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The scenario has occurred, but didn't result in fires that time.

Except that this statement is false. There's newspaper reports from all over he US from the latter parts of 1859 of wildfires happening all over the place. Because the US had just covered itself in this really neat continent-sized antenna (the telegraph network) which was throwing sparks all over the place (feel free to peruse the references in this paper).

Still everyone wants to ridicule the Electric Universe Theory. Can you at least humor it and see if it explains a thing or two before looking down your nose at it? Y'know, in the spirit of dispassionate inquiry.

About the telegraph lines. The "solar wind" (that's the mechanical description of it) is the flow of charged particles from the sun. Charged particles that are in motion is the very definition of an electric current. That's just a fact. The Earth is built like a gigantic leaky capacitor with a negatively charged ionosphere, an insulating/dielectric layer of air and a positively charged ground. When electric current from the sun exceeds the normal input due to solar storms it's not a surprise that this current will especially affect conductive cables. The longer the cables the more they are affected since they are good conductors and the charge is measured in terms of volts per square meter.

It's a shame that these days "Electric Universe" has become the new "conspiracy theory", triggering an instantaneous holier-than-thou ridicule from people who are not familiar with it and have never seriously studied it. It's the opposite of terms like "for the children" or "to fight terrorism" that instantly inspire an equally irrational level of adamand support. If you can overcome the hypnotic knee-jerk of the emotional burdens other people have wrongly placed on such terms, you achieve what is known as thinking for yourself. Good day.

Some of us have noticed this about cosmology for a long, long time now. Global warming is just a trendier issue so it gets noticed first, that's all.

“Certain results of observational cosmology cast critical doubt on the foundations of standard cosmology but leave most cosmologists untroubled. Alternative cosmological models that differ from the Big Bang have been published and defended by heterodox scientists; however, most cosmologists do not heed these. This may be because standard theory is correct and all other ideas and criticisms are incorrect, but it is also to a great extent due to sociological phenomena such as the ‘snowball effect’ or ‘groupthink’. We might wonder whether cosmology, the study of the Universe as a whole, is a science like other branches of physics or just a dominant ideology.”
—Martin Lopez-Corredoira, astrophysicist.
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=bqx15w21

Some of you more knee-jerk types would also benefit from this article because some of you use some really weak arguments.

See http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/davesmith_au.htm and also http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/guest.htm. I guess when you look for evidence of something and find absolutely nothing, it's okay not to abandon the theoretical reasons why you looked for it in the first place. Clearly you just need to use a galaxy as a detector this time. Yeah, right. How scientific. How long will it be until you guys quit defending this non-falsifiable bullshit and learn what Karl Popper tried to teach us a long time ago?

See http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/davesmith_au.htm and also http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/guest.htm. I guess when you look for evidence of something and find absolutely nothing, it's okay not to abandon the theoretical reasons why you looked for it in the first place. Clearly you just need to use a galaxy as a detector this time. Yeah, right. How scientific. How long will it be until you guys quit defending this non-falsifiable bullshit and learn what Karl Popper tried to teach us a long time ago?

... the solar wind contains oppositely charged particles ...

First of all, thanks for the apology. We can all communicate as civilized human beings without name calling.

The solar wind contains primarily electrons, which being 1836 times lighter than protons can escape the solar gravity more readily. The current from the sun is by no means charge balanced, but negative charges far outnumber positive charges. You also must realize plasmas are complex and I am not a plasma physicist, but an engineer, electrical engineer to be exact. As such I also took physics in college, but I know a lot more about electricity than most astronomers. Electric currents in a vacuum such as outer space, encounter no resistance and therefore can travel unimpeded over vast distances guided by electric fields.

(...why neutrally charged objects such as those in your room...)
You can easily do an experiment demonstrating the enormous power of the electric force compared to the gravitational force. Get a comb, a piece of cotton cloth, and some Styrofoam peanuts or bits of paper. Rub the comb with the cloth and see how easily the comb overcomes the gravity of a large body such as whole earth, and picks up those Styrofoam peanuts. The number of electrons stripped from the comb, compared to the total number of electrons in that column is miniscule. Yet this tiny charge imbalance is sufficient to overcome the entire planet's gravity. Compared to a number with 36 zeros behind it, even our national debt counted in pennies is tiny, although that may be cold comfort. :-)

(...the many, varied, and critical roles electromagnetism plays in sub-atomic and quantum theory....)
I suppose you never have heard of the double slit experiment,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
where a single photon or electron can appear in two places at the same time. This is a very vivid effect that experimentally demonstrates quantum theory. Quantum theory also plays a role in the cosmos as a whole. The red shift up until recently thought to be due to the Doppler effect, is quantized, that is it occurs in little jumps of about 70 km/s. This makes it impossible to equate red shift with motion or distance and puts a large crimp into our ability to determine the real distance of galaxies from Earth. We know that there are large magnetic fields in space. We also know of no way to generate a magnetic field other than by an electric current and we know that an electric current cannot be generated unless there is a difference in potential, ie. an electric field. Even a relatively weak electric field over cosmic distances can accelerate a charged particle to enormous energies, such as they measure in cosmic rays. Even the LHC, if it ever comes online, cannot begin to come close to the energies involved in such particles.
Since I am not a plasma physicist and have-not studied plasmas extensively, I cannot and would not go into all the details here anyway, but you can learn all about that if you so desire. I do however know that the electric explanation of the operation of the universe does not require abstract mathematically contrived constructs such as dark energy, dark matter and black holes. Most of the time, the simpler explanation is more likely the correct one. The electric explanation of the universe and its contents is much simpler, although yet, and probably for the foreseeable future, incomplete. In my view, all cosmologists are like blind men trying to describe an elephant, but the electric plasma explanation gives a simpler picture of said elephant.

(... see the importance of electromagnetism ....)
All of chemistry and biology, indeed your very life right now in your body, is dependent on the electric force and operated by it.

Maybe you can look at:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/
and tell me where they are wrong, because so far I have not

....Like I said, I know all about you Electric Universe idiots...

Apparently you don't know of course, that anyone who resorts to name-calling has already automatically lost the argument. When you debate someone, one of the first rules is that there be no personal attacks or name calling. Someone who resorts to those, has already lost the debate. Some of the so-called idiots have won Nobel prizes in the past.

(...LOL. No, it was probably an air burst, which wasn't understood in 1908,...)
International scientists have made trips to that area with modern instruments and found no evidence whatsoever of any material foreign to the area. Even if the meteorite or other matter exploded in the air, there would be evidence of this on the ground and in the ground and there's not.

(...it's matter that we simply haven't detected directly yet. ...)
And never will detect it because it doesn't exist. We also will never detect black holes, because they are purely mathematical entities that simply do not exist in real life. A singularity is a mathematical abstraction and one of those is supposedly at the heart of every black hole, and was according to the Big Bang Theory what the universe sprang from.

(...We are able to measure it, via its gravitational effect...)
  We are NOT able to measure it, but all is observed is the motion of galaxies in a way that necessitates all these fictitious, nonexistent objects in order to explain this motion we do observe, by gravity only models. If the electric interaction is taken into account as well, note I said as well as gravity, then the need for these purely mathematical constructs disappears.

(...And easily made fun of. Which is why this was so much fun....)
Too bad that the object of this is for you to make fun of someone. I guess I was fooled into thinking that I was having a serious discussion. I did not make fun of you, because I thought you are somebody I could have a serious discussion with. Apparently you are not. However since the electric universe is not my idea, maybe you just better peruse http://www.thunderbolts.info/home.htm and make fun of them. Study the material carefully first though, because they have a much simpler explanation for many of the data that are coming to us with the help of modern instruments and space probes. Most of the time in nature, the simpler and more elegant explanation is usually the correct one, but of course not always. In this case however, adding in the electric interaction, makes for a mathematically less convoluted explanation than only taking gravity into account. It just totally inexplicable to me, but apparently not to you, how scientists can totally ignore a force that is 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity, in the operation of the universe on a large scale, as well as on a quantum scale within and among the atoms.

They only reason I can think of for the downright refusal of mainstream scientists to consider electricity in the large-scale operation of the universe, is that the electric processes greatly speed up everything. This is a philosophical issue, because it throws large question marks into the currently held views on evolution.

.....the opposite and negative charges as will exist in a plasma will cancel out...

That is patently false. In any plasma, charges separate in even the tiniest electric field which can and do exist over cosmic distances. The reason we know this, is that space is permeated by huge magnetic fields which can only arise to two electric currents which in turn can only exist because of enormous potential differences in different parts of the galaxy and the universe as a whole.

(...the net electric charge is very small ...)

But again is false, because if it were true there would be no solar wind. The solar wind is a massive movement of charge. In order to have such a massive movement of charge, there must be an electric field of huge proportions as well to drive this current.

(... but for another great many it simply isn't contributing anything, and gravity does in fact dominate....)

If you read my post carefully, you will note that I said that gravity is an operation but it must be considered that the electric force is also there and will dominate any time there is an electric field because that implies a charge imbalance.

