I've been interacting with both the EU theorists and their mainstream critics for more than a decade now. I also collect and document critiques of modern science -- and to be clear, there are far more than you probably realize.
Lensing was introduced as a way to explain discordant redshifts. If you go back to the original papers where it was proposed, the theorists readily admit that they did not consider any alternative hypotheses. Thus, it does not make a whole lot of sense to call this a proof for anything really.
"All that can be said in rebuttal is that it would be even more remarkable if the 4 images, all with the same redshift, existed for some other reason, in a configuration which can be so well modelled by the lensing hypothesis"
The Impact of Gravitating Lensing on Astrophysics, Martin J. Rees Institute of Astronomy, Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 OHA
Well, actually, an alternative ejection hypothesis was put forward by Halton Arp to explain exactly this type of observation. The theorists simply ignored it.
Some lenses are probably valid, but this presumption that there is only one way to create a lens is probably not.
"In this process, one starts with a presumed law of nature -- an obviously correct (accepted) generalization about the way things work -- and deduces (works out, derives) its logical consequences.
A hypothesis arrived at via this deductive method is promoted to the status of being a theory when and if a large enough body of experts accepts it. This is an application of the Socratic Method, also sometimes called the 'dialectic method.' Socrates (469-399 B.C.) believed that truth ws discovered through intense conversations with other informed people. Thus, in this method, a vote of the experts determines when and if a theory is correct. Once such a theory has been accepted, it is not easily rejected in light of conflicting evidence. It is, however, often modified -- made more complicated. When over time a theory becomes officially accepted, the essence of the matter has been settled and fixed. Modifications to the fine points of the theory can then be proposed and debated, but the backbone structure of the theory is set. That framework has already been firmly established.
An inherent flaw lurking in this method is: What if your 'obviously correct,' basic, starting-point presumption is wrong?"
Pulsars are not just observations. It's also an attempt to explain the objects by proposing a physical mechanism. That mechanism would have us believing that some pulsars can spin at the speed of a dentist's drill (!) -- which is probably not a claim which we should just assume is true.
What we see is a regular pulsation of light. To claim that the only way to explain that is by rotation would seem to completely skip over the possibility that the flickering could simply be a repeating electric discharge.
After all, neutronium has never been produced within any laboratory, and in fact it violates the Island of Stability. We know from the laboratory that it is not possible to pack neutrons together like this -- so a little bit of skepticism is probably in order.
Electrical cosmology does not disagree that quasars exist; they simply point to the work of Halton Arp to explain quasars as AGN ejections.
It is apparently necessary to frequently remind people that 95% of the universe's matter is apparently missing in modern cosmology. The detectors which have been designed to look for dark matter have become a million times more accurate in recent decades -- yet no dark matter is to be found. One fully rational reaction to these facts is to suspect that cosmology is approaching a dead end. Certainly, at some point, a justifiable response is to start questioning the starting point hypotheses and assumptions which have brought us to this troubling problem.
Scientific consensus is a social process and scientists are subject to the same social forces which regular people contend with on a daily basis. In fact, a scientist outside of their very limited specialization can be fairly compared with a layperson. In fact, if you were to study critiques of modern science, you'd observe that a common critique is that correction in the sciences is undermined by specialization.
You'd want to look into the work of Halton Arp in order to understand the answers to this. Arp began his career as Edwin Hubble's protege. He studied peculiar galaxies, and the strangest to this day are still referred to by their Arp number. What Arp and a number of other astronomers claimed to observe is that when a galaxy becomes stressed, it ejects a quasar.
That quasar begins its life with very high redshift, but over time, he claimed that the redshift normalizes to a value more consistent with that of galaxies, and the quasar will evolve into a galaxy which sometimes looks remarkably like its parent. What he is arguing against is that there is only one way to create redshift. Arp believed that redshift has two separate components -- one which is intrinsic to the matter itself, and a second factor contributed by the object's motion. If he is correct, the implication is that the Big Bang is basically a mistake.
(A lot of people ask where all of this electricity would then be coming from? -- as if not knowing the answer to that metaphysical question somehow discounts the observation that it is happening.)
Wal Thornhill has proposed that the large inherent redshift value likely indicates an electron-deficient region of space (the quasar begins as just protons), and he bases that analysis upon observations of the plasma focus device -- which is what he proposes "black holes" actually are.
