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The Secret of the Sun's Heated Atmosphere
eldavojohn writes "There has long been speculation on why the Sun's surface is a mere ten thousand degrees while the atmosphere can reach millions. Space.com is reporting that the mystery has now been solved. Researchers looked for Alfven waves in the solar chromosphere and found them. Followup studies employing simulations demonstrated that the energetics work out to transfer energy from the Sun's surface to its overlying corona.. The magnetic waves may also be the power source behind the solar wind."
When I saw that article, I couldn't help but think "Damn that's a hot data center, glad I'm not running any of their servers :-) " then again if someone were truly able to get a computer running at that temperature, maybe they're worth considering...
...in bed
...but does it run solaris?
ALFVEN!!!
Hannes Alfven strongly advocated against magnetic reconnection and any theory of the corona's temperature that outright assumes that electricity is not involved. The idea that astrophysicists would attach his name to a theory that he vigorously fought against is a clear indication of peoples' lack of knowledge with regards to the history of science associated with his work. This has to be the ultimate form of scientific disrespect for what was in fact a very great man! Alfven started out as a power grid engineer! He studied electrical currents, people. Shame on Space.com for carrying this article and shame on the astrophysical community who persist in using his name to trumpet a cause for which he so vigorously fought against. And shame on everybody for just going along with the idea that Maxwell's Equations are meaningless in space. When you see a magnetic field, your first question should always be, "Where's the current?" To assume that it is not present even when you can see the magnetic field is just mind-boggling!
Are astrophysicists just unaware, or are they being malicious?
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas - a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is fused into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine. The heat and light of the sun come from the nuclear reactions of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and helium.
I'll bet Keebler's are pissed.
Maybe I should quit getting my info from television documentaries, but on the episode of the Universe (Astronomy program on the History Channel which debuted last year) dealing with the Sun, they stated that the likely cause of this was that the sound waves generated by the nuclear nature of the sun were causing enough pulsing/friction within the sun's atmosphere to superheat it compared to the surface.
Is this still a viable theory? (or was it ever one?)
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Good joke, but...actually,
- the correct spelling uses a diacritical mark over the 'e', as wikipedia indicates: "Alfén."
- the correct pronunciation is more like ahlf'-vay-uhn or ahlf'-vay-n or ahlf'-vayn (with the last vowel sound a "schwa" nearly collapsed into the 'é' if it's even pronounced at all).
I am not Swedish, but this is how I've heard native Swedish speakers pronounce it when asked specifically about how to pronounce his name.
captcha: neutrino, no joke!
I'm not familiar with Alfven, but I offer the following:
Joseph Preistley is credited with discovering oxygen.
That's a wonderful honor and all except his opinion was that air gets clogged with "phlogiston" when material is burned, such that a fire within an enclosed environment gets extinguished because the air can no longer absorb this stuff.
Nowadays, chemists understand that free oxygen gets depleted during a fire - which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of Preistley's strongly held belief.
What can I say, "misplaced honor happens".
This is not my sig
They have spent a decade or three researching magnetic reconnection - in the lab, via in situ space probes, and by remote sensing (a.k.a. using telescopes) - and have developed descriptions of the behaviours of plasmas, building on Alfvén's work and these discoveries, that match the observed phenomena nicely.
Take a look at the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (http://mrx.pppl.gov/), as an example of lab-based plasma physics work on magnetic reconnection.
But maybe you know something about the behaviour of plasmas that the thousands of researchers - experimentalists, theorists, 'observers', and those who simulate plasmas in computers - don't, or have missed?
Why not write a paper to Nature, or Science, giving chapter and verse of the holes in their work?
The sun gets its energy from pulling matter in. That is why it is much hotter on the surface.
Hoyle advocated this and I am not sure why no one is researching it.
Great. Another Electric Universe rant.
See topic...
In which of his publications may one read more? I am not sure why no one is researching it Perhaps because there's no evidence of any net motion of matter in to the Sun? There is a solar wind, and it flows outward; the Sun is losing mass (matter), not gaining it (the occasional comet or asteroid it eats nowhere nearly makes up for what it loses in the solar wind).
So, so sad. You guys are just utterly clueless to what is being argued. The worst part is that you care so much about ridiculing something that you know nothing about. There is absolutely *nothing* about the Electric Universe that has been "debunked".
Well-intentioned people can in fact cause great harm. So sad!
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
What powers the Sun?
... but as he published it, in Russian, in a physics journal that had essentially no circulation outside the (then) USSR, in the 1950s, he missed getting the glory for it).
Here is a good overview, written in 1996, of the standard solar model (SSM) (http://www.ap.stmarys.ca/~guenther/Level01/solar/what_is_ssm.html).
In a nutshell, the SSM matches a wide range of relevant observables, from the Sun's mass, its 'sound spectrum' (helioseismology - the solar equivalent of seismology), its radius, its energy output, the constancy of that energy output (time periods of years to billions of years), its (estimated, inferred) composition, and so on*.
In 1996, there was one, very annoying, exception - the flux of neutrinos from the Sun seemed to be way too low!
This very nice article by John Bahcall^, on the Nobel website, tells the story of how 'the solar neutrino problem' was solved (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/articles/bahcall/index.html; it turns out that the original author of the the 'MSW' neutrino oscillation theory was actually Bruno Pontecorvo
There is, as SD readers know from pln2bz's comments, an alternative view of what powers the Sun: giant electric currents throughout the galaxy. As far as I know, this 'Electric Universe' idea (EU) has no basis, either in terms of quantitatively matching any significant subset of the relevant observations, or in terms of the underlying theory (ask an EU proponent about how much experimental support there is for the EU idea of what supports the Sun against gravitational collapse, to take just one example; or to characterise the current which powers the Sun, in terms of charge carriers, flux, speeds, and so on, and how well this characterisation matches what inter-planetary probes such as Ulysses or Galileo or Cassini have detected).
* If any reader is interested in reading more on this, right up to the latest ApJ papers, just holler!
^ Bahcall was one of the greats of 20th century astronomy; although he didn't share the Nobel for discovering the solution, his decades-long work on the problem (including his encouragement of Davis, who did get the Nobel) was crucial to that solution.
You know, I could well be wrong about this.
Would you be kind enough to give references to papers published in relevant peer-reviewed technical journals that support your original assertions?
Please, only papers which report results from space probes that have sampled the inter-planetary medium, over significant time-frames.
Must be because of the MySQL purchase?
Oh wait...
Or, perhaps, all I have said is that
a) there are (AFAIK) no published papers, in relevant peer-reviewed journals, that support the {insert quoted EU assertion here}; and
b) if there are, would you, pln2bz, please be kind enough to provide references to such papers (so I, and any other SD reader who may be interested, can read them and apply whatever critical thinking seems apt).
Oh, and it's APODNereid, if you please.
The reason for all of this is God! It's just a form of intelligent design, put there to make ./'ers freak out and have boring discussions about nothing anyone cares about :)
there are in fact alternative possible explanations for our observations which astrophysicists tend to ignore
Or, more pertinently, these so-called alternatives fail several key tests, such as internal consistency, consistency with relevant theories whose domains of applicability overlap (quantum mechanics, in this case), and (above all) consistency with good, relevant observations.
They are complicit with ignoring these alternative explanations because math already exists for the conventional paradigms
And you know this because? Your objective evidence is ... what, exactly?
The public has this misconception that astrophysicists have *ruled out* alternative explanations in an honest manner by completing a comprehensive review of all of the theories out there, and what one discovers over time is that in fact, that has not occurred in the slightest
So, once again, if you please ... references to papers, published in relevant peer-reviewed journals, which lay out this/these 'alternative explanation(s)' and which show internal consistency, consistency with quantum mechanics (in the relevant domains of applicability), and (above all) consistency with good, relevant observations and experimental results.
I think I have asked for this nearly ten times now; not once (that I recall) have you answered.
We've seen stars erratically jump all over the HR diagram, including FG Sagittae, V605 Aquilae and V4334 Sagittarii and V838 Monocerotis ("The Electric Sky" by Don Scott points to a total of seven counter-examples to predicted stellar evolution)
Hmm ... not a bad track record then, for standard models of stars ... given that there are detailed records on what, about a billion stars?!
And if any SD reader is interested, a quick check on the relevant, peer-reviewed literature will show that pln2bz's assertion here is, shall we say, only coincidentally consistent with the truth.
In fact, we see unusual things with stars on a weekly basis, and this should rationally induce some self-doubt. And yet, it does not! Every enigmatic observation is just rolled into the standard model as quickly as it goes into the books, and at the expense of people actually proposing creative solutions that better explain *all* of our observations.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but science is a process of discovery ... only by testing, modifying, testing again, and so on, is progress made. After all, if the 'enigmatic observations' cannot be 'rolled up into the standard model', then it's time to change it!
As for 'people actually proposing creative solutions', let's have them roll up their sleeves, write up their solutions, and get them published, shall we? That way everyone can review them, critique them, test them, and so on.
And yet, there are laboratory plasma physicists who argue against things like magnetic reconnection as being redundant of exploding plasma double layers (Alfven included). It is wrong to completely ignore these people. We should foster a public debate on these issues and honestly assess who is right without preferences to either. Instead, what we get is millions of dollars pumped into magnetic reconnection with little to no consideration of exploding plasma double layers.
So, in the last few hours, you've gone from claiming magnetic reconnection cannot possibly be right (because Alfvén said so), to reading the hundreds (or thousands) of published papers on the topic (including the results of lab experiments), and concluded that they all fail because of something else that Alfvén said?
You sure are a fast reader.
So, yeah, parsing criticism until it no longer makes sense is all fun and games. But the big picture is not so funny at all.
Hmm ... are you s
Forgive my naivete but when I was a little boy I thought the sun was hotter due to convection. Hot things rise and are less dense. Cold things go down. Except this occurs with steroids on the sun.
And if the answer is at least "completely!" (or equivalent), then can we discuss what you consider to be scientific methods?
It may be that the universe is ruled by electric currents; it may be that it's not (and it may be that it's something in between). Surely a few comments discussing how smart people (nerds or not) could go about finding out would be time and typing well spent?
That you, yourself, reject the standard scientific (astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, space/plasma physics) paradigm seems clear*.
What's not clear - to me at least - is what you suggest should be used instead.
May I ask, again, that you do your SD readers a favour by putting fingers to keyboard and at least outlining your preferred alternative?
{turning to some specifics} All of the clues are right before us to assemble a competing cosmology to the conventional theories. Why is it not done? Whatever the reason, it's certainly not because it *cannot* be done. So why not do it, pln2bz? Let's see
Or do you mean incredibly effective in the same way Birkeland's model of the rings of Saturn are self-luminous (when they're not)?
Or do you mean incredibly effective in the same way that the orbit of the Moon can be modelled - without plasmas - to a ~2 cm accuracy (in the sense of observed - expected)?
Perhaps people here don't realise it because it's not true?
* You've said so, several times, in SD comments.
Sun : Very Hot, May cause personal injury.
Sun : Warning, do not look directly in sun with remaining good eye.
Ross Youngblood
To play devil's advocate, why does it matter so much to you if electricity takes a subservient role? From some perspectives, quantum mechanics takes a subservient role to predicting how billiard balls interact on a pool table, but it certainlty doesn't mean QM isn't good for predicting tunneling in your flash drive's eeprom. Why *must* an effect not have a subservient role? The color of the flash drive is mostly an electric effect, but doesn't necessarily effect the flash drive electronics.
Of course that depends on what you call a universe. If it is everything, then it is by definition closed (i.e., not getting any electrical input from outside since there is no outside). However, if you shrink your term to "galaxy" or "solar system", then certainly there's the possiblity of not being a closed electrical system. Although of course that's being as pedantic as your dismisal of current astrophysical models right?
Does it matter if inanimate objects are fighting or cooperating? For example, does a bird's wings fight the air to create lift or cooperate with the air to create lift? This is completely immaterial to a "real" scientist (although I'm sure a pseudo-scientist might care about this to motivate a model where there is little scientific proof). I'm sure that Einstein didn't ask himself if the electrons were fighting the incoming photon or cooperating with it when describing the photo-electric effect, because, well, he could just show you the electron was ejected and let you draw your own conclusion
You must be new here, anyone has the right to ridicule anyone about their interpretation and get away with it
It's actually entertaining how science has got so personal and less observational these days (don't get me started about evolution and string theory, not the fsm string theory, but the one tying up all of the physicists these days). Somewhere along the way people forgot about actual science and decided there was "dogma" to convice to the masses. Unfortuantly, all this did was create a vehicle to bring out the crackpots with their own competing "dogma". Science isn't actually about truth or explanation or classification, it's about experiment and observation. The "theory" part is just poetry (whose beauty is in the eye of the beholder) and a place holder to assist in making predictions. If the predictions are wrong, the theory is of course wrong, but a wrong theory doesn't invalidate experiments or the observations. Of course there's no reason a theory has to make "sense" or be "beautiful" either, but if a theory is not testable, it's no better than poetry and as we all know, there are many more literary critic than poets out there...
