One straightforwardly physical way to explain gravity is as a distortion of electron orbitals, similar to what is seen with the van der waals force. If atoms were to simply resonate with one another, and if electrons had sub-particles, that would seem to be a pretty good theoretical basis for explaining gravity as related to E&M.
By 1904 the electromagnetic view of the world had taken off and emerged as a highly attractive substitute for the mechanical view that was widely seen as outdated, materialistic, and primitive. As an indication of the strength of the new theory, it was not only discussed in specialized journals, but also began to appear in physics textbooks...
In commemoration of the centenary of the United States' purchase of the Louisiana Territory, a Congress of Arts and Sciences was held in St. Louis in September 1904. Among the physics delegates were several international leaders of physics, including Rutherford, Poincare, and Boltzmann. The general message of many of the addresses was that physics was at a turning point and that electron theory was on its way to establishing a new paradigm in physics. In his sweeping survey of problems in mathematical physics, Poincare spoke of the 'general ruin of the principles' that characterized the period. Poincare was himself an important contributor to electron theory and he was now willing to conclude that 'the mass of the electrons, or, at least of the negative electrons, is of exclusively electro-dynamic origin... [T]here is no mass other than electro-dynamic inertia' (Sopka and Moyer 1986, 292). The address of another French physicist, thirty-two-year-old Paul Langevin, was more detailed, but no less grand, no less eloquent, and no less in favor of the electromagnetic world picture. Langevin argued for his own (and Bucberer's) model of the electron, but the detailed structure of the electron was not what really mattered. The important thing was the coming of a new era of physics. As Langevin explained in his closing words:
'The rapid perspective which I have just sketched is full of promises, and I believe that rarely in the history of physics has one had the opportunity of looking either so far into the past or so far into the future. The relative importance of parts of this immense and scarcely explored domain appears different to-day from what it did in the preceding century: from the new point of view the various plans arrange themselves in a new order. The electrical idea, the last discovered, appears to-day to dominate the whole, as the place of choice where the explorer feels he can found a city before advancing into new territories.... The actual tendency, of making the electromagnetic ideas to occupy the preponderating place, is justified, as I have sought to show, by the solidity of the double base on which rests the idea of the electron [the Maxwell equations and the empirical electron]... Although still very recent, the conceptions of which I have sought to give a collected idea are about to penetrate to the very heart of the entire physics, and to act as a fertile germ in order to crystallize around it, in a new order, facts very far removed from one another... This idea has taken an immense development in the last few years, which causes it to break the framework of the old physics to pieces, and to overturn the established order of ideas and laws in order to branch out again in an organization which one foresees to be simple, harmonious, and fruitful' (ibid., 230)
Evaluations similar to Langevin's, and often using the same code words and imagery, can be found abundantly in the literature around 1905. They rarely included references to quantum theory or the new theory of
There is a common pattern with aggregator sites today which deal with scientific press releases to simply regurgitate press releases that other sites are posting. These stories are typically chosen because they fit a narrative which the Slashdot community already believes. But, such "news values" are not in the spirit of Silicon Valley, which has a strong tradition of leading the world on issues related to science and tech.
Modern aggregator sites today are increasingly realizing that there are two types of stories: those stories which exploit the users by feeding their worldviews back to them (directly termed "exploitation") and those stories which encourage users to learn new ideas which might challenge their preconceived notions ("exploration"). Slashdot has since the beginning focused entirely upon exploitation, which satisfies the user base, but also makes the tech community more insulated from competing views. This is most obvious with regards to what is happening at the geographical center of the tech world, in the Mission in San Francisco (where there have been some high-profile incidents with regards to gentrification and overall disrespect for the native culture), but the effects of such policies are also -- perhaps more importantly -- observable in the world of science.
Why not try a bit harder to educate the tech community on some of the most vocal critics of both science and tech? There is a rather long list of such critics to work with, some of them have very impressive CV's, and some of the claims they've made have been really quite extraordinary.
Martín López Corredoira is an astrophysicist, philosopher and academic whistleblower. He has published more than 50 cosmology and astrophysical papers on subjects like the structure of the Milky Way, stellar populations, and observational astronomy topics which required analytical calculations, computer simulations, statistics, photometrical and spectroscopical observations and analysis. He wrote in The Twilight of the Scientific Age...
"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."
"There are several reasons to write about this topic. First of all, because I feel that things are not as they seem, and the apparent success of scientific research in our societies, announced with a lot of ballyhoo by the mass media, does not reflect the real state of things."