I study scientific controversies and peoples' reactions to them. It's not because I am "distressed"; it's because I am trying to figure out who is right. Observing how people interact with controversies is a necessary aspect of that process given the taboo nature of questioning expert scientific authority. One of my favorite approaches, for example, is to present the same evidence to a hundred different people. Eventually, unexpected social patterns reveal themselves.
What is remarkable is that you cast these three hypothetical constructs as somehow proof for something - yet, you draw the line at electricity in space.
Re: "Likewise, the Big Bang model has a host of observations that support it, in detail, and with numerical precision."
Hey, by the way:
Anthony L. Peratt, ‘Dean of the Plasma Dissidents’, The World & I, May 1988, p.190-197
"To Alfvén, the Big Bang was a fable -- a fable devised to explain creation. 'I was there when Abbé Georges Lemaitre first proposed this theory,' he recalled. Lemaitre was, at the time, both a member of the Catholic hierarchy and an accomplished scientist. He said in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas Aquinas’ theological dictum of creatio ex nihilo or creation out of nothing."
The trouble with this approach, of course, is that (1) E&M is just so much more powerful than gravity; and (2) your rebuttal involves a hypothetical object which has never been directly observed.
Here's a newsflash for you: The admission by mainstream astrophysicists that AGN jets are electric currents is a clearcut vindication for the Electric Universe. Whether or not you like this fact, it is not very complicated.
Some 11 years ago, I watched a curious thing happen in the comments of a Slashdot article, and it would forever change my life. I watched on as members of the tech community labeled as pseudoscience the simple idea that electricity can travel through space over plasma (and actually do stuff of importance at the largest observable scales). Since that day, I have systematically tracked this electricity in space debate, and I have come to view the reporting on this topic as the greatest science journalism failure of our time.
To review, a plasma is just a gas with some percentage of unbound charged particles. We call it plasma, rather than gas, because it observably behaves differently. With less than even just 1% ionization, the ionospheric gas is observed to respond to electromagnetic fields. In the laboratory, plasmas can form into very complex structures like filaments. These filaments exhibit a long-range attraction and short-range repulsion with one another, which causes them to pair up without combining. Careful inspection of a novelty plasma globe will reveal that the filaments will tend to separate when they come into contact with the glass. The filaments can also link up with one another into very complex networks. All of this complexity is rather remarkable given that we are just talking about the "fourth" state of matter.
Now, let's review the current state of this electricity in space debate as it should be reported by science journalists.
Galactic expert, Tim Thompson, has claimed that Peratt's decision to publish in IEEE was an attempt to avoid scrutiny. He admitted that no galactic researcher has ever read IEEE and they wouldn't know that the journal even exists (it's the largest technical organization in the world); and Thompson even went so far as to advise that galactic researchers intentionally avoid reading IEEE. You can see an annotated snapshot of his online forum post here.
2. We have been left with the impression that the CMB can only be explained as a remnant of the Big Bang expansion. This is simply not true:
That quote comes from one of the world's leading plasma physicists, Anthony L. Peratt (Physics of the Plasma Universe, Second Edition, 2015, p.33-34.)
Peratt would go on to publish a paper revealing more than a hundred local hydrogen filament structures which he claimed correlate with structures in the WMAP cosmic microwave background.
It would seem that people are not yet connecting the dots here between these recent admissions by astrophysicists that large-scale electric currents are real,
and this faint microwave fog that is apparently coming at us from all directions. There is, without a doubt, more than one way to explain this cosmic microwave background; but you'd never know this from the science
Re: "Perpetuation of an old idea in the teeth of all of the evidence accrued in the meantime that it was incorrect requires a sort of wilful blindness and is indeed the sign of either a crackpot or a troll. OR you could just be kidding on the trollish side of things, but reposting an old thing from well over 100 years ago... really?"
Each of the ideas you've presented here were arrived at through a process of viewing the world through the lens of the existing theoretical structure. A community which cannot extricate itself from the theories it discusses sufficient to actually question them -- in other words, transcend the subject-object barrier as a matter of routine -- has lost the ability to use science as a tool for thinking.
Science either HAS YOU, or you HAVE IT.
And by that I mean that questioning assumptions is not an indication of a person who is deranged, but is actually a crucial part of thinking about scientific concepts, and where we see people labeling such behaviors as "crackpots" or "trolls", something is very wrong with the culture which took us to this point. And we can probably even link the failure to find dark matter to this larger culture which is doing all of the labeling. These things are not all unrelated, by chance. It is not an accident that we are approaching this dead-end in cosmology, and that everybody in this community pretends as though everybody must continue thinking in the same exact manner, all in unison, collectively, towards this dead-end.
If the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, the next nearest star would be 4 MILES away. Mainstream science wants us to believe that they can sprinkle in some invisible, hypothetical matter into this intervening chasm, and suddenly the weakest force -- gravity -- will become the universe's organizing force.
People are not trolls for doubting the original assumptions and starting-point hypotheses which got us to this point; those ideas were conceived almost entirely before any in situ measurements of space were made, at a time when space was widely assumed to be empty. When we sent the first rockets to space, it was immediately admitted that a huge mistake had been made.
"'Space' was invented on Earth before we knew what was out there"
Dark matter detectors have become a million times more sensitive in recent years, but none has been found. We have had some of the world's smartest people on this problem for a very long time now.
These ideas are approaching a reckoning, but the people here on Slashdot treat them the exact same as they did when I visited this forum a full decade ago -- as if these null results mean nothing for the chances of dark matter's eventual discovery, and as if there is no need to second-guess the judgments, mistaken assumptions or starting-point hypotheses which took this community to this point.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it looks like you've found your excuse to avoid the hard work of actually learning the debate.
I'm just guessing, but probably your first mistake was assuming that science journalists would report on it.
I've been interacting with both the EU theorists and their mainstream critics for more than a decade now. I also collect and document critiques of modern science -- and to be clear, there are far more than you probably realize.
Lensing was introduced as a way to explain discordant redshifts. If you go back to the original papers where it was proposed, the theorists readily admit that they did not consider any alternative hypotheses. Thus, it does not make a whole lot of sense to call this a proof for anything really.
The Impact of Gravitating Lensing on Astrophysics, Martin J. Rees Institute of Astronomy, Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 OHA
Well, actually, an alternative ejection hypothesis was put forward by Halton Arp to explain exactly this type of observation. The theorists simply ignored it.
Some lenses are probably valid, but this presumption that there is only one way to create a lens is probably not.
You appear to be in a state of denial
Astronomy & Astrophysics
The jets of AGN as giant coaxial cables
From the paper:
"It also indicates that astrophysical jets are fundamentally electromagnetic structures."
Don Scott, The Electric Sky, p.13
"In this process, one starts with a presumed law of nature -- an obviously correct (accepted) generalization about the way things work -- and deduces (works out, derives) its logical consequences.
A hypothesis arrived at via this deductive method is promoted to the status of being a theory when and if a large enough body of experts accepts it. This is an application of the Socratic Method, also sometimes called the 'dialectic method.' Socrates (469-399 B.C.) believed that truth ws discovered through intense conversations with other informed people. Thus, in this method, a vote of the experts determines when and if a theory is correct. Once such a theory has been accepted, it is not easily rejected in light of conflicting evidence. It is, however, often modified -- made more complicated. When over time a theory becomes officially accepted, the essence of the matter has been settled and fixed. Modifications to the fine points of the theory can then be proposed and debated, but the backbone structure of the theory is set. That framework has already been firmly established.
An inherent flaw lurking in this method is: What if your 'obviously correct,' basic, starting-point presumption is wrong?"
Pulsars are not just observations. It's also an attempt to explain the objects by proposing a physical mechanism. That mechanism would have us believing that some pulsars can spin at the speed of a dentist's drill (!) -- which is probably not a claim which we should just assume is true.
What we see is a regular pulsation of light. To claim that the only way to explain that is by rotation would seem to completely skip over the possibility that the flickering could simply be a repeating electric discharge.
After all, neutronium has never been produced within any laboratory, and in fact it violates the Island of Stability. We know from the laboratory that it is not possible to pack neutrons together like this -- so a little bit of skepticism is probably in order.
Electrical cosmology does not disagree that quasars exist; they simply point to the work of Halton Arp to explain quasars as AGN ejections.
It is apparently necessary to frequently remind people that 95% of the universe's matter is apparently missing in modern cosmology. The detectors which have been designed to look for dark matter have become a million times more accurate in recent decades -- yet no dark matter is to be found. One fully rational reaction to these facts is to suspect that cosmology is approaching a dead end. Certainly, at some point, a justifiable response is to start questioning the starting point hypotheses and assumptions which have brought us to this troubling problem.
Scientific consensus is a social process and scientists are subject to the same social forces which regular people contend with on a daily basis. In fact, a scientist outside of their very limited specialization can be fairly compared with a layperson. In fact, if you were to study critiques of modern science, you'd observe that a common critique is that correction in the sciences is undermined by specialization.
You seem to not be fully tuned into what is currently happening. This is not a "bullshit" journal:
The Astrophysical Journal Letters
Measurement of the Electric Current in a kpc-Scale Jet
You'd want to look into the work of Halton Arp in order to understand the answers to this. Arp began his career as Edwin Hubble's protege. He studied peculiar galaxies, and the strangest to this day are still referred to by their Arp number. What Arp and a number of other astronomers claimed to observe is that when a galaxy becomes stressed, it ejects a quasar.
That quasar begins its life with very high redshift, but over time, he claimed that the redshift normalizes to a value more consistent with that of galaxies, and the quasar will evolve into a galaxy which sometimes looks remarkably like its parent. What he is arguing against is that there is only one way to create redshift. Arp believed that redshift has two separate components -- one which is intrinsic to the matter itself, and a second factor contributed by the object's motion. If he is correct, the implication is that the Big Bang is basically a mistake.
(A lot of people ask where all of this electricity would then be coming from? -- as if not knowing the answer to that metaphysical question somehow discounts the observation that it is happening.)
Wal Thornhill has proposed that the large inherent redshift value likely indicates an electron-deficient region of space (the quasar begins as just protons), and he bases that analysis upon observations of the plasma focus device -- which is what he proposes "black holes" actually are.
This is pretty much in line with the phys.org comments.
So far looks like the earliest commenters are all people who refuse to learn this debate.
I study scientific controversies and peoples' reactions to them. It's not because I am "distressed"; it's because I am trying to figure out who is right. Observing how people interact with controversies is a necessary aspect of that process given the taboo nature of questioning expert scientific authority. One of my favorite approaches, for example, is to present the same evidence to a hundred different people. Eventually, unexpected social patterns reveal themselves.
"Do not be misled"
What is remarkable is that you cast these three hypothetical constructs as somehow proof for something - yet, you draw the line at electricity in space.
Re: "Likewise, the Big Bang model has a host of observations that support it, in detail, and with numerical precision."
Hey, by the way:
Anthony L. Peratt, ‘Dean of the Plasma Dissidents’, The World & I, May 1988, p.190-197
"To Alfvén, the Big Bang was a fable -- a fable devised to explain creation. 'I was there when Abbé Georges Lemaitre first proposed this theory,' he recalled. Lemaitre was, at the time, both a member of the Catholic hierarchy and an accomplished scientist. He said in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas Aquinas’ theological dictum of creatio ex nihilo or creation out of nothing."
"Again and again Alfvén reiterated the point: the underlying assumptions of cosmologists today 'are developed with the most sophisticated mathematical methods and it is only the plasma itself which does not 'understand' how beautiful the theories are and absolutely refuses to obey them.'"
The trouble with this approach, of course, is that (1) E&M is just so much more powerful than gravity; and (2) your rebuttal involves a hypothetical object which has never been directly observed.
Here's a newsflash for you: The admission by mainstream astrophysicists that AGN jets are electric currents is a clearcut vindication for the Electric Universe. Whether or not you like this fact, it is not very complicated.
Does it really make sense to expect that one of the most complex ongoing scientific debates can be explained in a paragraph?
What I generally tell people who respond to scientific controversies with TLDR is that you might consider a less intellectual activity ... like sports.
Dear Slashdot Community,
Some 11 years ago, I watched a curious thing happen in the comments of a Slashdot article, and it would forever change my life. I watched on as members of the tech community labeled as pseudoscience the simple idea that electricity can travel through space over plasma (and actually do stuff of importance at the largest observable scales). Since that day, I have systematically tracked this electricity in space debate, and I have come to view the reporting on this topic as the greatest science journalism failure of our time.
To review, a plasma is just a gas with some percentage of unbound charged particles. We call it plasma, rather than gas, because it observably behaves differently. With less than even just 1% ionization, the ionospheric gas is observed to respond to electromagnetic fields. In the laboratory, plasmas can form into very complex structures like filaments. These filaments exhibit a long-range attraction and short-range repulsion with one another, which causes them to pair up without combining. Careful inspection of a novelty plasma globe will reveal that the filaments will tend to separate when they come into contact with the glass. The filaments can also link up with one another into very complex networks. All of this complexity is rather remarkable given that we are just talking about the "fourth" state of matter.
Now, let's review the current state of this electricity in space debate as it should be reported by science journalists.
1. It is not widely known, but definitely a fact that proper galactic rotation curves were simulated in the early 80's on government supercomputers by one of the world's leading plasma physicists, without the need for any dark matter. The reason that the arms appear to rotate as almost fixed plates, in this view, is that they are conducting electrical currents.
Galactic expert, Tim Thompson, has claimed that Peratt's decision to publish in IEEE was an attempt to avoid scrutiny. He admitted that no galactic researcher has ever read IEEE and they wouldn't know that the journal even exists (it's the largest technical organization in the world); and Thompson even went so far as to advise that galactic researchers intentionally avoid reading IEEE. You can see an annotated snapshot of his online forum post here.
2. We have been left with the impression that the CMB can only be explained as a remnant of the Big Bang expansion. This is simply not true:
That quote comes from one of the world's leading plasma physicists, Anthony L. Peratt (Physics of the Plasma Universe, Second Edition, 2015, p.33-34.) Peratt would go on to publish a paper revealing more than a hundred local hydrogen filament structures which he claimed correlate with structures in the WMAP cosmic microwave background.
It would seem that people are not yet connecting the dots here between these recent admissions by astrophysicists that large-scale electric currents are real, and this faint microwave fog that is apparently coming at us from all directions. There is, without a doubt, more than one way to explain this cosmic microwave background; but you'd never know this from the science
Re: "Perpetuation of an old idea in the teeth of all of the evidence accrued in the meantime that it was incorrect requires a sort of wilful blindness and is indeed the sign of either a crackpot or a troll. OR you could just be kidding on the trollish side of things, but reposting an old thing from well over 100 years ago... really?"
Each of the ideas you've presented here were arrived at through a process of viewing the world through the lens of the existing theoretical structure. A community which cannot extricate itself from the theories it discusses sufficient to actually question them -- in other words, transcend the subject-object barrier as a matter of routine -- has lost the ability to use science as a tool for thinking.
Science either HAS YOU, or you HAVE IT.
And by that I mean that questioning assumptions is not an indication of a person who is deranged, but is actually a crucial part of thinking about scientific concepts, and where we see people labeling such behaviors as "crackpots" or "trolls", something is very wrong with the culture which took us to this point. And we can probably even link the failure to find dark matter to this larger culture which is doing all of the labeling. These things are not all unrelated, by chance. It is not an accident that we are approaching this dead-end in cosmology, and that everybody in this community pretends as though everybody must continue thinking in the same exact manner, all in unison, collectively, towards this dead-end.
If the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, the next nearest star would be 4 MILES away. Mainstream science wants us to believe that they can sprinkle in some invisible, hypothetical matter into this intervening chasm, and suddenly the weakest force -- gravity -- will become the universe's organizing force.
People are not trolls for doubting the original assumptions and starting-point hypotheses which got us to this point; those ideas were conceived almost entirely before any in situ measurements of space were made, at a time when space was widely assumed to be empty. When we sent the first rockets to space, it was immediately admitted that a huge mistake had been made.
A Popular Science interview in 1963 with James van Allen plainly states at the top of page 76 in big bold letters:
"'Space' was invented on Earth before we knew what was out there"
Dark matter detectors have become a million times more sensitive in recent years, but none has been found. We have had some of the world's smartest people on this problem for a very long time now.
These ideas are approaching a reckoning, but the people here on Slashdot treat them the exact same as they did when I visited this forum a full decade ago -- as if these null results mean nothing for the chances of dark matter's eventual discovery, and as if there is no need to second-guess the judgments, mistaken assumptions or starting-point hypotheses which took this community to this point.