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Aftermath of Distant Planetary Collision?
gazurtoid writes "Astrobiology Magazine is reporting that astronomers have announced a mystery object orbiting the 8-million-year-old brown dwarf 2M1207 170 light-years from Earth might have formed from the collision and merger of two protoplanets. The object, known as 2M1207B, has puzzled astronomers since its discovery because it seems to fall outside the spectrum of physical possibility. Its combination of temperature, luminosity, and age do not match up with any theory. 'Hot, post-collision planets might be a whole new class of objects we will see with the Giant Magellan Telescope', said Eric Mamajek of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics."
Maybe these planets are similar to Earth after the collision that resulted in the Moon. If so it would be incredibly useful for learning about the formation of the Earth and the Moon. as well as our geologic history.
Sounds like Borg Cube to me.
Perhaps they'll get me the hell outa here. I start dual booting Vista and linux to hedge my compatibility bets.
"He Who Dares Wins"
I hope astronomy never goes the way of Egyptology and Archaeology in failing to address or acknowledge the existence of any anomaly. Or has it already?
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Is Astrobiology Magazine slumming with the astrophysicists while waiting for someone to find life outside of Earth's biosphere?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
That playing pool with planets is a perfectly good way to plug up a white hole.
1. When they say they're here to assimilate us and our technology, we comply and tell them they're welcome to it.
2. Convince them that our most sacred piece of technology is Windows ME, and give them many copies to assimilate.
3. Point and laugh.
It's the remains of Alderaan
"... Earth might have formed from the collision and merger of two protoplanets." ... explains why Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus?
...170 years ago we sent out an accidental radio signal - 30 years before we discovered what radio was. Unfortunately those aliens had their own version of SETI (called TTFA - Trying To Find Aliens), which picked up the signal. Due to their recent invention of the internet and the subsequent panic over "proof" of alien life they panicked and sadly ended wiping themselves out in a nuclear war. The planet itself survives as a nuclear wasteground, still too hot to support life, but now noticeable by the very planet that accidentally caused it's destruction all that time ago...
Turn your cosmology filter off for a few moments people. Temporarily drop all of the assumptions about what you're seeing here, and consider carefully what you are seeing in the article's image. Look at the star, and notice the structure of the infrared filaments -- the star's corona -- coming off of it.
It is a legitimate question to ask:
Doesn't this star look like a ball of lightning?
People may not be aware of the significance of this, but within the Plasma Universe perspective, planetary birthing is the result of a fissioning process that results from the star experiencing more electrical stress than it can handle. It responds by splitting into two objects in order to increase its surface area. If the electrical stress is only minor, you get a planet. If it's major, you get two stars. The expulsion will travel some distance away from its ejection point before settling into an orbit.
Within this other paradigm, there's a chance that if they continue watching this thing that they may observe it spit another one out right before their eyes in a bright flash.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Imagine all of the things we have seen and learned about in our lifetimes? The whole prospect of finding other objects out there in the universe still amazes me, even though my cereal doesn't come with Haley's Comet matchbox cars and Nasa patches aren't cool anymore. Damn you trendy space-lovers! Damned you all!
Never monkey with another monkey's monkey.
Hey...
On Earth here we use fission to produce fusion (Thermonclear weapons - ask your mom)...
But your pungent post suggests that our planetary overloads (perhaps Soviet) use fusion to produce fission!
Well, I for one... aw, forget it!
.
- aqk
F U
All I ever hear from you is stuff about
"White holes", "Black Holes", etc etc.
Now, north of the border, a good Canadian Asstrophysical lad would simply say
"Up Uranus!"
and be done with it!
.
- aqk
F U
Considering that there are losers pathetic enough to stalk me here for years with their unrequited homosexual advances, it is not surprising that one or some of them would extend their petty obsession beyond the comment system and onto the moderation system.
You can't take the sky from me...
The problem with "underdevelop" as the crux of one's view of international relations is that overly rapid development is also harmful, basically because it compresses even more of the deleterious side-effects of development into even shorter periods than they were/are/have been given in the West to mix & re-stabilize.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
Off Topic, and Funny; Insightful, and Troll; etc.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
The 'significance' of the apparent similarity is far more mundane.
What you 'see' in the image is a representation of data from an instrument attached to a telescope in Chile.
That data itself is the result of a great deal of number crunching, based on long chains of logic, based on theories of physics.
The "the structure of the infrared filaments -- the star's corona -- coming off of it" is nothing of the sort!
If you are REALLY interested in those 'infrared filaments', I would be happy to recommend a few papers on 'the NACO adaptive-optics facility' (the instrument used in this case); you might be interested to learn how much of these are exactly what you'd expect from a point source imaged through the atmosphere above the VLT.
Speculation can be fun; speculation based on such gross mis-understanding of the input data surely isn't.
1) 'the Plasma Universe' is NOT 'supported by IEEE! At least, not in the sense that you imply. In fact, I hear that this claim has caused some IEEE members to get quite upset, and they are now taking steps to stop this kind of nonsense.
... it may be weak in name, but its effects are profound, its wingéd messengers can leap tall buildings in a single bound! not only can they pass through solid walls, but even a light-year of solid lead is but tissue paper to them! Its flock vastly outnumber those of the baryons, and when the truth about dark matter (DM) is finally discovered (any day now, promise), the awesome reality of the dominance of the universe by the weak force will become clear - DM is neutralinos, the supreme embodiment of the weak force!!!! {feel free to continue adding exclamation marks here}.
Here's the lowdown on the part of the IEEE that DOES cover plasma physics (my emphasis): "NPSS [Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society] IS...
- The IEEE Technical Society that covers the fields of Fusion Technology, Nuclear Medical and Imaging Sciences, Particle Accelerator Science and Technology, Pulsed Power Systems, Radiation Effects, Radiation Instrumentation, Plasma Sciences and Applications, Standards for Nuclear Instruments and Detectors, and Computer Applications in Nuclear and Plasma Sciences." [source: http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/nps/aboutnpss.htm]
2) Isn't time we hear from proponents of the weak force? the strong force?
I mean, proponents of 'the Electric Universe' claim, falsely, that astrophysicists regard gravity as the only force worth studying, and counter-claim that 'electricity'* is really the only one (odd though that while 99.{insert more 9's here, to your taste}% of the universe is plasma, 100% is mass-energy, so gravity wins).
Surely there must be folk who believe that a plague should visit both houses; that the strong force is {insert your favourite number here} orders of magnitude stronger than electromagnetism, and that only the inconsequential neutrinos can escape the grip of the strong force (see, true believers of this cult can make just as many false claims as 'EU theorists'!)? There must be a Nobel Laureate whose work can be picked over to find juicy morsels that support these obvious truths!
And let's not neglect the weak force
Oh, and let's not forget that the weak force IS ('could be' only to doubters) responsible for CP violating events, and thus, the reason for our very existence in our universe today (why we have matter-antimatter asymmetry, and all that).
* Of course, they don't mean that; they really mean electromagnetism.
For example, among the replies to your >400 comments are some which are very thoughtful, respectful, and detailed. The authors seem to have taken a great deal of trouble to understand what you wrote, and replied accordingly.
Then there's the apparent disconnect between what you have written (and what folk can read for themselves, by following the links you provided) and what many (most?) SD folk recognise - from their day-to-day work* - as science: the role of hypotheses, models, theories, and so on, and the paramount importance of (quantitatively) testing these against (all) good, pertinent experimental results and (astronomical) observations.
IIRC (if I recall correctly), you were very clear that you rejected the standard scientific paradigms as legitimate methods for testing these 'Electric Universe' ideas.
Yet you have yet - IIRC - to provide an alternative framework by which those ideas may be checked and tested.
Perhaps there is a paradigm shift under way; perhaps 'picture science' and 'mythology trumps physics' will one day rule the world.
But if such a shift does occur, who will design, build, launch, operate (etc) the next Hubble Space Telescope?
* remember, quite a few of those who have responded to your comments declared themselves to be working scientists
The Plasma Universe theory, perspective or point of view -- whatever you want to call it -- is real, very alive, relatively rich in detail and history, and supported by multiple unrelated disciplines. It is a true synthesis of all of the natural sciences, but what it concludes is that plasmas in space are being mathematically modeled incorrectly. And this is where people tend to turn off. In plasma-based cosmologies, plasmas are electrodynamic entities that, like in the lab, respond with electrical resistance and luminosity to changes in their charge density. In conventional cosmologies, astrophysicists *assume* that plasmas are "perfect conductors", they *assume* that space is "quasi-neutral" -- that a given volume of space essentially has equal numbers of positive and negative charges -- and they *assume* that magnetic fields are "frozen-in place" within a plasma (as opposed to being affected by the mechanics and electrodynamics of the plasma itself). Very importantly, this would all be true were it not for the natural behavior of plasmas within the laboratory. Within the laboratory, we see clear indications that all three of these assumptions are invalid. In the laboratory, plasmas will naturally form filaments. These filaments have long-range attraction and short-range repulsion, which means that they twist around one another, and yet never fully combine. These braided ropes are observed all over the place in space, and astrophysicists have a rich lexicon to pull from for describing them: magnetic ropes, flux tubes, or even elephant trunks. But one thing they greatly resist calling it is an "electric current", for if electric currents can exist in space on large scales, then they would certainly do things of importance. They would cause forces. This is a big problem for conventional theories because they have been assuming that space is not electrically connected as much as possible for centuries now. It's like an addiction that they just can't shake. The box keeps getting bigger for their closed electrical systems over time, but only at a snail's pace. The idea that the entire universe might be electrically connected is something that they refuse to consider even when presented with evidence that it is so.
/. are tired of the PU theory - it's unlikely that we'll get anything more definitive than "maybe it's true, maybe it isn't".
Maybe that's why so many people on
Plasma-based theories are far more inherently testable than the current theories. In the conventional thinking, we don't even get rock-solid definitions for gravity and mass. And we're constantly barraged with pseudo-scientific ideas like multiple dimensions and string theory. What you have to realize is that the Plasma Universe is almost entirely based upon laboratory experience, whereas the conventional theories are largely the result of equations tinkering. The concept of "magnetic reconnection", for instance, which presumably demonstrates a mechanism for explaining the fact that the Sun's corona is 100x hotter than its surface (!), has never been validated within a laboratory despite being discussed for decades now. And importantly, there is no reason for why we cannot validate magnetic reconnection within the lab.
There you go again, oodles of words that (sometimes) correspond well to what's in the collective body of scientific studies of the IPM (inter-planetary medium), magnetospheres of planets, stars, the ISM (inter-stellar medium), galaxies, AGN (active galactic nuclei), and so on, but (mostly) are distortions, mis-understandings, mis-characterisations, and (let's be honest here) outright falsehoods.
Why not engage in a 'on the merits' discussion, in an internet discussion forum where LaTeX is implemented? Where we can write down the equations, look at the statistical tests, examine the actual data, (and so on)?
Why not tell us all the URL of such a forum which presents these 'Electric Universe' ideas, in the form of hypotheses models numbers e
Nereid, you seem to think that I *really* care about responding to your interruptions. But you present nothing for my mind to chew on. You are little more than a pest to me, and I've unfortunately stopped actually caring what you write. If I respond to you, consider it your lucky day, and don't expect twice in one day (unless you finally decide to send something that contradicts the ideas I speak of). I will only respond to your "meat" -- never the wasted typing that you fill screens with. Your comments are generally so unimpressive that I'm quite sure that the people who discuss them with you see straight through them, and wish you would spend more time discussing the actual issues. You come off as somebody who believes that they are having an impact on something, but so long as interest in plasma-based cosmologies is increasing, your problem is actually growing. It's the rate of growth one way or another that ultimately matters. And being in the majority doesn't mean anything if grad students are flocking to the alternative theory; you've set course for becoming a relic. At some point in time, you will probably decide to actually pick up a copy of the "The Electric Sky" yourself. But, you will hold out as long as possible. The irony is that the decision to not be open-minded will ultimately make yourself obsolete. One day, you'll overhear two people talking about how various observations are interpreted for the two major cosmologies, and you won't even understand their conversation. You will have intentionally taken yourself out of the discussion, and over time, you will come to find that your static pool of knowledge is archaic and no longer commonly accepted. This is the inevitable result of allowing yourself to become fixated on any particular idea to the exclusion of all others. In the engineering world, things can change *very* fast. It seems like you've come to "appreciate" the slow rate at which things change within astrophysics, but your problem is that you've misinterpreted it to be a *natural* pace.
Within the Plasma Universe, we only believe things that are supported by observation; and if it has not been done in a lab, we will always remain somewhat dubious. We feel no need to conform to any consensus, and people do disagree on some of the basics. This is a healthy way to be. It keeps us on our toes, constantly searching out for a better explanation. Consensus is *great* for religion, but not so much for science.
It's not going to be so great for your career either in the long run.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
you're trying to convince people that IEEE acts as a single individual. That's absurd.
You're the one who often says on this forum the following:
"astrophysicists* refuse to consider X", inaccurately portraying the mainstream scientific community as heterogeneously incurious
(* you've yet to become rid of your years-long bad habit of saying "astrophysics" to conflate everything to do with space from planetary science to astronomy to astrophysics to cosmology)
"mainstream science is blinded by its own education/indoctrination/knowledge/etc.", inaccurately portraying mainstream science as heterogeneously inept in its own element
We guess how the universe could be with equations, but it's the lab work that let's us know that we're getting close.
Now you're getting somewhere. We theorize, then interrogate nature. We can interrogate nature by observation and experimentation. You seem only to accept what you call "lab work" or "laboratory experimentation" but never observation! There is no fundamentally no difference between *observing* an experiment at arm's length and *observing* phenomena across the street and *observing* phenomena many light years distant. In a scientific inquiry, the critical difference is that an experiment allows you to interrogate nature in (at least a few) ways of your choosing instead of in ways of nature's choosing. That's why it's correct to say, as you often do, that "it's perfectly legitimate to try to explain the universe in terms of plasmas." However, plasma cosmologies are less successful at describing the phenomena we observe than are other cosmologies even though some of *those* cosmologies often contradict one another. When you and the other Saturnian Configuration / Electric Universe proponents try to call your "soup-to-nuts" (mythology-to-stars-to-weather-to-matter-itself-etc) approach with plasma cosmology, you bastardize the phrase "plasma science" because it's just not.
You never actually try on your own to give EU an honest chance because you never actually "touch the meat" of what's being argued...
I can't speak for APODNereid, but I certainly have (by now, thanks to your long nuisance here on Slashdot and elsewhere) investigated EU and the nebulously-related Saturnian outgrowth of Velikovskian ideology. I find them both imaginative (a plus) but utterly unconvincing in every detail I have investigated, including both those from within my own area of expertise and those outside it. They're bad science in every respect. It is ironic that You (EU/SC camp) complain that nobody pays attention to Your hand-waving speculation about phenomena but it is You who pay no attention (through ignorance or dismissal) of the reasons "mainstreamers" are uninterested in plasma cosmologies. I'll give You a hint: they tend to be invalid at describing scientific data both past and present.
...and I believe that people see this more clearly in your statements than you realize.
It is quite possible for a person to investigate what EU says and yet be thoroughly unconvinced by it. I think it is also likely that many observers would conclude about your own comments that You do not give "mainstream" science an honest chance, and think it obvious that you have little understanding of "mainstream" science. This is certainly my appraisal.
Many people *want* a rational dialogue on forums like this and all you do is deprive them of that by countering *every* statement I make with attempts at making me look ridiculous.
If that's not the pot calling the kettle black, nothing is. Your behavior on Slashdot shows that you basically never allow even a *single* disparaging comment to go unchallenged; you always have to have the last word, and you typically write many-page responses in an effort to awe by-standers and spam-out the opposition. This strategy is ongoing, and here we are. Some of your recent discussions have rage
you seem to think that I *really* care about responding to [responses critical of EU].
You've said yourself (on other internet forums) that you think it is important never to allow comments casting doubt upon your writings to go uncontested. Your behavior as revealed by your long-term comment history on this and other places on the web is extremely consistent with this too.
I will only respond to your "meat" -- never the wasted typing that you fill screens with.
From pln2bz? The king of the 5-page Slashdot posting, who has referred to these in other forums as "my articles"? What hypocrisy. If you're not willing to talk about why the EU claims are dubious, spurious, and outright invalid, fine. You're the one who interprets silence (or even brevity of response) as weakness of argument, and thinks most other people do too.
Your comments are generally so unimpressive that I'm quite sure that the people who discuss them with you see straight through them, and wish you would spend more time discussing the actual issues.
Your comments are generally so poorly-reasoned and hypocritical that I'm quite sure people see right through them. You always talk about things you find important to EU arguments, but you have essentially no understanding of the mainstream science you seek to supplant. You use the phrase "plasma physics laboratory" to bludgeon your readers' minds into plasma ideas to the exclusion of the entire body of physics. You disparage "mainstream scientists" as merely speculative theorists, and by extension the role of actual theory (hint: it requires mathematics) in what you call theory. You have misunderstood and/or misinterpreted literally scores, maybe hundreds of scientific observations from many scientific fields, in none of which do you possess expert knowledge.
You come off as somebody who believes that they are having an impact on something
You come off the same way, and in fact you're overt and explicit that it is your intention to drum up interest in EU material.
...so long as interest in plasma-based cosmologies is increasing, your problem is actually growing.
Support for Creationism is also increasing, and that too is a problem. Increasing interest levels are not an increasing indication of correctness.
you've set course for becoming a relic.
This is a persistent misconception that you have about mainstream science. It is *not* homogeneously orthodox, and its practitioners are *not* (in most cases, fortunately) proud but dim bulbs shaded even dimmer by their pride. It is you who have set course for becoming a relic by failing continually to understand the strengths and weaknesses of modern cosmologies, including plasma cosmologies.
You will have intentionally taken yourself out of the discussion, and over time, you will come to find that your static pool of knowledge is archaic and no longer commonly accepted.
That's the position you presently occupy. In science, the pool of knowledge does not remain static, even if a few practitioners fail to accommodate new knowledge. That's why science works in the first place. You're just fantasizing about the opponents you've chosen (by virtue of your willful ignorance) suffering through it later as you do now.
This [scientific/intellectual irrelevance] is the inevitable result of allowing yourself to become fixated on any particular idea to the exclusion of all others.
I hope the irony in your stating this fact is not lost upon you. You probably haven't had a scientifically open-minded moment since Scott/Thornhill/Talbott/Cardona made your mind up. You've probably read every published piece (and some unpublished) about the EU subject and many tangential materials, none of which offer any scientific rigor. At the same time
Would you be so kind as to tell all readers just what APODNereid's "favored theories" are? Be sure to use only APODNereid's comments in Slashdot as your source material.
Back to the invitation: may I ask, again, if you'd be interested and willing in having a discussion of Peratt's published papers on galaxies, which discussion to focus on the plasma physics in those papers and the relevant astronomical observations?
I'd appreciate an unequivocal 'yes' or 'no'. If the ideas are so absurd, then shouldn't people see that for themselves? I'm arguing about facts, and you're constantly arguing against arguing about facts. Another, all too common, theme in your SD comments.
First, I feel it is important for readers to see for themselves just how inaccurate your portrayal of the 'facts' is. And for them to have a good set of primary source URLs so they can go check for themselves, independently.
An example: "Look at the star, and notice the structure of the infrared filaments -- the star's corona -- coming off of it." The 'facts' are somewhat different than you portray them, and I made a suggestion on where readers may go to get more details (the primary source in this case being an ESO website, and the papers linked to therefrom: http://www.eso.org/instruments/naco/overview.html).
Second, almost all the scientific 'facts' you introduce contain intricate webs of theory-based logic. The ideas you are promoting seem to me (based on my own reading of the websites etc to which you have provided links) to reject many of the theories in these logic trains. Ergo, the 'facts', as stated by you, are equivalent to "1 = 2" in some way
Third, I would hope that my most potent critiques are those directed at the explicit or implicit methods which underlie the 'Electric Universe' ideas.
To repeat: this is the Science part of Slashdot. To have a meaningful discussion, we need a certain minimum of mutual comprehension. For most folk, 'Science' carries the baggage of things like peer-reviewed papers, hypothesis-model-theory, quantitative testing, internal consistency, and so on.
Yet you yourself have said, more than once, that you reject most of these fundamentals.
That's fine, there's nothing sacred about any of these.
However, I have yet to see anything of substance from you on what you propose to take the place of these fundamentals.
How does one do science, in the brave new world of 'the Electric Universe paradigm'?
Here it is again: Why not tell us all the URL of [...] a forum which presents these 'Electric Universe' ideas, in the form of hypotheses models numbers equations data etc
Here they are again: [T]ell us all the name of the lab(s) in which Birkeland, Alfvén, Peratt, Tesla, etc conducted experiments with a 2x10^30 kg ball of plasma (of any [...] composition)?
[Tell us] the labs in which they investigated the green [O III] 495.9 and 500.7 nm lines ('nebulium', a term Birkeland was, no doubt, familiar with), by direct observation of such lines?
I thought these were very simple, straight-forward questions, of the kind you'd be only too pleased to answer. What part of 'if it has not been done in a lab, we will always remain somewhat dubious' did I fail to understand?
It is a true synthesis of all of the natural sciences, but what it concludes is that plasmas in space are being mathematically modeled incorrectly. And this is where people tend to turn off. In plasma-based cosmologies, plasmas are electrodynamic entities that, like in the lab, respond with electrical resistance and luminosity to changes in their charge density. In conventional cosmologies, astrophysicists *assume* that plasmas are "perfect conductors", they *assume* that space is "quasi-neutral" -- that a given volume of space essentially has equal numbers of positive and negative charges -- and they *assume* that magnetic fields are "frozen-in place" within a plasma (as opposed to being affected by the mechanics and electrodynamics of the plasma itself).
The concept of "magnetic reconnection", for instance [...] has never been validated within a laboratory despite being discussed for decades now. And importantly, there is no reason for why we cannot validate magnetic reconnection within the lab.
If asked to guess, I'd say you wrote this without critically thinking about it, and certainly without investigating the work of the scientists who study the Earth's magnetosphere and the IPM (inter-planetary medium).
Last month, the AGU (American Geophysical Union) held its Fall 2007 meeting in San Francisco. I think I recall reading that some 15,000 people attended.
Just from the titles of the sections (http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm07/?content=program&show=glance), I'd guess that this would have been an extremely important meeting for all Plasma Universe/Electric Universe groupies - 'Atmospheric and Space Electricity', 'Planetary Sciences', 'Solar and Heliospheric Physics', 'Magnetospheric Physics', and so on.
Within Solar and Heliospheric Physics (http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/sessions5?meeting=fm07&sec=SH) it would seem there were quite a few sessions that would have been of intense interest to you. Some examples:
SH41C - Magnetic Reconnection in Laboratory, Magnetospheric, and Solar Plasmas I (http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/sessions5?meeting=fm07&part=SH41C&maxhits=400), with such sessions as:
* "Causes and Consequences of Reconnection in the Laboratory" (abstract is here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMSH41C..06P), and,
* "Experimental merging, coalescence, reconnection, and bouncing of two flux ropes" (abstract: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMSH41C..07I - note that the six authors seem to work in the same lab as Peratt; interesting, don't you think?)
SH44A - Magnetic Reconnection in Laboratory, Magnetospheric, and Solar Plasmas IV Posters (http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/sessions5?meeting=fm07&part=SH44A&maxhits=400), which featured posters with such interesting titles as:
"Magnetic reconnection with multiple X-lines in an open system: Two fluid simulations with finite electron inertial effects"
"Breakdown of the Frozen-in Condition and Plasma Acceleration: Dynamical Theory"
"Self-regulation of the reconnecting current sheet in relativistic pair plasmas"
"Fast Reconnection in Electron-Positron Plasmas via Turbulent Outflow Jets"
"Universal Method for Describing Magnetic Reconnection"
From a different pln2bz comment:
Nereid, you seem to think that I *really* care about responding to your interruptions. But you present nothing for my mind to chew on. You are little more than a pest to
Based on what you have written, here in SD, pln2bz, I imagine that you (and Thornhill, and Scott, and Peratt, and
Would readers of this comment be interested to have these PU promoters join such a discussion? Of necessity, any internet discussion forum would have to support the relatively straight-forward posting of the symbols (etc) in the equations in Alfvén's theory, together with those in the papers reporting magnetic reconnection in the lab
Maybe a review of the advances in observational cosmology over those 20 years might be of interest?
Perhaps a more detailed look at this "actualistic" vs "prophetic" dichotomy could prove insightful?
For example, how accurate a characterisation was it in 1990? How accurate today?
To what extent would such a detailed examination inform readers about this Plasma Universe idea?
* for example "The latter proposes a very detailed knowledge about the origin of the universe", "the Alfven-Birkeland theory of auroras"
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
pln2bz, I went looking for this "in-depth review of magnetic reconnection for the past couple of months" at the site you named, but the only thing I could find that vaguely resembled this was a thread started by MM on 21 December, 2007 (barely a month ago, not two), and that concentrates on this arXiv preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3452*.
Not once, anywhere in that thread, are any papers on the study of magnetic reconnection in lab plasmas (i.e. lab experiments) mentioned.
In fact, the thread resembles a scripture study class - what did Alfvén have to say about X? are the words written in this wikipedia page an accurate reflection of what Alfvén wrote?
There are no equations, no theory, no models, no analyses, and none of the participants seems to have even tried to find papers reporting the study of magnetic reconnection in lab plasmas, much less read them and try to understand them!
But perhaps I got the wrong thread?
* You will see, of course, that this preprint is not about presenting the results from lab studies, but rather interpreting observations of solar phenomena.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
In fact, I think they need my opposition, to set them straighter, if you get my meaning. They don't easily re-conform to new facts, but eventually, they do, just as conformist as ever. I don't always see the humor in it, either, but when I do, I try to share the humor. You look like you could use a helping.
Anyway, regardless of what I decide about EU generally or the fission theory of planet formation specifically, it's a pleasure to see somebody posting material like that from Olson. There is certainly far too little attention -- even on "for Nerds" Slashdot -- to the arbitrary, and therefore often-wrong [usually?], nature of many [most?] "normative" forces in social interactions. Being scientific thinkers, you and I know well that generalizations are useful, ie good, only when correct.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
Hint: it was not Birkeland, Alfvén, Peratt, or Tesla. He is much more well-known in the United States for "inventing" the light bulb. OMG, heat it, and it glows. For this, Edison is bestowed the title "genius" alongside Tesla & Einstein? Pfft, not in my book!
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
I might not always be in a mood to actually do it, but if the same joke were told with "Linux" instead of "Windows ME," I should mod it up as funny. Anyway, crippling alien computers with our own worst computer programs, whatever you happen to think they are, is indisputably a funny update to the computer virus cliché.
I SAID "INDISPUTABLY"!!
Just kidding. You have every right to your stupid, contrary opinion. Just kidding. Sort of.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
My comment, the second part anyway, was intended as a bit of a joke - if you ever get the pleasure of reading some 'Electric Universe' material, you'll see what I mean about 'the universe is 99.999% plasma, therefore electricity rules!'
... just ask! :-)
You'll also quickly discover the amount of venom, vitriol, and so on proponents of these ideas hurl at what they call 'mainstream astrophysicists'.
I'd be happy to suggest resources on theories of planetary formation, be they webpages, books, papers, blogs, or discussion fora
Thanks, and I'm now asking; please "suggest resources on theories of planetary formation, be they webpages, books, papers, blogs, or discussion fora ... :-)"
:-(
I have 3 years down on a BS in physics, which I had to abandon for financial reasons, and I'm pleasantly surprised to find my own curiosity about phenomena parsecs away as strong as ever, or more so. I'd still like to see more voters having a realistic cost/benefit-rooted appraisal of nuclear energy's value to themselves, but I'm too grown-up to believe in Miracles.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
I did notice that TVF's falsifiable prediction was conveniently -- we may not say "deliberately" so, but it is curious, isn't it? -- set far into the future, although understandably. He is correct, to the extent that twin-planet pairs would be much easier to identify by orbital wobble after a few centuries. But, would it really be impossible, for a solar system only ~100LY from here? I'll have to check my CRC Handbook for wavelengths & distances, but it seems to me his claims should be provable/falsifiable -- with great effort, admittedly, but no greater than that demanded of Galileo, whose claim was similarly unwelcome, +/- one order of magnitude.
;-)
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
Icarus, "International Journal of Solar System Studies"; unfortunately it's a subscription publication (though with some ingenuity you can find at least the abstracts of many Icarus papers through ADS; papers with preprints on arXiv are, of course, free) http://icarus.cornell.edu/. This is the best, deepest, etc resource (IMHO).
...
ADS Abstract service, for finding papers relevant to planetary formation (click on Physics and Geophysics Search http://adsabs.harvard.edu/ads_abstracts.html)
General, diffuse website: Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD, most have at least some good links; not specific to planet formation though http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html)
General astronomy discussion forum (LOTS of very knowledgeable and helpful people): BAUT (http://www.bautforum.com/)
General physics discussion forum (not much on planetary formation however): Physics Forums (http://physicsforums.com/index.php)
I'll suggest some of the other resources in a later comment
As if it isn't already obvious, I won't have anything else to say about planetary formation or Plasma Model/Electric Universe/??? vs. Standard Model/??? until, at least, the next thread.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
As I said, since I last looked in detail at his stuff ...
...
The link in my comment is to the arXiv preprint of Will's latest compilation; it can be quite daunting to read through all xxx pages, and unless you've mastered the math behind GR the formalist framework will likely be nigh impossible to grasp.
However, I find the ingenuity of some of the tests breathtaking, and the sheer doggedness of some of those experimenters
On top of that, think of how odd many of the tests would have seemed to 19th (and earlier) century physicists. Or this: what does a scintillation detector, a bit of radioactive iron, a loudspeaker, and a tower have to do with the cosmic microwave background?? The astonishing connection is that the former (crudely) describes the famous Pound-Rebka experiment (confirming gravitational redshift, just as Einstein ordered); the latter is a key test of the 'Big Bang theory', which at its heart is the application of GR to the universe as a whole.
Can you please point me to his falsifiable prediction? The tremendous progress in weak lensing, this last decade or so, and plans for GAIA (etc), may mean such tests may come much, much sooner.
Thanks.
... at the time, 'radial velocity' was the only game in (detection) town; today, microlensing and transits are both proven, and neither is affected by the difficulty TVF mentions.
The TVF page was written in 1997, with an update to a table in 2004.