Thanks to your presence on Slashdot and other Electric Universe partisans on other relevant forums, I've exerted great effort investigating EU's claims, evidence, and reasoning. I know understand quite clearly the arguments you use, the (twisted or misconstrued) "evidence" you present, the misconceptions you have about the day-to-day business of science, and your fundamental lack of understanding of both physics and the practice of science in general. There is absolutely *nothing* about the Electric Universe that has been "debunked". Everything not defined in terms so vague as to be un-debunkable have been debunked. Everything else you cling to is not science, but fanciful speculation and wishful thinking, or outright jealousy. The worst part is that you care so much about ridiculing something that you know nothing about. I think the same thing every time I see you or your ilk say "'astrophysicists' refuse X" or "mainstream scientists ignore X" or "only PLASMA researchers IN LABORATORIES can shed light on cosmology". I don't think you understand thing one about anything you talk about here on Slashdot. Well-intentioned people can in fact cause great harm. So sad! I think the same thing of you. You're awfully self-righteous for someone with so little knowledge of modern sciences, or even basic physics; let alone the theory and physical observations that lead to modern scientific understandings of things like stars and matter and energy and even simple craters.
You're like a petulant child, throwing a temper-tantrum when told the sun doesn't work in the fanciful way you imagined. You, too should learn about the system of knowledge and the development of modern physics and astronomy before you so condescendingly ridicule them.
"Yeah, it's there, but it doesn't *DO* anything. At least, not what you say!" You know how many times I've heard that?
Apparently not enough to motivate you to actually investigate why they think that, but enough to make you email a mythologist for his opinion on modern physics, and maybe read more books published on your side of your self-appointed adversarial relationship with science.
Every time that you see a "black hole" shooting a jet at another galaxy, ask yourself: are they fighting, or are they cooperating?
I'm sorry the other AC chose to over-analyze your metaphor. I know what you're saying.
What looks like a violent blast to one person can quite reasonably be argued to be a connective filament between two galaxies to another person.
The "violence" is immaterial. Many S- and SB- type galaxies are ejecting axial particle streams in directions where no galaxies are there to "cooperate", even on ONE pole, let alone both(!) poles simultaneously. If this were an electromagnetic phenomenon, we would not see this type of thing without bending electromagnetism to the breaking point.
If instead these streams are ejected by some gravitational cause, we should not be surprised at our findings of some galaxies hitting each other but most examples of otherwise identical streams pointing in any old direction, galaxy or no. After all; there are at least tens of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, and chance alone explains why some jets hit other galaxies, while most do not.
Who can say that they are right when the issue is rarely even discussed?
Science is not about consensus; it doesn't work by judging lots of ideas. It works by having ways to know when you've found wrong ideas, which is called reductionism. Science doesn't have to "discuss" (have a dialog about) your Electric Universe hypotheses. Such a discussion will not advance human knowledge, but will serve only to placate the proponents of such a theory (hah! not likely) and distract people from exploring more promising and fruitful paths of scientific inquiry. Your rantings on Slashdot and elsewhere would require geologists, astronomers, cosmologists, meteorologists, physicists, archaeologists, chemists, evolutionary biologists, and anthropologists to devote their minds and careers to Electric Universe when they can see even superficially in many cases how it doesn't work. That you cannot underscores how little of the available human knowledge you understand or can be bothered to investigate as your own hobby/obsession these last few years.
And the axes of galaxies furthermore connect up to create a vast electrical network.
For a suitably imaginative "electrical network". I've seen that crap; (Thornhill, or Scott?) just draws the lines to suit the positions of the galaxies; there's no configuration that couldn't suit this. Even if a configuration DID look less suitable, it would be nothing further to claim that "well, uh, for some reason it's in another state and is in transition. Here, let me go do some highly-suspect redshift calculations and mis-interpretations...".
It's called creative problem solving.
You're the only ones who think there is even a problem in the first place. You're the only ones who think the "Electric Universe" view has any grounding in physics, because you have nothing beyond lay-experience in the scientific fields in which you dabble. There's not a space scientist in the bunch, to my knowledge; only a bunch of unaccredited (a warning, not an automatic fail) dilettantes, an electrical engineer, a plasma physicist, and a mathematician. Maybe there are more, but those seem to be the only group working in/on/around Electric Universe and Saturnian stuff.
For God's sake, we see terraced craters all over the friggin place, and terraced craters can be formed with rotating Birkeland Currents.
Fallacy of hasty generalization. Terraced craters can
pln2bz must be busy doing "damage control" at an outbreak of Badmouthing Electric Universe In A Public Forum. Normally a snide one-liner like that would get you about 1000~3000 words of pedagogical ranting about "history of science" and "philosophy of science", laced with factual errors and logical fallacies, and the occasional grain of truth whose significance he fails to use to his own advantage. See his comment history on Slashdot or other forums for copious examples.
I would like, however, to discourage readers from making such snide and condescending remarks as these just egg him on to no benefit. The issues he raises are valuable case-studies of how philosophy, knowledge, logic can be misused and misconstrued. I hope that anyone who has something to discuss will do so, but I don't think badgering does any good.
The article he linked you was dug up and posted by a forum member at the Electric Universe discussion forum, Thunderbolts.info. The basic gist of their argument is that psychological myopia alone can and probably does explain why nobody gives their story credence, under the operating principle that they are clearly and beyond reasonable doubt right. This view is widely held by the contributors in that forum, and of course by the site's purveyors who are the originators of the Electric Universe concept and have written several rather credulity-straining books on the subject.
If any reader is interested in reading more on this, right up to the latest ApJ papers, just holler!
Since your relatively recent arrival amid these savage Slashdot forums, you seem to have made a point of rebutting junk science in general, and investigating pln2bz's (among others') junk science in particular. Those are admirable goals, and on behalf of myself and I suspect others who read Slashdot I say welcome and glad to have you.
I know it takes time to do this, and it's a bother, but listing reliable links in comments (and quoting: even better) is an efficacious debate tactic and moreover a thorough demonstration of correctness. pln2bz does this all the time; he has an enormous list of URIs organized for his ready use in online propaganda efforts and a (small!) library of EU- and Velikovskian books at hand. You've perhaps seen his very statement of this fact in a post on either Slashdot or another forum (ahem), or probably inferred as much anyway. I think you would be prudent to at least meet this propaganda with fact by listing, say, at least one reliable paper on a subject, or at least pointing readers to or adsabs or even arXiv.org (being careful about the last, as there's some unfortunate copy there sometimes). pln2bz' organization and unshakable fanaticism are, in my experience, rare even among the Electric Universe hobbyists, and studying them and their ideas suggests that anyone trying to clean up their mess will at least need some level of organization and doggedness.
(ask an EU proponent about how much experimental support there is for the EU idea of what supports the Sun against gravitational collapse, to take just one example;
You say you've read through many/most/all of pln2bz' comments on Slashdot, and it seems you've also investigated his (and others') posts on his favorite Electric Universe forum and support group. Perhaps you recall that he was asked at least twice about the sun, gravity, and planetary orbits. Naturally these are damning questions that EU doesn't address (hah! yet, as we shall see), so he appealed to Wallace Thornhill for help. (In fact, it may have escalated to Thornhill after even the imaginative and sharp-tongued David Talbott, who usually answers pln2bz' Big Physics questions, couldn't come up with anything. Otherwise Thornhill seems rather quiet; I interpret this to mean even he can't imagine an answer to everything, and pln2bz and others just shrug it off as "Thornhill is a man of few words" verbatim.) Thornhill's response was a classic, jaw-dropping "EU is right if there's new physics" moment:
(from http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=358211&cid=21423145 )
It is important to note that this disallows any assumptions about the internal density and composition of celestial bodies to be made from gravitational perturbations!
Yes, Thornhill wrote a response to a Slashdot comment that flatly denies the nature of gravity, the nature of mass, and (as both a cause and effect of these denials; circular...) our ability to measure either via observation. pln2bz's central scientific philosophy was exposed when he said, almost verbatim: "Thornhill could still be right even if he doesn't know the math behind it." Since that comment, pln2bz and others on the EU fansite have spoken even more readily of unifying gravity within electromagnetism, and thus of anti-gravity, power projection, and the like. They have not one clue of how to formulate this as a quantitative law, and flatly deny relativity and most/all observations that support it.
I've seen the same pattern all over their goings on. I would encourage bystanders curious about the farcical nature of Electric Universe to investigate pln2bz' previous comments, check out his links, and pay special attention to the authors Charles Ginenthal, Wallace Thornhill, David Talbott, Don Scott, Dwardu Cardona, Anthony Peratt, Halton Arp, and Ralph Jurgens
You have made many assertions.
Others have questioned, or challenged, or rebutted, your assertions.
Of the assertions challenged, where independent verification or validation seems possible, I think the best that could be said is that you were unable to answer the questions or address the challenges.
More disturbing, however, is that most direct questions or challenges or rebuttals have gone unanswered, unaddressed.
Instead, it seems you simply ignore the challenges etc; sometimes you change the topic, sometimes you make even wilder assertions, and so on.
What do they say about trolls?
Fact: even in the MRX (Magnetic Reconnection Experiment, attached to the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab http://www.pppl.gov/projects/pages/magnetic_reconnect.html) there are (apparently) no laboratory plasma physicists so arguing. EU is highly testable. Translation: only if those doing the marketing of the idea are not required to show how, in any meaningful detail.
Fact: to the extent that the rich variety of theories, models, hypotheses, etc that comprises mainstream science is inconsistent with "EU", then said EU has been tested, repeatedly
Fact: Some of those who've commented on the EU ideas presented by pln2bz have not, in fact, "read the evidence". However, many have, and have questioned it and challenged it. So far, your track record in answering these direct, pertinent questions and challenges has been nearly perfect (you've failed to answer, almost every time).
Care to explain - quantitatively - Zwicky's 1930s detailed observations on the radial velocity distribution of the Coma galaxy clusters (since repeated, for hundreds of other clusters)?
Care to explain - quantitatively - the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)?
Care to explain - quantitatively - the observed trend in the average density of the universe, as the scale over which that density is measured increases?
Care to explain - quantitatively - why the night sky is dark (except, of course, in Manhattan)? They can generate spiral galaxies with the proper rotation curves using nothing more than the characteristics of laboratory plasmas. You know one thing that rather annoys me is your repetition of stuff that you've been called on before, had shown to be (often grossly) wrong, and have never addressed.
This is another example of such dishonesty.
Peratt's papers on this topic do NOT, repeat do NOT, "generate spiral galaxies with the proper rotation curves using nothing more than the characteristics of laboratory plasmas"!
If you continue to think that they do, let's have a discussion on these assertions. If you are unprepared to do so, please don't get offended if I (and others) start to treat what you say accordingly.
Perhaps some of those new folk will get around, soon, to writing papers which they submit for publication in relevant peer-reviewed journals?
Perhaps some of them will try to explore - quantitatively - the numerous internal inconsistencies in "EU theory"?
Perhaps the text which accompanies the TPODs will start to contain fewer gross inaccuracies?
Or maybe they flock there for light relief?
Hot things rise and are less dense. Cold things go down. Except this occurs with steroids on the sun.
But remember that there is no gravity at the centre of the sun, just as there is no gravity at the centre of the Earth. (OK, strictly speaking, there is micro-gravity.)
Assume that the sun is pretty much a fluid (and ignore viscosity, or anything viscosity-like, such as electromagnetic attraction or repulsion in a plasma). This means that denser bits will sink to a point because the closer to the centre they get the less force there is pulling them to the centre.
(As an aside, I can imagine that the centre of the sun would be a wild place with all these layers and bands and blobs of materials of different densities and electromagnetic properties bumping about, without gravity to order them... ...perhaps like a superheated liquid that has not yet begun to boil, but when it does, WATCH OUT!)