"Science is not a direct means for reaching the truth. Science works with hypotheses rather than with truths. This fact, although recognized, is usually forgotten. It gives rise to the creation of certain key groups within science which think that their hypotheses are indubitably solid truths, and think that the hypotheses of other minority groups are just extravagant or crackpot ideas...
all through history, and even now, there have been many instances of discussion about how to interpret aspects of nature, with various possible options without a clear answer, in which a group of scientists have opted to claim their position is the good or orthodox one while other positions are heresies."
Or, how about Jeff Schmidt, who published a scathing critique of the physics graduate program titled Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives?
"My thesis is that the criteria by which individuals are deemed qualified or unqualified to become professionals involve not just technical knowledge as is generally assumed, but also attitude -- in particular, attitude toward working within an assigned political and ideological framework."
"At the end of the week the entire physics faculty gathers in a closed meeting to decide the fate of the students. Strange as it may s
As an aside, never forget that microwave emissions are a natural, expected result of plasmas conducting electric currents. The point seems to have been completely lost on cosmologists who seem to believe that a microwave background signal coming at us from all directions can only be explained in metaphysical Big Bang terms. Actually, there would be nothing particularly difficult about explaining the CMB with plasmas, the most common state for observable matter...
It is simply a matter of explaining why the spikey synchrotron microwaves would become thermalized into a smooth bell curve.
I see that there remains an aversion here to questioning the cosmic plasma model. Rather than investigate the dark-mode filamentary plasmas we already observe crisscrossing the galaxy on numerous scales, theorists continue to play with their simulations -- and the public continues to buy into the notion that this is science. How many more decades will this go on?
The models were designed to make one point -- that man might have an influence upon the climate -- and they do this with only 15% station coverage, 200 x 200 mile GCM squares, forcings at the top of the atmosphere to keep the results realistic, only a handful of stations at the poles and in the oceans, and with the sweeping assumption that the energy which the solar wind plasma dumps into the poles has no effect upon our climate system. When the models have proven to be inaccurate, ad hoc explanations are supplied to justify the failure. The scientists eagerly ignore any satellite data which does not support their case.
You want to make this the law of the land? Talk about setting a precedent...
Should NASA-funded Yue Deng stop building her own GCM models at the University of Texas which take into account the solar wind plasma? Seems that she would be in legal limbo with such a decision...
Yes, it seems that this article is a public relations piece, to my eye, to leave the impression that we are the good guys. But, with other nations already deployed experimental weapons to destroy satellites, it stands to reason that the best funded military will be very active in this area as well. It's not clear to me that the Slashdot moderators who let this through are aware of this.
It's a very large problem. We teach the students to memorize problem set recipes (aka exemplars), and the paradigm over time extends the exemplars to new observations regardless of how good the fit is. People then go online to criticize competing ideas, oftentimes without any awareness of the details of the debate. It's very rare to observe people running claims back-and-forth between the theorists and their critics -- and that's even though many theorists who disagree with the textbook theories make themselves available by email for rebuttals.
We should teach scientific controversies, and we should be teaching them very differently than the other domains which might not significantly change for another hundred years. Currently, academia simply pretends that many longstanding controversies simply do not exist, and these controversies can predictably act as an innovation bottleneck over time. If all we did was show students that there are competing arguments which oftentimes differ at the point of the initial hypothesis, students would become far better at asking good research questions. And this single change to the way that we teach science could secure our technological lead for another century.
Thank you for posting this article. It's honestly very rare to see here on Slashdot, and yet also very important.
Re: "Is this related to gamma ray bursts generated by strong lightning, also a recent observation?"
It's an electrical connection between clouds near the surface and the edge of space. I am personally more interested in the reaction here on Slashdot than the actual photograph, because there are surely many electrical engineers and space enthusiasts who read these boards, and yet nobody asks any poignant questions about this electrical connection to space in light of the current textbook theories about lightning. It seems that those probing questions will have to wait for the next cohort, who I have to imagine at some point will abandon the assumptions that this cohort has adopted.
Notice the eagerness with which former wikipedians suggest that the solar neutrino deficit problem has already been solved, even though those claims were only based upon an observation at one end of the path:
Several neutrino observatories were built in the 1980s to measure the solar neutrino flux as accurately as possible, including the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and Kamiokande. Results from these observatories eventually led to the discovery that neutrinos have a very small rest mass and do indeed oscillate [change type]. Moreover, in 2001 the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory was able to detect all three types of neutrinos directly, and found that the Sun's total neutrino emission rate agreed with the Standard Solar Model, although depending on the neutrino energy as few as one-third of the neutrinos seen at Earth are of the electron type. This proportion agrees with that predicted by the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein effect (also known as the matter effect), which describes neutrino oscillation in matter, and it is now considered a solved problem.
