a planet with rings (example: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071023.html), or even invisible pink fairies ... there is no objective method (that I know of) to choose between these claims.

Amusing aside: some of you have seen this "neutrino image" of the Sun (or similar) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980605.html, http://elvis.phys.lsu.edu/svoboda/superk/sun.gif. At least one prolific EU proponent interpreted this to show that neutrinos are emitted from the surface of the Sun, not its core! {insert ROFL smilies here}^

Concerning BAUT

There is a very long thread there, on the Electric Universe (nearly 2400 posts! http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/28596-electric-universe-model.html), as well as instructions to all those who wish to post on the topic, and links to all other EU-related threads (http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/45529-read-first-re-posting-electric-universe-ideas-here.html).

In addition, this thread may be of interest to readers of this comment: http://www.bautforum.com/about-baut/55206-reflections-year-half-s-experience-baut-s-atm-section.html.

* whic

In future, when I respond to your comments, I shall state explicitly that the intended audience does not include you.

With that preamble over ...

Down here, at the bottom of the ocean of air, distant "point sources" in the optical (or visible) and near-infrared wavebands are smeared out by what astronomers call "seeing". You notice this as the twinkling of stars in the night sky. Assuming radial symmetry*, the 1D distribution of intensity of such a seeing smeared point source looks like a Gaussian, but isn't (it's a Kolmogorov distribution, as the primary source of distortion is turbulence). Adaptive optics is a term used to describe a range of techniques to deconvolve the seeing, to recover the "beyond the atmosphere" 2D distribution of source intensity; the most ambitious of these aim to deliver diffraction limited images, using phase conjugation and laser guide beacons to "measure and compensate for turbulence-induced phase aberrations in three dimensions".

The image cited by pln2bz was taken by NaCO (NAOS-CONICA, Nasmyth Adaptive Optics System Near-Infrared Imager and Spectrograph), attached to one of the VLTs (http://www.eso.org/instruments/naco/index.html). Note the following comment: "Publications based on data obtained with the NACO instrument should quote the following reference papers: Lenzen, R. et al. 2003, SPIE 4841, 944 and Rousset, G. et al. 2003, SPIE 4839, 140." Clearly, pln2bz did not bother (perhaps he felt his SD comments did not constitute a "publication"); he's in good company, as his source was undoubtedly TPOD (or similar), which also did not bother.

Why does this matter?

Fundamentally, it goes to the issue of "evidence", which EU proponents (not only pln2bz, not only on Slashdot) get so worked up about.

As I said above, the two objects in the VLT/NACO image are statistically the same as two point sources.

One could, as pln2bz has done, claim to see something other than two point sources.

However, one could also claim that there's a face in the image (example1: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070421.html; example2: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990315.html), or a planet with rings (example: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071023.html), or even invisible pink fairies ... there is no objective method (that I know of) to choose between these claims.

Amusing aside: some of you have seen this "neutrino image" of the Sun (or similar) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980605.html, http://elvis.phys.lsu.edu/svoboda/superk/sun.gif. At least one prolific EU proponent interpreted this to show that neutrinos are emitted from the surface of the Sun, not its core! {insert ROFL smilies here}^

Concerning BAUT

There is a very long thread there, on the Electric Universe (nearly 2400 posts! http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/28596-electric-universe-model.html), as well as instructions to all those who wish to post on the topic, and links to all other EU-related threads (http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/45529-read-first-re-posting-electric-universe-ideas-here.html).

In addition, this thread may be of interest to readers of this comment: http://www.bautforum.com/about-baut/55206-reflections-year-half-s-experience-baut-s-atm-section.html.

* whic

Icarus, "International Journal of Solar System Studies"; unfortunately it's a subscription publication (though with some ingenuity you can find at least the abstracts of many Icarus papers through ADS; papers with preprints on arXiv are, of course, free) http://icarus.cornell.edu/. This is the best, deepest, etc resource (IMHO).

ADS Abstract service, for finding papers relevant to planetary formation (click on Physics and Geophysics Search http://adsabs.harvard.edu/ads_abstracts.html)

General, diffuse website: Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD, most have at least some good links; not specific to planet formation though http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html)

General astronomy discussion forum (LOTS of very knowledgeable and helpful people): BAUT (http://www.bautforum.com/)

General physics discussion forum (not much on planetary formation however): Physics Forums (http://physicsforums.com/index.php)

I'll suggest some of the other resources in a later comment ...

Seems the BAUT thread finally went up. Mods must have been sleeping or on vacation or something. At least over there, I can post a few choice images...

