I am simply the person who is showing you that we've been misled - by others. When a person shows you that somebody else may be misleading you, a rational response would be to thank the person for taking the time to explain it.
You really need only look at the lengthy process you've just experienced to understand how "hundreds of millions of scientists all over the world and throughout history" might be coming to the wrong conclusion: Recall that the problem began when a Wired science journalist failed to mention a controversy that is very much related to the incredibly anomalous observation that quasars can "shut down" in less than ten years. I've spoken to numerous people about Halton Arp; there are not many people who are deeply aware of his work.
Notice how you ended up on Tom Bridgman's site, where he then misled you in a number of ways about Halton Arp's claims. It took me only a few minutes to show you how. Why are you not upset with Tom Bridgman? Either way, don't you see that the "hundreds of millions of scientists all over the world" would also end up at Tom Bridgman's site?
Then you posted incredibly misleading Debye screening screening claims. It took me less than 10 minutes to present four well-documented examples of Debye screening violations. That has somehow upset you - even though, in practical terms, I have helped you to see an overt contradiction in modern physics. Many people today - physicists included - continue to believe that EM charges are screened even as observations of kiloparsec-long electric currents have become acknowledged by mainstream astronomers. These are not reasons to become angry with the person who has pointed out the contradiction. You've witnessed a truth which very few people have seen. It's a special experience to see a mistake in science before the scientific community has realized it.
Your own personal reaction to controversial science says much about the depth of your own thinking and your own propensity to lead. When we treat controversies as an open-ended clash of worldviews where the answer is not already known, we sharpen our critical voice, we develop the habits of higher-order thinking, and we open the door to becoming effective leaders...
When science becomes controversial, we have to prepare for the possibility that there may be a mistake in our body of knowledge. To the extent that we refuse to do so, we abandon the aspect of scientific theory which distinguishes it from other aspects of our culture — its provisional nature.
What has been overlooked in the unfortunate science journalism and science education which dominate today is that there are processes happening in each of our own individual minds which greatly resemble this never-ending process of change we see at play on the larger stage of the scientific world. And just the same, when we fail to actively engage with controversial science at the personal level, we are diminishing our own personal propensity for change — which sets into motion habits which then limit our own leadership capabilities...
The heart of the problem is this: to get to the true complexity of a scientific debate, a person has to be willing to entertain the notion that there exists a mistake in their own personal knowledge... to succeed at critiquing ourselves and our beliefs, we must ourselves go through a personal transformation. We have to cross what is called the subject-object barrier, from a state where we are in the grips of our existing worldview (e.g., subject to the textbook theory) to a state where we can discuss this mainstream worldview as an object.
We are talking about two different minds here: It is not merely a technical challenge to cross the subject-object barrier; it is an adjustment to the m
Re: "Gravity may be weak, but it doesn't get shielded like the EM field is."
Many theorists and online critics today insist that there exists a theoretical limit to EM forces dictated by a concept known as Debye screening. The argument commonly goes like this...
"The good old 'EM is 10^39 times stringer [sic] than gravity' myth. This is ignorance of both gravity and EM! Gravity is weaker but there is only one 'charge' -- it cannot be shielded. EM has two charges -- it can and is shielded. In plasma there are basically no EM forces on scales larger than a few Debye lengths. This is 10 meters in the solar wind."
"In plasmas and electrolytes the Debye length (also called Debye radius), named after the Dutch physicist and physical chemist Peter Debye, is the measure of a charge carrier's net electrostatic effect in solution, and how far those electrostatic effects persist. A Debye sphere is a volume whose radius is the Debye length, with each Debye length, charges are increasingly electrically screened. Every Debyelength, the electric potential will decrease by 1/e."
The chart on that page clearly lists these limits to electromagnetism's reach, per medium:
Solar core - 10^-11 m
Tokamak - 10^-4 m
Gas discharge - 10^-4 m
Ionosphere - 10^-3 m
Magnetosphere - 10^2 m
Solar wind - 10 m
Interstellar medium - 10 m
Intergalactic medium - 10^5 m
"Debye screening is used as an explanation by mainstream to point to why discharges won't occur in galactic scenarios. I.e. the charged particles within a plasma wouldn't be affected by an external electric field outside the Debye length/radius. This length also signifies the volumes where discharges can occur; a few meters in the solar wind and up to a hundred kilometers in intergalactic medium (still not very long distances)."
The problem with this concept is that observations have repeatedly shown us that it fails to actually constrain EM forces. Even if it has proven an accurate general guideline, the idea has repeatedly failed us as a rule or law. Treating this rule-of-thumb like a law of physics is akin to claiming that since the Earth's atmosphere is typically insulating, atmospheric lightning should not be possible. Well, the obvious problem is that you can see, yourself, that lightning happens. So, when you see reports in science articles of electric discharges, ask yourself: Has Debye screening been violated?
"Static electricity is known to play an important role on Earth's airless, dusty moon, but evidence of static charge building up on other objects in the solar system has been elusive until now. A new analysis of data from NASA's Cassini mission has revealed that, during a 2005 flyby of Saturn's moon Hyperion, the spacecraft was briefly bathed in a beam of electrons coming from the moon's electrostatically charged surface...
Measurements made by several of Cassini's instruments during a close encounter with Hyperion on September 26, 2005, indicate that something unexpected took place in the charged particle environment around the spacecraft. Among those instruments, the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) detected that the spacecraft was magnetically connected to the surface of Hyperion for
Re: "With regard to dark matter, it always amuses me when people find it hard to believe it exists, when every second over 1e10 of solar neutrinos pass through every square inch of their body without interaction."
This is not at all a comprehensive statement of the problem. The trouble that gravitational cosmology is running into is not just a matter of detection - but also fundamentally a problem of distance: We can state the problem in common sense terms using the Burnham model:
If the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, then the next nearest star would be 4 miles away!
This is why the non-detection of dark matter so greatly matters. Common sense suggests that the force of gravity cannot span these vast distances without observable matter. The reporting on the dark matter problem consistently fails to present the Burnham model - which is designed to help you to comprehend the incredible distances claimed to exist between stars. Big Bang theorists reap benefits from their own refusal to create this public understanding. It's inherently misleading.
Re: "When scientists tell you for example that we are observing dark matter filaments because a variety of reasons, you pretend that this is conclusive evidence of plasma filaments because they didn't take into account some hypothetical feature (Birkeland currents)."
What even is a dark matter filament? How would a person even argue against such a conceptual label? Is there any way to falsify it? What are your own personal reasons to believe such claims?
Re, Tom Bridgman's claim: "If Arp's interpretation was correct, how could a galaxy have the SAME redshift as a nearby quasar? Perhaps they're chance alignments? According to Arp, that is not likely!"
I don't see why Bridgman believes this is such a challenge to explain. He's certainly not trying very hard to apply Arp's model! Imagine, e.g., that a quasar is ejected through the plane of the galaxy. Due to the high density of material it would encounter, one could speculate that its inherent component would very rapidly adjust to reflect its surroundings.
Now, if you were to just reflect for a moment on the current situation of cosmology - that 95% of the universe's matter is apparently missing, and yet this has not induced anybody to abandon the framework - you should realize that Bridgman's analysis is not one bit a fair treatment. By the precedent standards which have already been deployed by Big Bang proponents, Arp should be permitted to propose all sorts of ad hoc extensions to fit observations to his framework. How can anybody possibly suggest that only the Big Bang framework is allowed to make such adjustments? You're being led to a designed conclusion, and not thinking too deeply about the context which Bridgman is having you ignore.
It's great that you are taking the time to learn of the arguments on both sides, but are you also thinking about what Bridgman is claiming? You want to go online to argue against Arp, but you're not taking the time to actually learn his model sufficient to apply it. This can still work as a way of learning a model, but you've really stacked the deck against acceptance of Arp's model with your approach of keeping it vague in your own mind.
Re, Tom Bridgman's claim: "By the 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope was demonstrating that QSOs appeared to be in galaxies... In Arp's book, he reports on a press conference where John Bahcall was announcing some of these early results (pg 55). Rather than acknowledge this was a severe blow for his model, Arp emphasized that this could not be demonstrated for ALL quasars observed. Arp's denial was in the same class as creationists complaining about gaps in the fossil record, who, when an intermediate is found, insists that evolution now has TWO gaps!"
First of all, you should have noticed the red flag of using Hubble imagery to judge Arp's model. QSO's can have features which obviously don't appear in optical.