Finding the "no gravity at the center" part hard to imagine? Imagine that the centre of the Earth is a cavity (with a nice 20C temperature, 1 ATM pressure, etc., so that you can survive this thought experiment). Imagine that you are at the centre of this cavity. How much gravity is there on you? Well, the dominant factor would be the planet all around you. OK, so far so good. But every bit of that planet pulling you in one direction is almost entirely cancelled out by the bit 180 degrees opposite. Despite unevenness in the Earth, in the end, you would be simply free floating. At least to several decimal places.
At the surface, gravity is a big deal and the "dense things fall" part works. But the closer they get to the centre, the less they are pulled toward the centre. And as their fall is slowed by the all other material around them, they stop. Or, more to the point, gravity becomes less important than nuclear pressure, which will tend to push things toward the surface again.
More or less. FWIW. YMMV. IANAL. IANAA. Etc.
I'm here EdgeKeep Inc.
Heat rises, duh.
;)
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Thanks for the kind words, AC! :-)
... either because they've been banned (for persistent rule violations) or can no longer make their case.
Each internet discussion forum has its own rules, and within those rules, a wide range of writing styles and delivered content are possible.
There's also the effectiveness of what's written, in terms of the writer's (or writers') intentions and goals.
"Electric Universe" (and plasma universe, plasma cosmology, etc) ideas are all over the internet, with prolific proponents in a great many discussion fora. For some reason, such proponents seem to be particularly active in fora (or sections of fora) devoted to science, and within science to physics, astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology. At least, that's my perception.
On those fora which have rules to enforce their avowed science-based scope and purpose, it seems EU proponents are, by and large, no longer active
This is not surprising, given the disconnect between the content and presentation of EU "theories" and the methods etc of the relevant sciences.
pln2bz has been writing in SD for some time now, and it seems that most of those who bother to respond to his comments have already concluded just how non-scientific the content of those comments is. This is, no doubt, partly due to the numbingly repetitious nature of his comments; it's as if nothing of significance has happened in "EU theory" for the last decade or three - certainly no new papers.
Worse, pln2bz doesn't even seem to modify his faves (magnetic reconnection, the Deep Impact mission, Peratt's galaxy simulations, solar wind acceleration, to name just a few) in light of the often very strong critiques of these, from other SD writers. In one way, this makes rebuttal easy - simply re-write the last rebuttal, to improve its impact with SD readers.
The most curious thing to me is the extreme reluctance to say anything about how, from the POV of "EU theory" as the harbinger of an alternative, science (astronomy, physics, etc) should be done: is there a role for independent verification and validation? for independent review? for (public) disclosure of methods and data? What is the role of hypotheses (or equivalents)? of models (whether quantitative or not)? of theories (in whatever form)? How is the legitimacy (or otherwise) of testing to be determined? And so on.
To me, this extreme reluctance to even acknowledge the pertinence of these (and related) questions is a good indication that the proponents of this stuff know - in their hearts - that honest answers would greatly damage their cause, possibly fatally.
So, why bother? I'm still trying to answer that question.
Would you be kind enough to elaborate on what you mean by "physical" and "metaphysical"? In your reply would you mind including at least a brief mention of gluons, colour charge, the chirality of neutrinos (and anti-neutrinos), and quarks?
Oh, and as usual, some pointers to where an SD reader may review alternative explanations to the wide range of excellent astronomical observations that underpin dark (non-baryonic) matter and 'dark energy'. Quantitative explanations, of course. When the spiral arms of galaxies were observed to rotate unusually, everybody should have taken a very deep breath and reconsidered the fundamental force of the universe. It was never done. Hmm, I guess you've not heard of Moti Milgrom, or Jacob Bekenstein, or R. H. Sanders, or S. McGaugh, or
One more categorical pln2bz assertion busted. Astrophysics is a complete and utter mess! Is that - solely - because you don't understand it?
And if I declare, with two exclamation marks, and in all caps ASTROPHYSICS IS A SUBLIME SYMPHONY!! does that trump your lower case, one exclamation mark claim? We don't even get clear and concise explanations for what gravity and mass are! Hmm
I'll grant you that the Higgs mechanism is somewhat less than clear and concise, in terms of explaining how particles acquire (or have) mass ("a relativistically invariant quantum fluid" requires quite a bit more math than non-Euclidean geometry), but it is still a remarkable proposal. Perhaps this year or next will see the first announcements of experimental results confirming (or not) the consistency of this proposal with the universal reality.
One more thing: your comment reads like you somehow expect that the universe should be (easily) comprehensible to at least a large subset of Homo sapiens individuals. Where does this expectation come from?
I estimate that you have alleged at least 100 times (here in SD) that (many of) those who respond to your SD comments do not take the trouble to even read the material you present, much less understand it.
May I present a mirror, for your consideration?
Just a few days ago, in comments on another SD story (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=423972&cid=22125844), I suggested that you had misunderstood that image, not least because you did not know how it was created. I gave you a link, to a website dedicated to explaining what the instrument (NACO) is and how it works.
Did you try to understand it? or even bother to read it?
We can conduct an unscientific test. The hypothesis is that you did not read the material; the test is whether a subsequent comment by you contains objective evidence to that effect. Let's see
Somewhat disheartening, if not entirely unexpected
I mean, if someone takes the trouble to try to explain to you how an astronomical image is created, and points out that your interpretation is inconsistent with how the image was created, and you not only ignore them, but (seem to) continue to assume it shows certain features which are, in fact, merely artifacts, why should any reader not be highly sceptical of other things you write?
Here's the straight dope: the two objects in the "image" are completely consistent with POINT SOURCES! More specifically, the two sources have 2D fourier transforms that are statistically the same as point sources, given the estimated PSF (which PSF has also been measured, during the engineering run prior to NACO being signed over to the scientific team).
In future, when I respond to your comments, I shall state explicitly that the intended audience does not include you.
...
... there is no objective method (that I know of) to choose between these claims.
With that preamble over
Down here, at the bottom of the ocean of air, distant "point sources" in the optical (or visible) and near-infrared wavebands are smeared out by what astronomers call "seeing". You notice this as the twinkling of stars in the night sky. Assuming radial symmetry*, the 1D distribution of intensity of such a seeing smeared point source looks like a Gaussian, but isn't (it's a Kolmogorov distribution, as the primary source of distortion is turbulence). Adaptive optics is a term used to describe a range of techniques to deconvolve the seeing, to recover the "beyond the atmosphere" 2D distribution of source intensity; the most ambitious of these aim to deliver diffraction limited images, using phase conjugation and laser guide beacons to "measure and compensate for turbulence-induced phase aberrations in three dimensions".
The image cited by pln2bz was taken by NaCO (NAOS-CONICA, Nasmyth Adaptive Optics System Near-Infrared Imager and Spectrograph), attached to one of the VLTs (http://www.eso.org/instruments/naco/index.html). Note the following comment: "Publications based on data obtained with the NACO instrument should quote the following reference papers: Lenzen, R. et al. 2003, SPIE 4841, 944 and Rousset, G. et al. 2003, SPIE 4839, 140." Clearly, pln2bz did not bother (perhaps he felt his SD comments did not constitute a "publication"); he's in good company, as his source was undoubtedly TPOD (or similar), which also did not bother.
Why does this matter?
Fundamentally, it goes to the issue of "evidence", which EU proponents (not only pln2bz, not only on Slashdot) get so worked up about.
As I said above, the two objects in the VLT/NACO image are statistically the same as two point sources.
One could, as pln2bz has done, claim to see something other than two point sources.
However, one could also claim that there's a face in the image (example1: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070421.html; example2: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990315.html), or a planet with rings (example: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071023.html), or even invisible pink fairies
Amusing aside: some of you have seen this "neutrino image" of the Sun (or similar) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980605.html, http://elvis.phys.lsu.edu/svoboda/superk/sun.gif. At least one prolific EU proponent interpreted this to show that neutrinos are emitted from the surface of the Sun, not its core! {insert ROFL smilies here}^
Concerning BAUT
There is a very long thread there, on the Electric Universe (nearly 2400 posts! http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/28596-electric-universe-model.html), as well as instructions to all those who wish to post on the topic, and links to all other EU-related threads (http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/45529-read-first-re-posting-electric-universe-ideas-here.html).
In addition, this thread may be of interest to readers of this comment: http://www.bautforum.com/about-baut/55206-reflections-year-half-s-experience-baut-s-atm-section.html.
* whic
Cosmic variance (Daniel Holz', JoAnne Hewitt's, John Conway's, Julienne Dalcanton's, Mark Trodden's, Risa Wechsler's, and Sean Carroll's blog) has just been upgraded to support LaTeX! (http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/01/22/succumbing-to-latex/)
;-)
Comment 8, by Julienne: "This has to be the most fabulously geeky comment thread, EVAH!"
Then read comment 10, by Sean
Being a first draft on how to be more effective in addressing Electric Universe (Plasma Universe, etc) comments, posted in threads on stories in the Science section of SD.
Empirically, such threads stay open for comments from 4 to at least 10 days; anyone have insights into how to accurately predict this lifespan?
Empirically, you get ~3500 characters of text before "Read rest of this comment" kicks in (unless your score is high).
SD itself gives guidelines on how a comment's score is arrived at (it's a dynamical process).
So in the Mechanics of Writing Department, -=*write early, write briefly, write often, and write well*=- would seem to sum it up.
On to the content.
Here's a provisional list of EU faves (I'm leaving out mythology, for now):
* magnetic reconnection
* solar wind accelerates past planets
* electrical neutrality
* spiral galaxy rotation curves
* plasma physics, per laboratory experiments
* Alfvén and Birkeland hero worship
* Z-pinches
So in the Prepare your URLs Department, an SD comment on each of these would be very handy.
Now for my fave: the Electric Universe method of research and investigation.
Essentially nothing seems to be available, in terms of an outline of what the core attributes of this alternative form of science is supposed to be, though leokor's comment is quite helpful (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=388752&cid=21836590).
However, we can formulate hypotheses on what these attributes are, and test them using the body of SD comments from EU proponents as input data (in addition to the prolific pln2bz and leokor (1 comment only), I have found iantresman (also 1 comment only) and mgmirkin; any reader know of others?).
So in the Turn a Mirror on Them Department, some research into what the ideal world of Electric Universe 'science' looks like is called for (stay tuned).
Of course, anyone reading this is welcome to add comments!
(not even 2k characters; should be fine)
there is no workable cosmology being presented
Indeed, there is no alternative, scientific cosmology being presented.
When you get a chance, would you mind providing links to material on any such alternative that addresses (quantitatively, of course) the following:
* why the night sky is dark
* the Hubble relationship (i.e. the relationship between observed redshift and distance, for galaxies, quasars, GRBs, etc)
* the primordial abundance of light nuclides (H, D, 3He, 4He, and 6Li)
* the SED (spectral energy distribution) of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - i.e. its 2.73K blackbody spectrum
* the CMB dipole
* the CMB angular power spectrum
* the observed large-scale structure of the universe (here's an example: http://www.sdss.org/news/releases/20031028.powerspectrum.html).
You act as if there is only one possible cosmology that can possibly be created
No need to read the APODNereid tea leaves ... I'll say it directly, loudly, and clearly: I think the number of possible cosmologies (to use pln2bz's term) is certainly greater than one. Further, only a few decades ago at least two possible cosmologies seemed consistent with the relevant astronomical observations and experimental results (today there's only one, that I know of).
many very intelligent people have backed the plasma-based cosmology approach
I thought you'd've given up using this kind of argument; you've certainly been beaten up for it many times, here in SD.
Once upon a time, many very intelligent people backed the "Earth is flat" idea too, and the élan vital approach. The universe cares not one jot what people, intelligent or not, back.
I can tell that you have not read the materials because you consistently assume that the arguments are less powerful than they actually are.
Right, like the one about magnetic reconnection has never been observed in a laboratory (URL:http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&no_d2=1&cid=22144874>), or the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets! (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&no_d2=1&cid=22148864), or Arguing that space must be charge neutral on some scale is tantamount to declaring that we've reached a conclusion on a metaphysical question (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=358211&cid=21392029).
your objections to it would give way to more nuanced feeling towards it
If you care to read my previous SD comment, in this thread, you'll see what I'm planning to do. In a nutshell, I will examine - using standard methods found in science - "the plasma-based cosmology approach"; specifically, the extent to which it is internally consistent, independently verifiable (or can be independently validated, if you prefer), and key characteristics of the methods used to classify things as "facts" (and "evidence"). I intend to use an empirical approach.
the telescopes are getting better
Indeed they are!
Let's do a little "what if" experiment, shall we?