Cheers,

~Michael Gmirkin

Update:

Apparently they thought I was a threat! What kind of threat is still unclear to me.

I've been immediately banned from BAUT without a word to me, or much of an explanation (I might also note that means I can't even log in to send a private message to the admin who banned me to ask why or appeal it). I've only been a member of the site for some odd 48-72 hours and already I've been banned and accused of being part of some "conspiracy" of disinformation, or some such nonsense?

Ridiculous! Utterly and completely.

I came with specific questions, and specific images for discussion, which I believed would be of interest and use to their user base. And they doused me with gas and threw a match, figuratively speaking... Don't burn the heretic

The punishment [from my point of view] certainly did NOT fit the perceived "crime" [from their point of view]. There were lesser remedies available, such as a private message to the user in question stating that I'd put something in the wrong area, that the thread was being moved, that there are specific rules (which they could have quoted and directed a user (me) to to read), they could have opted for a 72 hour suspension, as opposed to a full 1-year ban.

But, no, they decided to go for the harshest punishment FIRST. That seems to reveal quite a bit about their thought processes, or lack thereof.

I'm sorry, but I can't let this kind of knee-jerk reactionary action go unnoticed or unchallenged. It seems typical of some sites to "burn the heretic."

My dubious distinction

upriver, mgmirkin, and iantresman have all been suspended for one year for violations of rules 6, 11, and 14 as part of a coordinated effort to promote a specific ATM [Against The Mainstream] idea, in the mainstream section of the forum.

This particular idea has already been covered in detail in the ATM section, and the main protagonists refuse, or are unable to supply any supporting math when faced with any questions or criticism.

Post Edit: based on email conversation, I now believe that iantresman was not part of the coordinated effort, and am lifting his suspension.

To respond to a few points above:

1. Was my only "crime" in their eyes the fact that I placed the post in the wrong section of the forum? If so, a simple move of the thread would have resolved the issue. Most forum software makes that task quite simple. Likewise, the punishment far outweighed the crime.
   Addendum: I see they have subsequently moved the thread, so that it will no longer be visible to those who find such ideas as Birkeland's verifiable laboratory work "quaint" or "heretical," despite being based on known lab physics. My post simply includes the suggestion that they might be applicable to a wider sphere of science.
2. I think that it was slightly more than that, insofar as apparently I hold a view slightly different from their "consensus reality." They must find that quite dangerous...
3. Their other contention relates to "doing the math." Firstly, the presentation of a natural philosophy CONCEPT does not require a mathematical model in its inception. That is an artifact of Einsteinian cosmology, and has generally reversed the flow of scientific progress, in some ways, by assuming that just because someone writes a sound mathematical expression that somehow equates to how things work in reality. Math is a language, and it is equally

Seems the BAUT thread finally went up. Mods must have been sleeping or on vacation or something. At least over there, I can post a few choice images...

Cheers,

~Michael Gmirkin

Update:

Apparently they thought I was a threat! What kind of threat is still unclear to me.

I've been immediately banned from BAUT without a word to me, or much of an explanation (I might also note that means I can't even log in to send a private message to the admin who banned me to ask why or appeal it). I've only been a member of the site for some odd 48-72 hours and already I've been banned and accused of being part of some "conspiracy" of disinformation, or some such nonsense?

Ridiculous! Utterly and completely.

I came with specific questions, and specific images for discussion, which I believed would be of interest and use to their user base. And they doused me with gas and threw a match, figuratively speaking... Don't burn the heretic

The punishment [from my point of view] certainly did NOT fit the perceived "crime" [from their point of view]. There were lesser remedies available, such as a private message to the user in question stating that I'd put something in the wrong area, that the thread was being moved, that there are specific rules (which they could have quoted and directed a user (me) to to read), they could have opted for a 72 hour suspension, as opposed to a full 1-year ban.

But, no, they decided to go for the harshest punishment FIRST. That seems to reveal quite a bit about their thought processes, or lack thereof.

I'm sorry, but I can't let this kind of knee-jerk reactionary action go unnoticed or unchallenged. It seems typical of some sites to "burn the heretic."

My dubious distinction

upriver, mgmirkin, and iantresman have all been suspended for one year for violations of rules 6, 11, and 14 as part of a coordinated effort to promote a specific ATM [Against The Mainstream] idea, in the mainstream section of the forum.

This particular idea has already been covered in detail in the ATM section, and the main protagonists refuse, or are unable to supply any supporting math when faced with any questions or criticism.