According to this IAU "Working Group on Extrasolar Planets" webpage (http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/boss/planets.html), only a pulsar had a detected planetary system in 1997, with the first 'regular' system detected in 1999 (Ups And).
According to this tracking website (http://exoplanet.eu/catalog.php), ~25 multiple planet systems have now been discovered, of which eight have three or more planets.
While this - likely - isn't enough to do a statistically rigorous test of the TVF's idea, the rate of discovery, and the number and quality of soon-to-be-onstream new projects, suggests that such a test may be possible in less than a decade.
TVF's assessment ("it is difficult to separate out periods for bodies of similar mass that are either close to the same value or are in resonance with one another") is unduly pessimistic
And a correction: I wrote 'weak lensing'; I should have written 'microlensing'.
Unlike astronomy, where there are just a few journals that cover most of the field, it seems that papers on the general topic of planetary system, and planets/moons/etc, formation are found in many.
... as well as the big guns such as Nature and Science.
.... however I couldn't find any.
In addition to Icarus, there is MNRAS (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society), ApJ (Astrophysics Journal), JGRE/JGRA (Journal of Geophysical Research), P&SS (Planetary and Space Science), GeoRL (Geophysical Research Letters), E&PSL (Earth and Planetary Science Letters),
There are also at least two regular meetings/conferences; examples from recent ones: 39th DPS meeting, session 32 (Planet and Satellite Creation and Evolution, on 10 October 2007) http://www.abstractsonline.com/viewer/viewSession.asp (link may not work); Fall 2007 AGU meeting, session P54A (Planetary Formation and Evolution) http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/sessions5?meeting=fm07&part=P54A&maxhits=400.
Somewhere among all these there must be a good review paper or three, published in the last year or so
A very readable, recent, book, with oodles of references is The Big Splat (Or How Our Moon Came to Be), by Dana Mackenzie. Of course, its focus is much narrower than the topic of this thread!
And that'll have to do for now.
In any case, Astronomy Magazine is hardly a relevant peer-reviewed journal is it! I mean, they almost never have any equations, do they?
Do you know which (published) paper(s) present a case for this? How many people must be talking about it before you decide to actually investigate it and contemplate it for yourself, Nereid? I'm not sure why you keep thinking this is in any way relevant.
I mean, tens or hundreds of millions of people (or more) talk about astrology, and have been doing so for a long time.
Back to the same question I've asked many a time; in the pln2bz view of alternative science:
What constitutes evidence?
What methods are legitimate wrt investigating such evidence?
What methods are legitimate wrt presenting, reviewing, critiquing, (and so on) conclusions drawn from investigations of evidence?
Oh, and the handle is APODNereid, if you please.
Double oh, may we expect to see, sometime soon, a preprint on the arXiv server, with you as an author, showing that all those plasma physics lab experiments on magnetic reconnection are fatally flawed?
Here is the abstract: We present a three-year series of observations at 24 microns with the Spitzer Space Telescope of the interstellar material in a 200 x 200 arcmin square area centered on Cassiopeia A. Interstellar dust heated by the outward light pulse from the supernova explosion emits in the form of compact, moving features. Their sequential outward movements allow us to study the complicated three-dimensional structure of the interstellar medium (ISM) behind and near Cassiopeia A. The ISM consists of sheets and filaments, with many structures on a scale of a parsec or less. The spatial power spectrum of the ISM appears to be similar to that of fractals with a spectral index of 3.5. The filling factor for the small structures above the spatial wavenumber k ~ 0.5 cycles/pc is only ~ 0.4%. In light of your less than electrifying (shall we say) track record re the NACO/VLT observations of 2M1207 (A and b), you may wish to consider taking the trouble to understand the observations ("evidence") reported in this preprint, including the long chains of theory-based logic, before you write something you may later regret.
Also, note that this is a preprint (though the Comments include "accepted by The Astrophysical Journal").
Click on the "Preprints & online articles" link, and explore! You may find the morning, afternoon, or more, that you spend reading both educational and rewarding.
My speculative guess is that the connection between Z-Pinches and Jupiter is that an Earthly lab with a powerful Z-Pinch has been used to explore regions of materials/matter parameter space, otherwise inaccessible, that have some correspondence to those hypothesised to occur in Jupiter's interior.
Nothing to do with "Electric Universe theories", as far as I understand such speculative prose (to borrow an AC's colourful term).
But, I could be wrong; when you've had a chance to read over this material, please let SD readers know what you found.
Of course, the extent to which any subset of these provides support for any EU ideas is surely impossible to determine