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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."
As someone on Usenet already put it, seeing how the Electric Universe proponents rationalize the failure of their predictions may be more interesting than seeing what the mission discovers.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
expelling material at supersonic speed
Supersonic speed in hard vaccuum? interesting...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
As a followup to my previous post, I've done some more googling. I found one of the biggest proponents of this wackjob theory happens to be one Jim McCanney, whose other claims include such gems as "weather is being manipulated". For a good thorough debunking of this crackpot, you might want to check out one of my favorite sites, Bad Astronomy.
The best part about the internet is, it's given everyone a voice.
The worst part about the internet is, it's given people like this a voice.
Interplanetanetary space (even interstellar space) is nowhere near a "hard vacuum".
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Yeah, interesting theory. Too bad no one has ever taken a spectrum of a comet tail to find out if it's sublimated ices or 'supersonic' bits of rock.
How does their 'theory' purport to explain the second tail of comets, which points along the comet's direction of motion, rather than away from the Sun? Maybe only *some* of the bits of rock are electrically charged? Maybe magic comet elves rub the charge off of some bits?
I had never heard of the Electric Universe, but they seem on par with the flat-earthers and creationists.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
So where should they look? Randomly send a few billion dollar probes and hope they find a spot where there used to be life? And no, not everyone was sure that life could have existed on Mars since many scientists do like hard evidence (instead of speculation).
Its also politics and practicality probably, the chances of the finding life past or present are very small. Any instrument designed to find such life would thus add weight without giving back anything useful (most likely). In addition, such a negative result would decrease interest in Mars and cut future funding potentially.
Of course, if you REALLY gave a damn about the reasons there are probably numerous interviews and websites on which NASA has given answers (or just try and contact NASA directly). However, you prefer to post such questiond on slashdot, instead of investigating them, since you either don't want to hear the answers or are too lazy to try and find them.
Well, they're predict the result of the experiment will differentiate from current theory in a specific way. So unlike all the other crackpot theories, this one is somewhat testable. So in a few weeks if comet(s) turn out to be mostly rocks then it might not be so crackpot anymore.
"I wish they'd put some numbers (if the crater is larger than "100 feet" then we are wrong. "If the ice detected in the debris is greater than X percent, we are wrong" etc."
Well spotted; scientific theories *must* be disprovable.
It must be possible, in principle, to disprove a theory otherwise its an axiom. And axioms need some justification (like Newtons laws of motion which are not scientific theories but (justifiable) axioms).
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Have your read the predictions?
n t.htm
http://thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/00curre
A bright flash is entirely consistent with electrical discharge. It is brighter than expected by mission scientists, who would base their expectation on the conventional model.
I doubt a conventional impact could create a flash like that.
If we take "a far bigger explosion" to mean "more energy liberated", then where did the extra energy come from? One explanation is electrical discharge.