Post Edit: based on email conversation, I now believe that iantresman was not part of the coordinated effort, and am lifting his suspension.

To respond to a few points above:

1. Was my only "crime" in their eyes the fact that I placed the post in the wrong section of the forum? If so, a simple move of the thread would have resolved the issue. Most forum software makes that task quite simple. Likewise, the punishment far outweighed the crime.
   Addendum: I see they have subsequently moved the thread, so that it will no longer be visible to those who find such ideas as Birkeland's verifiable laboratory work "quaint" or "heretical," despite being based on known lab physics. My post simply includes the suggestion that they might be applicable to a wider sphere of science.
2. I think that it was slightly more than that, insofar as apparently I hold a view slightly different from their "consensus reality." They must find that quite dangerous...
3. Their other contention relates to "doing the math." Firstly, the presentation of a natural philosophy CONCEPT does not require a mathematical model in its inception. That is an artifact of Einsteinian cosmology, and has generally reversed the flow of scientific progress, in some ways, by assuming that just because someone writes a sound mathematical expression that somehow equates to how things work in reality. Math is a language, and it is equally

Seems the BAUT thread finally went up. Mods must have been sleeping or on vacation or something. At least over there, I can post a few choice images...

Cheers,
~Michael Gmirkin

Helium 3 could solve the worlds energy problems, the only place to get it is the moon.

That would be fascinating if it were true. First of all, we do not have any He3 fusion reactors, especially not on the scale that commercial power generation requires. Second, to supply the US with its power needs would require 15-20 tonnes of He3 per year. To power the world, you'd need, say, 100 tonnes per year (note: this is just electrical power, not fuel in general. You'd still need gas for cars, diesel fuel for ships and trains, aviation fuel for jets, etc.). One million tonnes of lunar regolith yields only 10 kg of He3. In other words, you'd need to process 10 BILLION tonnes of regolith per year to power the Earth. According to google, lunar regolith has a density of between 1.8 and 2.6 tonnes per cubic metre. Let's call it 2. You'd need to process 5 billion cubic metres of regolith per year. I'm not sure how deep the He3 goes, but it's estimated that the regolith is only 4-5 metres thick, so let's say the He3 goes down 5 metres. In order to supply the Earth, you'd have to strip mine 1000 square kilometres of lunar surface per year. It would require far too much infrastructure. Third, we have no vehicles for ferrying the He3 back to Earth. Fourth, it would be very, very expensive. Some estimates put it at 20 trillion dollars to get the mining equipment in place. That's just the launch costs. It doesn't count the cost of the equipment itself. For that kind of money we can build He3 breeder reactors right here.

Read all about it on Bad Astronomy, http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/61876-gem-rank-1-unified-field-proposal.html. I know I should put it up on the physics archive, but they don't let fringe folks toss pdf's up there about a rank 1 field theory for gravity and light (yes, I figured out how the spin 2 graviton lives in the charge coupling term, if anyone here groks that issue). The test is to measure bending of light around the Sun, but six orders of magnitude better than needed to show Einstein was right, Newton was wrong. The GEM theory predicts 12% more bending, 0.8 microarcseconds, than the Schwarzschild metric. If we detect gravity waves, and measure them along 6 different axes, GR predicts the waves are transverse, and GEM predicts they would be longitudinal or scalar waves. Let the measurements decide!

doug
quaternions.com

Hello:

Like a good /. nerd, I do have my own unified field theory which has several testable hypotheses. It is 4D, I've got the action, field equations, and exponential metric solution for a point source. A discussion of the idea happened here:
http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/61876- gem-rank-1-unified-field-proposal.html
One test is to measure bending of light to second order PPN accuracy, basically a million times more than was needed to tell the difference between GR and Newton. Do that for GR, and there should be 10.96 microarcseconds more bending. For my GEM proposal, it should be 11.69, a difference of 0.73 microarcseconds. We can only make measurements to 100 microarcseconds today, bummer.

GEM also predicts that gravity waves should be the scalar and longitudinal modes of emission, since the transverse modes of emission are light. Cannot wait for those gravity waves to be detected!

I am pretty sure gravity is not going to mess with the speed of light in my proposal, where the vacuum state is linear, in gravity as in EM. In the GEM action, gravity lives in a second rank symmetric field strength tensor, and EM lives in a second rank antisymmetric tensor. The separate housing arrangements make sense since one is a spin 2 field, the other spin 1.

I hope it is the source.

doug

* Astronomy Knowledge Base
* Astronomy resources on the web

Also, this post will push down the presence of my post on artificial meats on the profile page, and I think it somewhat important to keep the link available.