But, more than that, it's not entirely clear to me, after reading this, that Bridgman understands the model which Arp had in mind towards the end of his life. Quasars do not have to eject perpendicular to the parent galaxy. Why must this always be the case? Circumstances can surely alter the trajectory if these ejections can indeed be modeled as violent electrodynamic plasma focus ejections - as Eric Lerner has suggested. In fact, Arp readily admits in the materials which I have seen that the ejections can also, in some cases, occur along the plane of the galaxy. Arp even somewhere in his Intrinsic Redshift lecture positions this as the likely cause for the violently disturbed galaxies he has documented in his "Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies".
The argument that Bridgman puts forward appears designed to invite the reader to dismiss Arp as a waste of time - which may work as an argumentative tool for many of his readers because it gives them an excuse to stop learning Arp's model.
Re: "You're basically arguing with a single person on the internet, and from where I'm sitting, you certainly aren't winning that argument."
A very important part of tracking controversies is documenting reactions by both laypeople and academics to controversial science claims. I've become increasingly organized on this since I began tracking controversies about twelve years ago. These conversations are very important in the sense that an uninvolved 3rd person can in certain ways benefit more from witnessing the exchange than the actual participants. If a participant, e.g., is unfairly characterizing the other side; if they are repeatedly condescending or making baseless accusations; if there are aspects to the site culture which appear to diverge from more established IRL cultural norms; or if a person is clearly not conceding fairly-made points, all of these types of behaviors can be witnessed and taken into account by third-person parties who have no personal stake in the arguments.
Mapping out complex scientific debates is, by itself, important historic work which academics have to date refused to do. It's obvious that cosmologists don't even have a "Plan B" for how they would react to settling their science to a dead-end. If and when it happens, they will initially have to consult the work that has already been done by non-academics.
For these reasons, Juan and I take outreach very seriously. I am frequently surprised by the ways in which people behave online, and even more surprising is the reaction from people that I am recording their responses. The Internet is obviously a completely public forum, so everybody should be treating one another as though they can be recorded at all times.
Having tracked the debate for such a long time at this point, I can clearly see that the debate over electricity in space is very much heating up. The trend has been towards more recognition of electric currents and electric fields at astronomical scales; more observations of unexpected counter-rotation at the largest scales (a unique feature of Birkeland currents); more observations of filamentary, skeletal structures pervading galaxies and apparently leading to the formation of stars in groups; more features currently referred to by astrophysicists as "clouds" which upon closer inspection with radio prove to be more like bundles of filaments. These historical trends do not bode well for gravitational cosmology.
Anybody who actually takes the time to read through my own comments will notice that Juan and I do not even share the same knowledge. We are talking about completely different matters: I discuss electrical cosmology and scientific controversies. Juan has expertise which runs well beyond my own on these topics of philosophy, Einstein and aether. This pretense that Juan and I are the same person is clearly intended to undermine Juan's technical remarks.
Slashdot moderators and participants need to carefully consider the issues which Juan is raising first of all because so much is at stake, but also for the simple reason that modern cosmology has failed to provide us with a coherent worldview. Albert Einstein never intended to create the anti-intellectual culture which currently dominates discussions of science on Slashdot. In fact, the tech community needs to take a hard look at its own anti-intellectual tendencies. Juan is obviously able to respond to every single challenge - yet he is treated as a second-class citizen on this site simply because he has arrived at a conclusion which differs from your own. He's fully able to respond to all challenges, and that should mean something. But, what we see instead is that the Slashdot community defines its tribe not according to how deeply a person is thinking about the big questions of science, but rather along how strictly a person adheres to modern science's incoherent ideology.
What does it even mean that the tech community fully embraces a universe that is 95% missing? You are treating this problem as though it is merely just another minor technical challenge, but the truth of the matter is that cosmologists have already tried and failed to solve this problem with the current framework. Those former efforts are how we have arrived at a universe that is 95% missing. It's time for the tech community to own up to the significance of cosmology's failure, and think more deeply about how their own culture has contributed to this obvious stagnation. Tech needs to decide if it will lead on these issues - or continue to mindlessly adopt the stagnation and incoherence which cosmologists have offered us.
"Adaptive work is required when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge...
adaptive change is distressing for the people going through it. They need to take on new roles, new relationships, new values, new behaviors, and new approaches to work. Many employees are ambivalent about the efforts and sacrifices required of them. They often look to the senior executive to take problems off their shoulders. But those expectations have to be unlearned. Rather than fulfilling the expectation that they will provide answers, leaders have to ask tough questions. Rather than protecting people from outside threats, leaders should allow them to feel the pinch of reality in order to stimulate them to adapt...
Instead of orienting people to their current roles, leaders must disorient them so that new relationships can develop. Instead of quelling conflict, leaders have to draw the issues out. Instead of maintaining norms, leaders have to challenge 'the way we do business' and help others distinguish immutable values from historical practices that must go...
Business leaders have to be able to view patterns as if they were on a balcony. It does them no good to be swept up in the field of action. Leaders have to see a context for change or create one. They should give employees a strong sense of the history of the enterprise and what's good about its past, as well as an idea of the market forces at work today and the responsibility people must take in shaping the futur
Jeff Schmidt was an editor of Physics Today for 19 years when he published those comments in his critique of the graduate programs, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul Battering System that Shapes their Lives. He was immediately fired by the American Institute of Physics, which led Jeff to sue them. This case shortly thereafter became the largest freedom-of-expression case in North American physics, with 500 physicists signing a letter of support for Jeff's right to publish his critique without losing his job.
The AIP ultimately settled with Jeff. You can learn about the details of the case here.
For the record, you speculated about dark matter filaments ("a perfectly plausible explanation"), and then complained that I wasn't following the scientific method. What a joke!
If all it takes in order for you to believe something is that somebody is making the claim, then you're probably in over your head participating in a discussion about cosmology and astrophysics.
My posts appear on his feed because he upvotes me. He has closely followed my own work on scientific controversies beyond the confines of Slashdot. We speak together almost daily. I alerted him to the Slashdot submission. Get a grip. Have you ever met somebody who agrees with you about lots of things? That.
Re: "You're fooling yourself by handpicking observational results, and fitting them to your competing model. Which is pseudoscience."
Here's a newsflash: Every time you decide to talk about anything at all, you are doing this same thing. Every science article which reports on a new observation is doing this same thing. Most scientific papers - which usually leave out numerous related details - are doing the same thing. You've redefined "pseudoscience" in such a manner that the term can now encompass nearly every single act of science communication.
Re: "Critical thinking starts with realizing that you yourself may be wrong, that your ideas are flawed, that your observational data is flawed. Only once you have made sufficiently certain that you might be right, you start inviting other people in your work to try to prove you wrong. And be very open to being wrong. If nobody can find anything wrong with your ideas and data, you might be right."
I would argue that you've not really defined critical thinking properly here. Critical thinking simply means being willing to critique ideas (especially mainstream ones). Here is a better definition, in my view, provided by Jeff Schmidt, author of Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul Battering System that Shapes their Lives:
"Professionals generally avoid the risk inherent in real critical thinking and cannot properly be called critical thinkers. They are simply ideologically disciplined thinkers. Real critical thinking means uncovering and questioning social, political and moral assumptions; applying and refining a personally developed worldview; and calling for action that advances a personally created agenda... An approach that backs away from any of these three components lacks the critical spirit... Ideologically disciplined thinkers, especially the more gung-ho ones, often give the appearance of being critical thinkers as they go around deftly applying the official ideology and confidently reporting their judgments. The fact that professionals are usually more well-informed than nonprofessionals contributes to the illusion that they are critical thinkers."
Re: "But keep trying to prove yourself wrong, using whatever new observational data you can find. That's how science works today."
There have been a number of books put forward - critiques of modern science - where it has been pointed out that nobody actually does this in practice. You might take a look at Science is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can't Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed by Henry H. Bauer. He pretty much takes the wrecking ball to the narrative you provide here. Really though: Before you go online to tell people how science works in practice, consider reading a few books which approach the subject in a critical manner.
Re: "You're doing the opposite. You're trying to prove your hypothesis right, using new observational data. Which would only strengthen the case that you might be right, never prove it. But what you fail to take into account is the large body of observational data that does not fit your hypothesis, thereby irrevocably disproving it."
