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So these brown dwarfs are essentially big balls of (mostly) hydrogen with the centers under tremendous pressures and temperatures but not quite hot enough to "light" (in a fusion sense). Well what would happen if you managed to drop a fusion bomb on it?

"Fusion" bombs fuse Deuterium and Tritium. Brown dwarfs already fuse Deuterium and Tritium for the part of their life cycle. That's what makes them brown dwarfs and not planets.

http://cronodon.com/SpaceTech/BrownDwarf.html

In order to create a real star, you need proton fusion. But that requires maintaining necessary heat and pressure for millions of years. If the gravity of the brown dwarf and the native deuterium and tritium couldn't do it then it is unlikely that your puny little H-bomb is going to accomplish much.

http://www.tim-thompson.com/fusion.html#ppcycle

Except that nothing makes sense in biology except in light of evolution. Therefore all biologists are evolutionists. They're probably also all cell theoryists, germ theoryists, gravitationalists, atomists, plate techtonicists....and I note that your stance on radiocarbon dating is both a) wrong and b) an unsupported assertion. Why don't you read up on it before disparaging something that you are ignorant of?

After rebooting the router, I can give you W.T. Bridgman's review of "The Electric Sky" and Tim Thompson's review of the electric sun idea, and a follow-up.

After rebooting the router, I can give you W.T. Bridgman's review of "The Electric Sky" and Tim Thompson's review of the electric sun idea, and a follow-up.

After rebooting the router, I can give you W.T. Bridgman's review of "The Electric Sky" and Tim Thompson's review of the electric sun idea, and a follow-up.

After rebooting the router, I can give you W.T. Bridgman's review of "The Electric Sky" and Tim Thompson's review of the electric sun idea, and a follow-up.

Pretty darned difficult:

Even at temperatures in the sun's core, 15,000,000 Kelvins or 27,000,000 Fahrenheit, the average lifetime of a proton against pp fusion is about 8,000,000,000 years.

http://www.tim-thompson.com/fusion.html

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'm guessing by your response that you believe their theory. Honestly, I had completely forgotten about them after Deep Impact because they were wrong about the outcome of the collision.

Even so, I'll see your link and raise you another: Electric sun

(Full disclosure: I believe in String Theory, even though it rarely makes predictions that can be proven in a lab. I also follow the Ekpyrotic universe model, which is almost as out there as the Electric Universe theory.)

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.

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.

To be completely fair, I haven't done due diligence with the Electric Universe model recently. I tried doing that once with the flat-Earthers to figure out how it all worked. After reading about 10,000 posts of back-and-forth I decided that sometimes the crazy theories really are crazy and not worth investigating. I read pro- and con- arguments for EU back before the Deep Impact mission and haven't looked at it since. I'm not really likely to have my mind changed now, but I'll browse their site(s) to see if they've made any new predictions.

The Electric Sky has been pretty thoroughly debunked. For example.

Both diminish the same way[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mass of a star is only a secondary effect.

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

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

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

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

"It also fits well the model of the sun being a *source* of the solar
wind plasma, which will stretch out the magnetic field as seen. A nice
confirmation of the standard theory. However, if the sun is the focus
of an electrical discharge, then the solar wind should be in-bound
instead of out-bound. Or, more precisely, an electric current should be
in-bound. But such is not the case; protons and electrons both flee the
sun rapidly in all directions, consistent with a thermally driven wind,
and inconsistent with an electrical origin. The field and plasma
observation actually serves to *disprove* the electric star hypothesis,
and to confirm the standard theory."

http://www.tim-thompson.com/grey-areas.html

You try to pretend that astro-physicists ignore the electro- side of electromagnetism. They obviously have a close relationship. Without going into the many other flaws of Electric Universe theory, where are the electrons flowing back towards the sun from this supposed electrical current between the sun and earth?

Actually, the evidence and observations often directly contradict the electric universe theories, and they just ignore the studies they don't like - then claim that standard model astrophysicists are ignoring the electro- side of electromagnetism, as seen upthread.

No true scientist is afraid of being proved wrong, they embrace it and use it to improve their work. Electric Universe proponents rarely provide ways for their theories to be falsified, and when what should be there according to their theories isn't, it's because we're not looking hard enough/in the right places/with the right equipment.

Electric fields disrupt plasma, magnetic fields contain them from observation, plus magnetic fields are much bigger than electrical fields in the sun's corona, plus where is the flow of electrons back towards the sun? Electric Universe proponents have no explanation for where all the energy is coming from that concentrates in the 'pinch areas' of stars. It shares many of the same characteristics as the over-unity (free energy) crowd. Standard model nuclear fusion matches many observations, though there's still some kinks around neutrinos.