Imagine you were granted 1 million seconds of time on the Hubble Space Telescope, using any instruments (or combination), and spread out over as much as a year. What would you use your time to observe?
Imagine the same, on any (or combo) of the VLTs (http://www.eso.org/public/astronomy/teles-instr/whitebook/).
On Spitzer (http://ssc.spitzer.caltech.edu/), XMM-Newton (http://xmm.vilspa.esa.es/), any of the ATNF (
you'd just argue with them ad infinitum over really silly things
(my emphasis)
But how to decide what's a "really silly thing" and what's the tiny thing - that you discover by being pedantic - which ushers in a revolution in physics? (an example, from the early years of the 20th century: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2008/01/light-deflection-at-sun.html).
IM(vH)O, getting a working arrangement on how to decide if something is "evidence" or not, on how to analyse ("interpret") it, on how to construct and test hypotheses, and so on is essential for there to be any meaningful dialogue. And you'll see that this is included in my list of To Dos, in an SD comment of mine from earlier today.
You view astrophysical interpretations as if they are statements of facts. Like much of the remainder of your own discipline, you frequently ignore the huge number of assumptions involved within these theories. This is not an effective strategy for getting at the truth.
Pot, meet kettle; kettle, meet pot.
:clap:
Your comments contain much unintended humour; this is a great example!
I seem to remember someone writing several SD comments about an interpretation of an "image" from the NACO instrument attached to one of the VLTs. When it was pointed out to this writer that they had misunderstood what the image was - in essence ignoring the huge number of assumptions involved with it - was the writer grateful for the opportunity to learn more about how astronomical images are obtained?
Indeed, ignoring the long chains of logic, inextricably tied to physics theories, that are part and parcel of every modern astronomical observation is "not an effective strategy for getting at the truth".
You could wake up on any particular morning and come to find that a new paradigm-changing observation has been made, and that your paradigm lost out
And do you know what I'll do on that day*? Go out and celebrate!
...) would do the same.
I would guess that a majority, perhaps a large majority, of astronomers (astrophysicists, cosmologists, planetary scientists,
For myself, I don't have to guess, because the future is already in my (personal) past. HINT: I think you've read about high-z SNe, haven't you?
And a reasonably intelligent person can see that you value feeling and sounding right over actually being right, because to prioritize *being* right, a person has to be willing to admit that they can be wrong -- even on the big questions.
No need to read tea leaves; I'll say it straight: APODNereid can be wrong. In fact, I'll go one better, and point you to a comment I made, that you responded to, where I said exactly that: "You know, I could well be wrong about this." (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&no_d2=1&cid=22145892)^
you can't even explain simple things like the temperature distributions for planets
Why do you think it's a simple thing? How do you determine what's "simple" and what's not?
Again, this goes to how your alternative approach to science differs from that of real scientists (more later, no doubt).
[threats of fire and brimstone, of dismissal and beheading, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings]
Oh dear, you've got me quaking in my (low-heeled, today) boots! Oh woe is me!!
Does that mean that you won't indulge me - and readers of this SD comment - in outlining what you'd observe if you were given a million seconds of HST, Chandra, Spitzer, SKA, JWST, VLT, Gemini, MAGIC, AMANDA, LIGO, LOFAR, etc 'telescope' time?**
* well, not that day anyway; more likely a year or two later, once the independent verifications and validations had come in,
Once readers of this comment have such materials in hand, as well as the Ishii et al. paper, I'm sure they will be able to make up their own minds as to how much support (or lack of it) the quantitative results provide.
Oh, and by the way, how are you doing in terms of getting those references I (and other SD writers) have asked for? You know, the ones that describe the relevant "Electric Universe" theories (quantitatively of course), and which show how well said theories match (all) the relevant, good astronomical observations (quantitatively, of course).
Instead of "cool as a cucumber", we can now say "cool as the sun's surface". Of course, everybody who's not an astrophysicist (or a slashdot reader) will look at you like you've just grown a new head, but ... you can't have everything.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
You can even get the lecture notes for a (graduate) university course in plasma physics (http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/plasma/plasma.html - as an aside, note how often the word "astrophysics" occurs in these lecture notes^).
What do you say to rolling up your sleeves and doing some research yourself?
* As an example, here is a list of publications on Cas A (a.k.a. G111.7-2.1), from the 1990s to 2006; note that many of these publications tell you how to go about getting the observational data used in the papers, and that much of it is available online, for free: http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/surveys/snrs/snrs.G111.7-2.1.html
^ I found this, in the introduction section, quite interesting, in light of a common, unsubstantiated, assertion in so many of your SD comments: "astrophysicists quickly recognized that much of the Universe consists of plasma, and, thus, that a better understanding of astrophysical phenomena requires a better grasp of plasma physics. The pioneer in this field was Hannes Alfvén, who around 1940 developed the theory of magnetohydrodyamics, or MHD, in which plasma is treated essentially as a conducting fluid. This theory has been both widely and successfully employed to investigate sunspots, solar flares, the solar wind, star formation, and a host of other topics in astrophysics. Two topics of particular interest in MHD theory are magnetic reconnection and dynamo theory."
rather than speculating about something that supposedly happened 13 or 14 billion years ago...
It's not rank speculation, but rather speculation constrained by and to consistency with empirical observations. That's what science is; "speculations" about the nature of the universe in the past are extrapolations from our interrogations of nature. You should note that calling any such inquiry "speculation" necessarily reduces your own position to mere "speculation". Perhaps you find that an improvement over the prevailing opinion that your position is (woefully uninformed) speculation while the position of Big Bang theory is elevated above that level by its incorporation of evidence. why don't you guys focus on explaining why comets and asteroids are surprisingly similar in composition? You're denying the antecedent. The veracity of the mainstream understanding of comets is not contingent on their dissimilarity with asteroids. The electric comet hypothesis, however, is contingent on their being essentially identical objects differentiated by their orbits and the alleged physical consequences of their orbits on them (or lack thereof). Even if "dirty snowballs" turn out typically to be "snowy dirtballs", they still contain water ice and undergo outgassing consistent with the mainstream concept. I'll bet you thought about saying "why comets and asteroids are identical in composition except for the effects of arcing and 'electrical machining'" instead of just "surprisingly similar". I think you sense just how dubious the EC explanation for water detection is. Calling that article "support" for the electric comet hypothesis is just a disingenuous argumentation tactic.
The electric comet hypothesis can only be supported by the available measurements if the investigator says "the hypothesis is supported by any result we encounter" (or misinterprets/fabricates known phenomena). Do you remember hearing Don Scott, in a radio interview in which he made his "predicted observations" about an approaching comet, that "[irrefutably electrical phenomena will happen], or maybe nothing at all"? I do. Scott's and Thornhill's "predictions" in their literature, media and publicity materials are of this same kind everywhere you look. Not one of them is unambiguously supported by any analysis I've ever seen, and I've read far more than the dumbed-down press releases and Thunderbolts hand-waving you and other EU hobbyists have lobbed around in support of the electric comet idea.
You seem eager to shift any discussion to what you consider to be EU's arena of greatest success. You, and Talbott, and others seem to want to use this as a beachhead for attacking every science from basic physics to the cosmologies to make sense of it all. EU subscribers consider any and every separate aspect of the EU stuff to be Talbott's(?) "domino effect" which makes them right and everyone else wrong.
They seem at least to realize that the only way their speculations can be right is if the findings of essentially all of science, in many indepently developed but nevertheless consistently agreeable fields, is wrong. This is why they are so keen to portray science as composed of separate and mutually exclusive "paradigms" (a la Kuhn): the only way to escape the weight of the evidence against their view is to deny the very nature of that evidence. They simultaneously think that their own speculation is independently corroborated, and even overlap substantially with a group calling itself the "Society for Interdisciplinary Studies". They deny the success of corroboration in "mainstream" science, while proclaiming successful corroboration in their own speculations. This is either simple ignorance of the history of particular theories and the tests which support them while breaking the contemporary competition, or doublethink.
What's completely amazing about your arguments that there is no real debate here is that you are actually *losing* t
Being a rather chaotic, eclectic collection of snippets ... not unlike how many scientific projects get started actually.
leokor's SD comment is already noted; still the only EU SD comment that explicitly addresses the scope of this project that I have found.
Quite a few AC's SD comments are quite insightful and helpful, so can be ruthlessly exploited*; for example:
pln: "There is absolutely *nothing* about the Electric Universe that has been "debunked"."
AC: "Everything not defined in terms so vague as to be un-debunkable have been debunked. Everything else you cling to is not science, but fanciful speculation and wishful thinking, or outright jealousy."
source: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22148840
pln: "Who can say that they are right when the issue is rarely even discussed?"
AC: "[Science] works by having ways to know when you've found wrong ideas, which is called reductionism. [... A discussion about EU ideas] will not advance human knowledge, but will serve only to placate the proponents of such a theory (hah! not likely) and distract people from exploring more promising and fruitful paths of scientific inquiry. Your rantings on Slashdot and elsewhere would require [many kinds of scientists] to devote their minds and careers to Electric Universe when they can see even superficially in many cases how it doesn't work. That you cannot underscores how little of the available human knowledge you understand or can be bothered to investigate [...]."
source: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22149382
AC: "the whole EU concept break[s] this inductive step [modern science, including astronomy et. al, can only say that what we observe in the future must be consistent with what we observe now, and that what we observe now must be consistent with what we observe now (i.e. our models must be consistent)] in two ways. 1) You deny the inductive step mainstream science makes when it says "there are probably no electric comets because none we've looked at so far were electric", and cling to the possibility that we might see one someday, as indeed we might. 2) You make large inductive steps, saying things like "If we can make formations resembling lunar craters with plasma guns, lunar craters must be caused by plasma discharges." That's the fallacy of hasty generalization; not using inductive logic."
source: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22150550
AC: "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 [] 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 [...]"
source: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=423972&cid=22123690
AC: "It's similar hubris for self-labeled "plasma physicists" (and even the occasional *actual* plasma physicist) to claim that a superficial resemblance of a few plasma effects they've seen in their work or models they've done on computers supersede the observations (of which they are largely unaware) of astronomers, cosmologi
There were several (three?) only a few hours ago; now they've disappeared!
Namely: what methods to use to develop the hypotheses and then test them?
For example, if, upon detailed investigation, it turns out that the "rules of evidence" and/or "rules of logic/inference" and/or inherent immunity to falsifiability of the EU paradigm combine to be so weak as to preclude anything but the most facile of investigation, should I use such rules (etc) in my own investigations? If I do, and if they turn out to be so weak, I'll be stuck with the equivalent of "anything goes", won't I? If I don't, and use rules (etc) typical of those of modern day astronomers and physicists (for example), what (meta-) validity would my conclusions have?
But perhaps it doesn't matter; either way, my own knowledge of the relationship of the EU paradigm to the standard methods of at least the branches of modern science called astronomy, astrophysics, and (maybe) physics will have been substantially clarified.
Besides, why worry about such possibilities ahead of doing the research?
It's not rocket science and your "outgassing" is nothing but electrical machining.
Please quantify the current, its source, and duration of this "electrical machining". A back of the envelope (a.k.a. "order of magnitude" (OOM)) estimate will do. And please, no more word salad.
Please, explain which parts of the Electric Comet document are incorrect ...
Thanks for the invitation ... I will gladly do so, to whatever depth any SD reader requests.
However, it will take some time; after all, that document is 21 pages long. I'll start either later in a later comment.
This is why I initially came to Slashdot: to learn what was wrong with the Electric Universe theory through immersion. The problem is that you guys never back your allegations up with hard, painful facts.
(my emphasis)
... perhaps that's because there is no such cosmology?
Shall I repeat, verbatim, your comment, earlier in this story thread (or was it the other recent one)? About how you refuse to read what I write?
Of course, nothing in SD's rules stops you from being disingenuous, dishonest, {insert stronger words here, to your taste}; as far as I can tell, the only method of censure for such objectionable behaviour is for your karma to go to "Troll", and that can happen only if your comments are consistently moderated negatively.
Here is a short list of "hard, painful facts" that are direct rebuttals of "the Electric Universe theory", as you have presented it recently. Note that this is far, far from being complete.
* magnetic reconnection does not exist, the focus of the ire of your first comment on this story thread (and many others in SD) - not only is it well-established in plasma physics, but has actually been studied in plasma physics laboratories (including that of your hero Peratt - LANL).
