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Can Electricity Travel Through Space on Astrophysical Jets? (mdpi.com)
Slashdot reader Chris Reeve writes: An October 2017 paper titled Electric Currents along Astrophysical Jets reports that "Several researchers have reported direct evidence for large scale electric currents along astrophysical jets." A review of the citations at the end of that paper and others (here and here, for instance) would seem to suggest that one of the great Internet science debates has finally been settled: Electricity does indeed travel through space over vast cosmic distances.
What has been interesting to watch about this unexpected development is that science journalists have so far not explicitly reported this as a shift in theory, and commenters on sites like phys.org appear to deny that any change has even occurred: "The jets have been shown not to be electric currents, the energy and the physics involved are certainly not electromagnetic." This comment completely rejecting these new findings was highly rated by other phys.org readers, suggesting that the failure to explicitly report this as a change in theory has left this controversial topic in a highly confused state.
The paper summarizes what it calls "observational evidence for the existence of large scale electric currents and their associated grand design helical magnetic fields in kpc-scale astrophysical jets." And the original submitter details the history of the question in a follow-up comment arguing that at our current moment in time, "a mistaken bias against electricity in space continues to dominate conversations."
What has been interesting to watch about this unexpected development is that science journalists have so far not explicitly reported this as a shift in theory, and commenters on sites like phys.org appear to deny that any change has even occurred: "The jets have been shown not to be electric currents, the energy and the physics involved are certainly not electromagnetic." This comment completely rejecting these new findings was highly rated by other phys.org readers, suggesting that the failure to explicitly report this as a change in theory has left this controversial topic in a highly confused state.
The paper summarizes what it calls "observational evidence for the existence of large scale electric currents and their associated grand design helical magnetic fields in kpc-scale astrophysical jets." And the original submitter details the history of the question in a follow-up comment arguing that at our current moment in time, "a mistaken bias against electricity in space continues to dominate conversations."
Dear Slashdot Community,
Some 11 years ago, I watched a curious thing happen in the comments of a Slashdot article, and it would forever change my life. I watched on as members of the tech community labeled as pseudoscience the simple idea that electricity can travel through space over plasma (and actually do stuff of importance at the largest observable scales). Since that day, I have systematically tracked this electricity in space debate, and I have come to view the reporting on this topic as the greatest science journalism failure of our time.
To review, a plasma is just a gas with some percentage of unbound charged particles. We call it plasma, rather than gas, because it observably behaves differently. With less than even just 1% ionization, the ionospheric gas is observed to respond to electromagnetic fields. In the laboratory, plasmas can form into very complex structures like filaments. These filaments exhibit a long-range attraction and short-range repulsion with one another, which causes them to pair up without combining. Careful inspection of a novelty plasma globe will reveal that the filaments will tend to separate when they come into contact with the glass. The filaments can also link up with one another into very complex networks. All of this complexity is rather remarkable given that we are just talking about the "fourth" state of matter.
Now, let's review the current state of this electricity in space debate as it should be reported by science journalists.
1. It is not widely known, but definitely a fact that proper galactic rotation curves were simulated in the early 80's on government supercomputers by one of the world's leading plasma physicists, without the need for any dark matter. The reason that the arms appear to rotate as almost fixed plates, in this view, is that they are conducting electrical currents.
Galactic expert, Tim Thompson, has claimed that Peratt's decision to publish in IEEE was an attempt to avoid scrutiny. He admitted that no galactic researcher has ever read IEEE and they wouldn't know that the journal even exists (it's the largest technical organization in the world); and Thompson even went so far as to advise that galactic researchers intentionally avoid reading IEEE. You can see an annotated snapshot of his online forum post here.
2. We have been left with the impression that the CMB can only be explained as a remnant of the Big Bang expansion. This is simply not true:
That quote comes from one of the world's leading plasma physicists, Anthony L. Peratt (Physics of the Plasma Universe, Second Edition, 2015, p.33-34.) Peratt would go on to publish a paper revealing more than a hundred local hydrogen filament structures which he claimed correlate with structures in the WMAP cosmic microwave background.
It would seem that people are not yet connecting the dots here between these recent admissions by astrophysicists that large-scale electric currents are real, and this faint microwave fog that is apparently coming at us from all directions. There is, without a doubt, more than one way to explain this cosmic microwave background; but you'd never know this from the science
I will agree, and after reading the utter BS, not even rational, and very self and observation-contradicting commenters on phys.org who keyboard-warrior instead of do real science and make actual observations, I'm glad I didn't sign up. One might as well sign up to some alt-politics conspiracy theory site...for all the effect it'll have.
At least physorg keeps the nuts all together.. maybe one grenade....
Quoting tons of other errors doesn't make it right. Truth isn't up for vote.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
"All aboard the armchair astrophysics train! Next stop, Electric Universe! Red Line right to Not Even Wrong, making stops at Time Cube, Flat Earth, Luminiferous Aether, and Turtles-All-the-Way-Down Town."
Nothing posted to
It was been proven that these currents emanate from the Timecube, and terminate in the Host Files. Laugh all you want, but we will ride these EmDrive jets to other stars. And you won't be invited.
... are shaped that way because in-falling matter crossing the event horizon of a black hole causes radiation of massive proportions.
Because those particular black holes have accretion disks, out-gassing has no where to go but out the unobstructed poles.
That action causes vortexes of streaming particles and ions that travel at close to the speed of light.
Electricity is one feature (and a small factor) of the "confusion."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It's simply charge. Scientifically 'electricity' is more of a field of study today than a thing because in science electricity has many forms with 'current' and static electricity being only two.
Electricity is not a form of energy.
http://amasci.com/miscon/whatd...
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
It is telling that all papers by this author and his collaborators seem to be in a closed ecosystem of citation where they only are cited each other. I am not familiar with the "Galaxies" journal. At least one of these papers is from A&A, which *is* a real peer-reviewed journal.
There are many red herrings here. First of all, the whole "we have a model that can explain galaxy rotation curves without dark matter" is not nearly as meaningful as some seem to say it is. There is a whole host of observations explained by dark matter, in detail, and with precision. Explaining just one of them doesn't do much if you can't explain all of the rest of the observations.
Likewise, the Big Bang model has a host of observations that support it, in detail, and with numerical precision.
The "electric universe" is not something that is worth paying attention to.
For popular-level information about the problems with the whole electric universe business, see this site: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/...
So the submitter is apparently extremely distressed regarding what goes on in internet discussion threads, both on phys.org and on Slashdot (based on his extremely long comment further up), for some reason.
My advice is - don’t get so worked up over what people say on the internet.
#DeleteChrome
The submitter write, "a mistaken bias against electricity in space continues to dominate conversations." What dominates conversations is a complete lack of credible evidence for this. It reminds me of the old days when Archimedes Plutonium invaded sci.physics and talk.origins.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
If there are large currents, endpoints should gain charge over time. Does that means we observe electromagnetic forces at large scale between charged regions?
In University I learned that an electric current is a flow of charged particles. Particles like electrons, protons and all kinds of ions like hadrons for example. It does not matter in what medium the motion happens. It may happen in solids like copper, liquids like acidic water, gasses like air (lightning) and of course by exentision ionized plasmas (lightning). It even happens in a vacuum which is evident by the electron current that flows through vacuum tubes that we've used for many decades in electronics.
So if a relativistic jet is comprised of ionized particles by definition it represents an electric current.
This is clearly a troll submission. Bullshit paper in a bullshit journal. Basically the equivalent of a crackpot posting on his own blog. How did this shit get posted?
Don't be misled by rknop, and just follow the controversy.
1) The peer review system may be relatively satisfactory during quiescent times, but not during a potentially-revolutionary controversy occurring at the core of science, when the establishment seeks to preserve the status quo. Many science organizations, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, have recognized the very real peer review "gatekeeping problem", which effectively prevents scientific innovation. This observed anti-pattern blocking scientific progress occurs because peer review can be like a court where the party making judgment is the very party who stands to lose most if the application prevails.
2) The notion of an unobserved hypothetical dark matter was invented exactly *because* of the significant discrepancy between observed curves and the ones predicted by theory. If the galaxy rotation curves can be perfectly accounted for in terms of non-hypothetical visible matter, i.e. plasma matter in the laboratory, and simulated in government supercomputers by a leading plasma scientist and former scientific advisor to the U.S. Department of Energy, with plasma being more than 99.9% of the observed matter in the cosmos, then all this is clearly very significant.
3) Big Bang Creationism, with its intrinsic ties to General Relativity, was first penned by a priest (Lemaître), established with crucial help of a quaker (Eddington), and then praised by a Pope (Pius XII). As an engineer dealing with the Principle of Conservation in absolutely anything I do, I can only conceive the Big Bang as a modern creation story, not really science. In any case, if the Big Bang were a science (and hence a falsifiable theory), then it has been indeed observationally falsified, a great many times over. Anyone interested in scientific controversies should learn the story of Halton Arp. See:
https://plus.google.com/+Chris...
4) You say that the idea of modelling cosmic plasmas as laboratory plasmas (the core idea behind the so-called Electric Universe) "is not something that is worth paying attention to." Actually, the only way to evaluate if a new view of the universe is worth paying attention to or not, is to suspend judgement and spend the time to understand the new perspective, and then to compare the new viewpoint with the old one. It is apparent that neither you or the "Rational Wiki" had spent the required time to immerse yourselves into the controversy. In fact, the whole "Rational Wiki" site is written with a profound ignorance of the subject of scientific controversies.
There is a fundamental difference between a healthy skeptical critical thinker, and an complacent apologist of the scientific status quo. If we want to promote scientific progress and innovation, we need more of the former and less of the latter.
Electricity comes from other planets.
What is this pseudo-science doing on slashdot, it this the best you can find as an article on what used to be a top tech site?
@Anon: "This is clearly a troll submission. Bullshit paper in a bullshit journal. Basically the equivalent of a crackpot posting on his own blog. How did this shit get posted?"
Slashdot are hiring on ten year olds to do the article vetting.
The theory of Plasma Universe (or Electrical Universe) is as valid as Cold Fusion
'nuff said !
Years ago when I got shouted down for wondering out loud if electric currents might indeed travel cosmological distances, I decided to stop arguing and just do my research. That Denise Gabuzda and others are publishing observational evidence for the presence of cosmological electric currents I hope means we have turned some kind of a corner here. Most scientists interested in electric universe models simply think we have underestimated the role of electric currents and fields in space, in cosmology, in cellular biology, in interspecies communication, in geology, in medicine, etc. Most of us do not argue or stand on soap boxes, or get into acrimonious theoretical smack-downs. We carefully and excitedly continue our experiments elucidating the wonderful ways nature uses electric fields and currents on all length and time scales. Thanks Chris for bringing this topic here.
....He's a patent lawyer, not qualified to discuss physics (Einstein)
Isn't it the nature of science, that a group gets locked into magic thinking, and teaches the magic thinking as science, which in turn makes a group detached from the scientific basis. Someone *outside* comes along, points out their failure, and science heads off in a different direction? i.e. its always outsiders who do that. Einstein being a typical example.
As a physicist you learned to accept QM as fact and selectively ignore causality to sustain that theory. ie. you've departed from science.
So simply saying "I am a physicist, he is an engineer" does not carry the weight you think it does. Quite the reverse.
You need to address the points, rather than attack the qualification of the man saying them, because you are uniquely unqualified to discuss physics and your PhD is more a theology degrees than a science award.
You are so full of shit.
And it is a mental deficiency that needs psychiatry.
So if we are living inside a computer simulation, then yes I guess we have an electric universe.
Now your going to tell me there are computers that don't run on electricity...
It's been decades since Slashdot had an electric universe story. Brings me back to the early '00s. Thanks for the memories Slashdot!
Magnetic Reconnection and Cosmic Plasma
Birkeland Currents Explained
Electroquake | From Crazy Idea to Settled Science
The galaxy should be charge neutral, in practice it probably has quite a large negative charge - because:
A) Relativity.
B) The black hole in the center will spit out electrons preferentially simply because as it strips mass from in-falling matter the electrons are lighter and get spat further out.
Fairly confident that the "It's charge neutral" simply isn't true once relativity gets factored in.
That may or may not be enough to explain the universe expanding but it's likely a contributor.
The lizard people have had a stranglehold on Physics for far too long. We must overthrow the lizard people so the truth about the electric universe can be heard.
Some galactic jets can be analyzed from the perspective of currents. This approach goes back further than most people realize: Electric Universe: Measurement of the Electric Current in a Kpc-Scale Jet