First off, plants aren't very efficient solar collectors. It's hard to find good numbers, but 3% to 6% efficiency is quoted here: http://www.bautforum.com/archive/index.php/t-33998 .html. Your yield is going to be worse than that, since some of the energy has to go to growing the plant.

The only figure I could find for ethanol yield of corn is 328 gallons/acre, so if all the energy used is also from ethanol we should net 82 gallons.

Solar thermal, or even photovoltaic, perhaps could be scaled up to be a major energy source, but trying to grow our fuel is only a path to perennial poverty.

Thought I should add.. the whole Electric Universe thing is pretty thoroughly deconstructed and debunked on Phil Plait's excellent Bad Astronomy forum here:
http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php?t=28596

What kind of horse shit story is this?

I dont see how you got the patience to argue with folks like the above but I guess that what it takes.

There are major differences between mainstream atrophysicists and the EU Theorists. If you are curious, go to http://www.bautforum.com/ and search on "electric universe" or "electric sun". The mainstream astrophysicists have a tendency to become condescending with regards to EU Theory. It's much the same on these forums. The thing is, few of them have actually read Don Scott's new book.

You can tell that the entire field has become quite used to a lack of skepticism within the public responses to NASA press releases. It appears that they are unaware that this goodwill is all based upon an audience that remains uninformed about plasma. The EU interpretation of NASA's observations consistently resolves anomalous data that NASA is frequently surprised with these days. They manage to explain much of the mechanics of the universe using forces that we can fully characterize within the lab. And they present a good number of predictions that can be tested. It's just a matter of time before these theories make it into the mainstream, but it will be a very painful process.

The real truth is that there are only good things that can result from people comparing two different cosmologies. It's no different than business: if Microsoft was the only company creating operating systems, there would be little impetus to improve their product. The new arrival of Apple and Google indirectly increases the quality of Microsoft's products. Without skepticism within their public audience, modern-day astrophysics has become an inferior product.

All that aside, it's very important to listen carefully to both sides of the debate. There's a lot to be learned by talking to people with mainstream astrophysical views. Unfortunately for them though, all of those Bad Astronomy debates come off as extremely demeaning. In the event that those people turn out to be wrong, which I believe to be the case, a lot of people are going to wish they had not gone on the record like that. People will be taking a closer look ten or twenty years from now at the things that are being said on this issue right now so that we can understand exactly what went wrong. There will inevitably be an investigation into how the peer review system broke down and why people didn't listen to the EU Theorists earlier. There's a chance that what we're seeing with global warming is just the beginning of a serious event for the human species. Or, it could turn out to be nothing. EU Theory clearly allows for a larger spectrum of possibilities than the mainstream theories.

There seems to be some serious misinformation on the deep impact site on nasa's website. Theres places where they claim most all that emissions from the impact is water. Some bold statements like "after weeks from the impact there were the equivalent of 1000 Olympic size swimming pools of water emitted from the comet."

It is possible that their sensors are receiving data that indicate something along the lines of water. If I understand things right -- and I'm slightly more fuzzy on this than many other items -- but I believe the EU Theorists are asserting that intense plasma phenomenon within comets can induce fusion. That could create some challenging data for scientists to resolve.

I really enjoyed the electric sky book. Really makes me more critical about what I see spouted out by nasa and other organizations about the universe.

That's what's so amazing about the book. Once you fully understand the EU message, you can now interpret NASA press releases on your own, and you can decide for yourself what to believe. Clearly, the more people that read the book, the more people who will critically think about NASA press releases and astrophysical theories in general. When you have only one choice for what to believe,

Sometime ago I wrote http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php?t=45872 and I will write it here again.

Planet: A small, diminutive, little, miniature, minuscule, minute, petite, tiny, wee, dwarf object compared with the Sun.

In his 1970 acceptance speech of his Nobel Physics Prize in Physics, Alfven pointed out that this idea of "frozen-in" magnetic fields, which he had earlier endorsed, was false. In reality, moving magnetic fields within a plasma create electric currents. This fact is one of the basic concepts embodied in the Electric Sky.

Hannes Alfven was unique among Nobel laureates in taking the opportunity of his acceptance speech to declare that he had been wrong in what he had said previously. Alfven said, "I thought that the frozen-in concept was very good from a pedagogical point of view, and indeed it became very popular. In reality, however, it was not a good pedagogical concept but a dangerous 'pseudo-pedagogical concept.' By 'pseudo-pedagogical' I mean a concept which makes you believe that you understood a phenomenon whereas in reality you have drastically misunderstood it."