* "solar wind continues to accelerate as it passes the planets" - busted in an earlier set of exchanges, by direct observation (I need to find the actual SD comment, so I can add it to my "EU theory" URL library)
* there is an alternative^, workable, science-based cosmology (some kind of "plasma universe" cosmology) - despite being asked, several times, where any curious reader could find such, that quantitatively accounts for why the night sky is dark (and ~five other sets of astronomical observations), you have not replied
* "Arguing that space must be charge neutral on some scale is tantamount to declaring that we've reached a conclusion on a metaphysical question" - busted several months ago, here in SD.
I've seen numerous images and facts that just have no credible explanation within your own paradigm. And it's real simple stuff too -- like the rays of Tycho and Aristarchus, like chains of craters that are actually the shapes of Lichtenbergs, and the numerous enigmatic temperature distributions of planets. The conventional theories have done a horrible job of explaining some of these things, and they ignore things that they do not work well with their theories. And this is what I find so compelling and straightforward. You guys just don't challenge yourself. You're so willing to just accept an explanation once mathematics is offered. It's as if there is a systemic fear of uncertainty within your discipline.
This is a good example of what seems to me to be a core method in the EU paradigm; to re-state it crudely:
"{insert selected observation/evidence/etc here} has no credible explanation within your paradigm, THEREFORE the EU paradigm MUST be correct!"
This kind of logical fallacy has a name - false dichotomy, or false dilemma^^.
Now to be fair, here's how the paragraph I just quoted begins: "Actually, EU is incredibly effective at describing many things that you guys just dismiss".
And thi
Take "magnetic reconnection", for example.
The laboratory work with plasmas includes exploration of the nature of magnetic reconnection, surely as pure an example of "Hannes Alfven's "actualistic approach" over prophetic computer-code style instructions" as you could possibly imagine, right? And yet pln2bz's very first comment in this story thread seems to be the exact opposite: staunch defence of a (simplistic) interpretation of a theory, and a trashing of dozens of solid experimental results, from laboratory work with plasmas.
Take "build a universe from scratch".
The EU conceptual framework and methodology emphasises plasmas, as 99.{insert as many 9's here as you wish}% of the baryonic matter in the observable universe is in this state.
But ALL baryonic matter is composed of electrons and quarks^! And laboratory work with these - an "actualistic approach" for sure - has lead to an hugely successful set of theories, based on quantum mechanics, such as QED (Quantum Electrodynamics). It has also lead to the resolution of the EPR paradox, with its mind-bending implications. So intellectually disturbing that not a few of the best physicists are on record as saying, in effect, the only thing we can do is "shut up and calculate".
Which surely leads to a bit of a dilemma for EU proponents, doesn't it? I mean, what is all this quantum theory stuff if not "prophetic computer-code style instructions for how to build a universe from scratch"? One simply can NOT work with this except through fifty-two weeks of Sundays of math, math, and still more math - "common sense" and "intuition" are quite unreliable guides. Yet every new lab experiment to test this stuff results in yet more medals for the theory.
So this hugely successful set of theories is BOTH "actualistic" AND "prophetic"!
How do such leading proponents of the EU paradigm ("Thornhill, Talbott, Peratt and others") deal with this part of physics? As far as I can tell (so far), they simply ignore it.
Or, more harshly, the EU paradigm seems to be the intellectual equivalent, in physics, of the Luddites.
(to be continued)
^ there are exceptions, of course, but for the most part they play no role in plasmas
What are the "rules of evidence"?
What are the legitimate forms of logic?
What is the role of open publication, of independent verification and validation?
What is the role of hypothesis formation and testing? although they all agree on the core conceptual framework and methodology, they don't always come to agreement on the details Where is this "core conceptual framework and methodology" published?
How has it been tested?
How are the numerous internal inconsistencies and inconsistencies with good experimental and observational results addressed? [this is] completely perfect because it means that we're being cautious and open-minded. And yet, as far as I can tell by reading pln2bz' SD comments, there are no proposals to use any telescopes, or any space missions, to actually test any of the ideas presented.
Take the what, hundreds?, of TBPODs (several of which pln2bz has provided links to, in SD comments).
Where among them can you read something like "and electrical engineers and EU plasma physicists have published proposals for several new space-based telescopes, with particular emphasis on how they should be able to address the following key issues in EU theory {insert list here}. These science cases may be found {insert list of papers here}"? or "{insert name here}, a leading EU theorist, today published, in {insert name of relevant peer-reviewed journal here}, a proposal for an instrument to augment the TMT. He said that such an instrument would, in all likelihood, provide crucial data for tests of {insert EU hypotheses here}"? Or "click here for a poster on a science program using the LSST that is designed specifically to examine a core assumption in EU theory, namely {insert details here}"?
Excuse me for expressing negative feelings about how a framework and methodology could be described as "completely perfect" when it omits even hints of what has brought physics its manifest huge successes - testing and experimentation.
"Are you just now figuring out right now that I don't read your messages?"
There's objectively verifiable evidence that the SD writer being referred to was ceoyoyo^ http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22150192:
"An good example is our friend a few posts up who insists that the solar wind continues to accelerate as it passes the planets. A few weeks ago I had the same argument with another electric universer who insisted that all our space probes show this to be true. So I posted links to the solar wind velocity graphs from SOHO and Voyager that show the opposite is true."
A few minutes with Google can indeed turn up exactly what ceoyoyo mentioned; for example, SOHO: http://www.dxlc.com/solar/solwind.html and Voyager: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994PhDT.........1V.
Note that there wasn't anything at all vague about what ceoyoyo wrote, and anyone reading this can independently verify what she (he?) wrote, by doing their own googling.
Now here's the real shocker (or not): this evidence about the behaviour of the solar wind has been known for over a decade (or even three); given the repeated insistence that the EU framework and method is "actualistic", and the importance the the electric Sun idea to EU proponents, am I the only reader of pln2bz' comment to find it rather odd that only in 2008 is he discovering something that a sceptic with an open mind could have discovered before many reading this today were even born?
Oh, and for the n-th time, the handle is APODNereid!
^ or perhaps it was CheshireCatCO http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22148128 "Neither of your links says that the solar wind is accelerating as it passes Earth. Both say that it accelerates near the Sun (within a few solar radii), which *is* non-controversial and even predicted by Parker's original work. What Parker doesn't explain is the magnitude of the acceleration (see Kivelson and Russel's book, for example), but you're denying that, aren't you?
Can you please bother to read your own links closely enough to verify their relevance? Simply posting a random link and saying, "here's my evidence" may look good at first glance, but it's really a very poor way to make a case."
You mean the dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of laboratory experiments which demonstrated, unequivocally, the existence of magnetic reconnection means that those parts of Alfvén's work where he railed against it are now invalid?
How about the non-existence, in any laboratory, of plasma which emits the two green [O III] lines? What does this have to say about the source of so much emission in so many astronomical objects?
Or the complete lack of any laboratory demonstration of a gravitationally^ induced small atomic dipole (the mechanism at the heart of at least one EU proposal)?
Or does the universal lack of any laboratory demonstration of an "intrinsic redshift" of >~1 mean Arp's observations are thus effectively invalid?
Of course, pln2bz may mean that a good lab experiment may rule out explanations like the small atomic dipole (ultracentrifuges subject atoms to far, far higher g-forces than would be found in, or on, the Sun), but cannot rule out things like green [O III] lines or "intrinsic redshift" - after all, you can't "prove a negative".
No, that can't be right either
Does any reader of this comment know how the EU framework and method addresses these apparent conundrums?
^ The lab tests of this are done every day, by the thousand - in the ultracentrifuges in so many industrial and medical facilites, for example, not to mention university labs.
In an earlier SD comment I posted a link to an online graduate level course in plasma physics. Even a cursory read of the relevant parts of that course would show that this comment of pln2bz' is woefully ignorant
"Magnetic reconnection" is used to model plasmas and explain observed behaviour (whether in the lab or in space) in part because it is a tractable approach. If anyone wants to develop an alternative that has the benefit for easier math, or a greater domain of applicability, or some other nice attribute, then I'm sure they will find many receptive audiences.
But no one - except, perhaps, a few EU proponents who simply don't understand the relevant physics - would confuse two different ways of handling complex mechanisms with "competing theories"! The electrons and ions do their things just the same way, no matter what approach is used to try to get a handle on the complexity (and gnarly math).
OTOH (on the other hand), if the underlying physics of "exploding double layers" is, in fact, different from that which the shorthand "magnetic reconnection" describes, then it would indeed be remiss of the plasma physicists to not recognise this, and investigate it.
And it should come as no surprise to SD readers that lab experiments have been done on "exploding double layers"! Indeed, here is a PhD thesis on just this topic (the author did this at no less an august lab than the Alfvén Lab, at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm Sweden): http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993JPhD...26.1192V. Now that may be a little difficult to get one's hands on, and it is now nearly 15 years' old, so how about something more recent and accessible? Like "TOPICAL REVIEW: A review of recent laboratory double layer experiments" perhaps (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007PSST...16....1C)? Here's the abstract: Recent developments in laboratory double layers from the late 1980s to the spring of 2007 are reviewed. The paper begins by a lead up to electric double layers in the laboratory. Then an overview of the main double layer devices and properties is presented with an emphasis on current-free double layers. Some of the double layer models and simulations are analysed before giving a more complete description of current-free double layers in radiofrequency plasmas expanding in a diverging magnetic field. Astrophysics double layers are briefly reported. Finally, applications of double layers to the field of plasma processing and electric propulsion are discussed. Oh, and I have a recollection that a certain prolific EU proponent wrote, quite recently, about having an open mind, and scepticism
Worse, for one who has written so glowingly about Alfvén, it seems pln2bz has not read much of the plasma physics which earned Alfvén his scientific reputation.
What, if not a mathematical tour de force, is MHD (magnetohydrodynamics http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/plasma/lectures/node60.html)? And who got a Nobel Prize for developing this?
But wait! What does the author of this graduate course in plasma physics have to say about the domain of applicability of Alfvén's great work?
This, from the introduction section (my emphasis): It is often observed that the above set of equations [the MHD equations] are identical to the equations governing the motion of an inviscid, adiabatic, perfectly conducting, electrically neutral liquid. Indeed, this observation is sometimes used as the sole justification for the MHD equations. After all, a hot, tenuous, quasi-neutral plasma is highly conducting, and if the motion is sufficiently fast then both viscosity and heat conduction can be plausibly neglected. However, we can appreciate, from Sect. 3, that this is a highly oversimplified and misleading argument. The problem is, of course, that a weakly coupled plasma is a far more complicated dynamical system than a conducting liquid. So, if one insists on drawing conclusions about what plasma physics is, and how it is applied, without even reading introductory texts on it, what could we say about the approach which leads to such a conclusion?
What is dubious? Please, explain which parts of the Electric Comet document are incorrect ... [URL snipped]
This comment of mine is the first of several which will examine the document pln2bz provided in the SD comment to which this is a reply.
... but none seem to be from papers published in relevant peer-reviewed journal. Two such papers are mentioned ("The results of the Deep Impact mission were published in the journal Science" and "In a paper published in the 1960s Dr. Brian G. Marsden, an astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, drew attention to the anomaly of comet fragmentation"), but a curious reader may no
Here I will take a first-pass look at what, empirically, constitutes "evidence" within the EU framework and approach.
This is important for two reasons:
first, I need to develop hypotheses concerning "evidence" for my investigation of the EU framework and approach, esp working hypothesis #2 ("EU theories cannot be falsified, even in principle, by any experimental ("in the lab") or observational results" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22183818); and
second, if pln2bz' SD comments are a reliable guide, EU proponents' track record of credibility is poor (examples:
"the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets!" BUSTED http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22148864, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22148128;
"Arguing that space must be charge neutral on some scale is tantamount to declaring that we've reached a conclusion on a metaphysical question" BUSTED http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=358211&cid=21392029;
"And shame on everybody for just going along with the idea that Maxwell's Equations are meaningless in space. When you see a magnetic field, your first question should always be, "Where's the current?" To assume that it is not present even when you can see the magnetic field is just mind-boggling!" BUSTED http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22181096;
"If you look carefully at the image, you can see that there is still a slight connective filament between them in the infrared" BUSTED http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22160038).
GENERAL CAVEAT: The results presented below are from an informal analysis of the PDF document; in particular, key terms (e.g. "images") are not defined. Among other things this means that if you, dear reader, choose to do your own analysis, your results may differ somewhat from those below. Also, I may have made some mistakes (if you chose to point them out, I would be grateful).