Some theorists have been ridiculed for pointing out the over-confidence in this claim.
"Spiral arms can hardly be formed by gravitational forces alone," Beck said. "This new IC 342 image indicates that magnetic fields also play an important role in forming spiral arms."
The new observations provided clues to another aspect of the galaxy, a bright central region that may host a black hole and also is prolifically producing new stars. To maintain the high rate of star production requires a steady inflow of gas from the galaxy's outer regions into its center.
"The magnetic field lines at the inner part of the galaxy point toward the galaxy's center, and would support an inward flow of gas," Beck said.
It seems apparent that what they're getting at is that the spiral arms are associated with electric currents which create the magnetic fields. Either way, a charge imbalance would be an easy route towards an explanation of this observation.
Venus is the most important archetype in mythology. The stories tend to share a common theme of Venus going through a dramatic transition from an object of beauty to one of horror.
What people have generally failed to realize is that Plato believed in a recent, human-historical event in the solar system, and he attributed all of the mythological archetypes to this single event.
"Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burned up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time"
(Notice that Plato is unwittingly describing a debris field that would regularly return to the earth after an initial catastrophe -- even though Plato has no idea what gravity or a debris field actually is...)
And, to make sure that everybody understands the meaning of the ancient myths, he further states:
"All of these stories, and ten thousand others which are still more wonderful, have a common origin*; many of them have been lost in the lapse of ages, or exist only as fragments; *but the origin of them is what no one has told"
We can debate his intent, but what I generally find is that people are not actually aware that Plato said this at all.
Many people are not aware, but it's been known for a number of years amongst physics education researchers how to actually measure the change in conceptual comprehension (actual assimilation of new concepts into the part of the mind that does real-world problem-solving) that results from a semester-long class. Force concept inventories (FCI's) can be administered both before and after a class, and these tests have already been given to tens of thousands of students. These tests have revealed very serious problems with public comprehension of science that starts on day 1 of the first mechanics physics course, suggesting that it is the lecture and problem set approach which is causing the problem. Eric Mazur has made a name for himself by discovering this problem at Harvard. What he found, by studying his own students, is that the plug-and-chuggers can ace their rote memorization exams, and yet still completely fail conceptual questions in the same exact domain/topic.
The college loans are not the only scandal happening at the universities. We should also be seeking to make sure that our straight-A students actually understand the materials they are memorizing, by instituting the FCI's. This would also help parents to determine the effectiveness of the various programs, and programs would once again compete on instruction.
It takes a lot of effort to look at a galaxy connected by wires, and nevertheless refuse to consider that the wires might actually be conducting...
"Observations with ESA's Herschel space observatory have revealed that our Galaxy is threaded with filamentary structures on every length scale. From nearby clouds hosting tangles of filaments a few light-years long to gigantic structures stretching hundreds of light-years across the Milky Way's spiral arms, they appear to be truly ubiquitous. The Herschel data have rekindled the interest of astronomers in studying filaments, emphasising the crucial role of these structures in the process of star formation."
Notice also people who try so hard to ignore electrical cosmology then subsequently just have no idea that they are re-discovering things that laboratory astrophysicists discovered in the 19th century...
You might consider listening to the graduate programs' biggest critic, Jeff Schmidt. He explains exactly what is going on here, but on a much more fundamental level. The consensus is created within the graduate programs. He shows exactly how that is. The key quotes from his book, Disciplined Minds are collected here:
That's exactly why we should be paying attention to electric joule heating -- because it is heat that would be particularly focused upon the poles, due to the effect of magnetic fields directing charged particles. The observational situation today is a bit much like trying to measure the inherent power of an AC signal with a DC probe: The E-field fluctuations at the poles are a bit faster than the tools being used to measure this power. There is energy within these fluctuations that is not being captured by efforts to date.
You're pointing to research done right around the time of the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts. Prior to that discovery, it was generally assumed that space was largely a vacuum. Our understanding of both laboratory and cosmic plasmas has significantly advanced since that time.
IEEE never stopped publishing on this topic, and there should be nothing at all controversial about taking the data necessary to meaningfully evaluate electric joule heating (which to be clear is not happening right now).
We should never base such a significant public policy purely on equations born of a half-century-old worldview. The inventor of magnetohydrodynamics, Hannes Alfven, was very clear on this point that the MHD equations have never accurately modeled the cosmic plasma. The call-to-action by climate change scientists dictates a rigorous approach where we actually seek to check the validity of these equations.
It brings me a lot of pleasure actually to see the Slashdot community transition on this issue. I feel like the people here are becoming more informed than the Slashdot moderators themselves who pick these articles -- a situation that is not entirely different from what is also happening at WUWT.
I might have to actually rejoin the comments here. I just didn't want to be a part of what was happening before.
There has been a debate over how to model cosmic plasmas (such as the solar wind) for more than half a century between the Astrophysical Journal and IEEE's Transactions on Plasma Science.
Conventional theory models this flow of charged particles fundamentally as a fluid, but these models have been in dispute since their inception.
Electric joule heating stems from the idea that these moving charges are an electric current, and advocates point to the fact that the solar wind is oftentimes guided by planetary magnetic fields into the poles.
The presence of hot spots at the poles of Enceladus, Neptune and Venus, in particular, are suggestive of the simple idea that these moving charged particles can heat up the planets.
It was noted in 2005 by NASA that Mars' ice caps had also been diminishing for three summers in a row.
Pluto has continued to warm up even as it moves away from the Sun.
Many atmospheric circulation models are unable to reproduce the observed polar stratospheric winds (aka the polar vortex).
The observed splitting of the polar vortex on both Earth and Venus is an expected feature of laboratory plasmas when they are conducting electrical currents, yet climate and planetary scientists claim to not understand either observation.
The solar wind intensity correlates with lightning strikes, raising questions about lightning's underlying cause, and suggesting that the Earth is part of a larger electrical circuit.
Sunspot numbers appear to correlate with lower stratosphere temperature anomalies, minus the temporal effects of volcanic eruptions -- suggesting that the sunspots are related to these electrical flows. Laboratory plasma terrella experiments appear to confirm this suspicion.
Electric field variability can significantly increase the amount of Joule heating, yet existing general circulation models assume a smooth field in both space and time. In other words, the current climate models do not take electric joule heating into account.
The primitive equations which are used to model atmospheric flows basically ignore charge change phenomena.
It tells me that people who follow science today -- professional scientists included -- try so hard to ignore scientific controversies that they basically undermine the entire scientific endeavor. What stands out with this "surprise" is that it has been less than two years since Halton Arp's death -- the man whose American telescope time was revoked because he claimed to see quasars ejecting in both directions from active galaxies.
I have to imagine that this is not even a malicious omission. It's sincerely naive -- which is 100x worse, because what it suggests is that modern science is spinning its wheels with its refusal to teach the newer graduate students (and public) about the former scientific controversies.
Perhaps it is the correct time to remind people that in the plasma laboratory, current-carrying filaments tend to exhibit both long-range attraction and short-range repulsion. Setting the scientific framework's needs aside for a moment, that would seem to point more logically to an electrical inference. Note that we see a similar dipolar structure at the poles of Venus as well.
The key test will be to observe whether or not they rotate around one another.
If they do, then it's time for Slashdot to end its ban on the electric discharge machining inference.
I encourage everybody to closely watch the reporting on his life story. What you will notice is consistently left out, in nearly every instance, is the actual historical lesson that Charles was told by numerous leading quantum theorists of the day that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle precluded such a device. And they told him this even as he explained that he had already built a functional prototype. Check his autobiography.
The history you hear for science is traditionally cleansed of the uncomfortable bits.
Re: "Especially since it is relatively easy to show (eg. to those with approx. an undergraduate education in a related field, or a precocious high-schooler) that FTL implies the possibility of backward time travel, barring a few really, really conceptually unlikely and unsatisfying scenarios."... There is one scenario which seems to have been overlooked, and which is really quite simple, and even suggested by the diagram shown attached to the article: The electron is possibly not a fundamental particle, and its subparticle does not "delay" in the same way. Ralph Sansbury has written about this, and even performed an experiment which seems to support it.
The argument made is really quite simple and elegant: It's that either matter and space are strange, or light is strange. Einstein placed his bet on the former, but look at how little effort has gone into considering the latter.
Don't stop thinking, people! The world is far more interesting when you actually engage it, and consider the obvious fact that there are at least a couple of mistakes in our theories that we need to identify.
Have you ever considered the argument that if the Earth was actually rotating around where the Sun was 8 minutes ago, that the system would not actually be stable? This was brought up by Tom Van Flandern.
Also, be aware that -- over time -- discrepancies have been found in the mass of the proton, the gravitational constant G and more recently, radioactive decay rates. In some cases -- as in G -- I'm aware that the discrepancies commonly exceeded the error bars; in fact, the error bars appear to actually be getting *larger*. This is supposed to represent a red flag, and it's supposed to lead people to ask new questions. But, what we see instead on sites like Slashdot is the tendency to disbelieve anything -- even simplifying explanations which Occam would approve of -- which are not also believed by authority figures -- who, in turn, are trying to protect their knowledge. Over time, the critics simply stop paying attention to Slashdot. And the people who continue to visit the site simply develop the false impression that there are no critics.
Slashdot Mirror
One straightforwardly physical way to explain gravity is as a distortion of electron orbitals, similar to what is seen with the van der waals force. If atoms were to simply resonate with one another, and if electrons had sub-particles, that would seem to be a pretty good theoretical basis for explaining gravity as related to E&M.
From Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century, Helge Kragh
"ELECTRON THEORY AS A WORLDVIEW
By 1904 the electromagnetic view of the world had taken off and emerged as a highly attractive substitute for the mechanical view that was widely seen as outdated, materialistic, and primitive. As an indication of the strength of the new theory, it was not only discussed in specialized journals, but also began to appear in physics textbooks ...
In commemoration of the centenary of the United States' purchase of the Louisiana Territory, a Congress of Arts and Sciences was held in St. Louis in September 1904. Among the physics delegates were several international leaders of physics, including Rutherford, Poincare, and Boltzmann. The general message of many of the addresses was that physics was at a turning point and that electron theory was on its way to establishing a new paradigm in physics. In his sweeping survey of problems in mathematical physics, Poincare spoke of the 'general ruin of the principles' that characterized the period. Poincare was himself an important contributor to electron theory and he was now willing to conclude that 'the mass of the electrons, or, at least of the negative electrons, is of exclusively electro-dynamic origin ... [T]here is no mass other than electro-dynamic inertia' (Sopka and Moyer 1986, 292). The address of another French physicist, thirty-two-year-old Paul Langevin, was more detailed, but no less grand, no less eloquent, and no less in favor of the electromagnetic world picture. Langevin argued for his own (and Bucberer's) model of the electron, but the detailed structure of the electron was not what really mattered. The important thing was the coming of a new era of physics. As Langevin explained in his closing words:
'The rapid perspective which I have just sketched is full of promises, and I believe that rarely in the history of physics has one had the opportunity of looking either so far into the past or so far into the future. The relative importance of parts of this immense and scarcely explored domain appears different to-day from what it did in the preceding century: from the new point of view the various plans arrange themselves in a new order. The electrical idea, the last discovered, appears to-day to dominate the whole, as the place of choice where the explorer feels he can found a city before advancing into new territories .... The actual tendency, of making the electromagnetic ideas to occupy the preponderating place, is justified, as I have sought to show, by the solidity of the double base on which rests the idea of the electron [the Maxwell equations and the empirical electron] ... Although still very recent, the conceptions of which I have sought to give a collected idea are about to penetrate to the very heart of the entire physics, and to act as a fertile germ in order to crystallize around it, in a new order, facts very far removed from one another ... This idea has taken an immense development in the last few years, which causes it to break the framework of the old physics to pieces, and to overturn the established order of ideas and laws in order to branch out again in an organization which one foresees to be simple, harmonious, and fruitful' (ibid., 230)
Evaluations similar to Langevin's, and often using the same code words and imagery, can be found abundantly in the literature around 1905. They rarely included references to quantum theory or the new theory of
There is a common pattern with aggregator sites today which deal with scientific press releases to simply regurgitate press releases that other sites are posting. These stories are typically chosen because they fit a narrative which the Slashdot community already believes. But, such "news values" are not in the spirit of Silicon Valley, which has a strong tradition of leading the world on issues related to science and tech.
...
...
Modern aggregator sites today are increasingly realizing that there are two types of stories: those stories which exploit the users by feeding their worldviews back to them (directly termed "exploitation") and those stories which encourage users to learn new ideas which might challenge their preconceived notions ("exploration"). Slashdot has since the beginning focused entirely upon exploitation, which satisfies the user base, but also makes the tech community more insulated from competing views. This is most obvious with regards to what is happening at the geographical center of the tech world, in the Mission in San Francisco (where there have been some high-profile incidents with regards to gentrification and overall disrespect for the native culture), but the effects of such policies are also -- perhaps more importantly -- observable in the world of science.
Why not try a bit harder to educate the tech community on some of the most vocal critics of both science and tech? There is a rather long list of such critics to work with, some of them have very impressive CV's, and some of the claims they've made have been really quite extraordinary.
Martín López Corredoira is an astrophysicist, philosopher and academic whistleblower. He has published more than 50 cosmology and astrophysical papers on subjects like the structure of the Milky Way, stellar populations, and observational astronomy topics which required analytical calculations, computer simulations, statistics, photometrical and spectroscopical observations and analysis. He wrote in The Twilight of the Scientific Age
"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."
"There are several reasons to write about this topic. First of all, because I feel that things are not as they seem, and the apparent success of scientific research in our societies, announced with a lot of ballyhoo by the mass media, does not reflect the real state of things."
"Science is not a direct means for reaching the truth. Science works with hypotheses rather than with truths. This fact, although recognized, is usually forgotten. It gives rise to the creation of certain key groups within science which think that their hypotheses are indubitably solid truths, and think that the hypotheses of other minority groups are just extravagant or crackpot ideas
all through history, and even now, there have been many instances of discussion about how to interpret aspects of nature, with various possible options without a clear answer, in which a group of scientists have opted to claim their position is the good or orthodox one while other positions are heresies."
Or, how about Jeff Schmidt, who published a scathing critique of the physics graduate program titled Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives?
"My thesis is that the criteria by which individuals are deemed qualified or unqualified to become professionals involve not just technical knowledge as is generally assumed, but also attitude -- in particular, attitude toward working within an assigned political and ideological framework."
"At the end of the week the entire physics faculty gathers in a closed meeting to decide the fate of the students. Strange as it may s
As an aside, never forget that microwave emissions are a natural, expected result of plasmas conducting electric currents. The point seems to have been completely lost on cosmologists who seem to believe that a microwave background signal coming at us from all directions can only be explained in metaphysical Big Bang terms. Actually, there would be nothing particularly difficult about explaining the CMB with plasmas, the most common state for observable matter ...
It is simply a matter of explaining why the spikey synchrotron microwaves would become thermalized into a smooth bell curve.
I see that there remains an aversion here to questioning the cosmic plasma model. Rather than investigate the dark-mode filamentary plasmas we already observe crisscrossing the galaxy on numerous scales, theorists continue to play with their simulations -- and the public continues to buy into the notion that this is science. How many more decades will this go on?
The models were designed to make one point -- that man might have an influence upon the climate -- and they do this with only 15% station coverage, 200 x 200 mile GCM squares, forcings at the top of the atmosphere to keep the results realistic, only a handful of stations at the poles and in the oceans, and with the sweeping assumption that the energy which the solar wind plasma dumps into the poles has no effect upon our climate system. When the models have proven to be inaccurate, ad hoc explanations are supplied to justify the failure. The scientists eagerly ignore any satellite data which does not support their case.
...
...
You want to make this the law of the land? Talk about setting a precedent
Should NASA-funded Yue Deng stop building her own GCM models at the University of Texas which take into account the solar wind plasma? Seems that she would be in legal limbo with such a decision
Yes, it seems that this article is a public relations piece, to my eye, to leave the impression that we are the good guys. But, with other nations already deployed experimental weapons to destroy satellites, it stands to reason that the best funded military will be very active in this area as well. It's not clear to me that the Slashdot moderators who let this through are aware of this.
It's a very large problem. We teach the students to memorize problem set recipes (aka exemplars), and the paradigm over time extends the exemplars to new observations regardless of how good the fit is. People then go online to criticize competing ideas, oftentimes without any awareness of the details of the debate. It's very rare to observe people running claims back-and-forth between the theorists and their critics -- and that's even though many theorists who disagree with the textbook theories make themselves available by email for rebuttals.
We should teach scientific controversies, and we should be teaching them very differently than the other domains which might not significantly change for another hundred years. Currently, academia simply pretends that many longstanding controversies simply do not exist, and these controversies can predictably act as an innovation bottleneck over time. If all we did was show students that there are competing arguments which oftentimes differ at the point of the initial hypothesis, students would become far better at asking good research questions. And this single change to the way that we teach science could secure our technological lead for another century.
Thank you for posting this article. It's honestly very rare to see here on Slashdot, and yet also very important.
Re: "Is this related to gamma ray bursts generated by strong lightning, also a recent observation?"
It's an electrical connection between clouds near the surface and the edge of space. I am personally more interested in the reaction here on Slashdot than the actual photograph, because there are surely many electrical engineers and space enthusiasts who read these boards, and yet nobody asks any poignant questions about this electrical connection to space in light of the current textbook theories about lightning. It seems that those probing questions will have to wait for the next cohort, who I have to imagine at some point will abandon the assumptions that this cohort has adopted.
That quote above actually comes from here, but the conclusion was apparently shared by many.
Some theorists have been ridiculed for pointing out the over-confidence in this claim.
http://phys.org/news/2015-06-m...
It seems apparent that what they're getting at is that the spiral arms are associated with electric currents which create the magnetic fields. Either way, a charge imbalance would be an easy route towards an explanation of this observation.
Venus is the most important archetype in mythology. The stories tend to share a common theme of Venus going through a dramatic transition from an object of beauty to one of horror.
...)
What people have generally failed to realize is that Plato believed in a recent, human-historical event in the solar system, and he attributed all of the mythological archetypes to this single event.
From Plato's Dialogues at https://books.google.com/books...
"Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burned up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time"
(Notice that Plato is unwittingly describing a debris field that would regularly return to the earth after an initial catastrophe -- even though Plato has no idea what gravity or a debris field actually is
And, to make sure that everybody understands the meaning of the ancient myths, he further states:
"All of these stories, and ten thousand others which are still more wonderful, have a common origin*; many of them have been lost in the lapse of ages, or exist only as fragments; *but the origin of them is what no one has told"
We can debate his intent, but what I generally find is that people are not actually aware that Plato said this at all.
Many people are not aware, but it's been known for a number of years amongst physics education researchers how to actually measure the change in conceptual comprehension (actual assimilation of new concepts into the part of the mind that does real-world problem-solving) that results from a semester-long class. Force concept inventories (FCI's) can be administered both before and after a class, and these tests have already been given to tens of thousands of students. These tests have revealed very serious problems with public comprehension of science that starts on day 1 of the first mechanics physics course, suggesting that it is the lecture and problem set approach which is causing the problem. Eric Mazur has made a name for himself by discovering this problem at Harvard. What he found, by studying his own students, is that the plug-and-chuggers can ace their rote memorization exams, and yet still completely fail conceptual questions in the same exact domain/topic.
See Confessions of a Converted Lecturer, or the first two devastating paragraphs of the abstract here.
The college loans are not the only scandal happening at the universities. We should also be seeking to make sure that our straight-A students actually understand the materials they are memorizing, by instituting the FCI's. This would also help parents to determine the effectiveness of the various programs, and programs would once again compete on instruction.
It takes a lot of effort to look at a galaxy connected by wires, and nevertheless refuse to consider that the wires might actually be conducting ...
...
"Observations with ESA's Herschel space observatory have revealed that our Galaxy is threaded with filamentary structures on every length scale. From nearby clouds hosting tangles of filaments a few light-years long to gigantic structures stretching hundreds of light-years across the Milky Way's spiral arms, they appear to be truly ubiquitous. The Herschel data have rekindled the interest of astronomers in studying filaments, emphasising the crucial role of these structures in the process of star formation."
See recent article at http://sci.esa.int/herschel/55...
Notice also people who try so hard to ignore electrical cosmology then subsequently just have no idea that they are re-discovering things that laboratory astrophysicists discovered in the 19th century
https://plus.google.com/+Chris...
You might consider listening to the graduate programs' biggest critic, Jeff Schmidt. He explains exactly what is going on here, but on a much more fundamental level. The consensus is created within the graduate programs. He shows exactly how that is. The key quotes from his book, Disciplined Minds are collected here:
https://plus.google.com/108466...
That's exactly why we should be paying attention to electric joule heating -- because it is heat that would be particularly focused upon the poles, due to the effect of magnetic fields directing charged particles. The observational situation today is a bit much like trying to measure the inherent power of an AC signal with a DC probe: The E-field fluctuations at the poles are a bit faster than the tools being used to measure this power. There is energy within these fluctuations that is not being captured by efforts to date.
You're pointing to research done right around the time of the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts. Prior to that discovery, it was generally assumed that space was largely a vacuum. Our understanding of both laboratory and cosmic plasmas has significantly advanced since that time.
IEEE never stopped publishing on this topic, and there should be nothing at all controversial about taking the data necessary to meaningfully evaluate electric joule heating (which to be clear is not happening right now).
We should never base such a significant public policy purely on equations born of a half-century-old worldview. The inventor of magnetohydrodynamics, Hannes Alfven, was very clear on this point that the MHD equations have never accurately modeled the cosmic plasma. The call-to-action by climate change scientists dictates a rigorous approach where we actually seek to check the validity of these equations.
It brings me a lot of pleasure actually to see the Slashdot community transition on this issue. I feel like the people here are becoming more informed than the Slashdot moderators themselves who pick these articles -- a situation that is not entirely different from what is also happening at WUWT.
I might have to actually rejoin the comments here. I just didn't want to be a part of what was happening before.
There has been a debate over how to model cosmic plasmas (such as the solar wind) for more than half a century between the Astrophysical Journal and IEEE's Transactions on Plasma Science.
Conventional theory models this flow of charged particles fundamentally as a fluid, but these models have been in dispute since their inception.
Electric joule heating stems from the idea that these moving charges are an electric current, and advocates point to the fact that the solar wind is oftentimes guided by planetary magnetic fields into the poles.
The presence of hot spots at the poles of Enceladus, Neptune and Venus, in particular, are suggestive of the simple idea that these moving charged particles can heat up the planets.
It was noted in 2005 by NASA that Mars' ice caps had also been diminishing for three summers in a row.
Pluto has continued to warm up even as it moves away from the Sun.
Many atmospheric circulation models are unable to reproduce the observed polar stratospheric winds (aka the polar vortex).
The observed splitting of the polar vortex on both Earth and Venus is an expected feature of laboratory plasmas when they are conducting electrical currents, yet climate and planetary scientists claim to not understand either observation.
The solar wind intensity correlates with lightning strikes, raising questions about lightning's underlying cause, and suggesting that the Earth is part of a larger electrical circuit.
Sunspot numbers appear to correlate with lower stratosphere temperature anomalies, minus the temporal effects of volcanic eruptions -- suggesting that the sunspots are related to these electrical flows. Laboratory plasma terrella experiments appear to confirm this suspicion.
Electric field variability can significantly increase the amount of Joule heating, yet existing general circulation models assume a smooth field in both space and time. In other words, the current climate models do not take electric joule heating into account.
The primitive equations which are used to model atmospheric flows basically ignore charge change phenomena.
This will likely turn out to be a mistake.
For a more graphical presentation w/ the sources for these claims, see https://plus.google.com/108466...
It tells me that people who follow science today -- professional scientists included -- try so hard to ignore scientific controversies that they basically undermine the entire scientific endeavor. What stands out with this "surprise" is that it has been less than two years since Halton Arp's death -- the man whose American telescope time was revoked because he claimed to see quasars ejecting in both directions from active galaxies. I have to imagine that this is not even a malicious omission. It's sincerely naive -- which is 100x worse, because what it suggests is that modern science is spinning its wheels with its refusal to teach the newer graduate students (and public) about the former scientific controversies.
Perhaps it is the correct time to remind people that in the plasma laboratory, current-carrying filaments tend to exhibit both long-range attraction and short-range repulsion. Setting the scientific framework's needs aside for a moment, that would seem to point more logically to an electrical inference. Note that we see a similar dipolar structure at the poles of Venus as well.
The key test will be to observe whether or not they rotate around one another.
If they do, then it's time for Slashdot to end its ban on the electric discharge machining inference.
I encourage everybody to closely watch the reporting on his life story. What you will notice is consistently left out, in nearly every instance, is the actual historical lesson that Charles was told by numerous leading quantum theorists of the day that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle precluded such a device. And they told him this even as he explained that he had already built a functional prototype. Check his autobiography. The history you hear for science is traditionally cleansed of the uncomfortable bits.
Re: "Especially since it is relatively easy to show (eg. to those with approx. an undergraduate education in a related field, or a precocious high-schooler) that FTL implies the possibility of backward time travel, barring a few really, really conceptually unlikely and unsatisfying scenarios." ... There is one scenario which seems to have been overlooked, and which is really quite simple, and even suggested by the diagram shown attached to the article: The electron is possibly not a fundamental particle, and its subparticle does not "delay" in the same way. Ralph Sansbury has written about this, and even performed an experiment which seems to support it.
The argument made is really quite simple and elegant: It's that either matter and space are strange, or light is strange. Einstein placed his bet on the former, but look at how little effort has gone into considering the latter. Don't stop thinking, people! The world is far more interesting when you actually engage it, and consider the obvious fact that there are at least a couple of mistakes in our theories that we need to identify.
Have you ever considered the argument that if the Earth was actually rotating around where the Sun was 8 minutes ago, that the system would not actually be stable? This was brought up by Tom Van Flandern. Also, be aware that -- over time -- discrepancies have been found in the mass of the proton, the gravitational constant G and more recently, radioactive decay rates. In some cases -- as in G -- I'm aware that the discrepancies commonly exceeded the error bars; in fact, the error bars appear to actually be getting *larger*. This is supposed to represent a red flag, and it's supposed to lead people to ask new questions. But, what we see instead on sites like Slashdot is the tendency to disbelieve anything -- even simplifying explanations which Occam would approve of -- which are not also believed by authority figures -- who, in turn, are trying to protect their knowledge. Over time, the critics simply stop paying attention to Slashdot. And the people who continue to visit the site simply develop the false impression that there are no critics.