Telescope Offers 'Clearest View Yet' of Milky Way - Including Plasma Filaments (ska.ac.za)

Chris Reeve writes: The MeerKAT radio telescope was inaugurated in South Africa this past Friday, revealing the clearest view yet of the center of the Milky Way. What is especially surprising about the produced image are the numerous prominent filaments which seem to appear in the foreground.

Herschel made a similar announcement just three years prior that "Observations with ESA's Herschel space observatory have revealed that our Galaxy is threaded with filamentary structures on every length scale." Intriguingly, close inspection of yesterday's SKA image show these filaments twisting around one another, yet without combining — a phenomenon observable in most novelty plasma globes when the filaments are conducting electricity... The SKA telescopes is one of the first telescopes to witness these filaments because it is 50 times more powerful than any former telescope, but also because it is apparently one of the few telescopes which can observe dark mode plasmas. For these reasons, the SKA telescope will inevitably revive the debate over the underlying physical reasons for filaments which exhibit coherent thin magnetic structure over light-year distances.
The original submission included a comment with more information about the theory of a plasma universe.

Comments

Electric Universe

[Anonymous Coward]

Galactic scale magnetic fields... Is this why stars don't orbit galaxies at the velocities predicted by gravitation alone? Perhaps this will ultimately put an end to dark matter hocus pocus.

Re: Electric Universe

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Re: And yet when we search for these massive fields, they've never been found

It's not clear why you expect to see "massive" fields. Don Scott has published the mathematics for the force-free field-aligned Birkeland current, and it is a Bessel function - a series of concentric cylinders of counter-rotating charge.

To be clear, there is no mathematical basis in the Bessel function for your claim that a massive field would be observable from outside of the filament structure.

If you take a close look at the geometry which is being alleged, you should notice that the existence of these counter-rotating cylinders means that we cannot assume that electric currents will produce large magnetic fields.

It wasn't more than about two years after Dr. Scott published this paper, by the way, that another paper was published, acknowledging the existence of counter-rotation in AGN [active galactic nuclei] jets:

our results have now yielded firm evidence that many — possibly all — AGN jets have inward currents along their axes and outward currents in a more extended region surrounding the jets. This provides fundamental information about the conditions leading to the formation and launching of the jets, as well as key input to theoretical simulations of astrophysical jets. It also indicates that astrophysical jets are fundamentally electromagnetic structures, which must be borne in mind when interpreting observed features in the distributions of both their intensity and linear polarization.

Some comments about the origin of Relativity

[Fluctuating Matter]

Dear Meglon,

We should always be extremely careful to distinguish between the quantitative vs. qualitative aspects of scientific theory. The former is constructed from abstract equations, the latter is constructed from abstract concepts. Both are maps (or aspects of a map) trying to describe the real territory, i.e. the universe.

You are right in that the quantitative aspect of Relativity has an enormous amount of experimental confirmation. What you seem to be missing is that such a mathematical framework was not originally developed by Einstein. This seems to explain why, when you get into the mathematics of Relativity, you have to study Lorentz Transformation Equations, the Lorentz Factor, Lorentz boosts, the Lorentz group, Lorentz Symmetry and Lorentz Invariance.

E. T. Whittaker, notable mathematician and science historian, wrote a classical textbook about the history of electricity and electromagnetism. If you check out the book, you will not find a chapter titled "The Relativity of Einstein", but you will find one titled "The Relativity Theory of Poincaré and Lorentz", in which Whittaker wrote:

"It is clear, from the history set forth in the present chapter, that the theory of relativity had its origin in the theory of aether and electrons. When relativity had become recognised as a doctrine covering the whole operation of physical nature, efforts were made to present it in a form free from any special association with electromagnetic theory, and deducible logically from a definite set of axioms". [A History of The Theories of Aether and Electricity, Vol 2, pages 42-43].

The original version of the quantitative map of Relativity — that we may call Lorentzian Relativity — is based on a qualitative interpretation where the speed of light is variable, time is absolute, and there is a preferred frame for light that is typically undetectable due to confounding properties of nature, such as the change in the rate of clocks with velocity and the contraction of matter with velocity. On the other hand, Einstein later found a way to obtain the exact same quantitative map through a completely different qualitative interpretation, i.e., the speed of light is constant in all moving frames, the rate of time is variable, and the undetectable aether is irrelevant. The new qualitative interpretation by Einstein was in line with the philosophy of instrumentalism, i.e. the philosophical belief that we should make no distinction between unobservable entities and non-existent ones, even if observations only make sense in terms of levels of physical reality that are not easily measurable, or beyond measurement.

Most importantly, people seem to be largely unaware that the quantitative maps of Einsteinian Relativity and Lorentzian Relativity are — in effect — quantitatively indistinguishable. Generally speaking, experiment cannot decide between the two. In other words, the quantitative maps (the equations) are identical, while the qualitative maps are totally different. This is thoroughly explained in the following paper by experimental physicist Doug Marett:

http://www.conspiracyoflight.c...

(See also the references included in the paper).

In other words, every experiment confirming Relativity is evidence confirming Lorenzian Aether-Based Relativity, which is the original Theory of Relativity. Considering that we generally cannot distinguish between the two "versions" of Relativity by quantitative measures, we should focus more than ever on carefully studying the qualitative differences between them, and making our choice wisely.

Interestingly, you mention technologies as demonstrating the validity of Einsteinian Relativity. In fact, technologies provide perhaps the easiest way to distinguish between Einsteinian and Lorentzian Relativity. Everyday technology shows that there is indeed a preferred frame. We just need spin to observe it.

Perhaps the easies