The part you are not yet seeing is that disproving something in cosmology is very, very tricky. Since we oftentimes cannot perform an experiment or take an in situ observation to settle a question, there is a lot of room for challengers. But you would not notice this from the reporting.
There is no "large body of observational data that does not fit" electrical cosmology. If you have a specific argument to make, you should present it so that we can talk about it. You're hiding behind an ambiguous argument.
Juan Calsiano is not me. He's a maverick philosopher that lives in Argentina who occasionally visits the United States for Electric Universe conferences. He's writing a philosophy book right now on these very subjects which he posts about, and is very well read on the subjects of aether, electrical engineering, Relativity, electrical cosmology and obscure history of science which is not taught in the graduate programs. We have approached these subjects from two completely different angles. I am not an expert in philosophy, and I continue to learn from Juan on a variety of subjects. It doesn't really surprise me that you feel the need to discount his existence. Many people are observably intimidated by the depth of his understanding on these subjects. It's really obvious, as nobody ever challenges him at the level of technical details.
Re: "if you want to take on mainstream cosmology, then create a consistent and testable hypothesis, and publish it."
The hypothesis that we can use observations of electric discharges in plasma laboratories to inform inferences about what we are seeing in space has proven to be wildly successful at predicting the features of space. There is a very long history of successes which are generally not taught to American graduate students; IEEE, the world's largest technical organization, publishes a journal which runs science papers on this topic (IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science); the U.S. government has employed one of the world's most authoritative experts in electrical cosmology - Anthony Peratt - to run some of its most expensive classified experiments. Peratt is the intellectual descendant of Hannes Alfven, who received the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his creation of magnetohydrodynamics. There can be little doubt that Alfven's work has been put to great use in a variety of U.S. military applications. Kristian Birkeland, e.g., actually invented the electromagnetic rail gun.
But you'd not realize any of this by listening to Big Bang proponents. Let's review the history they like to ignore, and take a closer look at the misleading ways that they prefer to tell the story.
"After Kristian Birkeland [1] (1867-1917) suggested in 1908 that Earth’s auroras were powered by corpuscular rays emanating
from the Sun that become deflected into Earth’s polar regions by the geomagnetic field, the existence of such magnetic field-aligned currents was strongly disputed based partially on the idea that currents could not cross the presumed 'vacuum' of space."
Birkeland became the world's first laboratory astrophysicist when he constructed his terrella - a "mini-Earth" - in order to help formulate his model. Birkeland's success would prove to be a major loss for the Royal Society, and as Ian Tresman documents, it took many years for mainstream astrophysicists to finally acknowledge that Birkeland was right:[pay close attention to the parts they leave out!]
"The history of Birekland Currents appears to mired in politics.[17]
After Kristian Birkeland suggested 'currents there are imagined as having come into existence mainly as a secondary effect of the electric corpuscles from the sun drawn in out of space,' (1908), his ideas were generally ignored in favour of an alternative theory from British mathematician Sydney Chapman.
In 1939, the Swedish Engineer and plasma physicist Hannes Alfvén promoted Birkeland's ideas in a paper published on the generation of the current from the Solar Wind.[18] One of Alfvén's colleagues, Rolf Boström, also used field-aligned currents in a new model of auroral electrojets (1964).[19]
In 1966 Alfred Zmuda, J.H. Martin, and F.T.Heuring reported their findings of magnetic disturbance in the aurora, using a satellite magnetometer, but did not mention Alfvén, Birkeland, or field-aligned currents, even after it was brought to their attention by editor of the space physics section of the journal, Alex Dressler.[20][this part is not mentioned in the wikipedia article]
In 1967 Alex Dessler and one of his graduates students, David Cummings, wrote an article arguing that Zmuda et al had indeed detected field align-currents.[21] Even Alfvén subsequently credited (1986) that Dessler 'discovered the currents that Birkeland had predicted' and should be called Birkeland-Dessler currents.[22]
Re: "Just because we don't know everything, doesn't mean you can just make up stuff. You're not even specific about the stuff you make up, it's just hand waving.
You're not framing the issue correctly. The theoretical distance between a Big Bang and lots of mini-bangs is not actually that big. All that we are doing here is removing claims about the beginning of the universe, and then postulating that matter is recycled in the most violent areas of the galaxy which we witness - the active galactic nuclei. If you are fine with a Big Bang, then lots of mini-bangs should not induce any trauma. There is a sense that you are trying a little bit too hard to resist in the light of the proposed change here.
However, the really important part here is to completely forget trying to deduce from principles the behavior of the AGN as black hole theorists have tried to do. If you actually read Eric Lerner's explanation of how the plasma focus works, the lesson you should be taking away from that is that we cannot simply deduce the behaviors of plasmas. A century of research in plasma physics has produced this single lesson as the most important lesson of our laboratory investigations: plasmas behave in unexpected manners. You can try to deploy the most sophisticated mathematics towards understanding them, but you will still fail. Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven warned about this very problem repeatedly, but the astrophysical community refused to listen - even when he lectured them about it in his 1970 Nobel lecture.
This may come as a surprise, but theorists "make stuff up" all of the time. Sometimes - gasp! - they even postulate ideas which are not consistent with the existing scientific framework (omg!). Really though: it's their job. Sometimes, new physics can come from unexpected places. There is nothing actually extraordinary from inferring new physics principles from a study of peculiar galaxies; it's actually a pretty clever approach which we should not rule out, since these are the edge cases - and our models must accommodate all known cases.
Re: "There is no way that your magical new quasar physics suddenly changes the results of some of the most precise physical measurements we have ever made."
It's not a very strong point at all because you're making an apples-to-oranges comparison here between the end state (a system which has fully stabilized) and the initial state (which happens to be one of the most energetic regions we can see in the universe). The nature of that initial state will depend very heavily upon what process created it (in this case a proposed "matter recycling" event). Can you really make sweeping claims that the initial state must adhere to the properties of the end state? I think your hyper-focus on forming rebuttals is distracting you from more deeply engaging these issues. Halton Arp, Eric Lerner and Wal Thornhill are clearly engaging this issue at a level above what you are doing here.
Re: "But all that is irrelevant because even *if* a variable electron would cause an intrinsic redshift at the source of emitted light, that still would not explain why the absorption lines of interstellar neutral hydrogen between the quasar and us, is *also* redshifted in a way that goes from zero to the quasar's redshift (i.e. in-between values)."
I've already dealt with this topic in another thread. It turns out that the astronomers whose work has been challenged by Arp are just as zealous as the Big Bang's online defenders. Not a huge surprise there that people would selectively report on observations in order to reach their preferred conclusions.
Arp makes a very important point in Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies that a null absorption line result may go unannounce
Re: "Higher-level reasoning simply looks like confusion from the outside... Wow, you are quite the narcissist, aren't you? The way you push your own agenda for validation, convinced you're right and we are wrong, certainly fits that bill...
There is no "agenda" at play other than to understand the landscape of the debate. In the world of tracking scientific controversies, identifying the arguments and claims is the mundane precursor to actual independent thought.
Re: "There is *no* known mechanism that allows the rest mass of an electron to change. If there were, we would have found it. It has been shown to remain constant with over 8 decimal digits."
This argument is not well thought out. The physics of quasars is not understood, and you do no service to anybody pretending as though you can tell us what it cannot be. The mainstream is constantly reminding us of how luminous and energetic these objects are, based upon their inferred redshift, so whatever point you are trying to make, you should think more deeply about it.
Re: "If quasars were ejected as electron severely deficient then they would be very much attracted to whatever ejected them, because electrostatic attraction is over 20 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity."
There is a long history of speculators who have formerly claimed that they can reason with electrostatics principles at astrophysical scales. This is one of the anti-patterns which I document online (so you will now be documented with the others).
Astrophysical plasmas are not at all like electrostatics. Electrostatics is the science of charge distribution between solids such that electrons are confined to isolated conductive mediums, but are both immersed within a larger non-conductive medium. In a plasma, the charged particles are free to move throughout the medium. The solid state - e.g., little tiny pebbles like our Earth - is exceptionally rare in space, so the situation plays out very differently. It turns out that there actually are regions of space which are notably more conductive than the broader interstellar medium. We call them Birkeland currents, and they can even act as ion sumps, pulling upon the ambient charged particles surrounding them. We could even use the term "accretion". Laboratory plasma physicists might use any of a variety of terms to describe these processes (Marklund convection or the Lorentz force or the Biot-Savart Law, etc). But, you will absolutely fail if you try to use electrostatics to reason your way to these behaviors. If you need to see more discussion of this, then read this.
