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Antique Fridge Could Keep Venus Rover Cool
Hugh Pickens writes "In the 1970s and 80s, several probes landed on Venus and returned data from the surface but they all expired less than 2 hours after landing because of Venus' tremendous heat. It's hard to keep a rover functioning when temperatures of 450 C are hot enough to melt lead but NASA researchers have designed a refrigeration system that might be able to keep a robotic rover going for as long as 50 Earth days using a reverse Stirling engine. NASA has not committed to a Venus rover mission, but a 2003 National Academies of Science study recommended that high priority be given to a robot mission to investigate the Venusian surface helping to answer such questions as why Venus ended up so different from Earth and if the changes have taken place relatively recently."
I've got an easier solution. Don't make the robot out of lead.
venus is a better terraforming candidate than mars. oh sure, if you want to get somewhere as quickly as possible that is vaguely hospitable to settlement, mars beats venus hands down
but if you want to talk about recreating earthlike conditions (water, temperature, gravity, atmospheric density), i think it would easier (easier, not easy) to precipitate out venus' atmosphere than to bulk up mars'. and if you stood on venus right now, you would weigh roughly the same. big bonus right there
where is all the water going to come from? how the heck do you thin out the venusian atmosphere to earth-like densities? i don't know. but however you do it, it's an easier starting scenario than mars
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If your going to have a Venus probe there is always the chance it will land on the earth and go berserk. So you need a bionic man or woman to fight it. Actually, why are we making Venus probes at all for a bunch of stupid textbook companies. Let them pay for th probe. what we need is to make fembots. I want fembots dammit. Affectionate fembots that can make flapjacks... Now that would be a worthwhile implementation of science.
Isn't it obvious. Venus is Global Warming run amuck. And we're next!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
While stirling engines are certainly old, the idea of using them as refrigerators is just recently catching on. Here in sleep Athens, OH a company called Global Cooling is the forefront producer of such devices (and is still hand-making a good number of them).
The nice little advantage to these coolers is that they operate with very high COP's, and are limited in lower temperature merely by available power and the boiling point of the working gas. In global cooling's case, Helium is typically used, so temperatures down to around 5K are obtainable (at which point the helium liquifies. Yeah. Cold.) Also, control of the device can be very precise, in that instead of a compressor kicking on and off, it operates constantly, quietly, and with good variable control.
LG is beginning to outfit refrigerators with Stirling pumps because they're so much better than current designs - only problem is they're not mass produced yet. Coleman has a portable unit shown here that is quite a nice unit, albeit very pricey.
One of my professors here at school is one of the pioneers of Stirling refrigeration, so I've been exposed to it a lot. If the whole country switched their refrigerators to stirling compressors, California could shut off its power grid and we'd still have a surplus of energy country-wide.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
Isn't the real reason we haven't been trying to rover there because it's just not a very interesting place? Wouldn't the rover just beam back "It's hot and everything's melted" over and over lol. If I remember correctly, there's no significant features to even study. You can't have mountains and ancient, dried up rivers and caves when everything's that hot. Mars is far more interesting.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Now that everybody has made the shift to ROHS electronics, who cares if the heat melts lead? They should be able to do it with all COTS parts.
Sterling's are older than the 70's. I've been tinkering on using a sterling for cooling off an engine block for a few years now (pretty good results too, allowing me to generate electricity from the previously wasted heat).
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Yeah, an engine, sure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BetaStirlingTG4web.jpg
Yes, but can this device provide adequate cooling for a pair of NVIDIA 8800's in a brutal "room temperature" environment?
They're going to power the 1) cooling unit for 2) the robot looking for life with 3) plutonium that will 4) generate heat Day 4 prediction: Mutant baby sulphur monsters come play in the pool of liquid robot.
Unfortunately, the rotation of Venus is ridiculously slow, that would create a problem, not only for human work cycles but, much worse, for managing temperature.