This 21 page PDF document, called a poster by the authors, contains ~20 direct quotes (examples: ""Comets are perhaps at once the most spectacular and the least well understood members of the solar system." M. Neugebauer, Jet Propulsion Laboratory", "According to a Stardust project press release, mission scientists expected "a dirty, black, fluffy snowball" with a couple of jets that would be "dispersed into a halo."", "When a coronal mass ejection greeted Comet NEAT, space scientists called it a spectacular "coincidence.""). Not one of these is given a clear attribution! Of course, with Google, a sceptical reader with an open mind could, probably, find most of these fairly quickly.
Most (>70%) of the direct quotes seem to be from press releases, or news conferences; at least one is from a book
This seems at odds with the Voyager mission, where "Researchers had long predicted that the solar wind speed would decrease with distance from the Sun" and verified by Voyager 2, see http://spacephysics.ucr.edu/index.php?content=v25/v8.html.
It is also noted that "Since 1977, Voyager has been monitoring the solar wind velocity and density", and the "Image - 39k" seems less conclusive, see http://spacephysics.ucr.edu/index.php?content=solar_wind/sw/swq1.html
Ian Tresman plasma-universe.com
However, several have usage statements.
For example, the Comet Linear image, from the STScI: "it is requested that in any subsequent use of this work NASA and STScI be given appropriate acknowledgement." (http://hubblesite.org/copyright/)
And the Comet NEAT image, from SOHO: "It is requested, however, that any such use properly attributes the source of the images or data" (http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/summary/copyright.html).
^ The image of asteroid Itokawa, from JAXA, has this: "When using materials, JAXA should be credited as the source. (Unless noted otherwise, the copyrights of the materials in the Photo Archives belong to JAXA.)" (http://jda.jaxa.jp/jda/service_e.html)
Working hypothesis #2a: Within the Electric Universe framework and approach, evidence presented does not need to accurately reflect its source, nor be fully attributed; copyrights need not be respected.
... but unless you are very familiar with his papers, it's unlikely you'll find it easily (i.e. in this example, the evidence is poorly attributed).
In an earlier comment today (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22208390), I presented an analysis of a document purporting to be written within the EU paradigm.
In that comment I provided examples of evidence that was not fully attributed, and (in an addendum (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22208968) of one image with a copyright that was not respected). Thus, these two parts of the working hypothesis are validated.
An example of "evidence presented does not need to accurately reflect its source"^ might be something like this:
In a paper published in the 1990s, Alfvén said "Whether this [a Big Bang cosmological model] is correct or not can only be found if the observed present state of the universe is used as a basis for a reconstruction of increasingly old states. It is reasonable to use well established laws of nature as a first approximation."* Clearly, Alfvén is here stating his unequivocal support for General Relativity-based FRW cosmologies, as GR is one of the most well-established of the laws of nature.
There is a paper, by Alfvén, published in the 1990s, which contains those words
Further, if you do manage to find the paper, you'll quickly see that this quote - while accurate - is used to make a point almost the opposite of what Alfvén went on to say! In other words, it's taken well and truly out of context.
Can the hypothesis that within the Electric Universe framework and approach, evidence presented does not need to accurately reflect its source be validated^^? Can such validation be found in the Electric Comet document? Stay tuned.
^ this could do with some editing; it's poorly expressed.
* Note that this is considerably longer than almost all the quotes used in the Electric Comet document.
^^ The answer, of course, is YES! As mentioned earlier "If you look carefully at the image, you can see that there is still a slight connective filament between them in the infrared" is a clear example of evidence presented that does not accurately reflect the source.
CheshireCatCO already busted pln2bz' assertion earlier (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22148128): "Neither of your links says that the solar wind is accelerating as it passes Earth. Both say that it accelerates near the Sun (within a few solar radii), which *is* non-controversial and even predicted by Parker's original work. What Parker doesn't explain is the magnitude of the acceleration (see Kivelson and Russel's book, for example), but you're denying that, aren't you?
Can you please bother to read your own links closely enough to verify their relevance? Simply posting a random link and saying, "here's my evidence" may look good at first glance, but it's really a very poor way to make a case."
The three links you provided, iantresman, support CheshireCatCO's comment
Did you, an apparently prolific proponent of EU ideas, intend to (directly) contradict pln2bz, who is also such a proponent?
Note pln2bz' original comment ("the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets!"); note my response ("This is just as inaccurate as your earlier comment about magnetic reconnection."), and then he dug himself into a hole ("The solar wind does indeed continue to accelerate even as it passes the planets.").
As you said yourself, you are an amateur; the "solar wind" in a richly complex bundle of phenomena.
For starters, the solar wind pln2bz was probably referring to (unbeknowst to him), and which you are also (even though you quoted the title of the page in one of your links - fast solar wind), is a subset of solar winds (if one may summarise so crudely), the 'fast solar wind'.
Then the first link you gave is about one theoretical model (and Parker's, by way of comparison) of the fast solar wind. There are many such models; for example "A 3D MHD Solar Wind Model With Pickup Protons: Comparison With Voyager Data" http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005AGUFMSH51A1201U, "Solar Wind Structure at Solar Minimum: 3D MHD Solar Wind Model Results Compared with STEREO and ACE Observations" http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMSH33A1076L, "Modelling of Solar Wind, CME Initiation and CME Propagation" http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005SSRv..121...91V, and "A Turbulence Model for Acceleration of the High Latitude Fast Solar Wind" http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006ESASP.617E.150V.
Finally, there's pln2bz' "the planets" (not "some of the planets", nor "Mercury and Venus", nor
If any reader of this comment is interested, I'd be happy to suggest some internet discussion fora where they may pursue these fascinating and complex phenomena in more detail (and where it would be much easier to discuss the hundreds/thousands of papers on the topic
* "Any theory that attempts to explain the inverse temperature problem must also grapple with the fact that the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets! There is no satisfying explanation for that one to date without consideration of an electric field, and the standard solar model miserably fails in explaining it. And this is no minor matter either because the solar wind, taken as a whole, constitutes the largest structure in our solar system, the heliospheric current sheet. Contemplate the implications of that for a moment: astrophysicists do not understand what is causing the motions of the largest structure in our own immediate neighborhood!"
Before I comment on the "Electric Comet Model" (ECM), as presented in the document ElectricComet.pdf, I would like to thank pln2bz for bringing it to SD readers' attention. From the evident glee in the writing of EU proponents these last few days, about this document, one may conclude that this is particularly good material, from the perspective of a concrete example of the Electric Universe framework and approach in action, both in terms of its internals (evidence, logic, consistency, etc) and match to observed phenomena (i.e. the ultimate test of anything scientific).
Page 5 of the document presents the ECM as a set of eight bullet points. True to its name, the physical mechanisms in the ECM have to do with electric currents and fields. Leaving aside (for now) the origin of comets (covered in the first part of the first bullet), here are the key mechanisms:
+ the charging of comets
+ the formation of coma and tail
+ "electrical discharge machining" (EDM) of the surfaces of comets
+ the formation of jets and filaments
+ the maintenance of filaments
+ the maintenance of the coma
+ "electrostatic cleaning" of the surfaces of comets
+ electrostatic deposition of dust and debris on the surfaces of comets.
No references are given. It is as if these mechanisms appeared in the document without any help from others, apparently Thornhill and Talbott did not need to stand on the shoulders of anyone, giant or not (thank you Newton). There are hints that others contributed to building the foundation: "The collimation of such jets is a well-documented attribute of plasma discharge" for example (though the relationship between EDM and plasma discharge is not mentioned), a debt to "engineer Ralph Juergens" is acknowledged on page 6, and there are several mentions of un-named "electrical theorists" (and one of "electric theorists") on other pages, with the implication that they had a hand in developing at least parts of the ECM^.
How, then, to answer pln2bz' question ("which parts of the Electric Comet document are incorrect"), as it refers to these eight ECM physical mechanisms? Given the absence of any references, I can think of only two approaches: 1) examine them using only what's written in the document, and 2) make an arbitrary choice of external references.
In my next comment I'll proceed with approach 1).
I am reluctant to put too much effort into approach 2), except in so far as that effort can contribute directly to testing my working hypothesis #2 ("EU theories cannot be falsified, even in principle, by any experimental ("in the lab") or observational results").
(to be continued)
A final note: does it really matter whether or not my working hypothesis #2a ("Within the Electric Universe framework and approach, evidence presented does not need to accurately reflect its source, nor be fully attributed; copyrights need not be respected" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22209504) is validated? I think it does, because it is a short logical step to "material presented by EU proponents cannot have more than minimal credibility" and "no matter how many times he says "trust me"*, as long as pln2bz is working within the EU framework and approach, you can't". Of course, it may be that highly inaccurate presentations, very poor attribution, and so on may be (very) rare (and so maybe EU material is mostly credible); naturally, formulating the working hypothesis in a quantitative form, and then testing it, should address this caveat.
^ Remember that here I am examining only the ECM as presented on page 5, and references to it, sans the bit about origins. So, for example, the reference to Alfvén's ideas on CMEs is beyond scope.
* I need to dig up the URL of the SD comment, or comments, in which pln2bz wrote this.
Before I look at some of the eight specific physical mechanisms in the ECM, a note about the PDF document itself.
... yet no definitions are given.
It is sub-titled "Poster Presentation Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 33rd International Conference on Plasma Sciences Traverse City Michigan June 4-8, 2006". For an example - in terms of references, sources, etc (not content) - of what astronomers are used to, consider this one (big!) page LSST poster, from the 209th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, early last year (it's about the same size as the ElectricComet document) http://www.lsst.org/Meetings/AAS/2007/JanPosters/newman_086.06.pdf. Note too that ADS will turn up lots of papers by the authors of this LSST paper, but none by either W. Thornhill or D. Talbott.
Three of the eight specific physical mechanisms are easily addressed (EDM and electrostatic cleaning of the surfaces of comets, electrostatic deposition of dust and debris on their surfaces) - the 21 page PDF contains no external references, and only the following internal ones (simple re-statements omitted):
- the image titled "Carving of Surface Relief" has a caption which includes "the surface on the right, produced by electric discharge machining (EDM)" (note there's nothing to say whether "electrical discharge machining" is the same as "electric discharge machining" or not)
- "The jets flare up and move over the nucleus irregularly, leaving scars typical of electric discharge machining" - this repeats the link of EDM to the action of jets ("The observed jets of comets are electric arc discharges to the nucleus")
- "The asteroid appears to have attracted considerable surface debris electrostatically".
Note that the first time the terms "electrical discharge machining" and "electrostatic cleaning" are used, they are in quote marks, signifying that they have special, non-standard meanings (if the authors follow a common orthographic convention)
So two of the three mechanisms are empty - you could rewrite the parts of the document which mention them using nonsense words and they would have just the same meaning.
EDM is linked to "jets"; next comment I shall examine four (of the other five) mechanisms (the formation of coma and tail, of jets and filaments, maintenance of coma and filaments) and also look at whether there's any more meat to EDM than there is to "electrostatic cleaning" or "attracted back to the nucleus electrostatically".
(to be continued)
With respect to specific, physical mechanisms in the electric comet model, per the PDF document in pln2bz' comment, we can already answer his question ("which parts of the Electric Comet document are incorrect"?) for two (of eight) mechanisms: they are neither correct, nor incorrect; rather they are meaningless*.
... unless the fundamental mechanism (the charging of comets) somehow breathes meaning into them. Oh, and the specific mechanism for tails - either formation or maintenance - is empty (only filaments are explained, in terms of a mechanism)*.
Mechanisms for the formation and maintenance of the cometary coma (and tail).
This statement, on page 16, pretty much says it all: "Most of the voltage difference between the comet and the solar plasma is taken up in a double layer of charge, called a plasma sheath, that surrounds the comet. When the electrical stress is great enough, the sheath glows and appears as the typical cometary coma and tail." Only two other statements add anything to the mechanism: "It is the electric force that holds the spherical cometary coma in place as the comet races around the Sun" (p5, where the ECM is laid out) and "The comet's charge, developed in deep space, responds to the new environment by increasing internal electric polarization and by forming [...] and a visible plasma sheath, or coma." (p6).
One more statement completes the explanations of these two mechanisms: "[a comet's] well-defined filaments extending up to tens of millions of miles without dissipating in the vacuum of space [revealed in its tails] is to be expected of a plasma discharge within the ambient electric field of the Sun." (p5).
So, in a nutshell, electric field plus plasma = coma; add "a plasma discharge" and you get the filaments in tails.
However, with no external references for any of this, and nothing more than the above (in the document itself), these mechanisms are just as meaningless as those covered in my previous comment
Mechanisms for the formation and maintenance of jets and filaments.
In the ECM, filaments and jets are intimately linked, but it is the mechanism for jets that is described in some detail: "The observed jets of comets are electric arc discharges to the nucleus, [...] excavated material is accelerated into space along the jets' observed filamentary arcs"; "The collimation of such jets [which] explode from cometary nuclei at supersonic speeds [...] is a well-documented attribute of plasma discharge"; "The comet's charge [...] responds to the new environment [...] by forming cathode jets"; and "an electric field accelerates matter in the jet; an electromagnetic "pinch effect" provides densities in the thin jets many orders of magnitude higher than those predicted from simple radial sublimation; and instabilities and fluctuations suddenly relocate jets in exceedingly short periods of time".
And, as mentioned in my previous comment, the jets are also linked with EDM: "Intermittent and wandering arcs erode the surface and burn it black, leaving the distinctive scarring patterns of electric discharges"; and "The jets flare up and move over the nucleus irregularly, leaving scars typical of electric discharge machining".
But how much meat is there, really? Let's substitute "electric arc discharge" for "jet", per the primary definition:
"The collimation of such electric arc discharges [which] explode from cometary nuclei at supersonic speeds [...] is a well-documented attribute of plasma discharge" - so "electric arc discharges" are a subset of "plasma discharges"
"The comet's charge [...] responds to the new environment [...] by forming cathode electric arc discharges" - consistent
"an electric field accelerates matter in the electric arc discharge; an electromagnetic "pinch effect" provides densities in the thin electric arc discharges many orders of magnitude higher than those predicted from simple radial su
The answer to pln2bz' question ("which parts of the Electric Comet document are incorrect"?), for eight (of nine) of the specific, physical mechanisms in the electric comet model (as presented in the PDF document he supplied a link to) is they are neither correct, nor incorrect; rather they are meaningless*. However, there is a possibility that the last mechanism - the charging of comets - somehow breathes meaning into the mechanisms for the formation and maintenance of the cometary coma, jets, and filaments.
...) is not even hinted at.
The charging of comets.
This mechanism is succinctly described in the second bullet of the ECM, on page 5: "Comets follow their elongated paths within a weak electrical field centered on the Sun. In approaching the Sun, a charge imbalance develops between the nucleus and the higher voltage and charge density near the Sun", and elaborated on p6 "The comet spends most of its time far from the Sun, where the plasma voltage is low relative to the Sun. In remote regions, the comet moves slowly and its charge easily comes into balance with its surroundings. But as the comet falls toward the Sun, it begins to move at a furious speed through regions of increasing voltage. The comet's charge, developed in deep space, responds to the new environment by increasing internal electric polarization", p16 "The Sun's radial electric field is weak but constant with distance in interplanetary space. In a constant radial electric field, the voltage decreases linearly with distance. A comet on an elongated orbit spends most of its time far from the Sun and acquires a charge in balance with the voltage at that distance. But when a comet speeds inward for a quick spin around the Sun, the voltage of the comet becomes increasingly out of balance with that nearer the Sun", and p 18 "The long-period comets spend a longer time in a region of lower plasma potential than the short-period comets. Consequently, their voltage difference on their approach to the Sun will be higher".
There is also an external reference for this mechanism: "In the 1960s, engineer Ralph Juergens [...] proposed that the Sun is a glow discharge, the center of an electric field extending to the heliopause."
In a nutshell, a comet's motion through the Sun's weak, constant radial electric (or electrical, the document uses both words) field causes the charging of the comet. The external reference at least admits the possibility that this mechanism may not be as meaningless as the other eight examined so far. Further, to the extent that at least some of the other mechanisms require an electric (or electrical) field, at least one aspect of them may not be meaningless*.
Assume, for now, that sufficient consistency between the electric (or electrical) field in the ECM and in Juergens' proposal can be demonstrated. Would there then be sufficient meaning for pln2bz' question to be answered, one way or the other?
Unfortunately not.
Why? Because the mechanism is poorly quantified. On the plus side, the use of terms such as "radial" (centred on the Sun), "constant with distance", "decreases linearly with distance" nails things down to within a constant (or several constants, or zero points); in the middle is the nature of comets' orbits (though see below); on the negative side, the relationship between a comet's speed (relative to the Sun, in a radial direction?), how fast it "comes into balance with its surroundings", and the charge it acquires at any point in its orbit is not described. By implication, a comet's charge imbalance is lessened by an aspect of one or more of the other mechanisms (electric(al) arc discharge, (other) plasma discharge, electrostatic cleaning), but whether there are other mechanisms, what the relative importance of these three is, and how any vary with any other factor (speed, radial distance, comet size, comet composition,
At first glance, it would seem that the nature of comets' orbits should be well-constrained;
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
33rd International Conference on Plasma Sciences (ICOPS)
Traverse City, Michigan
June 4-8, 2006 Here is the 33rd ICOPS requirement for posters (http://www.icops2006.org/oral-poster/index.html): Posters should fit on 4-by-8-foot boards. You will need to bring a finished, printed version of your poster. We will not be able to print posters at the conference. There are 3 poster sessions on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon. Each poster will be assigned a number, and you will need to mount your poster on the appropriately numbered board. Posters must be mounted by 10am on the day of your relevant poster session, and taken down by 6pm the same day. And here is the complete list of posters at this conference: http://www.icops2006.org/technical_program/poster_order.html
Notice something(s) odd?
The Thornhill & Talbott document doesn't look like it conforms to the 33rd ICOPS requirement for posters.
The Thornhill & Talbott (T&T) document is not listed as one of the 2006 ICOPS Poster Sessions.
I wonder, if pln2bz reads this, if he could ask Thornhill (or Talbott) for a clarification.
It would seem that this T&T document follows a quite different convention from at least one other poster at this conference (click on the link to "ICOPS 2006 Poster"; it's a > 1MB PDF): http://www.gangolee.com/research.html. Note that the Ombrello et al. poster is quite similar, in format and meta-content (references, etc), to the AAS LSST one I linked to in an earlier comment. I think those who have attended plasma physics, space physics, space science, or astronomy conferences might like to chime in: to what extent does the T&T document seem to conform to the conventions of posters you've seen at such conferences (wrt references, quantitative detail, etc)?
So one 'incorrect' thing about this document is that it does not seem to be what it purports to be.
The body of the caption is as follows: This heavily processed image of C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) is based on a CCD frame that was obtained on August 18, 1996, by Nick Thomas (Max-Planck-Institut fuer Aeronomie, Germany) and Heike Rauer (Observatoire de Paris, France), observing with the DFOSC multi-mode instrument on the Danish 1.54-m telescope at La Silla. The frame was taken at 04:20 UT through an R filter (to show the dust around the cometary nucleus) and the integration time was 20 s.
The subsequent image processing was perfomed by Hermann Boehnhardt (Universitaets-Sternwarte, Munchen, Germany). It involved bias subtraction and flat-fielding, followed by extraction of a subframe centered on the nucleus (the area corresponds to 797 x 797 pixels = 320 x 320 arcsec), logarithmic transformation and finally the application of a Laplace filter with a width of 15 pixels. The webpage concludes (my emphasis): "This is the caption to ESO PR Photo 37/96 [GIF, 76k]. It may be reproduced, if credit is given to the European Southern Observatory."
Curiously, credit does seem to have been given on at least one of the Thunderbolts webpages which reproduces it; how strange that what purports to be a poster presented at an scientific conference omits the credit (and seriously mis-characterises it).
Working hypothesis #2a is thus fully validated.
There are six bullets on page 10 of the PDF document, and 11 in the referenced webpage.
Two of the six are not mentioned on the webpage; one of the six corresponds to two separate bullets on the webpage; five bullets on the webpage are not mentioned in the PDF document (some bullets have more than one prediction).
All so-called predictions may be grouped into four classes, in a two-by-two matrix:
Quantified prediction (e.g. "the energy released in the impact will be between X and Y joules") vs qualitative ones (e.g. "the energy released in the impact will be huge").
Certain predictions (e.g. "the impactor will cease transmission x±y seconds before impact") vs uncertain ones (e.g. "the impactor may cease transmission before impact").
Note that a third possible classification can be ignored - for no prediction is the degree of certainty quantitative (e.g. there are no examples of "the impactor will cease transmission x±y seconds before impact (95% CL)").
Of the ~15 predictions (document and webpage combined), none are quantitative.
Of the ~15 predictions, ~eight are certain ("will"), though only three are absolute (the others are only "will" if another prediction in the logic chain is validated, none of the prior 'predictions' is certain, e.g. IF a discharge THEN {another prediction}).
In addition, ~five predictions are differences compared with what is "expected" from mainstream comet models, according to the authors. However, there are no references to any source where the authors' expectations can be independently checked (so you have to do your own research to find out whether the authors have accurately portrayed non-EU models, present fiction, or something in between).
Only two (maybe three) predictions are expressed in terms of direct observables; the rest could only be tested within the framework of interpretive chains of logic and theory (or so it seems to me); an example: "The impact/electrical discharge will not reveal "primordial dirty ice," but the same composition as the surface." - compositions are conclusions derived from long chains of analysis of observations. As I have already noted, the PDF document contains no discussion of observational analyses, nor any (external) references to any.
The most definite, most directly related to observables, prediction is this one, found in the PDF document, but not on the webpage: "The cameras will reveal sharply defined craters, valleys, mesas, and ridges ". Given that the Electric Universe so-called predictions were made after the results of comet Halley, Wild2, and Borrelly missions had been made public, this is hardly surprising!
The other 'direct observables' prediction is equally under-whelming: "We also expect an interruption of impactor transmission before it reaches the surface" (PDF), "Electrical stress may short out the electronics on board the impactor before impact" (webpage) - no method of determining whether any "interruption of impactor transmission before it reached the surface" is due to "electrical stress [shorting] out the electronics on board" (or any other cause) is given.
The third prediction possibly relating to a direct observable ("maybe three" above) is "Copious X-rays will accompany discharges to the projectile"; this appears on the webpage but not in the document. It's a 'maybe' because it's not quantitative (and it's conditional on there being one or more 'discharges').
Clearly none of these so-called predictions could be falsified by any of the results from the Deep Impact mission, without quite a lot of additional inputs (with the exception of the "sharply defined" prediction).
Given the prominence of the 'discharge' prediction(s), I shall examine them in more detail in my next comment.
Here's how this so-called prediction is described, on a TPOD webpage dated Jul 07, 2005: Electrical theorist Wallace Thornhill predicted two blasts. [...] And here is what happened in the words of NASA investigator Peter Schultz, describing the event recorded from the spacecraft:
"What you see is something really surprising. First, there is a small flash, then there's a delay, then there's a big flash and the whole thing breaks loose". Note that the uncertain nature of both the existence of any pre-impact "flashes" and their number, in the predictions, is absent from the subsequent write-up.
Note that you have to do your own research if you want to find out when and where, and in what context, Peter Schultz said those words (or if he said them at all, or if he is a NASA investigator, or
Note the assumption, by whoever wrote the 7 July webpage that "a small flash" is pre-impact (and that, for example, "a big flash" is impact).
Note the lack of commentary about the intensity curve, the failure to mention x-ray emissions (or lack of them), and any reference to megalightning bolts*.
As far as I know, there is no EU material - even a webpage, much less a paper - that presents a quantitative analysis of the impactor "flashes", using publicly available quantitative data (if any reader knows of any such, please provide the appropriate references).
So, continuing to answer pln2bz' question ("which parts of the Electric Comet document are incorrect") - recall that wrt the Electric Comet Model (ECM) presented therein the answers already in are that the specific, physical mechanisms are neither correct nor incorrect, rather they are meaningless^ - the most charitable thing one could say is that the so-called predictions are so qualitative as to be all but impossible to find incorrect. Less charitably, one could say that the ECM cannot be falsified, even in principle, by any observational results (i.e. working hypothesis #2 is validated), and that at least one EU promoter is disingenuous, dishonest, or has a very poor grasp of English.
Next: what can be said concerning "electrical theorist Wallace Thornhill" and physics?
* FWIW (for what it's worth), the CAIB did not find any evidence of any such bolts having struck Columbia.
^ recall that the analysis is being done on only the PDF document itself and any material it references, and that the origin of comets (in the ECM) is not being examined.
In the PDF document you will see a reference to Hannes Alfvén. A few minutes searching ADS, starting with "Alfven, H" in the author field, will turn up lots and lots of published papers. Almost all of them are filled with equations, numbers, and quantitative stuff; they also provide references to other material, where Alfvén has stood on the shoulders of others' work.