Part of the problem here is what happens to an electrostatic discharge when it encounters a plasma double layer. The double layers are the real difficulty which you face when you try to mix these toolsets. In nature, plasmas form into complex structures: sheets, cells, filaments, and even hub-and-spoke connectors which can link the filaments into networks. An electrostatic discharge will rarely penetrate a plasma double layer. If you need something to look at to understand this, then consider the case of a sprite encountering the ionosphere: The ionosphere is the plasma double layer, and the sprite cannot penetrate this structure. In fact, you could make the case that the sprite is a discharge from the top of the storm to the ionospheric double layers. Since these layers basically separate Earth from space, you could fairly state that the sprites are sort of like "lightning to space."
But, planetary scientists so disliked that phrase that they invented the term "sprite" (which in folklore is known as a devilish fairy that misleads people).
So, notice that the very first structure we encounter when we go into space is a plasma double layer.
"So, I looked into the techniques that totalitarian organizations use to get people to play a politically subordinate role, and I found that professional training programs use the same techniques.
These include, for example...
- recruitment through big promises
- social isolation
- milieu control [control over one's social environment]
- setting up teachers as unquestioned authority
- undermining true self confidence
- and gross exaggeration of the importance of the work to the world
And after seeing that similarity to cult indoctrination, I thought, well, how can this be resisted?
That's when I discovered this Army manual called Prisoner of War Resistance, in which the Army trained its people how to resist indoctrination if they are captured and made prisoners of war.
And I found that these techniques apply very well to graduate school and the workplace and any hierarchical, repressive situation. So, I wrote in my book that the United States Army issued a survival manual for graduate school...
(laughter)
... without knowing it, and... In fact, in a crucial way, the military manual is better than civilian advice books, which are written specifically for students. The civilian books help you conform to the demands of the institution. You get your credential, but you lose your identity in the process.
However, the Army manual shows you how to survive the training programs and keep control over your identity. The military even has a name for it; they call it
Re: "Lol, you really don't seem to know how redshift works. The shift occurs in the spectral absorption and emission lines of interstellar gas (mostly Hydrogen). These have a specific fingerprint (i.e. a pattern of lines, like a barcode) that shifts to the red side of the spectrum. The quasar is just the light source that ionizes the gas in front of it, often hundreds of thousands light years away."
"[I]f the electron mass - when it makes its transition in the atom, and emits the photon - if the mass is small, the photon is weak and it's redshifted. As the electron grows in mass, the photon which is emitted is stronger, and it drops in redshift."
Plasma physicist Eric Lerner has pointed out that if active galactic nuclei can be compared to plasma focus devices, then it is alternatively possible that quasars are being ejected electron-deficient. Arp was not a plasma physicist, and it seems unlikely that he was aware of Lerner's detailed argument.
Wal Thornhill appears to have built his own inference on top of Lerner's plasma physics approach:
"Quasars appear to be ejected, deficient in electrons, from their parent active galactic nucleus (AGN). The lightweight electrons remain tangled in the AGN plasmoid for much longer than the heavier protons and uncharged neutrons. As a result, the quasar has lower initial charge polarization compared to matter on Earth and, from the principle of E-MOND, all subatomic particles in the quasar have lower masses. Therefore, the emitting atoms also have lower masses, and their radiation has lower energy. The result is the observed intrinsic redshift of atomic emissions from quasars and their relative faintness."
What you are doing is pointing to the textbook theory, and saying "See?!" What these guys are pointing out is that there are alternative ways to explain what we see. They are working at the level of scientific frameworks, formulating new ways to interpret the data. This is a level of thinking above what you yourself are doing. Nobody is confused here about what the textbook says. Higher-level reasoning simply looks like confusion from the outside.
Re: "We can view the Universe through different lenses... Electricity and Magnetism could be one of them... ? It just seems we are too eager to label things as crackpot. Often times the 'crackpots' have been right."
Astronomer and cosmologist, Martín López Corredoira, has importantly noted:
"A superficial view may lead us to think that we live in the golden age of science but the fact is that the present-day results of science are mostly mean, unimportant, or just technical applications of ideas conceived in the past..."
"Space was invented on Earth before we knew what was out there."
There is an important historical aspect to what is happening which makes sense of it all: The gravitational universe idea is a legacy concept - akin to vigorously asserting the importance of MS-DOS in 2018. The idea comes from a time when people burned whale oil in gas lamps to read at night - (1) when the Milky Way was thought to be all there was; (2) when that single galaxy was assumed to be just a pile of stars; (3) when all we could see was disconnected points of light; (4) when astronomers did not even realize that radio waves come from space; and (5) when it was assumed that the space between stars was mostly empty.
Think about the collective implication of each of these assumptions: (2) through (5) all leave the impression that gravity must dominate at the largest scales. Today we know better about (2) through (5), but few are actually thinking through the implications of the historical changes.
Today, we understand that (1) the Milky Way is one of many galaxies; (2) we now realize that galaxies can be incredibly dynamic objects; (3) we can now see the connections between those points of light; (4) we now understand that optical is just a small sliver of the universe's total emissions; and (5) we today understand that not only is there significant matter between stars, but it is additionally conductive. These were all surprises, and aside from (1), they point to electricity - yet the gravitational ideas which came from that former time continue to dominate.
Consider the rapid pace at which things change in the Node.js community. If you don't pay attention for just a few months, you could find yourself having to repeatedly interject, "what's that?" Astrophysics is the exact opposite of this. There is no real innovation happening, no actual theorizing going on:
"Just look at almost any research paper in astronomy, or astrophysics. What are they doing? They are interpreting evidence on the basis of existing knowledge and “accepted standards” of reasoning and argument. They may come up with alternative theories, where one says it’s this, another says it’s that. They may fight over such alternative theories. But all the theories are ultimately based on the same fundamental assumptions. There’s no actual hypothesizing going on."
"All of the theoretical work that's been done since the 1970s has not produced a single successful prediction," says Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.
We would be very wise to take a closer look at the many surprises which have occurred since these old ideas were origina
That's a great paper you just pointed to. It begins:
1.1. Anomalous redshift problem
"The problem of the apparent optical associations of galaxies with very different redshifts, the so-called anomalous redshifts (Narlikar 1989; Arp 1987, 1998), is old but still alive. Although surprisingly ignored by most of the astronomical community, there is increasing evidence of examples of such anomalies. Statistical evidence has grown for such associations over the last 30 years (Burbidge 1996, 2001). For instance, all non-elliptical galaxies brighter than 12.8 mag with apparent companion galaxies have been examined (Arp 1981), and 13 of the 34 candidate companion galaxies were found to have QSOs with higher redshift. Given an accidental probability of less than 0.01 per galaxy, the global probability of this to be a chance is 1017. Bias effects alone cannot be responsible for these correlations (Burbidge 2001; Hoyle & Burbidge 1996; Bentez et al. 2001). Weak gravitational lensing by dark matter has been proposed (Gott & Gunn 1974; Schneider 1989; Wu 1996; Burbidge et al. 1997) as the cause of these correlations, although this seems to be insufficient to explain them (Burbidge et al. 1997; Burbidge 2001; Bentez et al. 2001; Gaztanaga 2003; Jain et al. 2003), and cannot work at all for the correlations with the brightest and nearest galaxies. The statistical relevance of these associations is still currently a matter of debate (Sluse et al. 2003)."
The explanation of this object became increasingly awkward for Big Bang proponents over time, as a reaction to unexpected observations:
"Peculiar galaxy NGC 7603 discovered 30 years ago by Halton Arp is one of the more striking examples of galaxy-quasar connections. It has recently been re-examined after the discovery of two new quasar-type objects embedded in the connecting filament. The renowned optical astronomer Margaret Burbidge has for decades been a central figure in the struggle to bring controversial observations such as NGC 7603 to the attention of conventional astronomers. And for her fairness and untiring efforts in the field, she has become one of the most widely repected women in astronomy."
"There's a very interesting galaxy known as NGC 7603... It's a Seyfert galaxy. That means it has one of these active nuclei with strong emission lines and a lot of activity, obviously, going on in its center. And it was studied years ago by Chip Arp in his Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. It has a spiral arm that seems to come right outside of the galaxy, trailing right out, and it ends up on a fainter galaxy. But it ends right up as though it's connecting the nuclei of the two galaxies."