(...Seriously, though. "Dark Matter" is just matter we can't see and we can't see...)

The gravity only theories presently accepted by mainstream cosmology requires something called dark matter which is supposed to make up over 90% of the universe. This is necessary to explain the motion of galaxies by gravity only. Any time a theory comes along that makes 90% of all matter in the universe invisible, that theory is clearly wrong. Science is about things we can see and measure not what can be theorized mathematically. Science is about experiments and observations not complicated math. Do you seriously propose, that 90% of all matter cannot be observed and measured in some form? That takes a lot of faith and faith is a realm of religion, not science. I am not proposing any massless charge carriers and you are assuming again by faith that heavenly bodies carry no charge and that there are no vast electric fields, especially highly ionized stars and luminous clouds, jets, and common plasma formations such as spirals.

(...Frankly it makes most astronomers uncomfortable to have to resort to...)

All astronomers should be very uncomfortable with the fact that they have to incorporate unseen and unmeasured objects such as dark matter and energy as well as black holes in their theories in order to explain the operation of the universe. These objects exist only as mathematical fictions in the formulas and equations of mathematicians. For example, the singularity that is supposed to lie at the center of a black hole is only a mathematical fiction. There is no such thing in physical reality as a point, which again exists only in mathematics. Math needs to be the servant of physics and science and not the queen. A physical observation needs to be made first and then that observation can be quantified with mathematical terms and not the other way around.

(...Publish! You, or whoever writes it,...)

None of this is original with me, but has already been written about in a book called "the electric universe" about which you can find out more here, http://www.thunderbolts.info/resources.htm

(...physicists will be trying to discover the intricate implications of your theory...)

In an electric universe, that is one that is dominated by electric processes primarily, everything happens orders of magnitudes faster, than in a universe that is controlled only or at least primarily by gravity. The reason for this is that electricity is 36 orders of magnitude more powerful than gravity. This is an unimaginably large number, that reduces the vast periods of time needed by evolutionary models. Physicists and other scientists trying to explain the origin of the universe by the evolutionary model, cannot do so if the timeframe is dramatically reduced. There is a philoso

Why don't you take a closer look at those "craters" on the moon. You sure they were made by asteroids or might there be a mechanism which is more consistent with the available evidence (contemporary scientific stasis be damned)?

(I'm the AC that also responded to you). After doing some research into their claims, I came across this: impossible dinosaurs. Their claim is as follows:

"Most conventional theories assume that gravity throughout the universe has always been and will always be a constant property of matter. ... The Electric Universe offers a different point of view. Gravity is not a constant. It's a variable that depends on the plasma environment. So Earth in the Mesozoic Era may have had less gravity than it has today. Holden calculates that in order for the largest dinosaurs to function, gravity must have been at least 1/3 (and possibly as low as 1/4) what it is today."

It took a fair amount of effort to dig up the relevant papers regarding changes in the gravitational constant. (Short answer for the mathematically challenged: it hasn't changed). I'd also point out that if gravity was 1/3 to 1/4 of what it was today, the moon wouldn't have remained in orbit.

The original slashdot article had a post detailing what their predictions were. They were wrong.

Let's just call bad science when we see it. Plasma cosmology predicts few things. When it has tried to, it failed. Much like the yeti, flat earth, luminous aether and timecube, it probably won't go away any time soon. But it really should.

The Electric Universe people were completely discredited when the NASA probe spawned from Deep Impact collided with the comet Tempel 1. If the Universe were -- as they claim -- made up of anti-matter, the resulting explosion of the probe and comet would have vaporized a fair chunk of the solar system.

Of course, this didn't stop them from saying that the collision actually proved their theory since there was a little explosion.

I believe you're proving my point for me when I say that the people who vehemently oppose the Electric Universe (EU) theory tend not to be familiar with it. I have read their works extensively and have never, ever seen the EU folks make the claim that the Universe is made up of antimatter. If you want to see what they had to say about the Deep Impact collison with Tempel 1, look here and you will find something entirely different from what you just described.

You can also find more on the Deep Impact event in this category of the Thunderbolts site.

To date, I have never once seen an opponent of the EU theory who was thoroughly familiar with it. There is no substitute for your own inquiry.

I find this concept really interesting and confusing at the same time. Consider that within plasma laboratories, we can observe certain fundamental morphologies that naturally result from the existence of charge density. Plasmas naturally form double layers, which tend to protect a plasma's charge. The double layer leads to the formation of plasma filaments. We see within the laboratory that plasma filaments tend to exhibit long-range attraction and short-range repulsion with one another. This causes the filaments to twist around one another like a braided rope. Within the plasma laboratory, we observe these complex twisted transfer charged particles very efficiently. They are called Birkeland Currents.

We see these braided filament plasma structures in space too, like in the Cygnus Loop ...

http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/hd1080p_screen/heic0712g.mp4

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/070103cygnusloop.htm

Braided ropelike plasma structures are the fingerprints of electromagnetic activity. When you see plasma behaving this way, you need to make sure that you're not trying to use fluids-based equations to understand/model it.

It's interesting that the same thing can be done with respect to radio waves. I'm actually a little bit confused as to why this works for radio waves. When Birkeland Currents do this, they require the existence of a plasma medium, and the structures do their thing in the lab because of the existence of the ionization. The plasma both responds to magnetic fields and creates its own due to the right-hand rule. But these guys seem to be saying that they can create these structures within the Earth's atmosphere in the absence of a plasma medium (?). With Birkeland Currents, the collimation occurs because the flow of charged particles generates a magnetic field.

I'm not getting something. Any plasma physicists out there??? Is HAARP creating an ionized pathway for the signal through the atmosphere?

That is the Electric Universe model of star formation.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [barnesandnoble.com], Thomas Kuhn's magnum opus, should be required reading before engaging in a debate on science. There's an aphorism that goes "all theories are wrong, but some are useful." We can and do use theories we know have flaws because in the vast majority of cases, they predict and explain what happens in nature.

This is an ideal that quickly falls apart when the effective message from government and private funding is "you support the mainstream theory or we kill your budget". That's not "this is just a theory that happens to do the job right now but may be wrong"; that is something else entirely. Just tell me how many successful predictions have been made by astronomers in the last 25 years and then compare that figure to any other scientific field.

When a better theory comes along to explain the observations, we begin to use that one instead.

That'd be nice, but I'm hearing too many scientists who have tried that only to have their telescope time revoked, their papers unpublished, their funding cut, etc. Halton Arp is a good example. I mean he has a theory that with a single idea has not only better explained astronomical phenomenon but has also successfully made predictions, and his experience is just as I have described. While I think comparing that to Galileo, who was in danger of losing life and limb, is a bit dramatic, a small write-up of his experience can be found here If you start looking, you will find lots of other examples in several other fields; astronomy just seems to be one of the worst and I suspect that's because of the house of cards that Big Bang cosmology has become (they can afford an amount of hubris that an engineer could not, for example, because if a bridge collapses no one is going to pretend that it didn't).

So, it is not difficult to find real problems with science as it is practiced today, namely that many unscientific things are going on and that money has become at least as important as facts, there remain the kind of popularity contests and persecutions that we like to think we left behind in the Middle Ages, and that's unfortunate. It may be worse still that lots of people like you will disregard these things (things you should not need me or anyone else to point out in the first place if you truly are interested in seeing the right thing happen) and talk about ideals that we'd all like to see that are simply not happening.

In other words, your response was eloquent and pleasing and "+5 Insightful" ... and full of denial. It's alright though, really. When there is a crisis in astronomy in 5-10 years and you ask yourself how this could have happened, why anyone didn't see it coming, just remember me. The way I like to explain it is "just because it has not yet grown into a 75-foot oak tree does not mean that the acorn has not been planted". Some people see the acorn and remove it early. Others are shocked when one day they see a 75-foot oak tree and are amazed at how much effort it takes to chop one down.

Here you go:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060719spacevortex.htm:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/051114currents.htm:

Here you go:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060719spacevortex.htm:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/051114currents.htm:

What are you talking about? You can uninstall chrome, and you know what I mean by that comment.

In my experience, knowing (or having the ability to know) what you meant does little to nothing to stop people from setting up a straw man that sounds similar to what you were saying and then talking about how wrong you were when they proceed to tear down that straw man. My favorites are when I anticipate this and go out of my way to explicitly clarify what I am saying and what I am not saying and someone proceeds to argue against a claim I was careful not to make. That people can do this and sincerely believe that they are right and that they really told me off is amazing.

An example of my own experiences with people who refuse to really listen to what you're saying and decide to respond to it anyway are here and this one is a particularly good example.

This is from http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1171, which is a completely unrelated discussion. Yet, I believe this paragraph applies:

I've repeated on this forum a few times, if anyone wants to posit there [sic] own self-consistent framework I will follow it for the purposes of discussion with that person. My experience with communication is that people do not take this kind of care. As a result they read someone else's words but, instead of learning something new, they simply think of what THEY would be thinking if THEY were using those words. Nobody actually learns anything new (something that wasn't already in their head). Everyone stays stuck in their own head, although they have the illusion of communication because they unknowingly think/say the same things in many many different ways

We're actually using Maxwell-HEAVISIDE equations all over the world after Oliver Heaviside rewrote Maxwell's original equations from quaternion notation into a much simpler vector notation.. throwing out some interesting stuff along the way.

Oh regarding those Electric Universe 'wackos':

You do realize that you're also calling a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics a wacko, right?

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1970/alfven-bio.html

And so far their successful predictions should at least be called _interesting_ and not 'wacko' for anyone who follows the scientific approach with components like theory, predictions, verification, modification etc.

http://thunderbolts.info/predictions.htm

While the ideas of plasma cosmology seem radical. At this point to me they don't seem any more radical than the ideas put forth by standard cosmologists of multiple universes, dark matter, multiple dimensions, black holes, neutron stars spinning from 1.4ms(!!) to thirty seconds, strange matter, dark energy, etc..

It would be interesting to see if this supports the electric universe theory, that the sun is not powered by gravity fusion, but is instead a giant Plasma Lamp. The purpose of the probe is to measure magnetic field lines of the sun from earth's low orbit, and perhaps it can travel far enough in its 8 minutes to detect the radial field lines that the EU theories say must exist...

Throwing a log on the fire, the Electric Universe people believe that "red-shift" in a galaxy is the result of one cluster being pushed out as a plasma ejection from a larger galaxy, one blue-shifts as it is pushed closer to us, and one red-shifts as it travels away, and that redshifting is not doppler-effect related.

Gravity Universe people use red-shift as the basis of measuring the age of the universe, the Big Bang, tthe need for dark energy, etc etc. That, plus luminocity, is the basis of estimating the age/distance from us.

It would be interesting if the EU people were right, and we just had an 80 year interlude of bad astronomy.

AFAIK, Electric Universe doesn't even have a *hypothesis* to explain the cosmic microwave anisotropy. Which was, by the way, a huge vindication for Big Bang theory, since it was predicted in advance.

AFAIK, Electric Universe doesn't even have a *hypothesis* to explain the cosmic microwave anisotropy. Which was, by the way, a huge vindication for Big Bang theory, since it was predicted in advance.

Has current cosmology made any headway in accepting itself? Last I heard they were still seeing exceptions to their own theory pulsar binary and the plasma universe was on the up and up with 50% of missing matter found to be intergalactic plasma. Of course the mainstream still claims all objects in space have a neutral charge and so can you, given that your able to ignore the wealth information that suggests otherwise: the sun and everything thing else.

...the electric universe otaku...

Love the term. Unfortunately, their beliefs, misunderstandings, and actions are not so superficial.

He's sure the most prolific one on Slashdot, though there are a few others who mostly do not seem to be regular readers but who sometimes chime in after he gives them an alert via email or forum post. He's taken a hiatus from Slashdot since early February it seems, but he's been actively recruiting elsewhere. This is from January, but you can see more of his writing here (along with a few transparent astroturfers):

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/11/572421.aspx

During his absence there have been many popular press science articles (pop science press, that is), including several featured on Slashdot, that usually cause that crowd to spring into action. If you're a big enough fan of that noise, try reading thunderbolts.info, a gathering of malcontents and dilettantes the like of which you've probably never seen: at least one of their respected and prolific hierarchy was banned from the abovetopsecret.com forum.

It will show you just how deeply entrenched are
1) their views on what they think is scientific knowledge and valid inductive logic
2) their pathological mistrust of anything that is "mainstream" (seen in many areas other than just what they think is cosmology)
3) their pathological disbelief of relativistic and quantum mechanics, and indeed anything which they do not find in some way "salient" or "reasonable" or "logical".

If you become a regular reader, he will probably think your hit contribution comes from a wave of "grad students". He came up with that idea himself and first asserted it on Thunderbolts or somewhere shortly before this post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=423972&cid=22121930

Debunked in last paragraph of this reply to that post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=423972&cid=22123690

He didn't like that, and repeated it soon after:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22150020

Debunked even further in the last couple paragraphs of this reply to that post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22150550

But he has since repeated it on Thunderbolts.info:
http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=13531

Reasoning doesn't seem to work, and even if it ever does I don't think it will be enough to overcome the pathological and entrenched dislike for how the universe actually operates. If you're a casual follower of the EU circle or Velikovskianism, you probably don't know just how deep the popular misunderstanding of science or its subject matter can be. Read on with caution, especially if you have any scientific training (let alone training in physics!); it will depress and/or anger you to see the *explicitly* deliberate propaganda/proselytizing effort on the part of this "otaku" in particular, and the progenitors moreover.

Pseudoscience (and the related, often ironically parroted term by EU-ers of "pseudo-skepticism") are anathema to science and do damage to the acquisition of knowledge, and thereby undermine the improvement of the human condition. Sorry if that sounds melodramatic, but that's the "tangible" effect. It's good for a laugh though, but you have to be good at laughing, and you'll probably get tired of laughing sooner or later.

Here's Ethan Allen's glib but deep (recursive, even!) classic:

"Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason w

why don't you guys focus on explaining why comets and asteroids are surprisingly similar in composition? You're denying the antecedent. The veracity of the mainstream understanding of comets is not contingent on their dissimilarity with asteroids. The electric comet hypothesis, however, is contingent on their being essentially identical objects differentiated by their orbits and the alleged physical consequences of their orbits on them (or lack thereof). Even if "dirty snowballs" turn out typically to be "snowy dirtballs", they still contain water ice and undergo outgassing consistent with the mainstream concept.

The instruments are picking up traces of OH coming off of the comets. The H are simply protons from the solar wind and the O is coming from silicates within the comet's body. Oxygen, of course, is one of the most common atoms in the universe. It's not rocket science and your "outgassing" is nothing but electrical machining.

You saw the two flashes. You presumably also saw the whiteouts in the video as the Deep Impact impactor approached. You saw Comet Holmes suddenly enlarge to a *sphere* with hardly a discernible tail and coma to about the size of the Sun. That you are so quick to just look at the structure of that unusual object and say "outgassing" is testament to your inclination to side with theory over common sense and observation.

I'll bet you thought about saying "why comets and asteroids are identical in composition except for the effects of arcing and 'electrical machining'" instead of just "surprisingly similar". I think you sense just how dubious the EC explanation for water detection is. Calling that article "support" for the electric comet hypothesis is just a disingenuous argumentation tactic.

Disingenuous argumentation tactic? You're kidding right? What about comet theory has gone as expected? Comets continue to be shrouded in mystery through the lens of conventional theories.

What is dubious? Please, explain which parts of the Electric Comet document are incorrect ...

http://www.thunderbolts.info/pdf/ElectricComet.pdf

This is why I initially came to Slashdot: to learn what was wrong with the Electric Universe theory through immersion. The problem is that you guys never back your allegations up with hard, painful facts. Bring it. "It" is certainly long overdue by now. I'm an open-minded individual. I *want* to be convinced.

The electric comet hypothesis can only be supported by the available measurements if the investigator says "the hypothesis is supported by any result we encounter" (or misinterprets/fabricates known phenomena). Do you remember hearing Don Scott, in a radio interview in which he made his "predicted observations" about an approaching comet, that "[irrefutably electrical phenomena will happen], or maybe nothing at all"? I do.

So what. I'm pretty sure he was worried about what sort of charge density differential he was going to get between the two items. I would have been too.

Scott's and Thornhill's "predictions" in their literature, media and publicity materials are of this same kind everywhere you look. Not one of them is unambiguously supported by any analysis I've ever seen, and I've read far more than the dumbed-down press releases and Thunderbolts hand-waving you and other EU hobbyists have lobbed around in support of the electric comet idea.

EU is a conceptual framework and methodology. It emphasizes laboratory work with plasmas (Hannes Alfven's "actualistic approach") over prophetic computer-code style instructions for how to build a universe from scratch. There is certainly a place in science for such scientific work, even if you refuse to acknowledge or appreciate the value, and even if you don't appreciate the work of Thornhill, Talbott, Peratt and others. It's the concepts and

The confusion with the Sun's inverse temperature situation (the corona is around 100x hotter than the Sun's surface) follows naturally from the theory that the Sun has a thermonuclear core, which originated around the time that we discovered that it *could* be the mechanism responsible for the tremendous energies we observe. But beware because the issue is by no means completely settled. Any theory that attempts to explain the inverse temperature problem must also grapple with the fact that the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets! There is no satisfying explanation for that one to date without consideration of an electric field, and the standard solar model miserably fails in explaining it. And this is no minor matter either because the solar wind, taken as a whole, constitutes the largest structure in our solar system, the heliospheric current sheet. Contemplate the implications of that for a moment: astrophysicists do not understand what is causing the motions of the largest structure in our own immediate neighborhood!