From that IEEE reference, and some searching on EU pages, you can estimate that Wallace Thornhill graduated in 1970 (+10 -15 years).
What were physics students taught, at the University of Melbourne, a few decades ago? Could they reasonably have been given passing grades, by their physics lecturers, for models developed and presented without references or equations? I can't be sure*, but I think it quite likely (>80%) that any of Thornhill's physics lecturers would have given him a failing grade for something like the (alleged) ICOPS poster with his name as an author.
How hard would it be to turn the ECM, as presented in that PDF document, into at least a first draft quantitative model? Read a few of Alfvén's papers, take a plasma physics graduate level course, and I think you'd agree that 1 hour to 1 day would be a good (95% CL) first estimate. Of course, Thornhill is no Alfvén, so let's be generous and say it'd likely take him 1 week to 1 month to come up with such a first draft
So why, after 30 years' of work, does a person with a BSc in physics put his name to a document so devoid of anything quantitative? A document that's purportedly a poster at an international plasma physics conference? Concerning a model that is supposedly based on (plasma physics) ideas developed by Alfvén?
Here's my entirely speculative guess as to the answer: because any quantitative model, even an OOM (order of magnitude) one, would be obviously inconsistent with a large number of good, independent, observations and experimental results
Of course, if you don't have at least a BSc with a major in physics^, you are likely to read the above and simply wonder
Next, and last: form vs substance.
* inputs to flesh this out greatly welcome!
^ or something similar.
This is my last comment on pln2bz', where he presented the 21-page PDF document (ElectricComet.pdf) and asked what is incorrect with it.
... but pln2bz has been unable to tell us where we can read such papers, despite his hotline to Thornhill.
In earlier comments, I have examined nine specific, physical mechanisms in the 'electric comet model' presented in that document, and found them all meaningless (as presented, even within the context of all references), examined the so-called six to 15 predictions about the Deep Impact mission (and found them equally meaningless), and considered how someone with a BSc in physics and an admitted admirer of Hannes Alfvén could write a poster for an international conference in plasma physics so contrary to the spirit of Alfvén's work, and his lecturers' teaching (not to mention having allegedly spent 30 years on that model).
This final comment concerns form vs substance - why take Thornhill to task for not publishing a paper in a relevant peer-reviewed journal? Why examine the "two flash" prediction in terms of quantitative parameters? And so on.
Note that this comment will glide over questions concerning just how well the assertions on the "two flash" prediction match the *actual* prediction (HINT: they do so only if your brain is so open it falls out).
At one level form matters a great deal: without it all kinds of hanky panky could become OK, from plagiarism, to revisionism, to an inability to independently check published assertions, and beyond. Of course, such pedantry matters not one jot if the relevant Electric Universe ideas get published in relevant peer-reviewed journals
At another level, form defines substance: science (and its penumbra) as dialogue has meaning (substance) only because of the mutually agreed conventions (forms) all participants implicitly accept.
Or saying this another way: if you can't do 'form', whatever you think you're doing, it sure isn't science.
I'm afraid I don't understand this comment, would you mind clarifying please?
It seems you are saying that Volwerk's PhD thesis and Charles' paper (among others) belong to the "Plasma/Electric Universe" "side"; are you?
In any case, would you mind saying a few words on how you see the two sides "of the divide" - what distinguishes one from the other?
And if we were to ask Volwerk or Charles about which side of the divide their works are from, how confident are you that they'd say, with certainty, that they are from the "Plasma/Electric Universe" side?
Any theory that attempts to explain the inverse temperature problem must also grapple with the fact that the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets! There is no satisfying explanation for that one to date without consideration of an electric field, and the standard solar model miserably fails in explaining it. And this is no minor matter either because the solar wind, taken as a whole, constitutes the largest structure in our solar system, the heliospheric current sheet. Contemplate the implications of that for a moment: astrophysicists do not understand what is causing the motions of the largest structure in our own immediate neighborhood!
(pln2bz; source: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22144600; emphasis in the original).
"the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets!" BUSTED http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22148864, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22148128
(APODNereid; source: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22208390).
Not quite; see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22279668. Admittedly, however, the original statement, if enthusiastic, is also imprecise.
(leokor; source: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22279804; emphasis added).
If you know of even one observation that doesn't square with Peratt's model of galaxies, by all means, let us know. For Peratt's model, see:
A. L. Peratt. Evolution of the Plasma Universe I. Double Radio Galaxies, Quasars, and Extragalactic Jets. IEEE Transactions in Plasma Science, PS-14, 6 (1986)
A. L. Peratt. Evolution of the Plasma Universe II. The Formation of Systems of Galaxies. IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, PS-14, 6 (1986)
(leokor; source: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22284506; emphasis added).
How about this: "Bright Spiral Galaxy M81 from Hubble" (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070529.html) - note the asymmetric arms, the large central bulge;
or this "One-Armed Spiral Galaxy NGC 4725" (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050901.html)?
To this day, Peratt's model remains the only one that explains the shape and stability of galaxies, and does it without recourse to such ad-hoc devices as dark matter.
(source as above; emphasis added).
... imprecise.
Even in 1986, and allowing for enthusiasm, this remains
For starters, the MOND folk (Milgrom, Sanders, McGaugh, etc) would no doubt take strong exception to the "without recourse to [...] dark matter" part (http://www.astro.umd.edu/~ssm/mond/).
Next, even in 1986, the observed "shape" of Double Radio Sources associated with Active Galactic Nuclei (DRAGNs) was inconsistent with the Peratt's model; today, with considerably more, much higher resolution, across many more EM wavebands observations, Peratt's model clearly fails both "shape" and "stability" criteria (an example: http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~abridle/dragnparts.htm).
Finally, we now have independent estimates of the radial distribution of mass in galaxies, from analyses of gravitational lensing, something not available to any sign
To be sure, double layers explode not only in the magnetotail. Alfven himself observed it en vivo, for example, when he was invited to investigate certain large-scale accidents at the Swedish power company. Moreover, double layers are heavily involved in the process deceptively called "magnetic" reconnection.
J.F. Drake. Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection.
Really? Not found to exist? Please point me to the sources for your statement. In the meantime, allow me to remind the readers of the most elementary properties of plasma. Double layers always form at the boundaries between plasma regions of different physical conditions. As an example, consider the stable double layer in the magnetopause. They even form under the conditions of relativistic Weibel instability; in lab, point a relativistic electron-positron or electron-ion beam at a slightly magnetized plasma; in space, a gamma ray burst will do:
Milosavljevic M., et. al. Steady-State Electrostatic Layers from Weibel Instability in Relativistic Collisionless Shocks. Astrophys. J. 637 (2006)
Double layers also form in current-carrying plasmas; in general, wherever there exists a voltage differential in plasma. Their formation leads to and/or is result of various plasma instabilities. Therefore, among other things, double layers are very common in multi-ion-species plasmas (typical in space). The cross-field current instability, that plays such an important part in the current disruption model, is one; see, for example:
G. Zimbardo, et. al. Magnetic turbulence and particle dynamics in the Earth's magnetotail. Annales Geophysicae 21 (2003)
R. L. Stenzel, et. al. Double layer formation during current sheet disruptions in a reconnection experiment. Geophysical Research Letter 9 (1982)
J. E. Borovsky. Double layers do accelerate particles in the auroral zone. Physical Review Letters 69, 7 (1992)
Reddy R.V., Lakhina G.S. Ion acoustic double layers and solitons in auroral plasma. Planetary and Space Science 39, 10 (1991)
El-Taibany, W. F.; Sabry, R. Dust-acoustic solitary waves and double layers in a magnetized dusty plasma with nonthermal ions and dust charge variation. Physics of Plasmas 12, 8 (2005)
Xiao C., et. al. Cluster Observation of Wave Excitation in the Magnetopause Caused by Interplanetary Shocks. 2006 Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting
Quoting the abstract: "Intense geomagnetic storms are usually caused by the CME-magnetosphere interaction. Up to now there are only very few in situ measurements with respect to the details of interactions of CME with the front shock and magnetosphere. In this paper we report such a fortuitous observation made by Cluster four spacecraft. At 16:35 UT on Nov. 4, 2001 LASCO/SOHO observed an Earth-direction halo CME. Associated with the CME were a front shock and a magnetic cloud, which caused an intense magnetic storm with $DstI could keep citing articles ad nauseum; there are too many to list here. Jus
I began following pln2bz' activities when I started recognizing his username on Slashdot steadfastly and repeatedly pushing Thornhill's/Scott's "Electric Universe" in particular and using pseudo-science in general. After some months studying his writings and responses at Slashdot and Thunderbolts.info and occasionally prodding him for responses, I wrote a few things I think you will find illuminating. I'm sorry they are somewhat long. You should probably read them along with pln2bz' writings, which (I'm sorry again) are *extremely* long. Even if this debate bores you, I hope you will read the first (and shortest) of the following for a flavor of it, and for context to most of pln2bz' Slashdot writings since then.
A) my complaints of pln2bz' specific logic errors and conceits in his propaganda (~5 pages):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=387489&cid=21706020
B) my reply to pln2bz' ~15-page non-reply to the above (~10 pages):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=387489&cid=21776070
C) APODNereid's list of my further (relatively short) writings in a recent discussion, with brief excerpts:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22183818
D) my comments in the present discussion (note especially #1 and #4):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22149382
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22150550
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22181156
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22162042
APODNereid has written more even more on these matters, and I am guessing you've read much of it already.
pln2bz still exibits the same logic errors now that I noted in A), as evidenced in the discussion noted in C) and the particular posts listed in D). pln2bz fancies himself a go-between for mainstream science (his "astrophysicists") and the Thunderbolts/Kronia people, and this is reflected in his various posts on Thunderbolts and Slashdot. He makes it explicit here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22197114
Based on Talbott's and sometimes Thornhill's responses and pln2bz' acceptance of them, I am not certain that presenting the relevant experiments, observations, physics, or formal logic foundations will convince pln2bz or any other EU proponent will illustrate how the EU/Saturnian hypothesis fails. This applies identically for the adolescents, adult lay-science-enthusiasts (like pln2bz and most Thunderbolts denizens), and crank or quack "scientists" espousing all the hand-waving. They just deny any contrary evidence or reasoning, cry foul when others decry their own other-worldly "evidence" and "reasoning", consider their lack of ability and scientific training a strength, and adopt partisan arguments while claiming they are open-minded and that the only reasons anybody could disagree with them are partisanship or training-induced ignorance.
Of late, leokorhas been applying the standard EU spiel more closely to Peratt's stuff, appealing to authority (see his response to your post, among others), and trying to lend credibility to Thornhill and Scott by blurring the distintions between the "Electric Universe" (of Thornhill/Scott) and plasma cosmologies in general by saying "Plasma Cosmology". This has rubbed off on pln2bz, who thinks the only obstacle to the proof and mainstream acceptance of EU is the lack of a sufficiently good argument.
Welcome to these savage forums.
Thanks for the quick response, leokor.
I have no desire, nor intention, of discussing what might or might not be in anything Peratt has not published - if he (or you, or anyone else) wishes to develop that model and publish papers based on that development, I'm sure he (or you, or anyone else) are free to do so.
So, over the next few days, I shall take up your challenge and cite papers presenting astronomical observations and analyses which falsify key parts of the Peratt model(s), as presented in the two papers linked to in your earlier comment.
If you follow the chain backwards, to the pln2bz comments, in a much older SD story thread, that AC was referring to, you'll see that he (and Thornhill, apparently) responded to the "pith-ball" question* very differently to what you wrote. Along the way the full comments were sliced and diced, and the contexts changed. Not much one can do about it I think, given the format of Slashdot.
I personally would be quite interested to explore the extent to which pln2bz' assertion (that I quoted, that you quoted, that
A general comment: it's pretty clear that you and pln2bz have different perspectives on what the "Plasma/Electric Universe" approach/worldview/whatever is, sometimes these appear in direct conflict^. It's also interesting to read how you've rephrased (shall we say) what he has written to make it appear less ridiculous, and to note the parts of what he wrote that you have chosen to not comment on. I intend nothing by this comment, merely noting what I have read, and a response to "stop diverting the readers' attention from the actual subject by trying to discredit Plasma/Electric Universe in general, by either demolishing strawmen or by picking on on occasional imprecise statement by this or that supporter".
* yes, it was originally a question!
^ saying that the assertion "that the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets!" (yes, there was an exclamation mark in the original) "if enthusiastic, is also imprecise" has got to be the best understatement I've read so far this year!