"In the Atlast of Peculiar Galaxies which was published in 1966, that was the point of the atlas. And one of the objects, just to illustrate what a peculiar galaxy is, is this what is now famous NGC 7603 - and this is the central Seyfert, which means just a very, very active galaxy with a lot of energy in the nucleus and a lot of explosive energy, and so forth, and here is the high-redshift companion here, and you see joined by a filament of material. It turns out from the observations that this filament of material is material of the galaxy - gas and dust and stars and so forth - that's been drawn out in the ejection. But the astonishing thing - a controversial matter - is that this galaxy is a much higher redshift than this.
Now, NGC 7603 has one redshift of about 8,000 kilometers per second, and the other galaxy has a much larger redshift. So, how can they be connected? Well,... these data we
You need to keep a very open mind about what you are looking at with astronomical imagery. NG7603 can fairly be interpreted as the galaxy version of a parent connected to its child with an umbilical cord. There are multiple levels at which a person can engage this image at. If you have not yet thought through the highest, then you are simply deciding to ignore a completely legitimate interpretation, and the universe could be far more interesting than your quick judgments would ever even notice.
Re: "There *is* an intrinsic redshift due to gravitational effects, but this only comes into play extremely close to extremely massive objects. The accretion disc of a black hole (i.e. the light generating part) is already too far out of the gravity well to show much gravitational redshift."
The original definition of "pathological" science is something like this:
"The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity. For example, you might think that if one onion root would affect another due to ultraviolet light then by putting on an ultraviolet source of light you could get it to work better. Oh no! Oh no! It had to be just the amount of intensity that's given off by an onion root. Ten onion roots wouldn't do any better than one and it didn't make any difference about the distance of the source. It didn't follow any inverse square law or anything as simple as that. And so on. In other words, the effect is independent of the intensity of the cause. That was true in the mitogenetic rays and it was true in the N rays. Ten bricks didn't have any more effect than one. It had to be of low intensity. We know why it had to be of low intensity: so that you could fool yourself so easily..."
If you watch the "Intrinsic Redshift" lecture on Youtube, he tells many stories of fighting with journals and peer reviewers to publish paper after paper after paper. These stories provide an important look at the struggles that a person faces when they publish work which challenges the orthodoxy. You've managed to take away the wrong lesson from the discussion you're reading about. Whatever your process is, it's producing the wrong result. This should alarm you.
Re: "Sure, and since then we used that data in ever-larger sky surveys and realized what we were seeing was the large scale structure of galactic layout with walls and voids. Since the majority of galaxies are found in certain structures, then of course one will find that their red shifts also tend to cluster.
Can you point me to any examples where this is the argument which was put forward?
Selection Effects in the SDSS Quasar Sample: The Filter Gap Footprint
M.B. Bell, S.P. Comeau (Submitted on 30 Nov 2009)
"In the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) quasars are targeted using colors and anything that can cause the identifying characteristics of the colors to disappear can create problems in the source selection process. Quasar spectra contain strong emission lines that can seriously affect the colors in photometric systems in which the transmission characteristics vary abruptly and significantly with redshift. When a strong line crosses a gap between two filter passbands the color effects induced by the line change abruptly, and there is also a dimming in apparent brightness compared to those redshifts where the strong line is inside a filter passband where the transmission is high. The strong emission lines in quasars, combined with the varying detectability introduced by the transmission pattern of the five filters, will result in a filter-gap footprint being imprinted on the N(z) distribution, with more quasars being missed when a strong line falls in a filter gap. It is shown here that a periodicity of (z) ~ 0.6 is imprinted on the redshift-number distribution by this selection effect. Because this effect cannot be rigorously corrected for, astronomers need to be aware of it in any investigation that uses the SDSS N(z) distribution. Its presence also means that the SDSS quasar data cannot be used either to confirm or to rule out the (z) ~ 0.6 redshift period reported previously in other, unrelated quasar data."
Re: "Just look at your own list of papers, lots in the 60s and 70s, then less and less until the 2000s when its just a handful. Did the effect disappear, or did people just ascribe this to something more prosaic than the, well, whatever was supposed to be causing it?"
"The observers come in now with the belief that we live in a Big Bang universe, and therefore all of their ways of understanding things are tailored to that. And they don't come in with the possibility that this - our alternative, or any other, for that matter - is right, and really do it in an open-minded way. And of course what goes along with that is that observers who would like to test this way find it very hard to get observing time, and so on. I mean, this relates to the whole issue of whether the... the complete lack of balance in the... way the observational programs and the funding are conducted. There's no question about that. I don't think that anybody would argue about it."
Re: "Good grief man, you're either a troll or an idiot. No, I'm not conflating anything. And no, the Big Bang singularity was not a mathematical point. It had a measurable albeit extremely small volume. And there is a good chance it was part of a bigger volume, which all inflated at the same rate, outside our observable universe."
This is cosmology we are talking about here, and the "dark" data is very much telling you right now that something important and fundamental is wrong with the idea.
Many practicing scientists have themselves gone on the record to express their own displeasure with the idea, its origins, its ad hoc nature, and the matter-of-fact manner in which its proponents speak about its chronology - which is itself ironic because they've also expressed a willingness to confidently change the chronology in order to explain away contradictions.
The Soviet Nobel laureate, Lev Landau, famously observed that
“Cosmologists are often wrong but never in doubt.”
Martín López Corredoira is the author of more than 50 cosmology and astrophysics papers, often as lead. He's written papers on the structure of the Milky Way, stellar populations, and observational astronomy topics which required analytical calculations, simulations, statistics, photometrical and spectroscopical observations and analysis. He has remarked:
"Cosmology is... is not a science. It has a lot of scientific aspects. We can know many things with the science: We can know how the galaxies are distributed - this is our measurement with observations - we can know how... many metals are in the intergalactic medium or in some galaxy, and all of these aspects are scientific. But, with regards and considerations about the beginning of the universe, this is in some way crossing the barrier of the science, and going to something in between the science and metaphysical aspects, in my opinion."
"People have said that science is a method for asking questions of nature. And if that's true, then we can say the Big Bang supporters are people who don't take NO for an answer."
"Inflation was proposed more than 35 years ago, among others, by Paul Steinhardt. But Steinhardt has become one of the theory’s most fervent critics. In a recent article in Scientific American, Steinhardt together with Anna Ijjas and Avi Loeb, don’t hold back. Most cosmologists, they claim, are uncritical believers:
'[T]he cosmology community has not taken a cold, honest look at the big bang inflationary theory or paid significant attention to critics who question whether inflation happened. Rather cosmologists appear to accept at face value the proponents’ assertion that we must believe the inflationary theory because it offers the only simple explanation of the observed features of the universe...
[I]nflationary cosmology, as we currently understand it, cannot be evaluated using the scientific method.'
The problem with inflation isn’t the idea per se, but the overproduction of useless inflationary models. There are literally hundreds of these models, and they are -- as the philosophers say -- severely underdetermined. This means if one extrapolates the models that fit current data to regimes which are still untested, the result is ambiguous. Different models lead to very different p
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to make my own recommendation that you consider learning the models which you are going online to criticize.
I am simply the person who is showing you that we've been misled - by others. When a person shows you that somebody else may be misleading you, a rational response would be to thank the person for taking the time to explain it.
You really need only look at the lengthy process you've just experienced to understand how "hundreds of millions of scientists all over the world and throughout history" might be coming to the wrong conclusion: Recall that the problem began when a Wired science journalist failed to mention a controversy that is very much related to the incredibly anomalous observation that quasars can "shut down" in less than ten years. I've spoken to numerous people about Halton Arp; there are not many people who are deeply aware of his work.
Notice how you ended up on Tom Bridgman's site, where he then misled you in a number of ways about Halton Arp's claims. It took me only a few minutes to show you how. Why are you not upset with Tom Bridgman? Either way, don't you see that the "hundreds of millions of scientists all over the world" would also end up at Tom Bridgman's site?
Then you posted incredibly misleading Debye screening screening claims. It took me less than 10 minutes to present four well-documented examples of Debye screening violations. That has somehow upset you - even though, in practical terms, I have helped you to see an overt contradiction in modern physics. Many people today - physicists included - continue to believe that EM charges are screened even as observations of kiloparsec-long electric currents have become acknowledged by mainstream astronomers. These are not reasons to become angry with the person who has pointed out the contradiction. You've witnessed a truth which very few people have seen. It's a special experience to see a mistake in science before the scientific community has realized it.
