Slashdot Mirror
Deep Impact on Comet Theory
AlexGP writes "Proponents of the Electric Universe theory have gone out on a limb ahead of Deep Impact. They're predicting it will show comets are just rocks and not dirty snowballs.
Controversially they assert comets are highly negatively-charged asteroids on eccentric orbits. As they travel further into the Sun's radial positive electric field, they discharge into space, expelling material at supersonic speed."
I admit, I'm a materials guy, not an astrophysicist, but I found it odd that I'd never heard of this "electric universe" model, and the best reference the submittor could find was from "thunderbolt.info". I decided to google for it, and the first link that came up was this gem, which links the electric universe to geocentric, anti-evolutionary, creationist crap. I can't find a single reputable source describing this so-called theory, just a bunch of crackpot websites. I call bullshit.
Apparently the Electric Universe doesn't believe in Spectroscopy, which has already shown the object to be an icy snowball ejecting gas.
Of course, I wonder if the probe is capable of picking up some of the effects decribed below, given the the design is aligned towards conventional theory, such as it is ... The whole thunderbolts.info websight makes of interesting reading. At least they are making predictions that can be proven/disproven based on data.
Predictions on "Deep Impact"
With the imminent arrival of the "Deep Impact" spacecraft at the comet Tempel 1, it is time to test competing theories on the nature of comets. The predictions and lines of reasoning offered here will set the stage for future analysis of the "electric comet" model.
We are posting this document at 1:45 a.m. Sunday, July 3, with "Deep Impact" less than 24 hours away. [...]
At 10:52 p.m. PDT July 3, the Deep Impact spacecraft will fire an 800-pound copper projectile at the nucleus of Comet Tempel 1. If all goes as planned the projectile will impact on the nucleus 24 hours later. The impact is expected to eject into space large volumes of subsurface material.
Cameras on the projectile will record its approach toward the nucleus, and instruments on the spacecraft will record the event across a broad spectrum. Dozens of telescopes will be trained on the comet. According to NASA scientists, the released material will provide a sample of the primordial water, gas and dust from which the Sun, planets, moons, and other bodies in the solar system formed.
Though Deep Impact team members see this as a milestone event, advocates of the Electric Universe expect a "shock to the system" with revolutionary implications. They say that a comet is not a primordial object left over from the formation of the solar system. Fundamentally, it is distinguishable from a rocky asteroid only by its more elliptical orbit.
In the Electric Universe a comet is a negatively charged object moving through the extensive and constant radial electric field of the positively charged Sun. A comet becomes negatively charged during its long sojourn in the outer solar system. As it speeds into the inner solar system, the increasing voltage and charge density of the plasma (solar "wind") cause the nucleus to discharge electrically, producing the bright coma and tail.
If the electrical theorists are correct, the implications of the event will not be limited to comet theory alone. At issue is the assumption of an electrically neutral universe, upon which every conventional astronomical theory rests. An electric comet would forever change the picture of the solar system and force astronomers to consider the overwhelming evidence that electricity lights not only our Sun but also all the stars in the heavens. Moreover, the cosmic electricians insist that this would only be the beginning of a more sweeping revolution touching all of the theoretical sciences and in the end recasting our understanding of earth history and the human past.
The most appropriate test of a new theory is its predictive power (see predictions from October 2001 in Wallace Thornhill's "Comet Borrelly Rocks Core Scientific Beliefs"). Therefore, we wish to make as clear as possible, in advance of the projectile's impact, the distinctions between the electric model and the standard model. Where the issues grow complex, the primary reason is that the standard model, which failed to anticipate any of the major discoveries about comets over the past three decades or more, has fragmented into competing versions, forced upon the theorists by unsettling facts. Nevertheless a shared ideology continues to guide orthodox comet investigation while limiting scientific perception. For this reason advocates of the electric universe do not believe that a reconciliation of the current theoretical fragments is possible.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Here is the [cough] official [cough] statement of the Electric Universe Model, which appears to have been thought up by an electrical engineer during his lunchtime:
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
It's a line from Once More, With Feeling, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical.
Happy to help!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...here. But at least this one makes a prediction that's about to be tested, so I should give it some credit. But crackpots have a tendency of adapting ingeniously to data that doesn't fit the theory. We'll see...
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
[Science doesn't provide yes/no answers.]
Sure it does. The scientific method is all about asking "is this hypothesis true?" to which you'll most likely get a yes/no answer.
This is not the scientific method at all. You don't get yes no answers. You set up hypotheses and then devise statistical procedures to test the hypotheses. You don't get yes or no answers from these tests. You get probabilities. There are nominal probabilities at which a hypothesis is traditionally considered to be accepted or rejected, but any good scientist realises that this is still a matter of chance and it requires subsequent experiments to back up the findings. Assuming, of course, you have put forward a sensible hypothesis, and used sensible statistical tests...
But when each question costs billions of dollars, how likely are you to ask a simple yes or no question like that?
The billions of dollars aren't about single questions (although I don't see where that figure comes from - the Mars rovers disn't cost). The money is spent to provide information about as many questions and hypotheses as possible. Each spacecraft is usually crammed full of dozens of experiments, all competing for space, power, field of view of sensors etc. They are good value for money.
Hannes Alfven, Swedish Nobel laureate physicist, also wrote Science Fiction under the pseudonym O. Johannesson (not to be confused with Eric O. Johannesson, Professor Emeritus, Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley).
Hannes Alfven is worth considering carefully in the context of allegedly crackpot theories. Nobody believed him about waves in plasma, until they found them (and named them after him). Nobody believed him about the solar wind causation of aurorae, until (50 years later) it became the conventional view, and his invention of the notion essentially forgotten. Nobody believed him, circa 1960, when he testified to the California legislature that radioactive waste from fission reactors would be a problem. And nobody believed him when he suggested that the universe is infinite in age, and an equal mixture of matter and antimatter, with the Big Bang being the result of a period of cosmic contraction that increased annihilation occurrences until radiation pressure forced the system to expand again. Anyone right several times in the face of skepticism may be assumed to have thought things through, and maybe be right again.
I'm not affiliated in any way with the Electric Universe people, but I do think that Hannes Alfven is under-rated, and deserves reconsideration for some of his ideas.
-- Professor Jonathan Vos Post
former Adjunct Professor of Astronomy
webmaster magicdragon.com
There are only about 5 particles/cm3 near the Earth, and it decreases from there by an inverse square law farther from the Sun. That's pretty darn hard of a vaccuum by common thinking. Yes, it will have a effect on a space probe going millions of miles, but calling it a hard vacuum isn't really that much of an overstatement.
"the Sun's radial positive electric field" ... ... exists half the time. The other half, it's negative. The solar wind changes in predominant charge two cycles per rotation, or roughly one switch per week.
If the comets were negatively charged, we'd no doubt have noticed them dancing in their orbits. And if the sub had a constant positive charge apart from the solar wind, we'd have noticed the fluctuations in it also.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B