Within that context, any certainty about what the Sun is or how it operates has absolutely no basis in the facts that we know to date. An honest assessment that strips out all of the *assumptions* about the Sun that we've accumulated over the years will result in a much wider range of possible theories. The unfortunate fact is that the field of astrophysics currently only studies one such possibility out of the entire set. They have essentially worked their way into a corner, and we get theories like magnetic reconnection to explain the inverse temperature problem. But in the process, they completely ignore the work of many great scientists like Nikola Tesla, Kristian Birkeland, Hannes Alfven and Ralph Juergens.

Mark my word: we will hear more about Nikola Tesla as the years move forward. It appears that Tesla's experiments with impulse currents led him to accidentally discover how to intentionally create either a z- or a theta-pinch (which is the fundamental force for creating planets and stars within plasma-based cosmologies). Tesla discovered that the pinch created a stinging pressure wave that could penetrate both glass and copper Faraday cages! He then discovered that he could pulse-width modulate these explosions at thousands of times per second to eradicate the harmful human effects associated with the electrical explosions. It appears that Tesla essentially discovered a mechanism for longitudinal EM waves. He correctly noticed that the force of these waves tends to outpace the compression wave (the electrons). He had no idea how dramatically true this is though, and the information is largely lost to this day. But it is being slowly rediscovered.

If you have doubts about any of this, then I urge you to read the very compelling materials offered on the Thunderbolts Forum by user junglelord ...

http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=933&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

Once fans of Nikola Tesla wake up to the fact that his findings make total sense within the Electric Universe framework, all hell is going to break loose!

To find out if this is happening, Terada and his colleagues targeted AE Aquarii with Suzaku in October 2005 and October 2006. The white dwarf resides in a binary system with a normal companion star. Gas from the star spirals toward the white dwarf and heats up, giving off a glow of low-energy (soft) X-rays. But Suzaku also detected sharp pulses of hard X-rays. After analyzing the data, the team realized that the hard X-ray pulses match the white dwarf's spin period of once every 33 seconds.

The hard X-ray pulsations are very similar to those of the pulsar in the center of the Crab Nebula. In both objects, the pulses appear to be radiated like a lighthouse beam, and a rotating magnetic field is thought to be controlling the beam. Astronomers think that the extremely powerful magnetic fields are trapping charged particles and then flinging them outward at near-light speed. When the particles interact with the magnetic field, they radiate X-rays.

You realize that terrestrial lightning releases x-rays too, right?

That article points to similarities in x-ray emissions to the Crab Nebula, which flickers at 30 times per second. From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/040916nebula.htm ...

The high-resolution picture of the Crab Nebula above (upper), taken by the Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows the filamentation produced by magnetic fields and electric currents, as material races away from the nebula's core at half the speed of light--a "higher speed than expected from a free explosion", according to NASA reports. Acceleration of particles is a trademark of electrical activity, and no other force in space is known to achieve this feat.

In the lower photograph taken by the Chandra X-Ray Telescope, we see the internal dynamics of the Crab Nebula, revealing structure typical of the intensely energetic activity observed in decades of laboratory experiments with electrical discharge in plasma. That these dynamics are revealed by x-rays is significant because x-ray activity always accompanies high-energy electrical interactions. The internal polar configuration is of particular interest. A torus or wheel-like structure revolves around an axial column--presenting what some have called a "doughnut on a stick". Polar columns or jets are expected in intense plasma discharge.

In their discussion of the Crab Nebula, NASA spokesmen refer to "a scintillating halo, and an intense knot of emission dancing, sprite-like, above the pulsar's pole". Though gravitational theories never envisioned the polar "jets", "haloes", and "knots" of the Crab Nebula, we can now recognize these as prime examples of electrical forces in the universe.

This object is the homopolar motor. Let me quote "The Electric Sky" on what a homopolar motor is:

"The general shape of a rotating disk carrying electric currents in the shape shown in figure 49 defines what is called the 'homopolar motor'. In 1831 Michael Faraday was the first to use this mechanism as a way to generate an electric current by moving a conducting path through a magnetic field.

When electric current is supplied to the disk, instead of being withdrawn from it, a mechanical torque is produced. Thus Faraday's device can be either an electric motor or a generator of electric power. The homopolar motor is the main element in the electric company's watt-hour meter on our homes. Its shape has been called a 'disk on a stick' or a 'doughnut on a stick'.

Not only do

So, pln2bz would have us accept that certain surface features on Io, Europa, AND Enceladus are *all* due (entirely?) to 'sputtering' or 'electric arcs', based solely (so it would seem) on certain qualitative similarities in the appearance of these features with some lab materials blasted with plasma guns^.

Nobody said anything like that, and I seriously doubt that such a statement could even possibly be defended -- which leads me to wonder about your intentions in even saying it.

However, despite the SD story having been up for over 10 days, he apparently did not bother to check the source, nor check whether Thornhill (or any other 'EU Theory' authority) commented on (or was even aware of) the apparent inconsistency; namely that the Keck results suggest the method of formation of the Enceladus features is not the same as the Io or Europa ones (for avoidance of doubt, the Keck results do not *prove* anything; such is the nature of modern science).

Why would finding differences in the amounts of sodium being excavated from each of the moons actually say anything about whether or not sputtering is happening? I don't see the logic.

What say you, pln2bz? Within the 'EU Theory' paradigm, is it legitimate to introduce evidence, concerning Enceladus' plumes in this case, beyond qualitative similarities in images? Especially when that (other) evidence is quantitative? When it is independent of the images?

Sure, but you're going to have to clarify why these findings matter for sputtering.

And if it is legitimate, how should that evidence be weighed? To what extent do the qualitative similarities trump the quantitative spectroscopic data? Or do 'EU Theorists' feel compelled to develop mathematical models of these hypothesised arcs and sputterings, to be used to test - quantitatively - how well many different sets of independent data can be accounted for (or, if you prefer, explained)?

Now that we're talking about Io and Europa, you might also try explaining why we see no volcano where Prometheus should be located on Io. From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/041216io-series-3.htm:

The photograph above was taken by the Galileo probe from a position over the plume of the "volcano" Prometheus on Jupiter's moon Io, as it spewed material 100 kilometers (62 miles) into space. The NASA release in October, 2000 reported that the insets for this photograph "were acquired to search for and image the plume vent or vents. We expected to see a small crater surrounded by radial streaks, but no such central vent can be seen in these or other images. Instead, we see bright streaks along the margins of the lava".

In the electrical interpretation, the two bright spots in the highest resolution inset are cathode arcs seen diffusely through their jets, as they continue to encircle the darker area exposed by prior etching of the surface. The hot spots are exactly where the electric model, as proposed by Wallace Thornhill, had predicted. Finding no volcano, NASA scientists were left to speculate on how a "lava lake" could generate the observed plumes and jets many miles above the surface.

Over time, the fall of sulfur dioxide snow, resulting from the etching process, will cover the darker areas in the photograph. Electric theorists identify these regions as the burnt surface of the moon exposed beneath the "snow", noting that these dark areas continually move with the movement of the Prometheus plume. Since the Voyager observations in the late 1970s, Prometheus and the exposed regions have traveled more than 80 kilometers (50 miles)!

No doubt it was this discovery that inspired one plasma scientist to find

Planetary scientists continue to perpetuate misunderstanding when they call the "Tiger Stripes" of Enceladus "cracks" that allow water to reach the surface. The channels are, in fact, precise analogs of those seen on Europa. Their frequent parallelism, their ridges or levees, and their ability to cut across all other channels in their paths stand as a definitive contradiction of the "fracturing" hypothesis. The pictures suggest something akin to a "claw" or router bit dragged across the surface in disregard for prior surface relief. That is a unique signature of an electric arc. In contrast, fracturing is invariably affected by a pre-existing surface channel or groove, as anyone who has ever worked with a glasscutter knows very well.

The puzzle of the "Tiger Stripes" parallelism can be simply explained by the phase-locked rotation of Enceladus about Saturn (it keeps the same face toward the gas giant), working in combination with the symmetrical, axially aligned magnetic field of Saturn. This unique alignment will naturally cause the magnetic field lines and their associated discharge currents to move in parallel to each other near the pole of Enceladus as it orbits Saturn. (Further constraints on the pattern may be due to a remnant intrinsic magnetic field in the south polar region).

As for the anomalous temperature readings in the region of jet activity, Thornhill suggests that the readings are way below what project scientists will find if they will measure the temperature at the focal point of a surface jet. Electric discharges become focused and hottest where they touch down on a surface. We are reminded that it was Thornhill who alone predicted that the plumes of the icy moon Io would be much hotter than NASA had ever contemplated. When the Galileo probe took a close look, the radiation overloaded the camera. NASA had not prepared for the surprise.

For background information on how anomalously high temperatures of electrical arcs were handled in the Io mission, check out http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/041217io-series-4.htm.

What I find peculiar about the situation though is that there is even so much controversy over the idea that these could be electrical arcs on Io and Enceladus. NASA already accepts that a burst of radio waves is associated with the material coming from Enceladus ...

"We have linked the pulsing radio signal to a rotating magnetic signal. Once each rotation of Saturn's magnetic field, an asymmetry in the field triggers a burst of radio waves," said Dr. David Southwood, co-author, Imperial College London, and director of science at the European Space Agency. "We have then linked both signals to material that has come from Enceladus." http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=733

That you guys and NASA continue to act as if Thornhill "owns" the idea of electrical terra-forming is a waste of everybody's time. If you see a burst of radio waves coming from Enceladus, material being thrown off of it, carved channels across the surface and very hot point sources that move across the surface associated with the rilles, are mathematical quantifications really necessary for a plasma arc to be considered as a possible explanation? I mean, NASA's image of Enceladus' atmosphere clearly depicts "Holt Plasma Flow" heading from Saturn to Enceladus, and the website attributes the magnetic field bend to "electric currents generated by the interaction of atmospheric particles and the magnetosphere of Saturn". But they just can't make the short leap from electric

Planetary scientists continue to perpetuate misunderstanding when they call the "Tiger Stripes" of Enceladus "cracks" that allow water to reach the surface. The channels are, in fact, precise analogs of those seen on Europa. Their frequent parallelism, their ridges or levees, and their ability to cut across all other channels in their paths stand as a definitive contradiction of the "fracturing" hypothesis. The pictures suggest something akin to a "claw" or router bit dragged across the surface in disregard for prior surface relief. That is a unique signature of an electric arc. In contrast, fracturing is invariably affected by a pre-existing surface channel or groove, as anyone who has ever worked with a glasscutter knows very well.

The puzzle of the "Tiger Stripes" parallelism can be simply explained by the phase-locked rotation of Enceladus about Saturn (it keeps the same face toward the gas giant), working in combination with the symmetrical, axially aligned magnetic field of Saturn. This unique alignment will naturally cause the magnetic field lines and their associated discharge currents to move in parallel to each other near the pole of Enceladus as it orbits Saturn. (Further constraints on the pattern may be due to a remnant intrinsic magnetic field in the south polar region).

As for the anomalous temperature readings in the region of jet activity, Thornhill suggests that the readings are way below what project scientists will find if they will measure the temperature at the focal point of a surface jet. Electric discharges become focused and hottest where they touch down on a surface. We are reminded that it was Thornhill who alone predicted that the plumes of the icy moon Io would be much hotter than NASA had ever contemplated. When the Galileo probe took a close look, the radiation overloaded the camera. NASA had not prepared for the surprise.

For background information on how anomalously high temperatures of electrical arcs were handled in the Io mission, check out http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/041217io-series-4.htm.

What I find peculiar about the situation though is that there is even so much controversy over the idea that these could be electrical arcs on Io and Enceladus. NASA already accepts that a burst of radio waves is associated with the material coming from Enceladus ...

"We have linked the pulsing radio signal to a rotating magnetic signal. Once each rotation of Saturn's magnetic field, an asymmetry in the field triggers a burst of radio waves," said Dr. David Southwood, co-author, Imperial College London, and director of science at the European Space Agency. "We have then linked both signals to material that has come from Enceladus." http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=733

That you guys and NASA continue to act as if Thornhill "owns" the idea of electrical terra-forming is a waste of everybody's time. If you see a burst of radio waves coming from Enceladus, material being thrown off of it, carved channels across the surface and very hot point sources that move across the surface associated with the rilles, are mathematical quantifications really necessary for a plasma arc to be considered as a possible explanation? I mean, NASA's image of Enceladus' atmosphere clearly depicts "Holt Plasma Flow" heading from Saturn to Enceladus, and the website attributes the magnetic field bend to "electric currents generated by the interaction of atmospheric particles and the magnetosphere of Saturn". But they just can't make the short leap from electric

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060313moonjets.htm

FYI, they are certainly interesting questions, but I doubt that they are 'burning' to any serious space scientist, plasma physicist, or astrophysicist. Why? If you really want to know, sign up for a PhD in one of these fields ...

If you are so independent a being from Thornhill and Scott and Talbott and Cardona et. al, with separate free will and powers of investigation, why do you find no flaws in their assertions while others do?

The reason is that I've reviewed the criticism, and my conclusion is that the debate is legitimate. There are truly two world views here. Although the numbers of supporters are not equally distributed, it's a legitimate debate between some laboratory plasma physicists and a large number of astrophysicists. I've reviewed the arguments presented by Tim Thompson; I've reviewed some of the older catastrophist materials between Carl Sagan and Velikovsky, and I've read some of Ginenthal; I've reviewed the Electric Universe materials by Don Scott and Wallace Thornhill; I've gone through the "mythological" evidence by Dwardu Cardona and Rens van der Sluis with an open mind; and I've paid very close attention to the accurate predictions that Wallace Thornhill has made, and almost more importantly, the responses to those predictions. Taken as a whole, EU Theory survives the criticism fully intact. In fact, it even presents many unresolved issues for the mainstream.

The problem is that the arguments are just far too complicated for most people to understand, and so it remains under the radar as far as the public is concerned. Many people have made the unfortunate mistake of assuming that this low visibility is a reflection upon the legitimacy of the arguments themselves. Of the few who are trained to understand astrophysical issues, the education they received clearly favored one particular cosmology. And that explains why the issue is so contentious. This is in fact a debate over whether or not their mathematics is matching the decades of laboratory research that has gone into plasma physics.

If a group of plasma physicists is arguing, for instance, that magnetic reconnection is in fact just a re-statement of exploding double layers or that there are major issues with how magnetism is treated within astrophysics, then those are *very* serious allegations that deserve a dignified response, and if possible, experimental validation one way or another. The fact that the plasma physics portion of EU Theory claims are just being ignored though for the sole reason that it is the EU Theorists who are saying them says much about the way in which astrophysicists deal with these sorts of issues.

One thing is clear to me from my readings: conventional astrophysicists completely and consistently underestimate the legitimacy of the EU Theory arguments and evidence. Many don't even know enough about it to realize that they're siding with mathematical models against lab results.

If they seem so perfect to you, is that because they are in fact so perfect or instead because of something else, such as a willing or otherwise uncritical read on your part, or?

Actually, the issue with conventional astrophysics today is that certain interpretations for observations are being completely ignored. If you look, for instance, at the Baltis Vallis on Venus, you observe a sinuous rille that spans 4,200 miles and that moves both up and down with the terrain, in apparant defiance of gravity. From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050203venusriver.htm:

"... Topographical analysis of the flow paths produced a puzzling result: some of them seem to flow uphill! Since gravity is gravity on any planet, the ground in these places must have shifted since the time the rivers ran."

Well, if we're to avoid allowing assumptions into our conclusions, then another completely legitimate explanation is that the sinuous rille was created by an electrical plasma, as we appear to also see occurring on Io and Enceladus. And we see the same exact thing with the Colorado River and the Kaibab Upwarp: rivers do not tend to punch straigh

Great points. For those interested here are some links dealing with the many issues surrounding "global warming". http://links.veronicachapman.com/OriginsOfOil.htm http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...9-68c808e8809e http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...n2871211.shtml http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/New...s/Aerosols.pdf http://nasadaacs.eos.nasa.gov/articl...6_highlow.html http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17997788/site/newsweek/?ic http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,269886,00.html http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/20_1-2_CO2_Scandal.pdf http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=438 http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/070507martianwarming.htm http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=8gfbewe7&keywords=global%20warming#dest http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071211101623.htm

Great points. For those interested here are some links dealing with the many issues surrounding "global warming". http://links.veronicachapman.com/OriginsOfOil.htm http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...9-68c808e8809e http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...n2871211.shtml http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/New...s/Aerosols.pdf http://nasadaacs.eos.nasa.gov/articl...6_highlow.html http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17997788/site/newsweek/?ic http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,269886,00.html http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/20_1-2_CO2_Scandal.pdf http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=438 http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/070507martianwarming.htm http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=8gfbewe7&keywords=global%20warming#dest http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071211101623.htm

There are huge implications. Here is an article which addresses just that. http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=8gfbewe7&keywords=global%20warming#dest Another one dealing with mars. http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/070507martianwarming.htm I thought the dust was supposed to make it colder. Wasn't that what killed the dinos? A huge meteor threw up tons of dust in the atmosphere causing an ice age. : )

I'm sure the electric universe guys will have a field day with this...

I'm not saying that comparative mythology isn't a valid field or that it can't give any useful knowledge. I'm saying that it gives knowledge about humanity and not about how stars work.

Many of the translations in ancient texts deal specifically with astronomical phenomena, and this is far easier to demonstrate than you are suggesting. You can't make blanket statements about the evidence like that. You have to look at what the translations say, along with justifications for the translations with notes on how others have performed those translations, and the logic follows from all of these facts. If you want to see the technique perfected, you should purchase a copy of "God Star" by Dwardu Cardona.

It sounds like you're implying the basis of the scientific method's power, which disallows the use of circumstantial evidence like that of mythological origin as evidence at all, is just some "urban legend" that I've been too unwitting to fathom.