Re: "Gravity may be weak, but it doesn't get shielded like the EM field is."
Many theorists and online critics today insist that there exists a theoretical limit to EM forces dictated by a concept known as Debye screening. The argument commonly goes like this ...
Wikipedia informs us:
The chart on that page clearly lists these limits to electromagnetism's reach, per medium:
Siggy breaks the claim down for us in terms that anybody can understand:
The problem with this concept is that observations have repeatedly shown us that it fails to actually constrain EM forces. Even if it has proven an accurate general guideline, the idea has repeatedly failed us as a rule or law. Treating this rule-of-thumb like a law of physics is akin to claiming that since the Earth's atmosphere is typically insulating, atmospheric lightning should not be possible. Well, the obvious problem is that you can see, yourself, that lightning happens. So, when you see reports in science articles of electric discharges, ask yourself: Has Debye screening been violated?
(1) A clearcut violation of Debye screening was witnessed in a 2005 Cassini flyby:
Skipping the vague arguments,
Re: "With regard to dark matter, it always amuses me when people find it hard to believe it exists, when every second over 1e10 of solar neutrinos pass through every square inch of their body without interaction."
This is not at all a comprehensive statement of the problem. The trouble that gravitational cosmology is running into is not just a matter of detection - but also fundamentally a problem of distance: We can state the problem in common sense terms using the Burnham model:
If the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, then the next nearest star would be 4 miles away!
This is why the non-detection of dark matter so greatly matters. Common sense suggests that the force of gravity cannot span these vast distances without observable matter. The reporting on the dark matter problem consistently fails to present the Burnham model - which is designed to help you to comprehend the incredible distances claimed to exist between stars. Big Bang theorists reap benefits from their own refusal to create this public understanding. It's inherently misleading.
The choice to build a cosmology upon the universe's weakest force should not be made lightly.
Re: "When scientists tell you for example that we are observing dark matter filaments because a variety of reasons, you pretend that this is conclusive evidence of plasma filaments because they didn't take into account some hypothetical feature (Birkeland currents)."
What even is a dark matter filament? How would a person even argue against such a conceptual label? Is there any way to falsify it? What are your own personal reasons to believe such claims?
Re, Tom Bridgman's claim: "If Arp's interpretation was correct, how could a galaxy have the SAME redshift as a nearby quasar? Perhaps they're chance alignments? According to Arp, that is not likely!"
I don't see why Bridgman believes this is such a challenge to explain. He's certainly not trying very hard to apply Arp's model! Imagine, e.g., that a quasar is ejected through the plane of the galaxy. Due to the high density of material it would encounter, one could speculate that its inherent component would very rapidly adjust to reflect its surroundings.
Now, if you were to just reflect for a moment on the current situation of cosmology - that 95% of the universe's matter is apparently missing, and yet this has not induced anybody to abandon the framework - you should realize that Bridgman's analysis is not one bit a fair treatment. By the precedent standards which have already been deployed by Big Bang proponents, Arp should be permitted to propose all sorts of ad hoc extensions to fit observations to his framework. How can anybody possibly suggest that only the Big Bang framework is allowed to make such adjustments? You're being led to a designed conclusion, and not thinking too deeply about the context which Bridgman is having you ignore.
It's great that you are taking the time to learn of the arguments on both sides, but are you also thinking about what Bridgman is claiming? You want to go online to argue against Arp, but you're not taking the time to actually learn his model sufficient to apply it. This can still work as a way of learning a model, but you've really stacked the deck against acceptance of Arp's model with your approach of keeping it vague in your own mind.
Re, Tom Bridgman's claim: "By the 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope was demonstrating that QSOs appeared to be in galaxies ... In Arp's book, he reports on a press conference where John Bahcall was announcing some of these early results (pg 55). Rather than acknowledge this was a severe blow for his model, Arp emphasized that this could not be demonstrated for ALL quasars observed. Arp's denial was in the same class as creationists complaining about gaps in the fossil record, who, when an intermediate is found, insists that evolution now has TWO gaps!"
First of all, you should have noticed the red flag of using Hubble imagery to judge Arp's model. QSO's can have features which obviously don't appear in optical.
But, more than that, it's not entirely clear to me, after reading this, that Bridgman understands the model which Arp had in mind towards the end of his life. Quasars do not have to eject perpendicular to the parent galaxy. Why must this always be the case? Circumstances can surely alter the trajectory if these ejections can indeed be modeled as violent electrodynamic plasma focus ejections - as Eric Lerner has suggested. In fact, Arp readily admits in the materials which I have seen that the ejections can also, in some cases, occur along the plane of the galaxy. Arp even somewhere in his Intrinsic Redshift lecture positions this as the likely cause for the violently disturbed galaxies he has documented in his "Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies".
The argument that Bridgman puts forward appears designed to invite the reader to dismiss Arp as a waste of time - which may work as an argumentative tool for many of his readers because it gives them an excuse to stop learning Arp's model.
Re: "You're basically arguing with a single person on the internet, and from where I'm sitting, you certainly aren't winning that argument."
A very important part of tracking controversies is documenting reactions by both laypeople and academics to controversial science claims. I've become increasingly organized on this since I began tracking controversies about twelve years ago. These conversations are very important in the sense that an uninvolved 3rd person can in certain ways benefit more from witnessing the exchange than the actual participants. If a participant, e.g., is unfairly characterizing the other side; if they are repeatedly condescending or making baseless accusations; if there are aspects to the site culture which appear to diverge from more established IRL cultural norms; or if a person is clearly not conceding fairly-made points, all of these types of behaviors can be witnessed and taken into account by third-person parties who have no personal stake in the arguments.
Mapping out complex scientific debates is, by itself, important historic work which academics have to date refused to do. It's obvious that cosmologists don't even have a "Plan B" for how they would react to settling their science to a dead-end. If and when it happens, they will initially have to consult the work that has already been done by non-academics.
For these reasons, Juan and I take outreach very seriously. I am frequently surprised by the ways in which people behave online, and even more surprising is the reaction from people that I am recording their responses. The Internet is obviously a completely public forum, so everybody should be treating one another as though they can be recorded at all times.
Having tracked the debate for such a long time at this point, I can clearly see that the debate over electricity in space is very much heating up. The trend has been towards more recognition of electric currents and electric fields at astronomical scales; more observations of unexpected counter-rotation at the largest scales (a unique feature of Birkeland currents); more observations of filamentary, skeletal structures pervading galaxies and apparently leading to the formation of stars in groups; more features currently referred to by astrophysicists as "clouds" which upon closer inspection with radio prove to be more like bundles of filaments. These historical trends do not bode well for gravitational cosmology.
Anybody who actually takes the time to read through my own comments will notice that Juan and I do not even share the same knowledge. We are talking about completely different matters: I discuss electrical cosmology and scientific controversies. Juan has expertise which runs well beyond my own on these topics of philosophy, Einstein and aether. This pretense that Juan and I are the same person is clearly intended to undermine Juan's technical remarks.
Slashdot moderators and participants need to carefully consider the issues which Juan is raising first of all because so much is at stake, but also for the simple reason that modern cosmology has failed to provide us with a coherent worldview. Albert Einstein never intended to create the anti-intellectual culture which currently dominates discussions of science on Slashdot. In fact, the tech community needs to take a hard look at its own anti-intellectual tendencies. Juan is obviously able to respond to every single challenge - yet he is treated as a second-class citizen on this site simply because he has arrived at a conclusion which differs from your own. He's fully able to respond to all challenges, and that should mean something. But, what we see instead is that the Slashdot community defines its tribe not according to how deeply a person is thinking about the big questions of science, but rather along how strictly a person adheres to modern science's incoherent ideology.
What does it even mean that the tech community fully embraces a universe that is 95% missing? You are treating this problem as though it is merely just another minor technical challenge, but the truth of the matter is that cosmologists have already tried and failed to solve this problem with the current framework. Those former efforts are how we have arrived at a universe that is 95% missing. It's time for the tech community to own up to the significance of cosmology's failure, and think more deeply about how their own culture has contributed to this obvious stagnation. Tech needs to decide if it will lead on these issues - or continue to mindlessly adopt the stagnation and incoherence which cosmologists have offered us.