I'm no astro-physicist, but of the research I've done into this, the majority of Electric Universe theories are poorly thought out horse pucky that don't match observational data, that try to explain holes in standard theory that aren't there.

http://www.tim-thompson.com/grey-areas.html

"It also fits well the model of the sun being a *source* of the solar
wind plasma, which will stretch out the magnetic field as seen. A nice
confirmation of the standard theory. However, if the sun is the focus
of an electrical discharge, then the solar wind should be in-bound
instead of out-bound. Or, more precisely, an electric current should be
in-bound. But such is not the case; protons and electrons both flee the
sun rapidly in all directions, consistent with a thermally driven wind,
and inconsistent with an electrical origin. The field and plasma
observation actually serves to *disprove* the electric star hypothesis,
and to confirm the standard theory."

I also don't mean something LOSING genetic information.

Also, speaking of the sun, did you know the sun burns off about 5 feet of nuclear material a day? That means if you step back in time the sun is much larger than it is now. Its a problem for evolutionists who think the earth HAD to be here for BILLIONS of years. You see, when you go back a few thousand years the sun is much larger, but not so big as to cause problems for life. But when you go back hundreds of thousands, much less millions of years, you get a sun so big that the earth's surface would be thousands of degrees hotter than currently. Temperatures that would liquefy iron are not conducive to life.

The electric Universe has been throughly debunked.
On the Electric Sun Hypothesis

Then there's way a few of them make stupid claims such as astronomers and physicists don't study plasma or electromagnetics in school, which is so ridiculous I don't even know what to say.

The real issue is this: if you took a list of the fundamental challenges that EU Theorists disagree with mainstream astrophysicists on to a laboratory plasma physicist, would he agree with those fundamental challenges? Namely ...

1. That plasma is scalable over a very large order of magnitudes. In other words, we can reproduce many observations of plasmas in space using laboratory plasma experiments here on Earth.

2. That magnetic and electric fields are the inseparable result of electric currents (they can induce currents, yes, but are themselves the result of moving electric charges).

3. That instantaneous charge neutralization never occurs in the real, physical world. Plasmas are not actually perfect conductors. Space plasmas will tend to be low in charge density, but high in charge mobility. Weak electric fields can and do exist inside of them.

4. That the frozen-in-place magnetic field concept is bogus. It's originator, Alfven, preferred the term "pseudo-pedagogical", which he used to describe the concept in his Nobel Physics acceptance speech in 1970. In reality, moving magnetic fields within a plasma create electric currents.

5. That the concept of magnetic reconnection is a farse that has never been observed. Instead, what has been observed is the release of large amounts of energy from magnetic fields in which it was previously stored. The theory of magnetic reconnection is redundant of physical laboratory plasma processes that we already understand. Magnetic field lines are nothing more than instantaneous descriptors of the magnitude and direction of a vector field. They do not "open up", "merge", "recombine", "twist", "dance" or whatever the latest popular term on space.com is.

6. The practice of wholesale modeling of space plasmas as fluids is flawed. Gases become electrical plasmas with less than 1% ionization within the laboratory, and electrical plasmas do not respond to gravity when in the presence of even a very weak electric or magnetic field. That would tend to extremely limit the application of fluids equations for plasmas, and essentially negates the practical usefulness of any model that attempts to portray space plasmas as fluids governed primarily by gravity.

The question is: would the laboratory plasma physicist agree with these statements that EU Theorists propose. The answer is quite certainly and undoubtedly, yes. Mainstream astrophysics has unfortunately become increasingly divorced from laboratory physics work, instead opting to substitute in invisible particles and forces to make up for their postulation that plasmas cannot do anything of importance when they transfer electrical charges.

Tim Thompson, a physicist with JPL, has addressed some more of the EU claims, particularly the problems they claim with the standard model: http://www.tim-thompson.com/electric-sun.html

That material was ge

I tried to take it seriously, but it immediately started falling apart when I took a look at it. For example, EU counters the explanation that the sun runs on fusion (primary evidence being a 40 year old and since resolved issue with neutrino counts). Yet experiments here on earth verify that fusion should occur under the conditions found in the sun (temperature, density, nuclear bonding energies, etc). Another problem is how the sun would have gotten its supposed massive positive charge while condensing from free gas and dust...a state in which charge imbalances should sort themselves out on the large scale extremely rapidly compared to gravitational condensation, since the EM force is 10^36 times as strong.

Then there's way a few of them make stupid claims such as astronomers and physicists don't study plasma or electromagnetics in school, which is so ridiculous I don't even know what to say. I'm just a lowly engineer, but even we got into effects central both the standard model and EU like the Lorentz force in freshmen physics class. Ad hominem is not a valid counter-argument, I admit, but it would greatly help me trust them if they tried to retain a little credibility.

Heck, I'm not sure you're even following EU properly. From what I've studied on it, I haven't seen any proposal for a way a planet would "puff out in an attempt to gather more electrical energy." I'd love to see a diagram of the forces causing that.