When he used the term "classical plasma theory", Alfven was referring pejoratively to this erroneous "frozen-in" idea and its cause -- the false assumption that plasmas are "ideal conductors." When discussing the failure of this so-called classical approach in the search for controlled nuclear fusion, Alfven pointed out that:

The 'thermonuclear crisis' did not affect cosmic plasma physics very much. The development of the theories continued because they largely dealt with phenomena in regions of space where no real check was possible. The fact that the basis of several of the theories had been proven to be false in the laboratory had very little effect. One [astrophysicist] said that this did not necessarily prove that they must also be false in the cosmos. Much work was done in developing these theories, leading to a gigantic structure of speculative theories which had no empirical support

Yes, you have misunderstood. What Tim said, and what your quotes say is that frozen in is an approximation based on the resistivity and lifetime of the plasma. In the strictest sense, fields are not frozen in since there is always a resistance. However, if the field movement is small during the lifetime of the plasma, you can do an approximation and say it is frozen.

MHD and "frozen in" are by no means synonymous, and you should not confuse them. Yes, that was the crux of Alfven's later work. That's what I was talking about when I said, "I think you will find that a rift deveolped between Alfven & the astrophysical community". Having developed MHD, Alfven then tried to abaondon it. He was wrong. MHD is applicable almost everywhere, and almost everyone except Alfven saw it. Modern plasma astrophysicists use MHD appropriately, and realize that the closed current models of Alfven are not in fact generally applicable, and are in fact generally wrong (but there are exceptions to every rule, which is why I also said, "One has to study these things on a case by case basis").

The third WTC building on 911 collapsed without ANYTHING touching it. It just collapsed straight down as if it had been demolished. They even abandoned it first. It was UNDAMAGED until it collapsed.

The HOLE in the pentagon was not large enough for the plane that struck.

The jet fuel of an airliner doesn't burn hot enough to melt the structural steel that was used in the WTC buildings. Yet they found molten steel in the wreckage.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7842741 50 9736411725&q=wtc+3
That was not an airplane strike, it was demolition.

Looking at this comment I found, the author makes a good arguement: If the light sabre were hot enough to easily melt stuff, wouldn't it radiate so much heat that it would burn the user?

I have to pass this one off on the folks over at the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today forum: Nemesis: BS or what?

This theory has been in the BS category for quite a while. Leave it to Slashdot, though...

in 26 years New Horizons will surpass Voyager I as the most distant human made object.

Apparently, someone disagrees. According to his “crude calculations”, New Horizons will not overtake the Voyagers.

I don't know which of you is right, and I admit I won't take the time to research enough data to scribble on an envelope of my own, but doesn't this depend a lot from the exact launch date? Perhaps the two-day delay changed the actual result?

There are several methods for the creation of elements including the r-process (supernovae), the s-process (red giants), the cosmic ray interaction, and the big bang. See this thread for more information:

http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php?p=249157

and wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis

I reallly shouldn't answer you, since it looks like everyone else has followed the advice of "don't feed the trolls" here, but... if you haven't read one that suggests some basic facts which can be used to debunk the claims of the article, then you just aren't looking. And I'm sorry, why does your B.S. meter not go off the scale when you read about "interstellar electric transmission lines" ?!? I'm afraid your B.S. meter isn't as good as you think.

Why not just go check out the badastronomer link like everyone says to ? Oh, be cause you're obviously trolling, that's why. Hey, don't get me wrong- especially when looking at some of the more interesting structures, thinking of *magneto*-electric fields involved does help explain those structures... but electric fields aren't the only ones that create some of these structures, and *everything* in cosmology can't be explained in such terms. There's *matter* and *fusion* involved in a lot of it.

Here is an excellent debunking of the "electric sun" theory, which is really a basis for much of the electric universe quackery, erm postulation. Until you can justify the inaccuracies and illogical arguments contained in that theory, everyone else will continue to consider the sum of the 'electric universe' theory to be, as Tim Thompson says, "devoid of merit". We don't reject it out of hand, we reject it because it doesn't fit measurable, observed reality, and reaches to explain things that are more easilty explained.

Here is a thread on the topic on the "Bad Astronomy and Universe Today" forum. Have fun trolling, but take it there. Most of us don't think it's worthwhile to debate pseudoscientists looking for publicity.

That doesn't have pseudo scientific nonsense I recommend going here, http://www.bautforum.com/ No I'm not trying to plug a forum but the electric universe theory is nonsense