Suppose they create some kind of shield between Venus and the sun, for instance with a swarm of thin foil satellites. The surface temperature would fall down to bearable levels, perhaps to the point of solidifying the CO2, which would make the atmospheric pressure fall. But even assuming that kind of technology, I see no way to get Venus rotating close to the Earth and Mars rates of about 24 hours.
it is easier to destroy than it is to create
;-)
so with atmospheric density, it is easier to start some sort of process that would precipiate mass out of venus's atmosphere than it would be to bulk up mars somehow (and can mars' gravity hold the density?)
as for oxygen, i forgot about that (duh!
but getting oxygen (and water) in sufficient quantities is equally hard and daunting for mars or venus. venus has hydrogen and oxygen locked up just as much as mars does, and will require some chemical/ atomic manipulation to arrive at the proportional quantity we need just as much as mars does. so for oxygen and water, i think you are talking massive difficulties either way right there, it's a wash in comparing the two planets thatways. both will require heavy manipulation, with a huge energy input, using technology far beyond our current comprehension
and in considering gravity, venus wins without a second thought
and something neither of us considered: magnetic fields. on this measure, both mars and venus stink. so any colony on either orb will be irradiated daily. uggh
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
According to TFA, Venus's plate tectonics shut down when the last of its water boiled away. Can any of you geniuses explain to me why water is required for plate tectonics to function?
I wonder how much Venus would cool if we simply dropped a couple hundred nukes on the surface. It would surely cool it by a few degrees, although I doubt it would cool it to anywhere close to comfortable temperatures.
And how do you pronounce that?
Ven-u-shun?
Ven-u-zian?
Ven-u-sian?
I would rather put a Stirling-cooled robot rover on Venus than pairs of human feet in the dust of the Moon.
Robotic exploration of our solar system is critically important and will achieve much more than a pair of glass-encased Lunar baby blues.
Leo Szilard was later instrumental in launching the US' Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. It was his idea, but he got Einstein to write the letter to President Roosevelt that convinced him to fund the project.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
there are many ways to block radiation
but obviously, you are correct to point out this is a major impediment. but beggars can't be choosers. i don't see any other small rocky orbs close by to consider. mercury is way worse, and the gas giants are, well, gas giants, and their moons are too cold
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
and you get wicked weather at the night/ day interface, a blistering midday, and a chilling midnight. but it won't be as wicked a change as on mercury, because the atmosphere will conduct some heat (little, yes, but some is better than none)
and even with day length considered, venus is still ahead of mars, considering all the other variables, mars comes out a worse prospect still
but you are correct to point out that day length is a big impediment, i forgot to address that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If Stirling Coolers are so efficient, why are we not using them to cool our homes & office buildings?
and this is why: considering terraforming venus, mars, or any planet, you are already in a realm of technological futurism that is impossible. so, when you say it is impossible to keep an oxygen rich atmosphere off of willing chemical kindling, well, who is to say there wouldn't be some sort of technology by then that could dampen that effect
i mean, in a way, you and sagan are describing the earth: lots of oxygen, lots of kindling. as san diego proved a few weeks ago, that's a problem. and yet the earth maintained this seemingly thermodynamically impossible balance long before there were human firemen running around. so we're not considering an impossible situation when we describe lots of oxygen and lots of carbon lying around. there are a myriad ways to poison and dampen a runaway plantary fire. it's not in the realm of impossible to keep the kindling and oxygen away from each other
look, this whole concept is extremely daunting. with terraforming, we are in the realm of fine-tuned and at the same time massive amounts of energy of an order well beyond anything mankind's technology can remotely comprehend. therefore, keeping oxygen and kindling away from flareup will probablt be an afterthought by the time we even considering mastering what is needed to make this work
i would conjecture that terraforming any planet, including mars and venus, will consist of not just molecular and chemical manipulations, but atomic ones as well. because neither mars, nor venus, nor any other planet will have oxygen in water in the right ratios for mankind, or even in the potential ratios, considering just their atomic oxygen and hydrogen stores. so atomic manipulations will probably be necessary to artificially induce the right ratios. yes: massive amounts of intricately controlled energy in consideration here. so perhaps you could "poison" the atmosphere in terms of making sure there is enough of some inert or interfering chemical that would dampen a potential flareup as the terraforming proceeded. nitrogen, or a nobel gas, for instance
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
we ARE turning our planet into venus
so, perversely and sadly, if we are going to survive to the point where terraforming venus ever becomes possible, to get to that point, we will have had to master the technology to cool down a hot planet already
yet another reason venus is a better candidate: a historically inevitable future technological convergence point. we will come to master the technology to cool down a hot planet no matter what, or we won't be around at all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Remember the Nuvistor? It would be interesting if vacuum-tube technology got revived in order to make a space probe capable of surviving high temperatures.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The problem with Venus's atmosphere is that there is so damned much of it. In order to get rid of Venus's atmosphere, you need get rid of the mass of something the size of asteroid Vesta. Basically, you need either calcium or something the size of the asteroid Vesta, and gently put it on Venus, and that will precipate the carbon out as calcium carbonate. Or, you could try and find a Vesta sized chunk of hydrogen, and via some chemical wizardry, that will get rid of the carbon dioxide as well and leave water. But even that amount of water wouldn't be nearly as much as in earth's oceans. The Earth has -a lot- of water.
This is my sig.
But there's still hope for this planet!
Sorry but I am not understanding the point of this when NASA has the tech to make chips that can take the high temperatures of Venus. http://arstechnica.com/journals/hardware.ars/2007/09/12/nasa-designs-new-ultra-high-temperature-chips
HA! They don't fool me. Damn thing would probably last 5 years.
What?
We at Venus welcome your cool beer-carrying roverlords. We're damned thirsty over here.
Table-ized A.I.
Why do you need nuclear power onboard when there is all that HEAT around you? Is there no way to convert that to usable energy?
Excuse me while I go slam my head against a wall...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's hot and nothing is melted. On earth the melting point of rock is lowered by the amount of water they contain. Water acts as a flux. On Venus where the climate is intensely hot and dry, crustal rocks melt at a very high temperature and are very strong. They create some pretty wild landforms (scarps, cliffs...) as a result.
This or this don't seem so boring to me. The Maxwell Montes are higher than the Himalayas. With adiababic cooling their tops will be hundreds of degrees cooler than the planetary mean. Also, with all of the volcanism and mobile lava flows you can expect there to be some amazing lava rivers and lava tube caves.
an ill wind that blows no good
And that Roman general was quite justified in pointing out those difficulties, given the many years of technological innovation and problems involved in inventing those examples. He's hardly a dullard for asking about the problems that someone in the future will have to overcome before your fantasies could come to life.
All the example of the Roman general proves is that it's not a good idea to make predictions, especially about the future. Sure, the Roman general would probably have laughed at you if you told him about a time, two thousand years in the future, where people would travel in horseless carriages, fly through the sky, send words, voices, and moving pictures across the world, and worship a crucified Jew.
On the other hand: where IS my flying car? 50 years ago I'm sure you could find people confidently predicting that in the far-off future of 2007, people would have androids do their chores, live under the sea, and fly to work in that flying car. And of course, it'd all be run on nuclear power. You can't tell me that "lack of imagination" is the reason I don't have my flying car. Flying cars, it turns out, are pretty damn hard to build.
About all we can do is extrapolate from current trends. Ten years from now, I'll be able to buy a faster PC with more memory and hard drive space, my cell phone will be smaller, more organisms will be genetically engineered, and Michael Jackson will be even more freaky. But will AIDS be cured? If I lose my daughter in a terrible accident, can I clone her? Will we solve global warming? Will Duke Nukem Forever be released? The revolutions are hard to predict. Our ignorance makes many possible things seem impossible, and many impossible things, seem possible. Where does terraforming Venus fit in? Hard to say. My gut feeling is that if it ever happens, it will come long after the day we all have flying cars. Of course, I may be forced to eat those words. But if that time ever comes, I will do so gladly- I'll be having too much fun with my flying car to care.
1. Venus was once like Earth is now . 2. Earth was once like Mars is now 3. They had Venusian SUVs that heated up the planet (but no Venusian Al Gore) . 4. Venusian scientists terraformed Earth . 5. Our ancestors moved to Earth (those who did not believe in Venusian Warming, stayed behind) . 6. The rest is history, however, there is serious consideration now for terraforming Mars just in case .
In some fantasy universe, sure. In our universe with our laws of physics? No.
Oh, I have plenty of imagination, but I also have a working knowledge of how the universe works. (Unlike your notional Roman general... and unlike you.)
Somebody that thinks Venus is a better candidate than Mars is indeed badly in need of enlightening. Because you haven't a fucking clue how the universe works.
If one assumes that Venus is the sister planet to Earth, formed out of swirling stellar material billions of years ago along with the Earth, then Venus should be about 20 degrees warmer at any given latitude than Earth is. And, in fact, that is what was taught 50 years ago before we had sent any probes to peer beneath Venus' dense cloud cover. When the 900 degree F surface temperatures of Venus were discovered in 1970 by the USSR's Venera 7 probe, Carl Sagan devised his "super greenhouse" theory, which instantly became the standard theory for explaining the extreme surface temperatures on Venus. Sagan's claim was that the less than 2% of solar energy which somehow finds its way through the thick carbon dioxide clouds of Venus to the surface is forever trapped there and cannot re-radiate as infra-red flux, and thus escape (flux is a measurement of an amount of something that flows through a unit area per unit time).
The only competing theory at the time was posited by Immanuel Velikovsky, who pointed to evidence supporting the notion that the planet Venus was a new planet that was still in the process of cooling down. Although Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collision" was so popular with the public that it once held the title of bestseller, the mainstream astrophysical community scoffed at the notion that an outsider whose expertise was in linguistics could offer any value whatsoever to a discussion about Venus' hot temperatures.
Carl Sagan's theory would require that Venus' atmosphere be in something called thermal balance. In other words, in order to rule out the possibility that Venus' heat originates from the planet itself, scientists must establish that the heat absorbed by Venus from the Sun must equal the heat emitted by Venus back into space. If Venus' surface was emitting more infrared light than the sunlight it was receiving, then Sagan's greenhouse theory would be ruled out and scientists would have to consider the possibility that Venus was probably cooling down from some past catastrophic event --a finding that could lend credence to Velikovsky's assertion that Venus was a new planet.
The November 13, 1980, issue of New Scientist contained an article titled, "The mystery of Venus' internal heat". It reads as follows:
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Most vacuum tubes have filaments that need to be hot to cause thermionic emission, but that doesn't mean one can keep the entire tube and its environment at 450 degrees C. The problem is made worse because the tube plates can only cool themselves by radiating heat through the vacuum to the glass or metal envelope or conducting down the leads, unlike semiconductors which can be heat-sunk. If the ambient temperature is too high the plate won't be able to dissipate heat, and out gassing from the overheated metal will ruin the tube.
Your comment is classical pseudoscience tactic: find some problem with actual theories and claim "so my completely ludicrous idiotic shambling on acid must be right!!!!oneone".
And for rest of universe, I would like to present Velikovsky in all ot his (in)famous glory...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky
http://skepdic.com/velikov.html
"report the arrival of Venus into our solar system as a comet-like body within the past 10,000 years"
No. Venus was to be expelled from Jupiter. And remind me, what comets have anything in common with Venus? Mass? Temperature? Looks? Materials? Orbital parameters?
What modern Obelix would say today? Of course, "Those crazy Americans!".
Or (c): the apparent brightness of the Sun is measured from Earth, the apparent brightness of Venus is measured from Earth, and a simple inverse square law calculation is done.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
It's hard to predict the future, particularily on a longer timescale. On a short timescale, extending current trends will likely be correct more often than wrong. (allthough it'll certainly be wrong too in some cases)
Why didn't you just say, "I believe Venus is a comet that entered the solar system in the last 10,000 years and that's why global warming is a liberal conspiracy."? Is it because bitter experience has taught you that padding it out with a thousand extra words makes it less likely that people will notice you're a nutjob?
I forgot to set the tounge-in-cheek flag. Sorry about that.
I read a book once about terraforming Venus by sending probes periodically over decades to inject payloads of hydrogen, algae, and seawater into the atmosphere. The algae would thrive off of the mainly Co2 atmosphere and multiply, producing o2, and gradually lowering the planet's temperature over a long period of time.
The problem with the proposal is I can't remember how they expected to keep water for the algae liquid at 450 degrees.
However, your basic point stands.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
When something has moving parts -- like a rover would -- it is much more difficult to properly insulate and lubricate the parts away from the heat. So do the firs things first: put a probe down to figure out as much of the array of conditions on Venus that can possibly be reproduced here on planet earth for scientific / technical testing here on terra firma.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
And a good practice run...
How about building a lunar rover capable of wandering over the lunar surface and placing a number of linked web cams at the various Apollo sites and a transmitting web server (or servers) nearby?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
You are right that it's hard to predict the future, but...
On the other hand: where IS my flying car? 50 years ago I'm sure you could find people confidently predicting that in the far-off future of 2007, people would have androids do their chores, live under the sea, and fly to work in that flying car.
We have the technology for "small flying vehicle", the problems are more unrelated to technology: that they are expensive, and require a harder-to-get pilot's licence.
As for androids doing chores, it was more that technology went a different route - having some robot that does everything is rather inefficient, so instead we have devices that are specific for a particular purpose. Things like washing machines, microwaves, dishwashers are gradually but significantly reducing the amount of time people have to spend on chores; things like robotic vacuum cleaners (and IIRC lawn mowers) are appearing.
A similar example might be video telephones, which are often portrayed in descriptions of the future. But the technology does exist (and any bog standard phone will do it now), it's just most people don't want to get dressed up to use the phone.
I do not have the time or patience to go through the many many many measurements of the thermal parameters of the Venus atmosphere and explain your misconceptions, however, orbiting probes as well as infrared and radiotelescope measurements from Earth have very well confirmed that Venus is very close to thermal equilibrium. It is not correct that there is a large internal heat source contributing significantly to the surface temperature.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I started writing a post illustrating how your analysis is conclusively incorrect, but you're really "not even wrong". Ever. I think this post instead will be more illuminating to the Slashdot readership:
Here's another gem in an illustrious succession from you:
"So long as astrophysicists refuse to follow the changes occurring within the field of comparative mythology -- which is an actual discipline with real scientific methodology -- they cannot claim that their theories were arrived at by rigorous methodology."
Comparative mythology is a science with rigorous methodology, and physics is not? Direct observation, with mathematical modeling, is bunk but translated/copied/forged human religous writings and artifacts, amounting to hearsay and outright lies, are not?
On this forum, you act like a contrarian blowhard with an unsatisfied ego.
You're the same guy we put up with around here espousing the disproven virtues of the Electric Universe cosmology and decrying fusion and the Standard Model.
Same on several bunk-science forums, according to a few seconds with google. I encourage moderators and interested readers to review your post history on Slashdot, and view samples your other writings on the web.
You have an "us-versus-them" mentality that seems to pit you against Carl Sagan an awful lot, as well as other mainstream (and typically famous) scientists. It's as though you're at least as happy to sling mud at someone like Sagan as you are to imagine yourself part of a darkhorse theory of physics as it spreads its wings, blowing away the infantile ignorance and superstitions of old.
Your posts on Slashdot (and elsewhere) score you highly on the crackpot index:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
Clearly you are not a scientist, but a dilettante. You support Velikovskian catastrophism as the origin of Venus, despite evidence both profound and prodigious against. Have you ever calculated an orbit? An orbital? Would you even know how to begin? Do you know what the latter is? Do you know what binding energy is? Do you know what a differential equation is, even? Clearly, no. If the answer were yes, you could see why these things were rejected by accredited scientists as soon as they became testable.
You always seem to find an audience on Slashdot just large enough to make "+5 Insightful". Your delusion is sickening, but the moderation is saddening. You need to learn critical thinking; it's the only thing that has gotten humans from fearful lives on the savanna to somewhat less fearful lives on the internet. As it stands, your abominable, deplorable disinformation is detrimental to human thought and understanding, and thus to human society at large.
On behalf of myself, other Slashdot readers, and the rest of humanity who must endure the machinations of any aspiring tech-folk you might poison or deter from productivity or enlightenment: stop clogging the internets with garbage and start that critical thinking bit.
A few years ago there was a lot of hype about using intense sound waves to set up a standing wave in a special tube in a manner that would produce very efficient refrigeration with no moving parts other than a hefty speaker voice coil. Anyone heard any further developments on that front? It would seem to me that with energy prices skyrocketing, these alternative, energy-saving ideas and others that alt-energy geniuses like Popular Science's Smokey Yunick used to come up with would be receiving lots of new attention. Then again, the oil industry IS one of the biggest lobbying groups on the Hill, so who knows when (if ever) we'll see a large-scale switch to alternate energy sources.
Flying car. Robot servant. Jacques Cousteau. Nuclear Power (Quote: "The provincial government had decided to see if private managers could do a better job running a major part of the nuclear fleet that supplies almost half of Ontario's electricity [emph. mine]).".
Expecting a perfect match to prediction is a physicist's game at this point. Everyone else has to deal with macroscopic error values.
A minor fact. For flux constant over time, the total flux emerging from any shell around Venus must be independent of the choice of shell. If Venus was radiating, then the total net flux in upper shells would be exactly as the same as the net flux in the lower shells. So variations in net flux on the way down aren't explained by the hypothesis that Venus itself is 'cooling down'.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I talk about mythology *all* of the time in my postings. There is no trick here. The Slashdot article in question though had little to do with mythology, so it was not the focus of my posting.
I'm not bitter, btw. I'm trying to get people to respond to the arguments of the Electric Universe Theorists, which I've educated myself in, for the purpose of seeing if there are any legitimate arguments that cast doubt upon their theories. Most of the responses I get though tend to be ad hominem attacks, and claims that I am "misleading" people. Most people argue that I am not worth their time. People don't understand that they need to get their licks in now before I go public with my documentary on the subject.
When I find an argument that seems solid, I forward it to the theorists, and they respond in kind. I will typically repost their responses here. What I've found after 1.5 years of doing this is that people are not actually reading what their theory says, and are in fact dismissing the evidence they point to in a piecemeal fashion, unaware that there is a fabric that connects all of these pieces together. What needs to be done is that people need to understand what they are saying -- the entire theory -- so that observations can be evaluated on the basis of both paradigms. But nobody's doing this because there is this general sense that science is heading in the right direction. I feel that, in light of the arguments of the heretics, this is a big mistake.
It's as simple as that, and there's nothing unethical about what I'm doing. In fact, I'm quite sure that people will eventually thank me for my work.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
This seems like a bit of revisionist history here ...
Revercombe and Suomi et. al. thought the upward IR flux was anomalous enough to warrant writing up a highly complex mathematical description of the manner in which all of those sensors had "failed".
If there was no problem, as you seem to suggest, then why bother?
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
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.
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
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
You know, if you weren't so stubborn about reading things that you don't already agree with, you could quite easily find the answer. It's interesting that you will waste your time arguing with me over these things, and yet you won't actually spend the money or time to understand what the theory states. I am confident of my understanding of what is happening because I've expanded my awareness of what they theory says beyond yours. Your carefully-crafted arguments seem to me like one long drawn-out excuse to avoid challenging your own belief system. The idea that you would be preventing me from spreading misinformation on Slashdot is silly when you've yet to fully read what is being alleged.
That's clever. It wasn't meant as a generalization. It was intended as a rebuttal to your allegation that ...
Your perception that I'm making sweeping generalizations is not accurate. The debate over the mathematical modeling of space plasmas is specific in its claims and philosophy and history of science can assist us in reaching a conclusion.
And yet, your thorough framework could come crumbling down like a house of cards at any moment ...
...
...
http://plasmascience.net/tpu/downloadsCosmo/Verschuur-CIV-HI-TPS-Aug2007b.pdf
Or in layman's terms
http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2007/11/big_bang
As a sidenote, Wallace Thornhill's "The Electric Universe" was the first published book
to reference Verschuur's allegations
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
To assist with any investigation of the Deep Impact Mission results that you may decide to take on, if I may, can I recommend the following link?
http://www.suppressedscience.net/news.html
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.