The Work of Leadership
by Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie
Jeff Schmidt was an editor of Physics Today for 19 years when he published those comments in his critique of the graduate programs, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul Battering System that Shapes their Lives. He was immediately fired by the American Institute of Physics, which led Jeff to sue them. This case shortly thereafter became the largest freedom-of-expression case in North American physics, with 500 physicists signing a letter of support for Jeff's right to publish his critique without losing his job.
The AIP ultimately settled with Jeff. You can learn about the details of the case here.
For the record, you speculated about dark matter filaments ("a perfectly plausible explanation"), and then complained that I wasn't following the scientific method. What a joke!
If all it takes in order for you to believe something is that somebody is making the claim, then you're probably in over your head participating in a discussion about cosmology and astrophysics.
Dear Anonymous Sherlock Holmes,
My posts appear on his feed because he upvotes me. He has closely followed my own work on scientific controversies beyond the confines of Slashdot. We speak together almost daily. I alerted him to the Slashdot submission. Get a grip. Have you ever met somebody who agrees with you about lots of things? That.
Re: "You're fooling yourself by handpicking observational results, and fitting them to your competing model. Which is pseudoscience."
Here's a newsflash: Every time you decide to talk about anything at all, you are doing this same thing. Every science article which reports on a new observation is doing this same thing. Most scientific papers - which usually leave out numerous related details - are doing the same thing. You've redefined "pseudoscience" in such a manner that the term can now encompass nearly every single act of science communication.
Re: "Critical thinking starts with realizing that you yourself may be wrong, that your ideas are flawed, that your observational data is flawed. Only once you have made sufficiently certain that you might be right, you start inviting other people in your work to try to prove you wrong. And be very open to being wrong. If nobody can find anything wrong with your ideas and data, you might be right."
I would argue that you've not really defined critical thinking properly here. Critical thinking simply means being willing to critique ideas (especially mainstream ones). Here is a better definition, in my view, provided by Jeff Schmidt, author of Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul Battering System that Shapes their Lives:
Re: "But keep trying to prove yourself wrong, using whatever new observational data you can find. That's how science works today."
There have been a number of books put forward - critiques of modern science - where it has been pointed out that nobody actually does this in practice. You might take a look at Science is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can't Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed by Henry H. Bauer. He pretty much takes the wrecking ball to the narrative you provide here. Really though: Before you go online to tell people how science works in practice, consider reading a few books which approach the subject in a critical manner.
Re: "You're doing the opposite. You're trying to prove your hypothesis right, using new observational data. Which would only strengthen the case that you might be right, never prove it. But what you fail to take into account is the large body of observational data that does not fit your hypothesis, thereby irrevocably disproving it."
The part you are not yet seeing is that disproving something in cosmology is very, very tricky. Since we oftentimes cannot perform an experiment or take an in situ observation to settle a question, there is a lot of room for challengers. But you would not notice this from the reporting.
There is no "large body of observational data that does not fit" electrical cosmology. If you have a specific argument to make, you should present it so that we can talk about it. You're hiding behind an ambiguous argument.
Juan Calsiano is not me. He's a maverick philosopher that lives in Argentina who occasionally visits the United States for Electric Universe conferences. He's writing a philosophy book right now on these very subjects which he posts about, and is very well read on the subjects of aether, electrical engineering, Relativity, electrical cosmology and obscure history of science which is not taught in the graduate programs. We have approached these subjects from two completely different angles. I am not an expert in philosophy, and I continue to learn from Juan on a variety of subjects. It doesn't really surprise me that you feel the need to discount his existence. Many people are observably intimidated by the depth of his understanding on these subjects. It's really obvious, as nobody ever challenges him at the level of technical details.
Re: "if you want to take on mainstream cosmology, then create a consistent and testable hypothesis, and publish it."
The hypothesis that we can use observations of electric discharges in plasma laboratories to inform inferences about what we are seeing in space has proven to be wildly successful at predicting the features of space. There is a very long history of successes which are generally not taught to American graduate students; IEEE, the world's largest technical organization, publishes a journal which runs science papers on this topic (IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science); the U.S. government has employed one of the world's most authoritative experts in electrical cosmology - Anthony Peratt - to run some of its most expensive classified experiments. Peratt is the intellectual descendant of Hannes Alfven, who received the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his creation of magnetohydrodynamics. There can be little doubt that Alfven's work has been put to great use in a variety of U.S. military applications. Kristian Birkeland, e.g., actually invented the electromagnetic rail gun.
But you'd not realize any of this by listening to Big Bang proponents. Let's review the history they like to ignore, and take a closer look at the misleading ways that they prefer to tell the story.
Despite a half-century of resistance led by the Royal Astronomical Society, Kristian Birkeland's theory that the aurora is caused by the Sun is now the accepted theory. So, what were the types of reasons proposed for why we should reject Birkeland's hypothesis?
Birkeland became the world's first laboratory astrophysicist when he constructed his terrella - a "mini-Earth" - in order to help formulate his model. Birkeland's success would prove to be a major loss for the Royal Society, and as Ian Tresman documents, it took many years for mainstream astrophysicists to finally acknowledge that Birkeland was right: [pay close attention to the parts they leave out!]
Re: "Just because we don't know everything, doesn't mean you can just make up stuff. You're not even specific about the stuff you make up, it's just hand waving.
You're not framing the issue correctly. The theoretical distance between a Big Bang and lots of mini-bangs is not actually that big. All that we are doing here is removing claims about the beginning of the universe, and then postulating that matter is recycled in the most violent areas of the galaxy which we witness - the active galactic nuclei. If you are fine with a Big Bang, then lots of mini-bangs should not induce any trauma. There is a sense that you are trying a little bit too hard to resist in the light of the proposed change here.
However, the really important part here is to completely forget trying to deduce from principles the behavior of the AGN as black hole theorists have tried to do. If you actually read Eric Lerner's explanation of how the plasma focus works, the lesson you should be taking away from that is that we cannot simply deduce the behaviors of plasmas. A century of research in plasma physics has produced this single lesson as the most important lesson of our laboratory investigations: plasmas behave in unexpected manners. You can try to deploy the most sophisticated mathematics towards understanding them, but you will still fail. Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven warned about this very problem repeatedly, but the astrophysical community refused to listen - even when he lectured them about it in his 1970 Nobel lecture.
This may come as a surprise, but theorists "make stuff up" all of the time. Sometimes - gasp! - they even postulate ideas which are not consistent with the existing scientific framework (omg!). Really though: it's their job. Sometimes, new physics can come from unexpected places. There is nothing actually extraordinary from inferring new physics principles from a study of peculiar galaxies; it's actually a pretty clever approach which we should not rule out, since these are the edge cases - and our models must accommodate all known cases.
Re: "There is no way that your magical new quasar physics suddenly changes the results of some of the most precise physical measurements we have ever made."
It's not a very strong point at all because you're making an apples-to-oranges comparison here between the end state (a system which has fully stabilized) and the initial state (which happens to be one of the most energetic regions we can see in the universe). The nature of that initial state will depend very heavily upon what process created it (in this case a proposed "matter recycling" event). Can you really make sweeping claims that the initial state must adhere to the properties of the end state? I think your hyper-focus on forming rebuttals is distracting you from more deeply engaging these issues. Halton Arp, Eric Lerner and Wal Thornhill are clearly engaging this issue at a level above what you are doing here.
Re: "But all that is irrelevant because even *if* a variable electron would cause an intrinsic redshift at the source of emitted light, that still would not explain why the absorption lines of interstellar neutral hydrogen between the quasar and us, is *also* redshifted in a way that goes from zero to the quasar's redshift (i.e. in-between values)."
I've already dealt with this topic in another thread. It turns out that the astronomers whose work has been challenged by Arp are just as zealous as the Big Bang's online defenders. Not a huge surprise there that people would selectively report on observations in order to reach their preferred conclusions.
Arp makes a very important point in Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies that a null absorption line result may go unannounce
Re: "Higher-level reasoning simply looks like confusion from the outside ... Wow, you are quite the narcissist, aren't you? The way you push your own agenda for validation, convinced you're right and we are wrong, certainly fits that bill...
There is no "agenda" at play other than to understand the landscape of the debate. In the world of tracking scientific controversies, identifying the arguments and claims is the mundane precursor to actual independent thought.
Re: "There is *no* known mechanism that allows the rest mass of an electron to change. If there were, we would have found it. It has been shown to remain constant with over 8 decimal digits."
This argument is not well thought out. The physics of quasars is not understood, and you do no service to anybody pretending as though you can tell us what it cannot be. The mainstream is constantly reminding us of how luminous and energetic these objects are, based upon their inferred redshift, so whatever point you are trying to make, you should think more deeply about it.