But you've used no scientific method to evaluate mythology. You've instead ruled it out based upon this other evidence that you're more familiar with. If we see writings, for instance, that indicate that ancient man witnessed something specific about Venus, and the observation spans separate communities separated by oceans, then shouldn't we consider that evidence as equal to the *assumption* that all of the planets formed together at once out of a circumstellar disc? What is really so similar about Earth and Venus, other than their close proximity, that would indicate that the two planets are "sisters"?

You're the one who finds myths more convincing than telescopic observations

In EU Theory, btw, the mythological evidence and astrophysical evidences can be pursued independently, and yet point to the same thing.

and who disregards the possibility that commonalities in human psychology and culture may be the unifying thread among human tales, and not planets and orbits reshuffling themselves contrary to mechanics.

Dwardu Cardona explores in great depth the notion that mankind developed his fears of catastrophe from intense weather phenomena. He does a great job of thoroughly discrediting it. It is in fact an urban myth that you fell for.

That's such an elementary mistake that I'll assume it's a typo. Planets radiate energy at wavelengths different from those at which they absorb energy. It depends on their surface composition, atmospheric composition, geometric albedo, the power spectrum of the local star, and so on. The Bond albedo describes how this works, and it doesn't sound like you understand that. Even worse for your argument, the same thing is true of Earth! Earth is still slowly cooling too, which means it's radiating more energy than it's absorbing. The approach you should have taken is to claim that Venus emits more total power than its Bond albedo allows. It doesn't, but at least you'd have the science right.

I'll send you some materials tomorrow, and you can tell me why they are wrong.

Again, human psychology. Some small number of plasma physicists will probably see similarities to their daily experience in cave paintings. Probably in modern graffiti and abstract art too. A small number of microbiologists would probably identify flagella and cilia, and possibly the double-helix of DNA when looking at the same pictures. Should they infer knowledge of the microscope by prehistoric humans all around the world and speculate on the source of that knowledge just because they're pretty sure those must be the structures in question? Of course not, and your argument is no better.

Just so that you know what you're arguing against, you should at least look at the images ...

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/070709squatter

"It's hard for people to imagine how the atmosphere of Venus would create
lightning," says planetary scientist Larry W. Esposito of the University of
Colorado. Venus, he points out, seems to lack the lightning-generation
system so familiar in terrestrial thunderheads: strong updrafts of
condensing vapor, which provide the particles that can carry opposite
electrical charges and the vertical motions needed to separate them. (The
sudden combination of the separated charges is a stroke of lightning. ) On
Venus, the clouds tend to resemble fog banks, says Esposito. "You don't see
much lightning in fog," he notes.

News of the announcement ...

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/071130blazingmane.htm

The planet Venus plays a critical role in EU Theory, as ancient cultures record its arrival as a comet-like body. It has been a contention for decades now that Venus is still cooling off from a catastrophic event.

Tim Thompson has spent much time trying to debunk EU Theory. His websites are frequently referenced by people as apparent proof that EU Theory is not true, but Tim Thompson has had a bad week. It's funny how all of these online conversations just fall into a black hole when enough time goes by. As a recap, Wal Thornhill clearly won this debate against Tim Thompson ...

From http://www.kronia.com/thoth/thoth14.txt:

[EDITOR'S NOTE: IN PREVIOUS POSTS WALLACE THORNHILL
HAS CONTENDED THAT THE PLANET VENUS SHOWS SUBSTANTIAL
EVIDENCE OF ELECTRICAL INTERACTION WITH ITS ENVIRONMENT,
A CONDITION SUGGESTING BOTH AN ELECTRICAL IMBALANCE
AND AN UNUSUAL, "COMET"-LIKE HISTORY.]

[Wal Thornhill, continuing his dialogue with Tim Thompson]:
>> The Venera spacecraft found continuous lightning activity from 32km down
>> to about 2km altitude, with discharges as frequent as an amazing 25 per
>> second. The highest recorded rate on Earth is 1.4/sec during a severe
>> blizzard. The Pioneer lander recorded 1000 radio impulses. Thirty-two
>> minutes after landing, Venera 11 detected a very loud (82 decibel) noise
>> which was believed to be thunder. Garry Hunt suggested at the time that:
>> '... the Venusians may well be glowing from the nearly continuous
>> discharges of those frequent lightning strokes'. A 'mysterious glow' was
>> detected coming from the surface at a height of 16km by 2 Pioneer probes
>> as they descended on the night hemisphere. The glow increased on descent
>> and may have been caused by a form of St. Elmo's fire and/or chemical
>> reactions in the atmosphere, close to the surface.

[Tim Thompson:]
>I cannot trace or verify Thornhill's remarks with regards >the Venera
>spacecraft. (PIB -- I assume Mr. Thornhill's original paper for the SIS
>included such references. Perhaps Mr. Thornhill or someone from the
>SIS can get a copy to Mr. Thompson for his perusal.) While the initial
>reports of lightning from Pioneer are easily available [1,2,3], those
>from Venera appear not to be [4,5], as they were published in obscure,
>or difficult to obtain sources. The Pioneer lightning detections were
>based on the observation of whistler mode waves (about 100 Hertz) when
>the orbiter neared periapse. The interpretation of those waves as
>lightning, supported by Scarf et al. [3], continues to be a matter of
>considerable controversy. There are a number of ionospheric processes

Like what? Let me guess: black holes?

If a person never read any criticism of black holes, then they could be forgiven for not realizing that the theory of black holes has adjusted over time to reflect observations. For instance, it was once thought that black holes were so powerful that nothing could escape them. Then, black holes were observed to possess jets coming out of them that involved intense magnetic fields and particles moving at near the speed of light, and the theories had to be modified. There's a great critique of black hole theory on Wallace Thornhill's holoscience site (http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=tyybhrr8). If you can read that criticism and maintain a solid belief in black holes, then I'd have to at a minimum give you credit for actually challenging your own belief system.

While sciencists are only humans, like we are all, they should give predecence of observations over belief system, as you say. And I think they doing pretty good, weeding out mistakes and cheats.

It would certainly seem this way if you weren't paying close attention, at least. After all, how would you notice all of the people that are being blacklisted and outright dismissed? Have you seen this site?

http://www.crank.net/

If you do any history of science reading, you will find that it is inevitable that some ideas within the fringes of science today will eventually make their way into the mainstream, and become accepted fact. Sites like this prefer that scientists be dismissed for the sole reason that they advocate theories that are not currently conventional. I can guarantee you that some of the people being ridiculed on this site will one day be vindicated.

But I can get more specific on this point. Wallace Thornhill made numerous predictions regarding the 1995 Deep Impact Mission based upon the concept of the Electric Sun Hypothesis:

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050704predictions.htm [thunderbolts.info]
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050630deepimpact.htm [thunderbolts.info]

Interestingly, the predictions were Slashdotted:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/03/1246254 [slashdot.org]

Now, if you go through those forum postings from Slashdot, you will observe that Slashdot readers make absolutely no distinction whatsoever between ridiculing an astrophysical PREDICTION and ridiculing an astrophysical theory. This is a very serious problem because predictions are the most powerful tool that astrophysicists have for validating theories. When it was subsequently discovered that Wallace Thornhill was right in nearly every single aspect of his prediction, there was no retraction by any of those people and no announcement by the moderators at Slashdot. Mention of the successful prediction was also eventually completely sanitized from wikipedia many years later. Clearly, they did such a good job that you've never heard of the entire situation.

One of Thornhill's successful predictions was that there would be a pre-impact flash -- something which nobody else was actually predicting at the time. There were in fact two flashes at the time of impact. Furthermore, images of Tempel 1 just prior to impact demonstrate clear whiteouts (arguably from electrical arcing ... http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050705impression.htm [thunderbolts.info]).

What you learn when you look into these things is that scientists dismiss ideas that they consider absurd withou

Like what? Let me guess: black holes?

If a person never read any criticism of black holes, then they could be forgiven for not realizing that the theory of black holes has adjusted over time to reflect observations. For instance, it was once thought that black holes were so powerful that nothing could escape them. Then, black holes were observed to possess jets coming out of them that involved intense magnetic fields and particles moving at near the speed of light, and the theories had to be modified. There's a great critique of black hole theory on Wallace Thornhill's holoscience site (http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=tyybhrr8). If you can read that criticism and maintain a solid belief in black holes, then I'd have to at a minimum give you credit for actually challenging your own belief system.

While sciencists are only humans, like we are all, they should give predecence of observations over belief system, as you say. And I think they doing pretty good, weeding out mistakes and cheats.

It would certainly seem this way if you weren't paying close attention, at least. After all, how would you notice all of the people that are being blacklisted and outright dismissed? Have you seen this site?

http://www.crank.net/

If you do any history of science reading, you will find that it is inevitable that some ideas within the fringes of science today will eventually make their way into the mainstream, and become accepted fact. Sites like this prefer that scientists be dismissed for the sole reason that they advocate theories that are not currently conventional. I can guarantee you that some of the people being ridiculed on this site will one day be vindicated.

But I can get more specific on this point. Wallace Thornhill made numerous predictions regarding the 1995 Deep Impact Mission based upon the concept of the Electric Sun Hypothesis:

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050704predictions.htm [thunderbolts.info]
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050630deepimpact.htm [thunderbolts.info]

Interestingly, the predictions were Slashdotted:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/03/1246254 [slashdot.org]

Now, if you go through those forum postings from Slashdot, you will observe that Slashdot readers make absolutely no distinction whatsoever between ridiculing an astrophysical PREDICTION and ridiculing an astrophysical theory. This is a very serious problem because predictions are the most powerful tool that astrophysicists have for validating theories. When it was subsequently discovered that Wallace Thornhill was right in nearly every single aspect of his prediction, there was no retraction by any of those people and no announcement by the moderators at Slashdot. Mention of the successful prediction was also eventually completely sanitized from wikipedia many years later. Clearly, they did such a good job that you've never heard of the entire situation.

One of Thornhill's successful predictions was that there would be a pre-impact flash -- something which nobody else was actually predicting at the time. There were in fact two flashes at the time of impact. Furthermore, images of Tempel 1 just prior to impact demonstrate clear whiteouts (arguably from electrical arcing ... http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050705impression.htm [thunderbolts.info]).

What you learn when you look into these things is that scientists dismiss ideas that they consider absurd withou

Like what? Let me guess: black holes?

If a person never read any criticism of black holes, then they could be forgiven for not realizing that the theory of black holes has adjusted over time to reflect observations. For instance, it was once thought that black holes were so powerful that nothing could escape them. Then, black holes were observed to possess jets coming out of them that involved intense magnetic fields and particles moving at near the speed of light, and the theories had to be modified. There's a great critique of black hole theory on Wallace Thornhill's holoscience site (http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=tyybhrr8). If you can read that criticism and maintain a solid belief in black holes, then I'd have to at a minimum give you credit for actually challenging your own belief system.

While sciencists are only humans, like we are all, they should give predecence of observations over belief system, as you say. And I think they doing pretty good, weeding out mistakes and cheats.

It would certainly seem this way if you weren't paying close attention, at least. After all, how would you notice all of the people that are being blacklisted and outright dismissed? Have you seen this site?

http://www.crank.net/

If you do any history of science reading, you will find that it is inevitable that some ideas within the fringes of science today will eventually make their way into the mainstream, and become accepted fact. Sites like this prefer that scientists be dismissed for the sole reason that they advocate theories that are not currently conventional. I can guarantee you that some of the people being ridiculed on this site will one day be vindicated.

But I can get more specific on this point. Wallace Thornhill made numerous predictions regarding the 1995 Deep Impact Mission based upon the concept of the Electric Sun Hypothesis:

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050704predictions.htm [thunderbolts.info]
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050630deepimpact.htm [thunderbolts.info]

Interestingly, the predictions were Slashdotted:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/03/1246254 [slashdot.org]

Now, if you go through those forum postings from Slashdot, you will observe that Slashdot readers make absolutely no distinction whatsoever between ridiculing an astrophysical PREDICTION and ridiculing an astrophysical theory. This is a very serious problem because predictions are the most powerful tool that astrophysicists have for validating theories. When it was subsequently discovered that Wallace Thornhill was right in nearly every single aspect of his prediction, there was no retraction by any of those people and no announcement by the moderators at Slashdot. Mention of the successful prediction was also eventually completely sanitized from wikipedia many years later. Clearly, they did such a good job that you've never heard of the entire situation.

One of Thornhill's successful predictions was that there would be a pre-impact flash -- something which nobody else was actually predicting at the time. There were in fact two flashes at the time of impact. Furthermore, images of Tempel 1 just prior to impact demonstrate clear whiteouts (arguably from electrical arcing ... http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050705impression.htm [thunderbolts.info]).

What you learn when you look into these things is that scientists dismiss ideas that they consider absurd withou

In effect, there is only "science"; there is no "mainstream" vs. "fringe". If there's observation in support of a scientific model, then that is the model that "mainstream" science will accept, ipso facto.

Let me first congratulate the mainstream on their ability to agree on everything. When you rule out the alternatives within your assumptions, though, it does become a bit easier to find common ground.

Your views on astrophysical observations seem to me very parochial. You completely leave out the fact that there is plenty of debate on the interpretation of observations. For instance, you completely ignore the debate over Halton Arp's observations, suggesting that there is no meaningful debate over his observations of low-redshift quasars connected to or in front of higher redshift galaxies.

You also completely ignore the fact that many scientists have spent their entire lifetimes unsuccessfully pursuing acceptance of their theories only to have their theories vindicated or co-opted after their death. Kristian Birkeland, for instance, struggled his entire lifetime to convince Sydney Chapman and the British that the aurora were caused by the Sun. Chapman repeatedly ridiculed Birkeland's theory even though he himself had proposed something similar before he was admonished for it. Like many people who ridicule EU Theory, Chapman didn't even have his facts straight enough to know what he was arguing against; he thought Birkeland was arguing that the Sun only sent protons. In fact, Birkeland was arguing that it was only the solar protons that were creating the aurora.

The entire mess with the source of the aurora was of course the result of a throwaway comment by Lord Kelvin. Kelvin's star power blinded a lot of people to the fact that he was sometimes full of shit. The same thing happened with Carl Sagan and Velikovsky.

Your view that science is pure and virginal, and unaffected by social drama or public preferences and prejudices is a bit naive. I mean, clearly you can tell that the public *likes* Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, black holes, wormholes, multiple-dimensioned universes and other various esoteric concepts that may defy common sense. The public does not like these things because they have sifted through the evidence themselves and identified these concepts as being more true than other ideas in astrophysics. The majority of the public likes them because they are fascinating -- like science fiction. They induce a sense of wonder in space that adds to their mundane lives here on Earth. More mundane theories that involve electricity over space plasmas have a hard time competing with black holes, which many people have developed emotional attachments with. When I told my girlfriend that black holes do not exist, she said, "But I *like* black holes!" Precisely.

If it is apparent to once practitioner of science that a model is optimal, it is so apparent to all practitioners of science. Information travels fast these days, so the lag from the establishment of "proof" (in the sense of supporting evidence) to widespread knowledge of that "proof" is short.

With such a simple model in place for understanding science, one wonders why people even bother studying the history or philosophy of science.

Let's review a specific example for why this is complete nonsense. Wallace Thornhill made numerous predictions regarding the Deep Impact Mission based upon the concept of the Electric Sun Hypothesis:

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050704predictions.htm
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050630deepimpact.htm

Interestingly, the predictions were Slashdotted:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/03/1246254

In effect, there is only "science"; there is no "mainstream" vs. "fringe". If there's observation in support of a scientific model, then that is the model that "mainstream" science will accept, ipso facto.

Let me first congratulate the mainstream on their ability to agree on everything. When you rule out the alternatives within your assumptions, though, it does become a bit easier to find common ground.

Your views on astrophysical observations seem to me very parochial. You completely leave out the fact that there is plenty of debate on the interpretation of observations. For instance, you completely ignore the debate over Halton Arp's observations, suggesting that there is no meaningful debate over his observations of low-redshift quasars connected to or in front of higher redshift galaxies.

You also completely ignore the fact that many scientists have spent their entire lifetimes unsuccessfully pursuing acceptance of their theories only to have their theories vindicated or co-opted after their death. Kristian Birkeland, for instance, struggled his entire lifetime to convince Sydney Chapman and the British that the aurora were caused by the Sun. Chapman repeatedly ridiculed Birkeland's theory even though he himself had proposed something similar before he was admonished for it. Like many people who ridicule EU Theory, Chapman didn't even have his facts straight enough to know what he was arguing against; he thought Birkeland was arguing that the Sun only sent protons. In fact, Birkeland was arguing that it was only the solar protons that were creating the aurora.

The entire mess with the source of the aurora was of course the result of a throwaway comment by Lord Kelvin. Kelvin's star power blinded a lot of people to the fact that he was sometimes full of shit. The same thing happened with Carl Sagan and Velikovsky.

Your view that science is pure and virginal, and unaffected by social drama or public preferences and prejudices is a bit naive. I mean, clearly you can tell that the public *likes* Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, black holes, wormholes, multiple-dimensioned universes and other various esoteric concepts that may defy common sense. The public does not like these things because they have sifted through the evidence themselves and identified these concepts as being more true than other ideas in astrophysics. The majority of the public likes them because they are fascinating -- like science fiction. They induce a sense of wonder in space that adds to their mundane lives here on Earth. More mundane theories that involve electricity over space plasmas have a hard time competing with black holes, which many people have developed emotional attachments with. When I told my girlfriend that black holes do not exist, she said, "But I *like* black holes!" Precisely.

If it is apparent to once practitioner of science that a model is optimal, it is so apparent to all practitioners of science. Information travels fast these days, so the lag from the establishment of "proof" (in the sense of supporting evidence) to widespread knowledge of that "proof" is short.

With such a simple model in place for understanding science, one wonders why people even bother studying the history or philosophy of science.

Let's review a specific example for why this is complete nonsense. Wallace Thornhill made numerous predictions regarding the Deep Impact Mission based upon the concept of the Electric Sun Hypothesis:

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050704predictions.htm
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050630deepimpact.htm

Interestingly, the predictions were Slashdotted:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/03/1246254

Science is unique to human activities in that it possesses vast areas of certain knowledge. The collective opinion of scientists in these areas about any problem covered by them will almost always be correct. It is unlikely that much in these areas will be chaned in the future, even in a thousand years. And because technology rests almost exclusively on these areas the products of technology work as they are intended to.

But for areas of uncertain knowledge the story is very different. Indeed, the story is pretty well the exact opposite, with the collective opinion of scientists almost always incorrect. There is an easy proof of this statement. Because of the large number of scientists nowadays and because of the large financial support which they enjoy, certain problems would mostly have been cleared up already if it were otherwise. So you can be pretty certain that wherever problems resist solution for an appreciable time by an appreciable number of scientists the ideas used for attacking them must be wrong. It is therefore a mistake to have anything to do with popular ideas for solving uncertain issues, and the more respectable the ideas may be the more certain it is that they are wrong.

Science is unique to human activities in that it possesses vast areas of certain knowledge. The collective opinion of scientists in these areas about any problem covered by them will almost always be correct. It is unlikely that much in these areas will be chaned in the future, even in a thousand years. And because technology rests almost exclusively on these areas the products of technology work as they are intended to.

But for areas of uncertain knowledge the story is very different. Indeed, the story is pretty well the exact opposite, with the collective opinion of scientists almost always incorrect. There is an easy proof of this statement. Because of the large number of scientists nowadays and because of the large financial support which they enjoy, certain problems would mostly have been cleared up already if it were otherwise. So you can be pretty certain that wherever problems resist solution for an appreciable time by an appreciable number of scientists the ideas used for attacking them must be wrong. It is therefore a mistake to have anything to do with popular ideas for solving uncertain issues, and the more respectable the ideas may be the more certain it is that they are wrong.

William Hartmann, senior scientist of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said the new findings are compelling but do not address all of the lingering questions about the event.

In the case of the Tunguska event, some of the most compelling evidence comes from those who experienced the terror first hand. In 1928, I. M. Suslov recorded the following testimony from a member of Shanyagir tribe (this taken from the Wikipedia site)--

"We had a hut by the river with my brother Chekaren. We were sleeping. Suddenly we both woke up at the same time. Somebody shoved us. We heard whistling and felt strong wind. Chekaren said, "can you hear all those birds flying overhead?" We were both in the hut, couldn't see what was going on outside. Suddenly, I got shoved again, this time so hard I fell into the fire. I got scared. Chekaren got scared too. We started crying for out father, mother, brother, but no one answered.

"There was noise beyond the hut, we could hear trees falling down. Me and Chekaren got out of our sleeping bags and wanted to run out, but then the thunder struck. This was the first thunder. The Earth began to move and rock, wind hit our hut and knocked it over. My body was pushed down by sticks, but my head was in the clear. Then I saw a wonder: trees were falling, the branches were on fire, it became mighty bright, how can I say this, as if there was a second sun, my eyes were hurting, I even closed them. It was like what the Russians call lightning. And immediately there was a loud thunderclap. This was the second thunder. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our Sun was shining brightly as usual, and suddenly there came a second one!

Me and Chekaren had some difficulty getting under from the remains of our hut. Then we saw that above, but in a different place, there was another flash, and loud thunder came. This was the third thunder strike. Wind came again, knocked us off our feet, struck against the fallen trees.

"We looked at the fallen trees, watched the tree tops get snapped off, watched the fires. Suddenly Chekaren yelled "Look up" and pointed with his hand. I looked there and saw another flash, and it made another thunder. But the noise was less than before. This was the fourth strike, like normal thunder.

"Now I remember well there was also one more thunder strike, but it was small, and somewhere far away, where the Sun goes to sleep".

William Hartmann, senior scientist of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said the new findings are compelling but do not address all of the lingering questions about the event.

In the case of the Tunguska event, some of the most compelling evidence comes from those who experienced the terror first hand. In 1928, I. M. Suslov recorded the following testimony from a member of Shanyagir tribe (this taken from the Wikipedia site)--

"We had a hut by the river with my brother Chekaren. We were sleeping. Suddenly we both woke up at the same time. Somebody shoved us. We heard whistling and felt strong wind. Chekaren said, "can you hear all those birds flying overhead?" We were both in the hut, couldn't see what was going on outside. Suddenly, I got shoved again, this time so hard I fell into the fire. I got scared. Chekaren got scared too. We started crying for out father, mother, brother, but no one answered.

"There was noise beyond the hut, we could hear trees falling down. Me and Chekaren got out of our sleeping bags and wanted to run out, but then the thunder struck. This was the first thunder. The Earth began to move and rock, wind hit our hut and knocked it over. My body was pushed down by sticks, but my head was in the clear. Then I saw a wonder: trees were falling, the branches were on fire, it became mighty bright, how can I say this, as if there was a second sun, my eyes were hurting, I even closed them. It was like what the Russians call lightning. And immediately there was a loud thunderclap. This was the second thunder. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our Sun was shining brightly as usual, and suddenly there came a second one!

Me and Chekaren had some difficulty getting under from the remains of our hut. Then we saw that above, but in a different place, there was another flash, and loud thunder came. This was the third thunder strike. Wind came again, knocked us off our feet, struck against the fallen trees.

"We looked at the fallen trees, watched the tree tops get snapped off, watched the fires. Suddenly Chekaren yelled "Look up" and pointed with his hand. I looked there and saw another flash, and it made another thunder. But the noise was less than before. This was the fourth strike, like normal thunder.

"Now I remember well there was also one more thunder strike, but it was small, and somewhere far away, where the Sun goes to sleep".

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/image07/070705lakecheko.jpg

On October 1, 1820, Humphrey Davy swept into the laboratory of the Roayl Institution with remarkable news for Michael Faraday. While performing a demonstration before a science class, Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted had noticed that an electrical current flowing in a wire moved a nearby magnetic compass needle. Whenever Oersted brought the compass toward the wire, something wrested the needle from its tenuous alignment with the earth's magnetic field and swung it in a different direction. Evidently, current in a wire creates its own halo of force -- later proved to be a magnetic field, not from an ordinary magnet, but from an electrical impostor. Oersted's observation confirmed what some scientists had suspected: Electricity and magnetism were fundamentally related. (This hunch was based on a philosophical stance that all forces are manifestations of a single fundamental force; scientists today are still trying to prove such a "grand uninified theory."

That no one before Oersted had observed the magnetic aspect of electricity may seem astonishing in retrospect, especially when battery-powered electric circuits were common in 1820s-era laboratories, and compasses had been around for centuries. True, the influence of a current-carrying wire on a compass needle can be subtle. (I've tried. It helps to wrap the wire several times around the compass to concentrate the magnetic effect.) But, more important, most scientists at the time had been educated (indoctrinated?) to believe that electricity and magnetism were distinct phenomena. In France, for example, where the ideas of the influential eighteenth-century physicist Charles Coulomb dominated the scientific community, electricity and magnetism were understood to be different fluids that do not interact with each other. After Oersted's announcement, physicist Andre-Marie Ampere lamented to a friend, "You are quite right to say that it is inconceivable that for twenty years no one tried the action of the voltaic pile on a magnet. I believe, however, that I can assign a cause for this; it lies in Coulomb's hypothesis on the nature of magnetic action; this hypothesis was believed as though it were a fact [and] it rejected any idea of action between electricity and the so-called magnetic wires. This prohibition was such that when [physicist] M Arago spoke of these new phenomena at the Institute, they w

The study, detailed in the Oct. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal, also found the comet tail acted as a source of electrons for the solar wind.

The solar wind consists of charged atoms that are missing most of their electrons, but Ulysses found that solar wind particles passing through the comet's atmosphere could regain some of those electrons. The particles exhibit a different charge when they do this, which SWICS can detect.

Both findings are a surprise to scientists. Thomas Zurbuchen, a study team member at the University of Michigan (U-M), likened Ulysses' pass through the comet tail to putting your hand in the waters of Lake Michigan and pulling out a fish.

The abstract wrote:
Recent studies suggest that flux-tube-like structures may exist in the solar wind. In this scenario, the solar wind plasma are confined in many individual flux tubes and plasma in these flux tubes move independently from each other. Within each flux tubes, the (MHD) turbulence is due to the local non-linear dynamics. Across the boundaries between adjacent flux tubes, however, the (MHD) turbulence receives another contribution from the sudden change of magnetic field directions between different flux tubes. Thus the solar wind turbulence will naturally be of multiscale and intermittent. In this paper, using the procedure we developed in [1], we analyze magnetic field data obtained from Ulysses spacecraft in both fast and slow solar wind, at various radii and latitudes. Our results show flux tubes exist in both the fast and the slow solar wind. ©2007 American Institute of Physics