Tim Thompson, a physicist with JPL, has addressed some more of the EU claims, particularly the problems they claim with the standard model: http://www.tim-thompson.com/electric-sun.html

"The explanation has been provided."

But has failed to convince these guys who correctly categorise "The Electric Sky" as a popularization and point to an excellent critique of the book.

If you are so eager to be a skeptic then start testing YOUR ideas and acknowledging their known flaws. If you do have the courage to test your convictions you will also notice that these "established scientists" are actively looking at alternatives to the big bang that involve plasma, including those that appear in popular science.

If you cared, you could easily find many pages debunking the "electric universe" theory. e.g. http://www.tim-thompson.com/electric-sun.html

There are no shortage of crackpot physics theories supported by allegedly upstanding scientists. Often it's not even anyone's fault. Someone sees a sliver of evidence for some wild theory and latches on to it, wildly grasping at straws to support it. It's human nature, but most scientists manage to overcome the desire to selectively interpret evidence for their own purposes.

http://www.steorn.net/
http://www.rexresearch.com/coler/coler2.htm
http://www.blacklightpower.com/
http://www.relativitychallenge.com/
http://www.thefinaltheory.com/

If you want to debunk current science, start by learning modern physics and the experiments used to defend modern physics. You can't effectively criticize theories when you don't know what they say or how past experiments have validated them.

The above crackpot sites might not even be wrong. It could be that the scientific establishment is corrupt, misinterpreting evidence, and unreasonably trying to squash competing theories. However, the way those crackpots are going about trying to disprove currently accepted physics is simply the wrong way to go about it. If any of them would design a repeatable experiment that conflicts with existing theories, they'd become instantly famous. Why don't they? Either they're lazy or they're frauds. In either case, they have no business calling themselves scientists.

http://tim-thompson.com/electric-sun.html

This is an actual scientist response to the electric sun junk arguments. ...

Here's what a *actual* protoscience looks like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory

Here's what psuedoscience looks like: "The current scientific establishment has been brainwashed into believing the standard model because of (*) and our model is much better but being unfairly discrimintated against by (whatever)"

* conspriracy, conformity, stupidity, etc.

The main practitioners of electric universe are themselves unversed in actual science, and the main proponents are completely scientifically illiterate laymen.

---

How does the scientific community treat ideas that are true but challenge basic assumptions? See Einstein. He was an outsider whose idea actually worked. So he was accepted when his predictions turned out to be right. He got friction, but in the face of evidence, everyone came around.

How to current unaccepted ideas that may or may not be valid look? String theory. When people call it unscientific, their response is not calling the rest of the science community a conspiracy and stupid, or getting laymen support to troll message boards, but working more on thier theory. It might be crap. It might not be. In either case it's a scientific idea, and if usefull it'll become part of the standard model, if not it'll be thrown away.

I would like to point out that the sun emits UV in the same ranges as Cerenkov, so the green cannot be due to any additional UV emitted by theorized nuclear processes. I am also skeptical of the frequency doubling/halving aspects of the argument; doubling typically requires an extremely regular crystal structure, and besides, a Maxwellian distribution of cloud material does not conceptually lend itself to a narrow range of color output.

Your mention of fusion is interesting. The natural abundance of deuterium is extremely low, and proton-proton fusion is so energetically improbable that even in the sun the average proton lifetime is 8 billion years. Therefore I find the argument extremely hard to stomach.

The other issue with your particle accelerator analogy is the lack of a vacuum to operate in. I agree there's tremendous amounts of energy being moved around, and a large potential difference, but no particle is going to traverse the entire electric field without hitting something and being effectively slowed down. Particle accelerators have to run their beamlines in vacuum for that reason.

Production of deuterium is a nuclear process, because you're slapping a neutron and a proton together.

p + p -> d + e + nu

The timescale/temperature required for this is "practical" only in the sun.

See http://www.tim-thompson.com/fusion.html#ppcycle

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

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

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

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

Chuckle. Just ten days ago I wrote a post about the Electric Universe theory and even had a link to the Thunderbolts.info website. If you want a more serious review of Electric Universe here's a JPL scientist's site on the subject.

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If carbon dating us unreliable past a few thousand years, as you say, what's a more reliable dating method past that timeframe?

There are several, depending on the half-life of isotopes that may be present. You can find a very good explanation of radiometric dating methods here. Some responses to some of the creationist's arguments against the validity of these approaches can be found here.

The two-slit experiments have been done in such a way as to test whether an observer is required.

Do you have a reference to that? I haven't seen any discussion of it before.

Here's an interesting theory that you might be interested in -- one of the methods for observation to take place without requiring consciousness. Ironically, it was proposed by the same Roger Penrose who believes the same thing you do, but for different reasons...

I see what you mean about the entropy of the data... in the end though, I think what's wrong here is that you're applying a subjective interpretation of entropy where an objective one is required. This page has an interesting discussion on what entropy is and isn't.