Re: "If quasars were ejected as electron severely deficient then they would be very much attracted to whatever ejected them, because electrostatic attraction is over 20 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity."
There is a long history of speculators who have formerly claimed that they can reason with electrostatics principles at astrophysical scales. This is one of the anti-patterns which I document online (so you will now be documented with the others).
Astrophysical plasmas are not at all like electrostatics. Electrostatics is the science of charge distribution between solids such that electrons are confined to isolated conductive mediums, but are both immersed within a larger non-conductive medium. In a plasma, the charged particles are free to move throughout the medium. The solid state - e.g., little tiny pebbles like our Earth - is exceptionally rare in space, so the situation plays out very differently. It turns out that there actually are regions of space which are notably more conductive than the broader interstellar medium. We call them Birkeland currents, and they can even act as ion sumps, pulling upon the ambient charged particles surrounding them. We could even use the term "accretion". Laboratory plasma physicists might use any of a variety of terms to describe these processes (Marklund convection or the Lorentz force or the Biot-Savart Law, etc). But, you will absolutely fail if you try to use electrostatics to reason your way to these behaviors. If you need to see more discussion of this, then read this.
Part of the problem here is what happens to an electrostatic discharge when it encounters a plasma double layer. The double layers are the real difficulty which you face when you try to mix these toolsets. In nature, plasmas form into complex structures: sheets, cells, filaments, and even hub-and-spoke connectors which can link the filaments into networks. An electrostatic discharge will rarely penetrate a plasma double layer. If you need something to look at to understand this, then consider the case of a sprite encountering the ionosphere: The ionosphere is the plasma double layer, and the sprite cannot penetrate this structure. In fact, you could make the case that the sprite is a discharge from the top of the storm to the ionospheric double layers. Since these layers basically separate Earth from space, you could fairly state that the sprites are sort of like "lightning to space." But, planetary scientists so disliked that phrase that they invented the term "sprite" (which in folklore is known as a devilish fairy that misleads people).
So, notice that the very first structure we encounter when we go into space is a plasma double layer.
The irony of people on Slashdot using the word "cult" to describe people who question academic science is that the graduate programs themselves have been compared to a cult by an academic whistleblower named Jeff Schmidt:
Re: "Lol, you really don't seem to know how redshift works. The shift occurs in the spectral absorption and emission lines of interstellar gas (mostly Hydrogen). These have a specific fingerprint (i.e. a pattern of lines, like a barcode) that shifts to the red side of the spectrum. The quasar is just the light source that ionizes the gas in front of it, often hundreds of thousands light years away."
That's a simple narrative you've got there. Halton Arp was Edwin Hubble's assistant. He states in the theory section of his Intrinsic Redshift lecture:
Plasma physicist Eric Lerner has pointed out that if active galactic nuclei can be compared to plasma focus devices, then it is alternatively possible that quasars are being ejected electron-deficient. Arp was not a plasma physicist, and it seems unlikely that he was aware of Lerner's detailed argument.
Wal Thornhill appears to have built his own inference on top of Lerner's plasma physics approach:
What you are doing is pointing to the textbook theory, and saying "See?!" What these guys are pointing out is that there are alternative ways to explain what we see. They are working at the level of scientific frameworks, formulating new ways to interpret the data. This is a level of thinking above what you yourself are doing. Nobody is confused here about what the textbook says. Higher-level reasoning simply looks like confusion from the outside.
Re: "We can view the Universe through different lenses... Electricity and Magnetism could be one of them... ? It just seems we are too eager to label things as crackpot. Often times the 'crackpots' have been right."
Astronomer and cosmologist, Martín López Corredoira, has importantly noted:
A 1963 interview with James van Allen made the point in big bold letters at the top of the page:
There is an important historical aspect to what is happening which makes sense of it all: The gravitational universe idea is a legacy concept - akin to vigorously asserting the importance of MS-DOS in 2018. The idea comes from a time when people burned whale oil in gas lamps to read at night - (1) when the Milky Way was thought to be all there was; (2) when that single galaxy was assumed to be just a pile of stars; (3) when all we could see was disconnected points of light; (4) when astronomers did not even realize that radio waves come from space; and (5) when it was assumed that the space between stars was mostly empty. Think about the collective implication of each of these assumptions: (2) through (5) all leave the impression that gravity must dominate at the largest scales. Today we know better about (2) through (5), but few are actually thinking through the implications of the historical changes.
Today, we understand that (1) the Milky Way is one of many galaxies; (2) we now realize that galaxies can be incredibly dynamic objects; (3) we can now see the connections between those points of light; (4) we now understand that optical is just a small sliver of the universe's total emissions; and (5) we today understand that not only is there significant matter between stars, but it is additionally conductive. These were all surprises, and aside from (1), they point to electricity - yet the gravitational ideas which came from that former time continue to dominate.
Consider the rapid pace at which things change in the Node.js community. If you don't pay attention for just a few months, you could find yourself having to repeatedly interject, "what's that?" Astrophysics is the exact opposite of this. There is no real innovation happening, no actual theorizing going on:
Without new hypotheses to explain the new, unexpected observations, our ideas about the universe have not kept pace with the rapid observational advancements:
We would be very wise to take a closer look at the many surprises which have occurred since these old ideas were origina
That's a great paper you just pointed to. It begins:
The explanation of this object became increasingly awkward for Big Bang proponents over time, as a reaction to unexpected observations:
See documentary, Universe: The Cosmology Quest:
Margaret Burbidge on NGC 7603:
Halton Arp on NGC 7603:
You need to keep a very open mind about what you are looking at with astronomical imagery. NG7603 can fairly be interpreted as the galaxy version of a parent connected to its child with an umbilical cord. There are multiple levels at which a person can engage this image at. If you have not yet thought through the highest, then you are simply deciding to ignore a completely legitimate interpretation, and the universe could be far more interesting than your quick judgments would ever even notice.
Re: "There *is* an intrinsic redshift due to gravitational effects, but this only comes into play extremely close to extremely massive objects. The accretion disc of a black hole (i.e. the light generating part) is already too far out of the gravity well to show much gravitational redshift."
There appears to also be a component that is related to the quasar's age.
The original definition of "pathological" science is something like this:
If you watch the "Intrinsic Redshift" lecture on Youtube, he tells many stories of fighting with journals and peer reviewers to publish paper after paper after paper. These stories provide an important look at the struggles that a person faces when they publish work which challenges the orthodoxy. You've managed to take away the wrong lesson from the discussion you're reading about. Whatever your process is, it's producing the wrong result. This should alarm you.
Re: "Sure, and since then we used that data in ever-larger sky surveys and realized what we were seeing was the large scale structure of galactic layout with walls and voids. Since the majority of galaxies are found in certain structures, then of course one will find that their red shifts also tend to cluster.
Can you point me to any examples where this is the argument which was put forward?
This is what I ran into:
Re: "Just look at your own list of papers, lots in the 60s and 70s, then less and less until the 2000s when its just a handful. Did the effect disappear, or did people just ascribe this to something more prosaic than the, well, whatever was supposed to be causing it?"
What has happened has been described by Geoffrey Burbidge:
Re: "Good grief man, you're either a troll or an idiot. No, I'm not conflating anything. And no, the Big Bang singularity was not a mathematical point. It had a measurable albeit extremely small volume. And there is a good chance it was part of a bigger volume, which all inflated at the same rate, outside our observable universe."
This is cosmology we are talking about here, and the "dark" data is very much telling you right now that something important and fundamental is wrong with the idea.
Many practicing scientists have themselves gone on the record to express their own displeasure with the idea, its origins, its ad hoc nature, and the matter-of-fact manner in which its proponents speak about its chronology - which is itself ironic because they've also expressed a willingness to confidently change the chronology in order to explain away contradictions.
The Soviet Nobel laureate, Lev Landau, famously observed that
Martín López Corredoira is the author of more than 50 cosmology and astrophysics papers, often as lead. He's written papers on the structure of the Milky Way, stellar populations, and observational astronomy topics which required analytical calculations, simulations, statistics, photometrical and spectroscopical observations and analysis. He has remarked:
Eric Lerner's description of the ad hoc nature of the theory seems to also perfectly describe the way in which proponents behave when they are challenged on the idea:
One of inflation’s cofounders has turned his back on the idea: