What I notice about the Quora claim is that the person did not include their algebra. He is making a claim about algebra, but fails to go through the math.
By contrast, others have indeed gone through the math, like here in the 2nd and 3rd bubbles and the answer of ~21,000 lbs would seem to be very far shy of the largest dinosaur weights. It seems very unlikely that fiddling with bone and muscle densities (etc) is going to make up the difference to the 176,000 pounds that the sauropod is claimed to have weighed.
The weight of the largest land-walking dinosaurs is a paradox.
The largest flying creatures from these times are also a paradox. 8 meters was thought to be the theoretical wingspan limit for any airborne creature -- at least until Quetzalcoatlus specimens were found.
What we see in these scientific disciplines are theorists fiddling with the numbers and behaviors in order to satisfy the paradox that they cannot exist in our current gravity. For instance, it has been claimed that the Pteranodon did not actually fly -- but rather could only glide. Yet, in some cases, the remains of these creatures are found with fish fossils and the bird had a throat pouch like a pelican. So, the creature goes down to scoop up some fish, and then what? How does it get back up to its nest? It doesn't seem that people think much about these problems these days.
Regardless, the largest flying creatures were a paradox.
Then, there are the problematic necks of the largest-necked creatures. Giraffes require an extraordinary blood pressure to get blood to their necks 20 feet up. But, the sauropod had a neck of about 50-60 feet in length! This raises issues related to not just blood pressure, but also torque.
Do the math on this blood pressure and torque, and the largest-necked creatures were a paradox.
Theorists will typically try to address just one of these problems at a time (by suggesting that the sauropod did not elevate its neck, reducing bone density or proposing that the air must have been thicker, for example), but it would seem that the only way to resolve all three problems at once is to alter gravity, no?
The Thunderbolts site does not claim that an electric discharge changed gravity. If you were to read through their materials, you'd see that the claim that David Talbott is making -- for which there is not absolute consensus amongst adherents to electrical cosmology -- is that the Earth was for a limited time part of a Herbig-Haro formation -- which is an unstable, yet astronomically observed, configuration for astronomical bodies in space where the bodies are strung out in a line, and exist in much closer proximity to one another. This alternative configuration would be part of what caused this lowered state for gravity, and the electric discharge was only related to the unstable configuration's breakup.
There are other comparative mythologists -- like Rens van der Sluijs -- who do believe that there is very important astronomical and planetary sciences history within the earliest mythological archetypes, but who have ended up at a more "uniformitarian" set of conclusions. Where there exists consensus is on the fact that the earliest stories told by mankind are infused with far more astronomical content than modern scientists are willing to recognize, and also that it is not possible to interpret the earliest mythological archetypes without using the tools of laboratory plasma physics.
It's important to stress the peculiar nature of our current solar system. We've seen enough exoplanetary systems by now to understand that our solar system could be remarkably unique -- which probably means that it is a completely awful template to use for constructing a hypothesis for how planets form. So, although people have and do make fun of David Talbott for proposing an exotic former state for our solar system, it would seem that our current solar system may not really be a "typical" solar system at all. The truth of the matter -- only occasionally acknowledged by the science journalists -- is that our planetary sciences theories are in a state of disarray at this point for the very reason that theorists have trouble assembling the systems that we can now clearly see without proposing planetary migrations.
What tends to happen with hypotheses is that when they begin, they start as very simple ideas. The nebular hypothesis was straightforward and seemed to work very well for many years. As we've observed a lot of different systems, that old idea is not faring so well. But, culturally, since we are all taught it, we tend to cling to it. It's all that most people know, so people who propose alternatives are perceived as sort of wacky. But, the situation in the planetary sciences is quite dire at this point: Even the scientists are at this point in time being forced to consider some pretty wacky ideas.
"How could dinosaurs get so big despite Galileo's square cube law?
The law - Square-cube law
From wikipedia
'The giant monsters seen in horror movies (e.g., Godzilla or King Kong) are also unrealistic, as their sheer size would force them to collapse.'
Wouldn't the law also affect dinosaurs like the Giraffatitan?
1 Answer
Apala Chaturvedi
Galileo's Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences contained what he considered to be one of his most profound insights: the square-cube law. If two cubes are made of the same material then they will have the same density. Yet since the two cubes have different area to volume ratios they will likewise have different stress at the base of each cube. If too much stress is placed on an object then it will fail, or in this case a large cube has a much greater possibility of collapsing. This is why sandcastles can only be a few feet high.
Galileo applied this to animals, what we now call allometry, and noted that a this implies the diameter of bones should be proportional to their length. It explains why ants can walk around on spindly little legs while lifting 50 times their body weight, compared to elephants with their tree-trunk sized feet who would strain to lift a quarter of their mass.
Also because of the Square-Cube Law, larger animals have less relative muscle strength than smaller animals. Both the muscle strength and bone strength are functions of the cross sectional area, while the weight of the animal is a function of volume.
It is because of relative muscle strength that an ant can lift fifty times its weight while a human can lift an amount equal to its own weight, and an Asian elephant can only lift 25% of its own weight. The greater muscle to weight ratio of smaller animals is what allows them to jump higher than several times their own height, while at the other extreme an elephant can not even jump.
While Galileo was successful in convincing the Church and the conservative science community that the world is not flat, the conservative science community has yet to embrace Galileo's Square-Cube Law even though it is clearly correct and fundamental to understanding every major science discipline.
Ultimately, there is no need to agree. And if you look at how the history of science has played out, what you will clearly observe is that science benefits enormously from the existence of rational disagreement and debate. My general approach is to delay judgment on controversies for as long as possible, because what I observe as an anti-pattern in domains like cosmology where uncertainty abounds is that people trend towards judging prematurely. The better approach in such cases is to systematically track. If academia was functioning in an ideologically responsible manner these days, where they were more concerned about producing innovations than defending hundred-year-old theories against innovation, that is what they would be teaching. The thing is, I've been tracking this debate now for a full 12 years, and it is becoming harder to avoid judgment in the light of the observable trends.
Re: "People claim relativity's true because it explains and has predicted a lot of things, and nobody's come up with anything that contradicts it."
The truth of the situation is that there is no real need for absolute consensus upon an inference which exists at the very edge of our ability to sense and judge what is going on.
To provide a very real-world example, I have a close (surprisingly young) electrical engineer friend who has been working tirelessly towards the full unification of aether with the Electric Universe and quantum mechanics, and presumably gravity. Every time that I pass on some new insight or information on these topics, he rebuts me with 10 details that I was not even aware of. He has voraciously digested everything that has ever been published on the topics of aether and Relativity; he recalls these details as though they happened yesterday. This culture of intolerance towards people who are pursuing these matters is extremely short-sighted, anti-innovative and presumptive that such people will never succeed in their efforts. There's more than enough room in physics for competing ideas about the fundamental nature of space, and you and I both know that if any sort of innovation was to emerge from such works, even the most vocal defenders of Relativity would not think twice about using such innovations.
Re: "Until you realize this, there's no point in continuing the discussion."
As the situation currently stands, you are free to throw shade on efforts to find better theories without any future penalty if you prove wrong. There are no consequences for being wrong, and of course no need to endure the social stigma that the innovators must endure every day for your eventual benefit. The inventors of the rocket and the laser, and the discoverers of epigenetics, plate tectonics and radio waves from space all persisted in spite of incredible intellectual hostility. It seems that throughout American history, we have repeatedly prioritized our own personal desire to feel right over the unknown possibilities which might result from being wrong. These cultural patterns, without a doubt, throttle the rate of innovation within our country.
Re: "But for the paradigm-shifting hypotheses to deserve serious attention they need to be robust enough to explain and predict what the current leading theory does, and preferably some of its shortcomings, in a falsifiable manner. So I find the Electrical Universe model trying to explain way too much with sporadic and tangentially related data."
All ideas obviously begin in an archaic state. I try to focus on scientific controversies more broadly, so I don't really want to leave the impression that the Electric Universe is the only one I follow. But, I feel confident based upon what I have seen that the trends are favoring electrical cosmology. By the ends of our lifetimes, enough ground will be covered that we will begin to approach parity in the support -- and at that point, the people who have gone online to argue against it will probably regret these behaviors. As I've stated in the many posts on this subject, these trends are not reported by science journalists, and so are invisible to anybody who does not first learn and then actively track the claims in the light of new observations. After having tracked the EU for a full 12 years, I feel that tracking is the missing secret sauce to judging competing scientific theories because it introduces an element of surprise which theorists cannot spin. When some observation is made which surprises the mainstream, the consistent pattern is that they will admit their surprise for the first few days. Then, as they confer, the pattern is that they become emboldened to adopt the mindset that the anomaly has always been known and predicted. It's a very consistent pattern. However, what they are not doing is tracking, and this is the fatal flaw in a culture which no longer values generalists. Specialization has become so intense that they can no longer understand completely valid arguments which originate from adjacent domains.
Re: "I'm aware of the galactic filaments in the universe, but I don't see how all this leads to an internally consistent alternative to the leading theories of dark matter and general relativity"
You should learn about the subject-object transition. I think you have adopted an ideal for how to think about science which you might benefit from questioning. People have studied how leaders (like CEO's) think, and a key quality is an ability to rapidly switch between competing -- even conflicting -- frameworks. Here is an excellent quote which greatly impacted my own thinking, and which I think sums up the situation quite well:
Village Venus Syndrome
Dr. Edward de Bono
"'Dr. Edward de Bono's book on practical thinking... makes interesting reading for... those concerned with the problems of interpretation in the historical sciences, with the aid of an ingenious experiment, he analyzes the way the human mind works and identified 'five ways to be wrong,' 'four ways to be right,' and 'five ways to understand.' Among the ways to be right -- which means ways in which one can convince oneself one is right -- is what he calls the 'village Venus,' or 'unique rightness' method, a mental process which he believes to be particularly common among scientists and academics. If one has lived one's whole life in a remote village, cut off from contact with other people, the village Venus must be the most beautiful girl in the world because one cannot imagine anyone more beautiful. In the same way a scientist or scholar who cannot imagine, or who has not heard of any explanation which will fit a given body of evidence, as well as the one he has thought of (or, one might add, has been taught), is capable of being fully convinced of its unique rightness. Consciously he tells himself, and believes, that it is right because it fits all the facts; but actually its rightness derives solely from the lack of rival explanations.'"
Re: "What we have is theories that have made lots of verified predictions, and which have survived lots of falsification attempts."
You are pointing to the accuracy and precision of the mathematics of Relativity, while glossing over the fact that Einstein lifted all of this math from the aether theorists. The debate over Relativity has always been over the physical inference, not the accuracy and precision of the mathematics. There are countless examples, but here is just one:
William Day, A New Physics, 2000, p.118
"Relativity is a strange and novel theory that has provided equations with extreme accuracy with a theory that logically cannot be true. The theory is at most a way to rationalize a mathematical description by an imagined condition that gives a workable formula, much the way Newton devised an equation by calling gravity a force acting at a distance."
What we know is that Einstein had the luxury of fitting his physical inference to the mathematics. People who subsequently point to the accuracy and precision of the math to establish the physical inference's validity are pitching circular logic.
Re: "3) In other words, there are no falsifiable predictions, so the Electric Universe is not currently a scientific theory."
Each framework begins in a different theoretical place. The fact that plasma cosmology begins with plasmas, and works its way towards a better explanation for gravity, is not an argument against it; it's merely an observation that the two frameworks exhibit differing coverage. There is nothing extraordinary about this. You want a neat and tidy situation where you can compare apples to apples, but reality is not neat-and-tidy as you wish. That's hardly an argument for which idea will win out.
Re: "If there are such currents, and they're strong enough to have effects, why haven't we noticed some effects? That needs to be answered."
Re: "Also, your attack on the Big Bang theories is irrelevant as well as ignorant (if you actually understood them, you'd have some idea why they're considered science, and you'd attack that idea)."
Anthony L. Peratt, Physics of the Plasma Universe, Second Edition, 2015, p.33-34.
"High-power microwave generation on earth belongs exclusively to devices using relativistic electron beams... A relativistic electron beam that does not produce microwave radiation is unknown. These same basic mechanisms are likely to have their natural analogs in cosmic plasmas."
The idea that the microwaves coming at us from all directions must necessarily indicate an expansion is total nonsense. It is one of the greatest collective delusions in the history of modern science.
The idea of expansion was proposed by a Catholic priest:
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."
You might take that into consideration when you contemplate why the Big Bang is so popul
Re: "How, tell me, should a planet not only move across the orbits of several other planets without disturbing them AT ALL but then suddenly change its velocity enough to actually change its orbit? Do you have a faint idea just how much energy is necessary for something like this?"
"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"
... then further on...
"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"
What do you think he means by "a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time?" Plato of course had no idea what gravity was, but he appears to be describing a debris field that returns to the planet over many years. In fact, that's one very logical way to explain why cultures like the Mayans would construct calendars which far exceed the seasonal variations necessary to farm.
"Earth and the other rocky planets aren't made out of the solar system's original starting material, two new studies reveal.
Scientists examined solar particles snagged in space by NASA's Genesis probe, whose return capsule crash-landed on Earth in 2004. These salvaged samples show that the sun's basic building blocks differ significantly from those of Earth, the moon and other denizens of the inner solar system, researchers said...
McKeegan and his team measured the abundance of solar wind oxygen isotopes. Isotopes are versions of an element that have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei. Oxygen has three stable isotopes: oxygen-16 (eight neutrons), oxygen-17 (nine neutrons) and oxygen-18 (ten neutrons).
The researchers found that the sun has significantly more oxygen-16, relative to the other two isotopes, than Earth."
Re: "At the very least we could have seen a significant difference in temperature if the planet radiated 15% more energy than it receives."
Venus Express discovered that surface features were not quite where they should be, evidence that Earth's cloud-covered neighbour spins a little slower than previously measured... Scientists have looked at the possibility of this change arising from short-term, random variations in the length of a Venus day, but have concluded that these should average themselves out over time.
Velikovsky was the first person to predict that Venus' temperature should be hot, and he did so at a time when the entire scientific community assumed Venus should be much like the Earth beneath the cloud cover. Velikovsky was of course a close friend of Einstein, who in his later years, took great interest in Velikovsky's work (Einstein's followers have traditionally and famously failed to live up to his own nuanced skepticism of his own work). You might try harder to ask how it could be that Velikovsky knew that Venus must be hot. He did so by studying ancient documents, which curiously recorded Venus' arrival in human-historical times into our solar system as a comet:
Venus and the Cosmic Connection
"Repeatedly, these calamities were attributed to a malicious deity almost invariably a goddess coming to wreak havoc upon the Earth. Although the actual names naturally varied, the deity involved turned out time and time again to be the one that cultures worldwide associated with the object we know today as the planet Venus. But they didn't talk about it as if it were a planet -- they described it as a comet. A Chinese text describes Venus as spanning the heavens, rivaling the Sun in brightness. Mexican astronomers referred to it as 'the star that smokes,' while on the opposite side of the world the same theme is found in the Hindu Vedas, the Hebrew Talmud, and the Egyptian description of Sekhmet. The Aztecs called Venus the 'heart' of Quetzlcoatl, which in turn means 'plumed serpent,' with feathers that signify fire. The serpent or dragon is one of the most common figures used in the ancient world to signify 'comet,' examples being the Greek Typhon, Egyptian Set, Babylonian Tiamat, Hindu Vrta, all of whom raged across the sky and brought destruction upon the world.
The word 'comet' comes from the Greek coma, meaning hair, and among ancient astronomers referred to a star with hair, or a beard. The same appellation was given to Venus. One of the Mexican names for Venus was 'the mane' -- the Peruvian name, chaska, means 'wavy-haired'; the Arabs call Venus 'the one with hair.' One of the most vivid comet images is the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, recognized universally as representing Venus. Ishtar is described as being 'the bright torch of heaven,' 'clothed in fire,' and the 'fearful dragon,' while her heavenly manifestation is known as the 'bearded star.'"
Velikovsky's successful prediction was one of the reasons for the Venus Pioneer mission: the scientists decided to generate their own evidence for a runaway greenhouse effect, in order to undermine Velikovsky's analysis from ancient texts. They miserably failed:
"The mystery of Venus' internal heat", Nov. 13 1980 issue of New Scientist
"Two years' surveillance by the Pioneer Venus Orbiter seems to show that Venus is radiating away more energy than it receives from the Sun. If this surprising result is confirmed, it means that the planet itself is producing far more heat than the Earth does.
F.W. Taylor, of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford, presented these measurements at the Royal Society meeting last week. Venus's surface temperature is higher than any other in the solar system, at 480 C. The generally accepted theory is that sunlight is absorbed at Venus's surface, and re-radiated as infrared. The latter is absorbed in the atmosphere, which thus acts as a blanket keeping the planet hot. It is similar to the way a greenhou
(1) Notice what neither you nor anybody else in the mainstream ever talks about: There must be some typical distance between stars at which they stop interacting with one another. What is this distance? I, and some others, have argued that the typical force of 1.5 x 10-14 Earth gee's meets this requirement. This is a completely inconsequential force, and nobody should be attempting to construct a cosmology based upon forces like this. All of you are wasting your time. We can already see that nothing will come of any of these efforts, yet you persist. I mean no offense by suggesting it, but it seems to me that you do so simply because this is what we were all taught, and you're struggling to reset your mental framework.
(2) You're thinking too deeply about the words I am using, and not enough about the nature of the situation. Look, for example, at the human body: If you traverse through the scales of the human body, you will progress through a variety of situations which have differing dominant forces: at the bacterial scale, gravity is inconsequential and the electric force dominates; at other scales, the effects of water or chemistry may dominate; at our perception, gravity dominates. In the electrical view, the universe is very much like a large organism. In fact, the term plasma was coined as a reference to blood plasma -- because it appears alive. In the laboratory, plasmas naturally form vessels which transport charge (we call them Birkeland currents); the plasma observably forms cell walls which protect their charge (we call them plasma double layers); the plasma forms into macro-structures like stars (similar to cells) and galaxies (similar to organs). Halton Arp has observed the galaxies essentially procreating. His ejection hypothesis even observes damage to the host during the process of birthing (he became famous for cataloging these "peculiar galaxies").
The point of what I am doing above is to demonstrate that there is more than one mental framework which we can approach the problem with, and the very fact that dark matter has not been found even as the instrumentation has become a million times more sensitive suggests that your own favored approach is rapidly approaching its endpoint. So, what are you going to do about it? Will you decide to seek out alternative frameworks? Or, will you go online and argue against those who already are, so that in the event that you reach this dead-end, everybody is now in the same unfortunate position as yourself?
(3) Wal has dedicated his life to doing just that. Gravity has become his main focus in these later years.
(4) We are talking about cosmology here. What aspects of the Big Bang creation event are "falsifiable"? I mean, context matters tremendously. An important part of science is to clearly understand its limits. Cosmology is an intersection between physics and metaphysics; there are some aspects which are scientific, and others like the origin of the universe which are truthfully beyond the limits of what science can do. This has nothing to do with Peratt. It's the nature of the game.
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.
This is a clearcut vindication for plasma scaling -- the claim that plasma structure replicates over enormous scales in the manner of a fractal. Theorists are attempting today to use this observation of s
Re: " If the Electric Universe model wants to be taken as real science then it needs to have the explanatory and predictive power necessary to account for all of these evidences at least as well as dark matter."
The answer to the riddle of dark matter is as follows:
(1) At the interstellar scale, gravity is a localized force. This should be common sense, for if the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, the next nearest star would generally be around 4 miles away (this analogy goes by the name of the "Burnham Model"). Simple algebra argues against stars gravitationally interacting with one another at the interstellar scale.
(2) And if you were to actually ask a theorist for proof that Relativity applies at the largest scales, the more honest ones would admit that they lack such proof:
Bankrupting Physics: How Today's Top Scientists Are Gambling Away Their Credibility, by Alexander Unzicker and Sheilla Jones (2013), p10:
"Combing through the library, I found a well-known textbook on galactic dynamics where the authors state:
'It is worth remembering that all of the discussion so far has been based on the premise that Newtonian gravity and general relativity are correct on large scales. In fact, there is little or no direct evidence that conventional theories of gravity are correct on scales much larger than a light year or so. Newtonian gravity works extremely well on scales of 10^12 meters, the solar system (...) It is principally the elegance of general relativity and its success in solar system tests that lead us to the bold extrapolation to scales 10^19 - 10^24 meters... [3]'
Wow! Fancy that. Two leading experts claim that the law of gravity has been well tested in our solar system only -- a tiny fraction of the universe that corresponds to a single snowflake in all of Greenland. Scientists seem drawn to the 'elegance' of the theory, which is not really a scientific criterion. I often confront physicists and astronomers with this quote. Usually they shrug and reply airily, 'That is indeed true, but why shouldn't the law of gravity be valid? So far, there is nothing better to replace it.'"
- J. Binney and S. Tremaine, S. Galactic Dynamics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 635.
(3) Wal Thornhill has provided a conceptually simple explanation for gravity which may or may not be correct (I suspect he is close). What is important about his conjecture is that it shows us an example for why gravity might be a localized force. His explanation goes like this:
- Every particle within each atom is made of orbiting ~0 mass charges.
- Every subatomic particle is distorted by the presence of others to form a tiny electric dipole.
Like magnets that are free to rotate, all the electric dipoles in protons, neutrons and electrons line up to produce gravity.
Neutral atoms distorted by gravity induce an electric field inside of a body.
The idea is useful, even if incorrect, because it gives us a simple framework to think and pivot from. For example, it's easy enough to see that gravity should be a localized force with such a mechanism. And we've seen this sort of thing elsewhere -- namely, the Van der Waals.
(4) So, what is happening at the largest scales? We know enough at this point to have a good clue about it. Consider, for example, this clue whose importance has been completely missed by the mainstream:
Many disc galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have a central bulge that resembles either a box or an unshelled peanut. This bulge may form when the circular orbits of
It really seems, from conversations with people who have been on Slashdot since the early years, that the low quality of discussions which have dominated for the past 10 years or so has caused the best contributors to leave this platform. Here's an example of the kind of conversations we see in other places on the topic of the Electric Universe. This comment was attached to a Thunderbolts Project video on youtube...
I've been looking into General Relativity (GR) these past months because of the severe criticism on this channel (my background is in math so differential geometry is not scary to me) and I've found some interesting points:
1) As I suspected for a long time Einstein is not the mythical genius who thought of relativity all by his own, indeed now I even appreciate more Maxwell & Riemann, two men I already knew to be great scientists and who deserve as much (if not more) accolades for Special Relativity (Maxwell) and General Relativity (Riemann).
2) The field equation of GR is an equity between the curvature of space and the total forces and is usually stated as: G = cT , G is the curvature (representing Gravity), c is a constant and T is the stress tensor. This statement leaves a very important term, namely the electromagnetic forces. The field equation should be written as: G = cT + M , where M is a tensor containing all the electromagnetic forces. In a half-dozen textbooks I checked only one has this tensor and the author immediately discard it because EM forces are "negligible" and proceed with using the field equation without it.
3) All the empirical "proofs" of GR are actually confirmation of the special case of the Schwarzschild Solution--valid only for the scale of the solar system--and not the general case. This is very important as this solution is derived with some guess work (even the general case have some guess work) with an eye to the Newtonian limit. There is no empirical confirmation of GR on the galactic or cosmological scales.
4) GR (minus the EM tensor) has field to explain the anomalies observed on the Galactic and Cosmological scale, resulting in the idiotic concepts of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. There seem to be no attempt to reconsider GR or utilize the electromagnetic term (long forgotten) to explain the anomalies resulting in acceptance of Dark Matter/Energy instead.
I conclude that the EM forces can be neglected on the Solar System scale but they have to be taken into account on larger and larger scale. For example Dr. Scott's article showing the velocity profile of a galaxy following the Berkland current profile certainly a strong indicator that EM forces play a major role on the Galactic scale.
Come on, Slashdot. Stop being a cesspool of rants every time the topic of cosmology comes up.
"Most people when they paint themselves into a corner will admit their mistake and splash their way out. Mainstream cosmologists turn round and dismantle the corner brick by brick until the building comes down on top of them.
Faced with observations of the motion of galaxies that can't be explained by gravity alone, it would seem reasonable to consider the possibility that electromagnetism might be responsible. After all, since science began physicists have been able to find only four different types of force: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, the last two of which act only at very small sub-atomic distances. Unfortunately however, there is less kudos in working with the classical physics of electromagnetism than in an exposition of some unexpected consequence of general relativity, and general relativity only deals with gravity."
- Harry Nielsen, Crisis in Cosmology (not in any manner affiliated with the Thunderbolts Group)
Halton Arp was hardly a "crackpot". He was Edwin Hubble's protege, and both Arp and Hubble were together skeptical of the now-accepted interpretation for redshift. The mainstream moved ahead with that interpretation regardless.
Up to the point where Arp published his paper demonstrating that the assumption that redshift must have only one interpretation was wrong (of course removing the most important argument for the Big Bang), he was considered the world's leading authority on disrupted galaxies. In fact, those galaxies are still labeled by their "Arp number" to this day.
Once he started pitching the argument that galaxies also have an intrinsic redshift value which from observations appears to derive from their age, he was removed from his telescope time. This was actually part of a much larger historical context where Caltech seized the Palomar telescope which was up to that point jointly operated with the Carnegie Foundation. Once they took control of that machine, they made sure that only research which supported the Big Bang hypothesis could be done on it...
Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
Halton Arp
"In the 1940's the largest telescope of its time, the 200-inch at Palomar, was conceived and built. Since Rockefeller and Carnegie were rival capitalists the Rockefeller Foundation could only give the money to California Institute of Technology rather than the Carnegie Institution of Washington where the world's leading astronomers were. Cal Tech, however had no Astronomy Department so an agreement was signed between the two Institutions that they would jointly operate the Observatory. The noted Carnegie astronomers such as Hubble, Baade, R. Minkowski then initially used most of the telescope time. Younger staff members were gradually included...
Quasars were discovered in 1963 and astronomers rushed to observe them because they assumed their high redshifts meant they were at great distances and that the nature of the universe would thereby be revealed. The Cal Tech radio astronomer who isolated the positions of the first quasars asked for telescope time to observe their spectra and obtain their redshifts. He was told only certain of the faculty could observe with the 200-inch telescope. Those select few went on to measure the spectra and reap the headlines and the original discoverer left the field in disgust...
There followed an interregnum of about 17 years in which the Cal Tech astronomy Department pressed for a larger and larger share of the telescope time. One must know that in the operating agreement for the Observatory that the Carnegie astronomers were appointed full faculty members at Cal Tech. Then in 1980 Cal Tech broke the agreement, taking over the 200-inch and severing the faculty appointments of the Carnegie astronomers. There were bitter protests by the suddenly discharged faculty (Appeals to the American Association of University Professors were not heeded)..."
You might consider looking more carefully at the actual history for how we've arrived at this conclusion of a Big Bang.
It's curious to watch people pretending today like there is only one way to bend starlight. The current craze over gravitational lensing actually began with a panic by mainstream astronomers...
Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
Halton Arp
"Prior to the 1950's Fritz Zwicky, the Swiss astronomer who had an illustrious and turbulent career in California, was aware that strong gravitational fields had been shown to bend light rays -- as in the famous eclipse observations of the displacement of positions of stars observed at a grazing angle to the sun's limb. At that time he started looking for an extragalactic object which might be directly behind another, and thus have its outer light rays bent inward by the gravitational field of the foreground object so that it formed a ring or halo. Some 'ring galaxies' were found, but they all seemed to be physical rings around the galaxy and not magnified background objects.
The more common situation to be expected was when the background object was not exactly centered and the gravitational ring collapsed into a one sided arc. But no striking examples of that were found either, so the subject had gone dormant. The sudden revival of gravitational lensing to the huge industry it is today is simply due to the quasars. In the 1960's and 70's I started finding high densities of quasars concentrated around nearby, low-redshift galaxies. Because of their high redshifts, it was felt that they could not be associated with low-redshift galaxies...
The Einstein Cross...
... When it was first discovered it caused a panic because it was essentially a high redshift quasar in the nucleus of a low redshift galaxy... Gravitational galaxy lensing had to be invoked for this one...
'We put the slit of the spectrograph between quasars A and B in the Einstein Cross and we registered a broad Lyman alpha emission in each quasar. But between them we found a narrow Lyman alpha line -- it looks like there is some low density gas at the same redshift as the quasars between them.' A jolt ran through me and I looked at him to try to read the expression on his face. As usual in such situations, his eyes avoided mine. The point was, of course, that a line between quasar A and B passed directly between the nucleus of the galaxy and quasar D. On the face of it high redshift gas was indicated near the nucleus of the low redshift galaxy. But what I knew, and what anyone can know looking at the Lyman alpha centered photograph in Color Plate 7-7, is that there is a putative Lyman alpha filament connecting quasar D to the galaxy nucleus. What the spectrum had confirmed was that this indeed was a low density, excited hydrogen filament connecting the two objects of vastly different redshift."
If you actually review discussions of the original observation, it's very clear that the astronomers were not considering any alternative hypotheses...
The Impact of Gravitating Lensing on Astrophysics, Martin J. Rees Institute of Astronomy, Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 OHA
"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 problem, of course, is that Halton Arp -- Edwin Hubble's protege -- very much was able to produce an alternative hypothesis (based upon ejection from active galactic nuclei), and once he suggested it in a published work, he was removed from his telescope time.
The following quote seems to reveal the secret sauce of micro-lensing:
Gravitational Lensing: An Astrophysical Tool
"1.3 Models
The small number of observables in lensing means that the observat
None of these people are adherents of the Electric Universe, yet they are all saying the same thing.
"Most people when they paint themselves into a corner will admit their mistake and splash their way out. Mainstream cosmologists turn round and dismantle the corner brick by brick until the building comes down on top of them.
Faced with observations of the motion of galaxies that can't be explained by gravity alone, it would seem reasonable to consider the possibility that electromagnetism might be responsible. After all, since science began physicists have been able to find only four different types of force: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, the last two of which act only at very small sub-atomic distances. Unfortunately however, there is less kudos in working with the classical physics of electromagnetism than in an exposition of some unexpected consequence of general relativity, and general relativity only deals with gravity."
- Harry Nielsen, Crisis in Cosmology
"An iron curtain divides the subjects of gravity and electrodynamics, in today’s academically accepted versions of physics. Those attempting to cross it will risk the intellectual equivalent of machine-gun fire..."
- Laurence Hecht, Should The Law Of Gravity Be Repealed? The Suppressed Electrodynamics of Ampère-Gauss-Weber, Spring 2001 editorial of 21st Century Science & Technology
"It seems crucial to try to unite at least gravitation and electromagnetism. That remains the most important problem faced by physicists today. Einstein is the one who originally issued this ambitious challenge; no one has been able to meet it thus far."
- Etienne Klein & Marc Lachièze-Rey, The Quest for Unity - The Adventure of Physics, p.124
"If you go on asking why? why? why? you end up with a fundamental question either in particle physics or cosmology: the sciences of the very small and the very large."
- Martin Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat (2001) p.155
"Moreover, physics is now faced with a crisis in which it is generally admitted that further changes will have to take place, which will probably be as revolutionary compared to relativity and the quantum theory as these theories are compared to classical physics."
- Bohm, David, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, D. Van Nostrand Co., New York, 1957, p.131
"Experiments on high speed electrons by Kaufmann, Bucherer, and others showed that at these high speeds the observed values of the acceleration 'a' fell below the level computed from the measured values of F and m, following a pattern which indicated that it would reach zero at the velocity of light. Einstein then decided that this was due to an increase in the mass at these high velocities. At this point he should have been told by his scientific colleagues that this variable mass hypothesis was only one of a number of mathematically equivalent possible explanations of the observed phenomenon, and that neither the hypothesis of mass increase nor any of the others could be accepted on more than a very tentative basis pending the accumulation of further evidence...
... But this is not the way that modern science operates. Einstein's assumption was enthusiastically accepted without further ado, and since that time the original experiments that his explanation was designed to fit, together with subsequent results of the same nature in the particle accelerators, have been regarded as proof of the validity of the hypothesis: a flagrant example of circular reasoning."
- Dewey B. Larson, New Light on Space & Time
"Einstein in 1920 (many years after his Relativity papers) said:
'Space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would b
Re: "The few predictions it can make have been shown to be wrong"
As I've stated in another thread here, you are blocking the best explanation we currently have for the observed layering of cosmic plasmas. A person need only go to the first nearest plasma to Earth -- its ionosphere -- and you will immediately run into the unavoidable problem of explaining how it can be that the different regions exist as layers which do not recombine or mix. In other words, why do plasmas exhibit structure with well-defined edges, where plus and minus charge can coexist without apparently recombining to form neutral matter? Your insistence that the cosmic plasmas are not behaving as laboratory plasmas blocks the most scientific explanation we have for layering in plasmas: the double layer.
Your insistence that Relativity must be right ignores the conflict which existed long before the Electric Universe ever came onto the scene -- one of the problems which the EU actually tries to solve -- that quantum mechanics is irreconcilable with Relativity. One or the other (or both) will need to undergo significant changes in order to create an internally consistent modern physics worldview. The treatment of theorists who are attempting to find such novel solutions (without rigid adherence to the existing theories) as somehow heretical would seem to entrench modern science into this irreconcilable state forever. There can come a point where defense of scientific theories becomes defense against innovation in the sciences.
Re: "Relativity works. There has been no experiment where it has had a negative outcome."
Entire books have been written on this topic, but the most important reason why your statement misleads is because you are referring to the accuracy and precision of the equations, whereas the actual debate on these matters has always been over the physical inference.
Yeah, how dare people discuss the idea that electricity flows through space in a tech forum? And no less, in regards to a mission whose purpose is to resolve "burning questions -- and some sizzling mysteries -- about the orb of hot plasma that lights up our Solar System". Nevermind the fact that the inverse corona temperature enigma is a mystery for the vey reason that it's power source is claimed to come from its core; I mean, we should leave it up to the scientists to come up with "a complex system of plasma, magnetic fields, and energetic particles" to explain how it can be that the farther we get from the power source, the higher the temperatures become.
Koberlein admits 4 years later that he was wrong to claim that the Electric Universe predicts no neutrinos, but take a look at the link you posted: He has left the claim there in his personal blog, without any mention of the mistake. Not only does he refuse to have his critiques reviewed, but when he is informed of obvious mistakes, he also refuses to retract those mistaken claims. This is the process which you are supporting by passing along his links. I'm always amused that people who claim to believe so strongly in the value of peer review will gladly point to unreviewed critiques so long as they personally agree with the claims being made.
Re: "The electric force travels faster than the speed of light with near-infinite velocity."
You've completely misstated this point, to the point of causing confusion. What Wal has suggested is that electrons have subparticles (he calls them "subtrons"). It is the subtrons which are interacting at near-infinite velocity and which confer quantum physics' mysterious attributes (absolutely not the electric force, which of course results from electrons -- not subtrons). Using this approach, it also becomes possible to explain gravity as a form of electron dipole distortion, much like what we already know about how the Van der Waals force works. This approach offers us a possible way to reconcile the quantum and gravity domains -- a problem which you of course fail to mention in your attempt here to discredit the EU. Their only crime here is to try to solve the problem that you fail to mention -- a problem which you will still be stuck with if you remove the EU from the conversation.
But, it's also incorrect to state that this constitutes their "central thesis". The central thesis is the conversation which we've been having here about how to model cosmic plasmas. When engaging these topics, its crucial to start there, because if you talk to people who consider themselves to be adherents, they will not place a whole lot of importance on subtrons, and you may also run into people who engage the EU topics, but who do not necessarily agree that all aspects of Relativity are wrong. Just like in mainstream physics, to the extent that people are thinking for themselves, you're going to observe a full spectrum of beliefs -- some better put together than others, of course.
"The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that many of his ideas were wrong or silly or in gross contradiction to the facts. Rather, the worst aspect is that some scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky's ideas. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge. And there's no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system. And the history of the study of our solar system shows clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong -- and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources."
Setting aside the fact that the existence of mathematics does not somehow make it correct, it is absolutely misleading to assert that there is no mathematics associated with either electrical cosmology (for example here) or the Electric Universe (for example here). In fact, understanding both require a deep appreciation for the Lorentz Force and Maxwell's Equations. Mathematics has been a part of electrical cosmology from its inception (for example here).
Math is crucial for understanding the critical ionization velocity effect; it has been used to show how Marklund convection can replace gravitational accretion as a system for forming stars (and unlike the idea of stars accreting gravitationally, the geometry matches observations of actual stars forming all at once in a burst). Don Scott could not have accurately predicted the structure of AGN jets without significant amounts of mathematics. He's a retired EE professor, so he has spent his life immersed in these mathematics which you claim the EU does not include.
Attempts to model space without electrodynamic plasma physics concepts are destined to fail. We know this because it's already been tried, and the approach has failed to explain the nature of the many cosmic plasma structures we observe.
Think about it this way: What is the first plasma we encounter as we leave the Earth? It's the ionosphere. You may not know a whole lot about the ionosphere, but if you've been paying attention at all, you will at least understand that it is layered.
You might spend some time thinking about why that is. Why should differing concentrations of charge exist in layers at all? Why not just a smooth gradient of charge that tapers off as one leaves Earth? Why should differing, adjacent regions of charge not neutralize one another?
"As neither double layer nor circuit can be derived from magnetofluid models of a plasma, such models are useless for treating energy transfer by means of double layers. They must be replaced by particle models and circuit theory.
A simple circuit is suggested which is applied to the energizing of auroral particles, to solar flares, and to intergalactic double radio sources... Double layers in space should be classified as a new type of celestial object." ("Double Layers and Circuits in Astrophysics", Hannes Alfven, IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Dec 1986)
In a 1992 paper titled, "Double Layers Do Accelerate Particles in the Auroral Zone," the authors plainly state:
"the direct observational evidence for substantial (multi-kV) electrostatic potential structures in the auroral zone is plentiful [16-27].
The Earth's auroral zone is far from being fully understood, but observations clearly show that electrostatic-potential structures (called double layers or electrostatic shocks) reside in the auroral magnetosphere."
Observations of laboratory plasmas have shown that double layers are what lend plasmas their structure. When you see a plasma filament in a novelty plasma globe, you should be asking: Why is charge confined to this thin filament? Laboratory plasma physicists point to the double layer as the source of this structure.
You should also be asking these same types of questions about the Van Allen Radiation belts: How can it be that these belts have all of this
Slashdot Mirror
What I notice about the Quora claim is that the person did not include their algebra. He is making a claim about algebra, but fails to go through the math.
By contrast, others have indeed gone through the math, like here in the 2nd and 3rd bubbles and the answer of ~21,000 lbs would seem to be very far shy of the largest dinosaur weights. It seems very unlikely that fiddling with bone and muscle densities (etc) is going to make up the difference to the 176,000 pounds that the sauropod is claimed to have weighed.
The weight of the largest land-walking dinosaurs is a paradox.
The largest flying creatures from these times are also a paradox. 8 meters was thought to be the theoretical wingspan limit for any airborne creature -- at least until Quetzalcoatlus specimens were found.
What we see in these scientific disciplines are theorists fiddling with the numbers and behaviors in order to satisfy the paradox that they cannot exist in our current gravity. For instance, it has been claimed that the Pteranodon did not actually fly -- but rather could only glide. Yet, in some cases, the remains of these creatures are found with fish fossils and the bird had a throat pouch like a pelican. So, the creature goes down to scoop up some fish, and then what? How does it get back up to its nest? It doesn't seem that people think much about these problems these days.
Regardless, the largest flying creatures were a paradox.
Then, there are the problematic necks of the largest-necked creatures. Giraffes require an extraordinary blood pressure to get blood to their necks 20 feet up. But, the sauropod had a neck of about 50-60 feet in length! This raises issues related to not just blood pressure, but also torque.
Do the math on this blood pressure and torque, and the largest-necked creatures were a paradox.
Theorists will typically try to address just one of these problems at a time (by suggesting that the sauropod did not elevate its neck, reducing bone density or proposing that the air must have been thicker, for example), but it would seem that the only way to resolve all three problems at once is to alter gravity, no?
Airplanes are not bound by Galileo's square-cube law.
The Thunderbolts site does not claim that an electric discharge changed gravity. If you were to read through their materials, you'd see that the claim that David Talbott is making -- for which there is not absolute consensus amongst adherents to electrical cosmology -- is that the Earth was for a limited time part of a Herbig-Haro formation -- which is an unstable, yet astronomically observed, configuration for astronomical bodies in space where the bodies are strung out in a line, and exist in much closer proximity to one another. This alternative configuration would be part of what caused this lowered state for gravity, and the electric discharge was only related to the unstable configuration's breakup.
There are other comparative mythologists -- like Rens van der Sluijs -- who do believe that there is very important astronomical and planetary sciences history within the earliest mythological archetypes, but who have ended up at a more "uniformitarian" set of conclusions. Where there exists consensus is on the fact that the earliest stories told by mankind are infused with far more astronomical content than modern scientists are willing to recognize, and also that it is not possible to interpret the earliest mythological archetypes without using the tools of laboratory plasma physics.
It's important to stress the peculiar nature of our current solar system. We've seen enough exoplanetary systems by now to understand that our solar system could be remarkably unique -- which probably means that it is a completely awful template to use for constructing a hypothesis for how planets form. So, although people have and do make fun of David Talbott for proposing an exotic former state for our solar system, it would seem that our current solar system may not really be a "typical" solar system at all. The truth of the matter -- only occasionally acknowledged by the science journalists -- is that our planetary sciences theories are in a state of disarray at this point for the very reason that theorists have trouble assembling the systems that we can now clearly see without proposing planetary migrations.
What tends to happen with hypotheses is that when they begin, they start as very simple ideas. The nebular hypothesis was straightforward and seemed to work very well for many years. As we've observed a lot of different systems, that old idea is not faring so well. But, culturally, since we are all taught it, we tend to cling to it. It's all that most people know, so people who propose alternatives are perceived as sort of wacky. But, the situation in the planetary sciences is quite dire at this point: Even the scientists are at this point in time being forced to consider some pretty wacky ideas.
Why did winged dinosaurs the size of small airplanes exist? They certainly couldn't fly in our current gravity.
Paradoxes are a human invention. Nature's never heard of 'em.
Galileo's Square-Cube Law appears to work for all land-walking animals alive today, but the scientific community seems to ignore its problematic application to the dinosaurs. Is it because there would seem to be a number of dinosaurs which could not seemingly exist in today's gravity?
Something additional to note is the common occurrence of serious bone diseases such as osteoporosis and arthritis observed in mammoth remains, for this could be called a vindication for the idea that mammoths existed at the very edge of the Square-Cube Law, or that a change in gravity is part of what destroyed them. There's additional discussion of the situation here
Ultimately, there is no need to agree. And if you look at how the history of science has played out, what you will clearly observe is that science benefits enormously from the existence of rational disagreement and debate. My general approach is to delay judgment on controversies for as long as possible, because what I observe as an anti-pattern in domains like cosmology where uncertainty abounds is that people trend towards judging prematurely. The better approach in such cases is to systematically track. If academia was functioning in an ideologically responsible manner these days, where they were more concerned about producing innovations than defending hundred-year-old theories against innovation, that is what they would be teaching. The thing is, I've been tracking this debate now for a full 12 years, and it is becoming harder to avoid judgment in the light of the observable trends.
Re: "People claim relativity's true because it explains and has predicted a lot of things, and nobody's come up with anything that contradicts it."
The truth of the situation is that there is no real need for absolute consensus upon an inference which exists at the very edge of our ability to sense and judge what is going on.
To provide a very real-world example, I have a close (surprisingly young) electrical engineer friend who has been working tirelessly towards the full unification of aether with the Electric Universe and quantum mechanics, and presumably gravity. Every time that I pass on some new insight or information on these topics, he rebuts me with 10 details that I was not even aware of. He has voraciously digested everything that has ever been published on the topics of aether and Relativity; he recalls these details as though they happened yesterday. This culture of intolerance towards people who are pursuing these matters is extremely short-sighted, anti-innovative and presumptive that such people will never succeed in their efforts. There's more than enough room in physics for competing ideas about the fundamental nature of space, and you and I both know that if any sort of innovation was to emerge from such works, even the most vocal defenders of Relativity would not think twice about using such innovations.
Re: "Until you realize this, there's no point in continuing the discussion."
As the situation currently stands, you are free to throw shade on efforts to find better theories without any future penalty if you prove wrong. There are no consequences for being wrong, and of course no need to endure the social stigma that the innovators must endure every day for your eventual benefit. The inventors of the rocket and the laser, and the discoverers of epigenetics, plate tectonics and radio waves from space all persisted in spite of incredible intellectual hostility. It seems that throughout American history, we have repeatedly prioritized our own personal desire to feel right over the unknown possibilities which might result from being wrong. These cultural patterns, without a doubt, throttle the rate of innovation within our country.
Re: "But for the paradigm-shifting hypotheses to deserve serious attention they need to be robust enough to explain and predict what the current leading theory does, and preferably some of its shortcomings, in a falsifiable manner. So I find the Electrical Universe model trying to explain way too much with sporadic and tangentially related data."
All ideas obviously begin in an archaic state. I try to focus on scientific controversies more broadly, so I don't really want to leave the impression that the Electric Universe is the only one I follow. But, I feel confident based upon what I have seen that the trends are favoring electrical cosmology. By the ends of our lifetimes, enough ground will be covered that we will begin to approach parity in the support -- and at that point, the people who have gone online to argue against it will probably regret these behaviors. As I've stated in the many posts on this subject, these trends are not reported by science journalists, and so are invisible to anybody who does not first learn and then actively track the claims in the light of new observations. After having tracked the EU for a full 12 years, I feel that tracking is the missing secret sauce to judging competing scientific theories because it introduces an element of surprise which theorists cannot spin. When some observation is made which surprises the mainstream, the consistent pattern is that they will admit their surprise for the first few days. Then, as they confer, the pattern is that they become emboldened to adopt the mindset that the anomaly has always been known and predicted. It's a very consistent pattern. However, what they are not doing is tracking, and this is the fatal flaw in a culture which no longer values generalists. Specialization has become so intense that they can no longer understand completely valid arguments which originate from adjacent domains.
Re: "I'm aware of the galactic filaments in the universe, but I don't see how all this leads to an internally consistent alternative to the leading theories of dark matter and general relativity"
You should learn about the subject-object transition. I think you have adopted an ideal for how to think about science which you might benefit from questioning. People have studied how leaders (like CEO's) think, and a key quality is an ability to rapidly switch between competing -- even conflicting -- frameworks. Here is an excellent quote which greatly impacted my own thinking, and which I think sums up the situation quite well:
Here's the graphic I think you s
Re: "What we have is theories that have made lots of verified predictions, and which have survived lots of falsification attempts."
You are pointing to the accuracy and precision of the mathematics of Relativity, while glossing over the fact that Einstein lifted all of this math from the aether theorists. The debate over Relativity has always been over the physical inference, not the accuracy and precision of the mathematics. There are countless examples, but here is just one:
What we know is that Einstein had the luxury of fitting his physical inference to the mathematics. People who subsequently point to the accuracy and precision of the math to establish the physical inference's validity are pitching circular logic.
Re: "3) In other words, there are no falsifiable predictions, so the Electric Universe is not currently a scientific theory."
Each framework begins in a different theoretical place. The fact that plasma cosmology begins with plasmas, and works its way towards a better explanation for gravity, is not an argument against it; it's merely an observation that the two frameworks exhibit differing coverage. There is nothing extraordinary about this. You want a neat and tidy situation where you can compare apples to apples, but reality is not neat-and-tidy as you wish. That's hardly an argument for which idea will win out.
Re: "If there are such currents, and they're strong enough to have effects, why haven't we noticed some effects? That needs to be answered."
The currents are observed to be creating both stars and galaxies. You just don't see it because you've failed to learn the by-now extensive history of the Birkeland current concept.
Re: "Also, your attack on the Big Bang theories is irrelevant as well as ignorant (if you actually understood them, you'd have some idea why they're considered science, and you'd attack that idea)."
I very much understand the "evidence" of the CMB, and here are some details which your science journalism has failed to inform you about:
The idea that the microwaves coming at us from all directions must necessarily indicate an expansion is total nonsense. It is one of the greatest collective delusions in the history of modern science.
The idea of expansion was proposed by a Catholic priest:
You might take that into consideration when you contemplate why the Big Bang is so popul
Re: "How, tell me, should a planet not only move across the orbits of several other planets without disturbing them AT ALL but then suddenly change its velocity enough to actually change its orbit? Do you have a faint idea just how much energy is necessary for something like this?"
Who says that the planets were not disturbed at all? Plato clearly states the fact that they were indeed disturbed, and further, that all of mythology is an attempt to convey this event:
... then further on ...
What do you think he means by "a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time?" Plato of course had no idea what gravity was, but he appears to be describing a debris field that returns to the planet over many years. In fact, that's one very logical way to explain why cultures like the Mayans would construct calendars which far exceed the seasonal variations necessary to farm.
What I notice is that when data does not conform to peoples' pre-existing notions, they tend to just completely ignore it. Taken at face value, the following data would seem to suggest that something extremely fundamental has changed in our solar system:
Re: "At the very least we could have seen a significant difference in temperature if the planet radiated 15% more energy than it receives."
Your expectations would seem to be wrong, but there have been additional vindications regardless:
R.A. Kerr, "Venus is looking too Pristine," Science, Vol. 250 (Nov. 16, 1990), p.912.
David Talbott is the only person -- academics included -- to ever tell the complete history for how astrophysicists came to adopt magnetohydrodynamics as the model of choice for explaining cosmic plasmas. This single act, alone, is profoundly historical, because the story is sufficiently awkward that academics refuse to tell it.
Velikovsky was the first person to predict that Venus' temperature should be hot, and he did so at a time when the entire scientific community assumed Venus should be much like the Earth beneath the cloud cover. Velikovsky was of course a close friend of Einstein, who in his later years, took great interest in Velikovsky's work (Einstein's followers have traditionally and famously failed to live up to his own nuanced skepticism of his own work). You might try harder to ask how it could be that Velikovsky knew that Venus must be hot. He did so by studying ancient documents, which curiously recorded Venus' arrival in human-historical times into our solar system as a comet:
Velikovsky's successful prediction was one of the reasons for the Venus Pioneer mission: the scientists decided to generate their own evidence for a runaway greenhouse effect, in order to undermine Velikovsky's analysis from ancient texts. They miserably failed:
(1) Notice what neither you nor anybody else in the mainstream ever talks about: There must be some typical distance between stars at which they stop interacting with one another. What is this distance? I, and some others, have argued that the typical force of 1.5 x 10-14 Earth gee's meets this requirement. This is a completely inconsequential force, and nobody should be attempting to construct a cosmology based upon forces like this. All of you are wasting your time. We can already see that nothing will come of any of these efforts, yet you persist. I mean no offense by suggesting it, but it seems to me that you do so simply because this is what we were all taught, and you're struggling to reset your mental framework.
(2) You're thinking too deeply about the words I am using, and not enough about the nature of the situation. Look, for example, at the human body: If you traverse through the scales of the human body, you will progress through a variety of situations which have differing dominant forces: at the bacterial scale, gravity is inconsequential and the electric force dominates; at other scales, the effects of water or chemistry may dominate; at our perception, gravity dominates. In the electrical view, the universe is very much like a large organism. In fact, the term plasma was coined as a reference to blood plasma -- because it appears alive. In the laboratory, plasmas naturally form vessels which transport charge (we call them Birkeland currents); the plasma observably forms cell walls which protect their charge (we call them plasma double layers); the plasma forms into macro-structures like stars (similar to cells) and galaxies (similar to organs). Halton Arp has observed the galaxies essentially procreating. His ejection hypothesis even observes damage to the host during the process of birthing (he became famous for cataloging these "peculiar galaxies").
The point of what I am doing above is to demonstrate that there is more than one mental framework which we can approach the problem with, and the very fact that dark matter has not been found even as the instrumentation has become a million times more sensitive suggests that your own favored approach is rapidly approaching its endpoint. So, what are you going to do about it? Will you decide to seek out alternative frameworks? Or, will you go online and argue against those who already are, so that in the event that you reach this dead-end, everybody is now in the same unfortunate position as yourself?
(3) Wal has dedicated his life to doing just that. Gravity has become his main focus in these later years.
(4) We are talking about cosmology here. What aspects of the Big Bang creation event are "falsifiable"? I mean, context matters tremendously. An important part of science is to clearly understand its limits. Cosmology is an intersection between physics and metaphysics; there are some aspects which are scientific, and others like the origin of the universe which are truthfully beyond the limits of what science can do. This has nothing to do with Peratt. It's the nature of the game.
And either way, it is already admitted by the ESA that ...
This is a clearcut vindication for plasma scaling -- the claim that plasma structure replicates over enormous scales in the manner of a fractal. Theorists are attempting today to use this observation of s
Re: " If the Electric Universe model wants to be taken as real science then it needs to have the explanatory and predictive power necessary to account for all of these evidences at least as well as dark matter."
The answer to the riddle of dark matter is as follows:
(1) At the interstellar scale, gravity is a localized force. This should be common sense, for if the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, the next nearest star would generally be around 4 miles away (this analogy goes by the name of the "Burnham Model"). Simple algebra argues against stars gravitationally interacting with one another at the interstellar scale.
(2) And if you were to actually ask a theorist for proof that Relativity applies at the largest scales, the more honest ones would admit that they lack such proof:
Bankrupting Physics: How Today's Top Scientists Are Gambling Away Their Credibility, by Alexander Unzicker and Sheilla Jones (2013), p10:
(3) Wal Thornhill has provided a conceptually simple explanation for gravity which may or may not be correct (I suspect he is close). What is important about his conjecture is that it shows us an example for why gravity might be a localized force. His explanation goes like this:
The idea is useful, even if incorrect, because it gives us a simple framework to think and pivot from. For example, it's easy enough to see that gravity should be a localized force with such a mechanism. And we've seen this sort of thing elsewhere -- namely, the Van der Waals.
(4) So, what is happening at the largest scales? We know enough at this point to have a good clue about it. Consider, for example, this clue whose importance has been completely missed by the mainstream:
It really seems, from conversations with people who have been on Slashdot since the early years, that the low quality of discussions which have dominated for the past 10 years or so has caused the best contributors to leave this platform. Here's an example of the kind of conversations we see in other places on the topic of the Electric Universe. This comment was attached to a Thunderbolts Project video on youtube ...
Come on, Slashdot. Stop being a cesspool of rants every time the topic of cosmology comes up.
- Harry Nielsen, Crisis in Cosmology (not in any manner affiliated with the Thunderbolts Group)
Halton Arp was hardly a "crackpot". He was Edwin Hubble's protege, and both Arp and Hubble were together skeptical of the now-accepted interpretation for redshift. The mainstream moved ahead with that interpretation regardless.
Up to the point where Arp published his paper demonstrating that the assumption that redshift must have only one interpretation was wrong (of course removing the most important argument for the Big Bang), he was considered the world's leading authority on disrupted galaxies. In fact, those galaxies are still labeled by their "Arp number" to this day.
Once he started pitching the argument that galaxies also have an intrinsic redshift value which from observations appears to derive from their age, he was removed from his telescope time. This was actually part of a much larger historical context where Caltech seized the Palomar telescope which was up to that point jointly operated with the Carnegie Foundation. Once they took control of that machine, they made sure that only research which supported the Big Bang hypothesis could be done on it ...
Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
Halton Arp
You might consider looking more carefully at the actual history for how we've arrived at this conclusion of a Big Bang.
It's curious to watch people pretending today like there is only one way to bend starlight. The current craze over gravitational lensing actually began with a panic by mainstream astronomers ...
Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
Halton Arp
If you actually review discussions of the original observation, it's very clear that the astronomers were not considering any alternative hypotheses ...
The Impact of Gravitating Lensing on Astrophysics, Martin J. Rees Institute of Astronomy, Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 OHA
The problem, of course, is that Halton Arp -- Edwin Hubble's protege -- very much was able to produce an alternative hypothesis (based upon ejection from active galactic nuclei), and once he suggested it in a published work, he was removed from his telescope time.
The following quote seems to reveal the secret sauce of micro-lensing:
Gravitational Lensing: An Astrophysical Tool
The Thunderbolts Project has decided to cover Slashdot readers' rejection of the mainstream astrophysical acknowledgement of electricity in space in their ongoing Space News Youtube series.
None of these people are adherents of the Electric Universe, yet they are all saying the same thing.
Re: "The few predictions it can make have been shown to be wrong"
As I've stated in another thread here, you are blocking the best explanation we currently have for the observed layering of cosmic plasmas. A person need only go to the first nearest plasma to Earth -- its ionosphere -- and you will immediately run into the unavoidable problem of explaining how it can be that the different regions exist as layers which do not recombine or mix. In other words, why do plasmas exhibit structure with well-defined edges, where plus and minus charge can coexist without apparently recombining to form neutral matter? Your insistence that the cosmic plasmas are not behaving as laboratory plasmas blocks the most scientific explanation we have for layering in plasmas: the double layer.
Your insistence that Relativity must be right ignores the conflict which existed long before the Electric Universe ever came onto the scene -- one of the problems which the EU actually tries to solve -- that quantum mechanics is irreconcilable with Relativity. One or the other (or both) will need to undergo significant changes in order to create an internally consistent modern physics worldview. The treatment of theorists who are attempting to find such novel solutions (without rigid adherence to the existing theories) as somehow heretical would seem to entrench modern science into this irreconcilable state forever. There can come a point where defense of scientific theories becomes defense against innovation in the sciences.
Re: "Relativity works. There has been no experiment where it has had a negative outcome."
Entire books have been written on this topic, but the most important reason why your statement misleads is because you are referring to the accuracy and precision of the equations, whereas the actual debate on these matters has always been over the physical inference.
Yeah, how dare people discuss the idea that electricity flows through space in a tech forum? And no less, in regards to a mission whose purpose is to resolve "burning questions -- and some sizzling mysteries -- about the orb of hot plasma that lights up our Solar System". Nevermind the fact that the inverse corona temperature enigma is a mystery for the vey reason that it's power source is claimed to come from its core; I mean, we should leave it up to the scientists to come up with "a complex system of plasma, magnetic fields, and energetic particles" to explain how it can be that the farther we get from the power source, the higher the temperatures become.
Koberlein admits 4 years later that he was wrong to claim that the Electric Universe predicts no neutrinos, but take a look at the link you posted: He has left the claim there in his personal blog, without any mention of the mistake. Not only does he refuse to have his critiques reviewed, but when he is informed of obvious mistakes, he also refuses to retract those mistaken claims. This is the process which you are supporting by passing along his links. I'm always amused that people who claim to believe so strongly in the value of peer review will gladly point to unreviewed critiques so long as they personally agree with the claims being made.
Re: "The electric force travels faster than the speed of light with near-infinite velocity."
You've completely misstated this point, to the point of causing confusion. What Wal has suggested is that electrons have subparticles (he calls them "subtrons"). It is the subtrons which are interacting at near-infinite velocity and which confer quantum physics' mysterious attributes (absolutely not the electric force, which of course results from electrons -- not subtrons). Using this approach, it also becomes possible to explain gravity as a form of electron dipole distortion, much like what we already know about how the Van der Waals force works. This approach offers us a possible way to reconcile the quantum and gravity domains -- a problem which you of course fail to mention in your attempt here to discredit the EU. Their only crime here is to try to solve the problem that you fail to mention -- a problem which you will still be stuck with if you remove the EU from the conversation.
But, it's also incorrect to state that this constitutes their "central thesis". The central thesis is the conversation which we've been having here about how to model cosmic plasmas. When engaging these topics, its crucial to start there, because if you talk to people who consider themselves to be adherents, they will not place a whole lot of importance on subtrons, and you may also run into people who engage the EU topics, but who do not necessarily agree that all aspects of Relativity are wrong. Just like in mainstream physics, to the extent that people are thinking for themselves, you're going to observe a full spectrum of beliefs -- some better put together than others, of course.
Carl Sagan:
Setting aside the fact that the existence of mathematics does not somehow make it correct, it is absolutely misleading to assert that there is no mathematics associated with either electrical cosmology (for example here) or the Electric Universe (for example here). In fact, understanding both require a deep appreciation for the Lorentz Force and Maxwell's Equations. Mathematics has been a part of electrical cosmology from its inception (for example here).
Math is crucial for understanding the critical ionization velocity effect; it has been used to show how Marklund convection can replace gravitational accretion as a system for forming stars (and unlike the idea of stars accreting gravitationally, the geometry matches observations of actual stars forming all at once in a burst). Don Scott could not have accurately predicted the structure of AGN jets without significant amounts of mathematics. He's a retired EE professor, so he has spent his life immersed in these mathematics which you claim the EU does not include.
Attempts to model space without electrodynamic plasma physics concepts are destined to fail. We know this because it's already been tried, and the approach has failed to explain the nature of the many cosmic plasma structures we observe.
Think about it this way: What is the first plasma we encounter as we leave the Earth? It's the ionosphere. You may not know a whole lot about the ionosphere, but if you've been paying attention at all, you will at least understand that it is layered. You might spend some time thinking about why that is. Why should differing concentrations of charge exist in layers at all? Why not just a smooth gradient of charge that tapers off as one leaves Earth? Why should differing, adjacent regions of charge not neutralize one another?
The math here explains why.
In a 1992 paper titled, "Double Layers Do Accelerate Particles in the Auroral Zone," the authors plainly state:
Observations of laboratory plasmas have shown that double layers are what lend plasmas their structure. When you see a plasma filament in a novelty plasma globe, you should be asking: Why is charge confined to this thin filament? Laboratory plasma physicists point to the double layer as the source of this structure.
You should also be asking these same types of questions about the Van Allen Radiation belts: How can it be that these belts have all of this