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Bad News for Earth's Magnetic Field
jabex writes "Scientific American's website has an article about the overdue magnetic field flip. According to research published in the journal Nature, it could take anywhere from 2000-10000 years to complete. That's a long time without a protective magnetic field."
Article has next to nothing to do with the blurb.. maybe the Slashdot "editors" should RTFA before posting.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Think Copernicus. Tell me of any seriously revolutionary idea which you know was accepted with open arms by all.
Of course not. You wouldn't hear good things about Linux in any Microsoft-sponsored presentation either, and wouldn't expect to. If you don't expose yourself to anything but orthodox dogma, why would you expect to understand heresy?
arXiv censored one of the clearest presentations, but try, from the start, no less than "A. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory" in which he says "An atom absorbs or emits light of a frequency which is dependent on the potential of the gravitational field in which it is situated." Not on any delta-G it travels through. Was he right? If so, the heresy was always present, and the high priests of cosmology have simply failed to acknowledge it.
J. H. Taylor, in "Astronomical and Space Experiments To Test Relativity," in General Relativity and Gravitation (Cambridge Uni Press, 1987), compares atomic clock time with pulsar timing data and concludes "Here is direct proof, based on a clock some 15,000 light years from the solar system, that clocks on Earth run more slowly when the moon is full - because at this time of the month we are deeper in the gravitational potential of the sun!" Looks like he was on Albert's side.
Probably mostly because it doesn't break down at all. (-:
"Redshift" (frequency changes) produced by one's position in a gravity well is part and parcel of GR. Redshift produced by a change in gravitational potential isn't.
"I just attended a talk by a Newtonian physicist and he didn't say a word about physics being broken"? (-:
Consider the pennies-on-a-balloon model of cosmology. Why should the balloon stretch and the pennies not? Is that not a special pleading unsupported by any verification or experimentation? Why should space strecth on a large scale and not on a small? Shouldn't such an effect be visible in the outer galaxies of a cluster? Or vary in the space surrounding a cluster? That's not science, that's dogma.
It also utterly fails to deal with stepped redshifts, as evidenced by visual observation of large samples of galaxies, and of Gamma Ray Bursters. Nor does it cope with the "excessive" brightness of distant galaxies, nor with closely associated galaxies featuring differing redshifts. And this is but the beginning of its troubles.
Knock out the "special pleading" by allowing space to stretch more or less uniformly, and you wind up with a galaxyless, even starless universe from a big-bang start.
Steady-state-ish. I'm favouring a system which has achieved an essentially steady state, not one which always was steady.
In this case, one doesn't have to "get around" CBR at all, since it fits nicely as the redshifted remnant of a cosmic "flame front" of galaxies and/or stars. The observed CBR variations fit nicely as well. On top of that, it also solves the "dark night sky" issue far more neatly than does entrenched cosmology, and a big long laundry list of other conundra.
[this is too long now, planets coming in a second reply]
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing