We live in very interesting times, where things -- like electricity -- which are extraordinarily mundane down here on Earth are apparently just completely preposterous in the context of space.
Re: "Uh, the vast majority of models I've seen are at least resistive, and often gyrokinetic or flat out kinetic instead of fluid. PIC is really popular for astrophysical plasmas, and a lot of the work on relativistic plasmas can't be fluid model at all."
There's an overt disconnect between what you are saying and the relentless onslaught of fluids concepts that appears within the analysis of astronomical plasmas. Whether or not the models in use are technically referred to as "fluids models", what is happening with them is that the plasmas are being modeled as fluids, without reference to electrodynamic plasma concepts observed within the laboratory.
There are by now numerous laboratory plasma physics concepts which generally don't appear in astrophysics papers -- including double layers, plasma instabilities (aka Peratt intabilities), z-pinches, critical ionization velocities, Marklund convection, and of course the force-free field-aligned Birkeland current.
Let's take an example from just this week. If you go to the original paper, it states:
Using numerical radiation hydrodynamical models, we show that the light curve of KSN 2015K is well fitted by a model where the supernova runs into external material presumably expelled in a pre-supernova mass-loss episode.
But, anybody who has spent time working with electrodynamic plasmas in the plasma laboratory should already be very familiar with the ring of vortices morphology, because this exact type of filamentation is what happens for the highest charge-density state of a conducting plasma, known as the z-pinch. In fact, plasma physicists have been imprinting electron beams onto a variety of materials for many decades now, producing this same form in the laboratory.
When people point out the obvious problem of failing to mention the correspondence between the astronomical and laboratory forms, people who honestly should know better tend to totally lose it, and it honestly creates a very anti-science situation where the exactly correct conversations are apparently out-of-bounds.
Personally, I believe that you understand where the disconnect is happening, and are just adopting a defensive posture. Why not be honest with us, and help us to better understand, in your own words, why objects like KSN 2015K and sn1987a cannot be considered the cosmic version of laboratory z-pinches? What physical features -- not just assumptions -- actually precludes such an analysis? An honest assessment would really help to advance the conversation.
Re: "There is a lot of talk about scientists and very little talk about physical theory. As far as I can tell, EU is some conspiracy theory about scientists as opposed to a science theory. Maybe it would be more attractive and approachable if they drop the antisocial, whiny cruft and stuck to business."
It's probably unfair to judge an entire cosmology through Internet comments. Since a lot of the efforts here are focused upon correcting misconceptions, these efforts may come off to some as "whiny". For a more thoughtful introduction, you might consider, instead, reading The Electric Sky by Don Scott, which goes into great length about how we can explain astronomical observations with ordinary laboratory plasma physics observations.
If you'd prefer to avoid purchasing their book, then consider their technical introduction, The Essential Guide -- which is actually geared towards those with an EE background. It is quite technical.
Alternatively, if you come from the world of plasma physics, you'd want to also supplement these works with the second edition of Physics of the Plasma Universe And in that case, there are also a couple of papers you should read here and here, which both review critiques of MHD in good detail.
For those that just want a very basic and quick introduction, then watch these twoYoutube videos.
There is really no shortage of high-quality resources, pitched at all of the various levels. If you aren't seeing them, then that definitely says more about your own efforts to find these resources than anything else.
EU === Electric Universe, but also EU == electrical cosmology. Its central thesis is that cosmic plasmas behave as laboratory plasmas -- an important claim in light of the realization, since 1958, that most of the matter that we can see with telescopes is matter in the plasma state (>99%).
One thing to know is that in the EU, there is no dark matter problem: Since we clearly observe plasma to conduct in the laboratory, what is being claimed is that the cosmic plasma is conducting across vast distances of space over plasma filaments -- much like what is already observed with a novelty plasma globe. These filaments are referred to by mainstream astrophysicists as "interstellar clouds", but in fact, "clouds" like the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are highly filamentary. They are hardly the only ones; in fact, hydrogen filaments are ubiquitous in space, and have been shown to precede the formation of stars.
What seems to confuse a lot of people about the debate is that mainstream astrophysicists are arguing against the idea that we can model cosmic plasmas as laboratory plasmas. But, this is indeed the case. They have been using fluids models to model cosmic plasmas, and this creates the extraordinary situation that when astronomical observations exhibit the features of laboratory plasmas, even professional astrophysicists and cosmologists will commonly fail to recognize very common forms observed in the laboratory for electricity over gas. When these failures are pointed out, the debate can become extremely emotional -- and we have a situation where stating "the obvious" creates a very acrimonious situation.
Adding to IMarv's comments, the sun's neutrino output has at times varied inversely with the sun's surface sunspot count. Were the neutrinos produced in the sun's nuclear core, this relationship would be inconceivable, since solar physicists calculate that it takes about 200,000 years for the energy of internal fusion to affect the sun's surface. The observations seem to raise the possibility that fusion is occurring near the sun's surface, and it only took one non-correlated half-cycle for theorists to completely stop paying attention.
The graph which shows this anti-correlation has been deeply buried in academic papers, so I've published a copy of it here.
One thing to consider, when contemplating the situation of an anti-correlation which apparently switches between on and off states is that the Sun clearly exhibits these different states through its cycle. To observe switching behavior, and immediately use that as reason to discount the existence of an anti-correlation is honestly a rush to judgment. You know, this is why we build models.
... except that for some people who have refused to question the worldview which was taught to them in school, for whom disrupting modern science theories is interpreted as an attack upon their own personal worldview. These people can be identified by their emotional rants and general failure to cite technical arguments, and they seem unaware of the fact that their "defense of science" is also a defense against innovation in the sciences.
Re: "Either Relativity is right, or EU is right.. can't be both... and EVERY experiment done has shown Relativity is correct"
You could swap out "EU" with "quantum mechanics", and we'd be in the same exact situation.
Re: "EU doesn't explain anything experimentally"
Just to give an example, it can explain why the ionosphere is layered. There is a very simple experiment which involves charge-loading a metal sphere in a vacuum. This very simple experiment produces a layering of charge, and experimentally, that would appear to suggest that our planet Earth is a charged body in space. There are many other examples -- but realize that they are not going to just pop into your science journalism newsfeed; you have to actually seek these arguments out.
Re: "and it requires Relativity to be completely wrong"
All you've done here is to ignore the disconnect between Relativity and quantum mechanics. The two ideas cannot be made to work with one another, so simple logic suggests that at least one of them must be in error.
Also: the failure to observe dark matter, even as instrumentation for observing it has become a million times more sensitive over the past 15 years, is further reason to suspect -- as has been stated by the Electric Universe theorists -- that gravity does not dominate beyond the planetary scale.
To the extent that people contemplate alternative ideas in cosmology, they do so because of cosmology's own failure to solve these same problems.
The advancement of science requires - absolutely - what I call 'forced' induction (as opposed to 'free' induction - what animals do). This requires that you go off on your own to think independently. The extent to which you 'go off alone' determines whether you will become an acceptable scientist or what you call a 'crank'. Unfortunately, the originality of your ideas is tied inextricably to the measure of your 'aloneness'.
Other people act as guides and supports (a frame of reference) upon which you can rely to 'set you straight' when you stray into the realm of the 'illucid'. As I have said, 'Self delusion is the bane of induction'. I know this to be true from extensive personal experience. It is a real struggle to keep one's thoughts on track without the assistance of other readily available opinion.
Thus, if a scientist at Cern has a really bad idea, he may mention it to a colleague who says,
'Did you slip on a bar of soap in the shower? Don't you remember the 'X' factor we were just talking about last week?'
And then the first guy says, 'Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Forget it.'
Now he's back on track in less than ten seconds.
Someone alone however, may struggle for weeks in the same situation, unable to see a simple thing that another disinterested person would notice immediately. He may pursue the wrongheaded matter to some new bizarre conclusion and believe that he has found the Holy Grail. And the more effort he has put into it, the less he will be willing to give it up.
Therefore, if you go off alone you tend to become a 'crank'... but if you remain with the herd you tend to discover nothing new, i.e. and become a 'pundit'.
There is a Gaussian distribution here.
There are perhaps five or six thousand individuals who actually try to do 'forced induction' at the highest level. Half of them fall on the left 'crank' side of the distribution and half fall on the right 'pundit' side. Each half needs the other.
You could make the case that the 'extremes' ought to be cut off. But I would say, 'Who is to decide the cutoff point?'. I certainly wouldn't want to make such a momentous decision. Hence, I don't criticize other people's stuff in general since I understand how difficult it is to produce anything at all.
The same applies in the larger sense to wide groups of individuals. If the 'ship of science' (or one of its smaller boats) decides to drop anchor and wait for the truth to come to it... they will stagnate and you will find that many more 'cranks' pop up to point out the paucity of perpendicular progress... at the same time offering new and evermore bizarre solutions to present problems.
This is actually the present situation. The physics establishment has decided that they can proceed by experiment alone (data gathering) and that the data will tell them what to 'induce' next.
In fact, it will.
But this is the method of the animal population... fre
Namely, it will try to help us finally understand why the Sun's atmosphere is 300 times hotter than its surface, which itself is a balmy 5,727C. This fact defies basic physics and to this day is unexplained. One of the leading hypotheses to account for the heat shift comes from famed physicist Eugene Parker, after whom the probe is named. In the mid-1950s, Parker theorized that the Sun's super-heated corona could be explained by a complex system of plasma, magnetic fields, and energetic particles that spark solar explosions called "nanoflares."
There have been a few important details consistently missing from the reporting on this subject:
(1) First of all, there is never any mention of the far simpler solution where the Sun is receiving some percentage of its power supply externally. A person need not be a solar physicist to understand that such a situation would create the thermal inversion which is observed. But, this common sense approach is never suggested in the science journalism on the subject.
(2) When Eddington first proposed his thermonuclear power source, it was widely believed that interstellar space was completely empty. And it wasn't until many years after the thermonuclear model gained in popularity -- with the first instrumented rockets launched at the start of the "Space Age" -- when it was discovered that an alternative power source -- charged particles -- fill space.
The Internal Constitution of the Stars, Arthur Eddington, p.25
"The problem of the source of a star's energy will be considered; by a process of exhaustion we are driven to conclude that the only possible source of a star's energy is subatomic; yet it must be confessed that the hypothesis shows little disposition to accommodate itself to the detailed requirements of observation, and a critic might count up a large number of 'fatal' objections."
The Internal Constitution of the Stars, Arthur Eddington, p.291
"In seeking a source of energy other than contraction the first question is whether the energy to be radiated in future is now hidden in the star or whether it is being picked up continuously from outside. Suggestions have been made that the impact of meteoric matter provides the heat, or that there is some subtle radiation traversing space which the star picks up. Strong objection may be urged against these hypotheses individually; but it is unnecessary to consider them in detail because they have arisen through a misunderstanding of the nature of the problem. No source of energy is of any avail unless it liberates energy in the deep interior of the star. It is not enough to provide for the external radiation of the star. We must provide for the maintenance of the high internal temperature, without which the star would collapse. The temperature gradient from the surface to the centre cannot be maintained by supplying heat at the bottom end. If, for example, sufficient heat is developed by meteoric impact to maintain the surface of Capella at 5200', the temperature throughout the interior will fall gradually to this level and the star will no longer be distended to low density."
It seems, in retrospect -- with the added information supplied by the presence of an all-pervasive cosmic plasma -- that Eddington's logic would have to be altered by many modern observations which support an external source.
(3) Consider, for example, the persistent mystery of the solar cycle. There's not really any reason for it which would necessarily follow from a thermonuclear model for the Sun:
That's missing the point. Scientists have for years now struggled to explain how to get from gravitational accretion to the planetary system we see today. And observing other stellar systems has only served to elevate the mystery. So, what would we expect to see if a foreign star was to come close enough that it actually was very much visible? We'd expect that it should shuffle the planets around in a manner which leaves us as confused as we are.
We might also expect to see something very much like this:
"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."
I keep a personal library of modern science critiques. I know how it works by now, probably more so than most specialists -- many of which never seek to actually become generalists. It doesn't happen without trying.
It wasn't just an uninformed public who made fun of Goddard. You're looking at the past through the lens of the present. Our cultural origins were more confused than this. We did not spring out of our intellectual womb, fully formed, like from the stork. Mistakes were made. Very, very big mistakes.
I 100% agree: People who rant about chemtrails are literally mentally ill. Joe Rogan had an excellent rebuttal to this nonsense on one of his shows; I want to create a transcript, it was so good.
Personally, I believe it because I spent a few years running the Electric Universe claims against their critics. I observed the reactions, and came to realize that there is a widespread refusal to simply let the cards fall where they may. Everybody is trying to force-fit the data into their pre-existing narratives and conclusions.
I also noticed that vindications for electrical cosmology occur far more often than people realize. They convince themselves that they can ignore the idea, then they don't notice when these vindications occur. There was one just last week, with the infrared images of Jupiter's pole. The ring of vortices is a classic form from the plasma laboratory which has been observed for almost a full century now. In the early days, plasma physicists would etch electrical discharges into various media like paper, and a very common form was a ring of vortices. This is a typical shape that electricity takes when it travels through gas: The plasma filaments break up into a ring of smaller filaments (vortices in 2d cross-section). Anthony Peratt has written a couple of papers detailing these "instabilities". In fact, some people refer to them as "Peratt instabilities".
For people who refuse to track the Electric Universe debate, the infrared ring of vortices at Jupiter's two poles are a mystery. Not a single astrophysicist on Twitter or elsewhere seemed to recognize this classic laboratory plasma form. I was personally stunned -- but I'm not sure why, because it's happened many times before. For those of us who have taken the time to learn about laboratory plasmas from this debate, we immediately recognize this form -- because it is common.
Do you see what is happening here? It's very serious and very bad. Science has become so specialized that scientists cannot recognize valid critiques from neighboring domains. And since nobody is tracking controversies, there have been many other examples of such vindications which went completely unnoticed.
The whole point is that this observation is a vindication for the approach proposed by David Talbott and Ev Cochrane, and yet none of the people here noticed because it was decided that the Electric Universe is "debunked". It should present us with an important lesson about process.
Let's review each of the many problems and oversights in your logic.
First, realize that Einstein died 3 years before (1955) anybody definitively understood that the universe is dominated by plasma (1958). Do you know why? Because for 24 long years -- from 1920 to 1944 -- the American public ridiculed Robert Goddard, the first person to suggest that we could send a rocket to the Moon, for not understanding that a "rocket would have nothing in space to push against" (a common misconception back then). Do you know what stopped the ridicule? The Germans took Goddard's invention and attacked Europe with 3,000 V2 rockets. Those V2's had all of Goddard's key inventions within them, because as the American public was mocking Goddard, the Germans were intently listening to everything he said.
Apparently, the American public learned nothing at all from that event, because to this day, we continue to ridicule innovators in the sciences. Like Don Scott of the Thunderbolts Group, Goddard was an American professor.
Re: "The scientific community says "gravity has to work pretty closely to how we think or satellites (among otehr things) wouldn't be possible and they clearly are"
Einstein lifted the Lorentz transformation from the aether theorists of the day. He did not invent this math.
Re: "So you need to come back with proof that you theory is at least as good as gravity in all areas that gravity is useful and can therefore replace it entirely or reconcile the parts that contradict gravity before it can be considered a viable addition to scientific knowledge"
The Electric Universe does not begin in the same place as conventional astronomy and cosmology. It starts by recognizing that the cosmic plasma models widely applied by astrophysicists are wrong -- and once the models are corrected to reflect our laboratory observations, the dark matter problem goes away. From that vantage point, options open up for how to proceed to explain gravity. But, Anthony Peratt's galactic simulation with proper rotation curves explains what is happening at the largest scales without need for any dark matter -- meaning that it essentially meets your criteria above (just not in the way that you imagined).
The point is that we have "potential wins" on both sides of this debate. It is not a one-sided affair, for instruments designed to detect dark matter have grown a million times more sensitive over the past 15 years -- meaning that dark matter is starting to look like modern cosmology's dead end.
You could have reasoned your way to the same conclusion without having to build all of those instruments, actually, by simply considering the ridiculous scales we are talking about here: If the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, the next nearest star would be a stunning 4 miles away (!). Simple logic and some very simple algebra is screaming at you that gravity is a "localized" force, starting at the interstellar scale.
Re: "General relativity works very well and is empirically verified by things like GPS satellites"
There are plenty of rebuttals online to this thoughtless claim. I encourage you to look them up. They're not difficult to find.
Re: "Because it is mysticism instead they claim that all things are plasma (because complex nuanced positions are hard to sell)"
All that I can say is: Welcome to the Space Age -- a revolution which is, apparently, still playing out.
"Plasmas play a fundamental role in nature. Probably more than 99 percent of visible matter in the universe exist in the plasma state. Plasmas exist, e.g. as interstellar gas, in stellar atmosp
On the specific issue of magnetic reconnection, I was really referring to the fact that there are two separate sides to that debate -- and the astrophysicists, if pressed, would have a difficult time explaining the opposing arguments.
In my opinion, a huge aspect to this problem is the institutional aversion to telling certain awkward stories that relate to these topics. The mistaken assumption of empty interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic space is perhaps a prime example of a story which academics and science journalists seem to treat as sort of "rated X" insofar as they generally refuse to place any importance on it. Yet, it can be traced back to the selection of numerous theories in the early 1900's. For example,
"Alfven's proposal of a galactic magnetic field met with widespread resistance (if not scorn), as it directly contradicted the prevailing wisdom that a vacuum filled interstellar space."
"Since we are limited to energy liberated in the deep interior of the star, extraneous sources of supply are ruled out, and it is scarcely possible to escape the conclusion that the supply of energy for future expenditure is already hidden in the star. Energy, however, cannot be successfully hidden; it betrays itself by its manifestation as mass. Energy and mass are equivalent, and we know the masses of the stars."
Although I don't have an authoritative source on hand, it can also be shown that Sydney Chapman used the assumption to reject Kristian Birkeland's proposal that the aurora originated with the Sun.
These are remarkable historical observations insofar as we today know that this assumption was incorrect (And more than that, the mistaken assumption was hiding from Eddington an alternative potential power source.)
The thing about this is that it's rare to see anybody connecting the dots between this former mistaken assumption and the theories which "won out" as popular today -- yet, it is also remarkably easy to show that it did in fact play a part. And there can be little doubt that even Einstein's work could also be implicated as basing on it, for the first instrumented probes were not actually sent to space until 1958 -- 3 years after his death. So, can it be that Einstein was simply working with what he had available to him? The question would seem to be valid, for once plasma is introduced into the conversation, then we can without a doubt formulate alternative hypotheses for all sorts of cosmological observations.
The mainstream would be wise to start telling the story of this mistake, for it is extremely important. I try to explain why here.
There is actually some merit to these claims that astrophysicists are not cultured in the observations of laboratory plasmas. When it comes to double layers, plasma pinches and the numerous forms of plasma instabilities, the very specific geometries of filamentation in plasmas (just last week observed at Jupiter's pole, and not a single astrophysicist acknowledged it!), the simple fact that microwaves are produced by electron beams (and hence a CMB can be explained with electricity in space just as easily as a creation event), the concept of quasi-neutrality (and what it really means for conduction in plasmas), the by-now handful of observable violations of Debye screening, the fact that the ionosphere behaves as a plasma with less than 1% ionization, an understanding of the history of the Birkeland current idea, the history of the empty vacuum of space mistake, the history of Alfven's rejection of MHD in his 1970 Nobel acceptance speech, the concept of Marklund convection, the observation of critical ionization velocities associated with HI hydrogen filaments, and a full appreciation of both sides of the magnetic reconnection event...
... when it comes to each of these topics, it is easy to demonstrate that astrophysicists have not been trained sufficient to reason about these matters in the astrophysical context. They're struggling to identify the points of contention because they've been left with the impression that there is no real debate to be had here.
The argument is not that astrophysicists don't know anything about plasmas. What they know is MHD -- and what has been put forward is the fact that that should not be assumed to always be the proper tool for interpreting astronomical plasmas.
They already know who I am because after I was maliciously attacked last week for my electricity in space post, they are the ones who restored my karma. When I complained that I was being down-voted by an angry mob, they agreed. So, it would seem that you've not fully tuned into the situation here.
It's just a conceptual label. The core claim of the Electric Universe -- the most important -- is simply that we can model cosmic plasmas as laboratory plasmas. Astrophysicists disagree, and instead model them as fluids subject to gravity. Yet, there is no fluid model which can ever accurately explain the behaviors of electricity and magnetism -- so where we see cosmic plasmas conducting, realize that the models in widespread use by astrophysicists today cannot explain this. By contrast, astrophysicists have rigidly stuck to claims that Debye shielding and quasi-neutrality undermine the notion of electricity in space. The recent announcements that electric currents travel along AGN (black hole) jets is an unacknowledged admission that Debye shielding and quasi-neutrality are meaningless conjectures. And those of us who have paid attention to concepts from the plasma laboratory understand that plasma double layers will make Debye shielding and quasi-neutrality meaningless (double layers are what allow the formation of complex macroscopic charge structures in plasmas). But, even though double layers have been definitively observed within both the plasma laboratory and even the Van Allen radiation belts, astrophysicists have refused to classify them as astrophysical entities. There have been a number of observations in recent years where scientists expressed surprise by some observation which was readily explainable with laboratory plasma physics concepts like double layers.
Those who are following the debate can see clearly how this is playing out; those who refuse to track it lack the context necessary to judge the debate's trajectory -- and these are the same people, imo, who have come to accept space as mysterious. Much of the mystery is actually introduced by the idea that gravity is dominating at the larger scales. The electrical cosmology approach generally treats gravity as a localized force which becomes irrelevant at the interstellar scale.
To go into more detail would take many more pages.
Re: "I have no idea what it is, specifically, that you're upset about that people won't accept as science."
Sort of. What I am actually arguing for is that people should track controversies over time. We need to crowdsource information about controversies, and what I promise is that if we do finally create such a system, it would boost the rate of innovation in the sciences across all disciplines.
The debate over electricity in space is merely a piece of a larger puzzle which speaks to our awkward interactions with scientific claims. That's at least how I view it. It is not the end of the story, and there is a lot of progress which can be made from merely studying the ways that people interact with scientific controversies. This is what I've been doing for 12 years now, and it's how I will design the social network which will eventually fix these problems.
It's important to stress that this is not an idea I came up with last night. My approach was to embed myself into the Thunderbolts Group, and then over the course of many years, I ran their claims directly against their biggest critics + the public. By observing the reactions to the same claims, many times over, you start to observe patterns. The point is not to say that this is all that is important; the point is that the social processes play an inordinate role in how people come to these conclusions. There is very little engagement with actual claims and technical details happening -- and this should to some extent alarm people -- because it should be clear that this is how groupthink can emerge.
There is nothing at all rigorous about judging something to be "meritless", and then acting upon that judgment by ostracizing anybody who conveys the important message that you have missed some important details since your decision. That's human behavior at its worst, and in terms of process, it should be rid from our academic institutions.
Truthfully, there is no need at all to judge cosmological claims. What is this pressing need to identify a solution? Is something about to happen? There is only need to -- as a group -- track the ideas over time -- so that we can then base our eventual judgment upon their actual performance rather than a handful of mistake-ridden un-reviewed critiques (the "debunkers").
What is really so compelling anyways about suggesting that the universe sprang into existence from nothing? This is nothing more than the original creation story told by the Catholic church, dressed up in mathematical formulae -- which apparently is sufficient to greatly impress some people.
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 consider what role this has played in the idea's popularity.
Slashdot Mirror
We live in very interesting times, where things -- like electricity -- which are extraordinarily mundane down here on Earth are apparently just completely preposterous in the context of space.
Re: "Uh, the vast majority of models I've seen are at least resistive, and often gyrokinetic or flat out kinetic instead of fluid. PIC is really popular for astrophysical plasmas, and a lot of the work on relativistic plasmas can't be fluid model at all."
There's an overt disconnect between what you are saying and the relentless onslaught of fluids concepts that appears within the analysis of astronomical plasmas. Whether or not the models in use are technically referred to as "fluids models", what is happening with them is that the plasmas are being modeled as fluids, without reference to electrodynamic plasma concepts observed within the laboratory.
There are by now numerous laboratory plasma physics concepts which generally don't appear in astrophysics papers -- including double layers, plasma instabilities (aka Peratt intabilities), z-pinches, critical ionization velocities, Marklund convection, and of course the force-free field-aligned Birkeland current.
Let's take an example from just this week. If you go to the original paper, it states:
But, anybody who has spent time working with electrodynamic plasmas in the plasma laboratory should already be very familiar with the ring of vortices morphology, because this exact type of filamentation is what happens for the highest charge-density state of a conducting plasma, known as the z-pinch. In fact, plasma physicists have been imprinting electron beams onto a variety of materials for many decades now, producing this same form in the laboratory.
When people point out the obvious problem of failing to mention the correspondence between the astronomical and laboratory forms, people who honestly should know better tend to totally lose it, and it honestly creates a very anti-science situation where the exactly correct conversations are apparently out-of-bounds.
Personally, I believe that you understand where the disconnect is happening, and are just adopting a defensive posture. Why not be honest with us, and help us to better understand, in your own words, why objects like KSN 2015K and sn1987a cannot be considered the cosmic version of laboratory z-pinches? What physical features -- not just assumptions -- actually precludes such an analysis? An honest assessment would really help to advance the conversation.
Re: "There is a lot of talk about scientists and very little talk about physical theory. As far as I can tell, EU is some conspiracy theory about scientists as opposed to a science theory. Maybe it would be more attractive and approachable if they drop the antisocial, whiny cruft and stuck to business."
It's probably unfair to judge an entire cosmology through Internet comments. Since a lot of the efforts here are focused upon correcting misconceptions, these efforts may come off to some as "whiny". For a more thoughtful introduction, you might consider, instead, reading The Electric Sky by Don Scott, which goes into great length about how we can explain astronomical observations with ordinary laboratory plasma physics observations.
If you'd prefer to avoid purchasing their book, then consider their technical introduction, The Essential Guide -- which is actually geared towards those with an EE background. It is quite technical.
Alternatively, if you come from the world of plasma physics, you'd want to also supplement these works with the second edition of Physics of the Plasma Universe And in that case, there are also a couple of papers you should read here and here, which both review critiques of MHD in good detail.
Personally, I also recommend focusing upon the historical arguments, whose importance are greatly under-appreciated ... e.g., the mistaken assumption of empty space, the story of Kristian Birkeland, the history of the Birkeland current concept, the electron theory as a worldview, the story of Halton Arp, the Big Bang's big redshift assumption, and this discussion of the debate over uniformitarianism vs catastrophism, for starters.
For those that just want a very basic and quick introduction, then watch these two Youtube videos.
There is really no shortage of high-quality resources, pitched at all of the various levels. If you aren't seeing them, then that definitely says more about your own efforts to find these resources than anything else.
EU === Electric Universe, but also EU == electrical cosmology. Its central thesis is that cosmic plasmas behave as laboratory plasmas -- an important claim in light of the realization, since 1958, that most of the matter that we can see with telescopes is matter in the plasma state (>99%).
One thing to know is that in the EU, there is no dark matter problem: Since we clearly observe plasma to conduct in the laboratory, what is being claimed is that the cosmic plasma is conducting across vast distances of space over plasma filaments -- much like what is already observed with a novelty plasma globe. These filaments are referred to by mainstream astrophysicists as "interstellar clouds", but in fact, "clouds" like the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are highly filamentary. They are hardly the only ones; in fact, hydrogen filaments are ubiquitous in space, and have been shown to precede the formation of stars.
What seems to confuse a lot of people about the debate is that mainstream astrophysicists are arguing against the idea that we can model cosmic plasmas as laboratory plasmas. But, this is indeed the case. They have been using fluids models to model cosmic plasmas, and this creates the extraordinary situation that when astronomical observations exhibit the features of laboratory plasmas, even professional astrophysicists and cosmologists will commonly fail to recognize very common forms observed in the laboratory for electricity over gas. When these failures are pointed out, the debate can become extremely emotional -- and we have a situation where stating "the obvious" creates a very acrimonious situation.
Adding to IMarv's comments, the sun's neutrino output has at times varied inversely with the sun's surface sunspot count. Were the neutrinos produced in the sun's nuclear core, this relationship would be inconceivable, since solar physicists calculate that it takes about 200,000 years for the energy of internal fusion to affect the sun's surface. The observations seem to raise the possibility that fusion is occurring near the sun's surface, and it only took one non-correlated half-cycle for theorists to completely stop paying attention.
The graph which shows this anti-correlation has been deeply buried in academic papers, so I've published a copy of it here.
One thing to consider, when contemplating the situation of an anti-correlation which apparently switches between on and off states is that the Sun clearly exhibits these different states through its cycle. To observe switching behavior, and immediately use that as reason to discount the existence of an anti-correlation is honestly a rush to judgment. You know, this is why we build models.
... except that for some people who have refused to question the worldview which was taught to them in school, for whom disrupting modern science theories is interpreted as an attack upon their own personal worldview. These people can be identified by their emotional rants and general failure to cite technical arguments, and they seem unaware of the fact that their "defense of science" is also a defense against innovation in the sciences.
Re: "Either Relativity is right, or EU is right.. can't be both... and EVERY experiment done has shown Relativity is correct"
You could swap out "EU" with "quantum mechanics", and we'd be in the same exact situation.
Re: "EU doesn't explain anything experimentally"
Just to give an example, it can explain why the ionosphere is layered. There is a very simple experiment which involves charge-loading a metal sphere in a vacuum. This very simple experiment produces a layering of charge, and experimentally, that would appear to suggest that our planet Earth is a charged body in space. There are many other examples -- but realize that they are not going to just pop into your science journalism newsfeed; you have to actually seek these arguments out.
It "doesn't have any math behind it"?
Re: "and it requires Relativity to be completely wrong"
All you've done here is to ignore the disconnect between Relativity and quantum mechanics. The two ideas cannot be made to work with one another, so simple logic suggests that at least one of them must be in error.
Also: the failure to observe dark matter, even as instrumentation for observing it has become a million times more sensitive over the past 15 years, is further reason to suspect -- as has been stated by the Electric Universe theorists -- that gravity does not dominate beyond the planetary scale.
To the extent that people contemplate alternative ideas in cosmology, they do so because of cosmology's own failure to solve these same problems.
The reasons for 'crankery'
It's a sign of weakness when somebody has to resort to misstating or understating an argument. This is what the actual argument looks like.
The submission states ...
There have been a few important details consistently missing from the reporting on this subject:
(1) First of all, there is never any mention of the far simpler solution where the Sun is receiving some percentage of its power supply externally. A person need not be a solar physicist to understand that such a situation would create the thermal inversion which is observed. But, this common sense approach is never suggested in the science journalism on the subject.
(2) When Eddington first proposed his thermonuclear power source, it was widely believed that interstellar space was completely empty. And it wasn't until many years after the thermonuclear model gained in popularity -- with the first instrumented rockets launched at the start of the "Space Age" -- when it was discovered that an alternative power source -- charged particles -- fill space.
The Internal Constitution of the Stars, Arthur Eddington, p.25
The Internal Constitution of the Stars, Arthur Eddington, p.291
It seems, in retrospect -- with the added information supplied by the presence of an all-pervasive cosmic plasma -- that Eddington's logic would have to be altered by many modern observations which support an external source.
(3) Consider, for example, the persistent mystery of the solar cycle. There's not really any reason for it which would necessarily follow from a thermonuclear model for the Sun:
This is a photograph of one of those imprints made by a plasma filament. See the article for more information.
That's missing the point. Scientists have for years now struggled to explain how to get from gravitational accretion to the planetary system we see today. And observing other stellar systems has only served to elevate the mystery. So, what would we expect to see if a foreign star was to come close enough that it actually was very much visible? We'd expect that it should shuffle the planets around in a manner which leaves us as confused as we are.
We might also expect to see something very much like this:
I keep a personal library of modern science critiques. I know how it works by now, probably more so than most specialists -- many of which never seek to actually become generalists. It doesn't happen without trying.
Re: "Because it is mysticism instead they claim that all things are plasma (because complex nuanced positions are hard to sell)"
Each quote admits that plasma is 99% of what we can see, so realize that if there is no dark matter, plasma is next in line for being the explanation.
"'Space' was invented on Earth before we knew what was out there"
It wasn't just an uninformed public who made fun of Goddard. You're looking at the past through the lens of the present. Our cultural origins were more confused than this. We did not spring out of our intellectual womb, fully formed, like from the stork. Mistakes were made. Very, very big mistakes.
I 100% agree: People who rant about chemtrails are literally mentally ill. Joe Rogan had an excellent rebuttal to this nonsense on one of his shows; I want to create a transcript, it was so good.
Personally, I believe it because I spent a few years running the Electric Universe claims against their critics. I observed the reactions, and came to realize that there is a widespread refusal to simply let the cards fall where they may. Everybody is trying to force-fit the data into their pre-existing narratives and conclusions.
I also noticed that vindications for electrical cosmology occur far more often than people realize. They convince themselves that they can ignore the idea, then they don't notice when these vindications occur. There was one just last week, with the infrared images of Jupiter's pole. The ring of vortices is a classic form from the plasma laboratory which has been observed for almost a full century now. In the early days, plasma physicists would etch electrical discharges into various media like paper, and a very common form was a ring of vortices. This is a typical shape that electricity takes when it travels through gas: The plasma filaments break up into a ring of smaller filaments (vortices in 2d cross-section). Anthony Peratt has written a couple of papers detailing these "instabilities". In fact, some people refer to them as "Peratt instabilities".
For people who refuse to track the Electric Universe debate, the infrared ring of vortices at Jupiter's two poles are a mystery. Not a single astrophysicist on Twitter or elsewhere seemed to recognize this classic laboratory plasma form. I was personally stunned -- but I'm not sure why, because it's happened many times before. For those of us who have taken the time to learn about laboratory plasmas from this debate, we immediately recognize this form -- because it is common.
Do you see what is happening here? It's very serious and very bad. Science has become so specialized that scientists cannot recognize valid critiques from neighboring domains. And since nobody is tracking controversies, there have been many other examples of such vindications which went completely unnoticed.
The whole point is that this observation is a vindication for the approach proposed by David Talbott and Ev Cochrane, and yet none of the people here noticed because it was decided that the Electric Universe is "debunked". It should present us with an important lesson about process.
Let's review each of the many problems and oversights in your logic.
First, realize that Einstein died 3 years before (1955) anybody definitively understood that the universe is dominated by plasma (1958). Do you know why? Because for 24 long years -- from 1920 to 1944 -- the American public ridiculed Robert Goddard, the first person to suggest that we could send a rocket to the Moon, for not understanding that a "rocket would have nothing in space to push against" (a common misconception back then). Do you know what stopped the ridicule? The Germans took Goddard's invention and attacked Europe with 3,000 V2 rockets. Those V2's had all of Goddard's key inventions within them, because as the American public was mocking Goddard, the Germans were intently listening to everything he said.
Apparently, the American public learned nothing at all from that event, because to this day, we continue to ridicule innovators in the sciences. Like Don Scott of the Thunderbolts Group, Goddard was an American professor.
Re: "The scientific community says "gravity has to work pretty closely to how we think or satellites (among otehr things) wouldn't be possible and they clearly are"
Einstein lifted the Lorentz transformation from the aether theorists of the day. He did not invent this math.
Re: "So you need to come back with proof that you theory is at least as good as gravity in all areas that gravity is useful and can therefore replace it entirely or reconcile the parts that contradict gravity before it can be considered a viable addition to scientific knowledge"
The Electric Universe does not begin in the same place as conventional astronomy and cosmology. It starts by recognizing that the cosmic plasma models widely applied by astrophysicists are wrong -- and once the models are corrected to reflect our laboratory observations, the dark matter problem goes away. From that vantage point, options open up for how to proceed to explain gravity. But, Anthony Peratt's galactic simulation with proper rotation curves explains what is happening at the largest scales without need for any dark matter -- meaning that it essentially meets your criteria above (just not in the way that you imagined).
The point is that we have "potential wins" on both sides of this debate. It is not a one-sided affair, for instruments designed to detect dark matter have grown a million times more sensitive over the past 15 years -- meaning that dark matter is starting to look like modern cosmology's dead end.
You could have reasoned your way to the same conclusion without having to build all of those instruments, actually, by simply considering the ridiculous scales we are talking about here: If the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, the next nearest star would be a stunning 4 miles away (!). Simple logic and some very simple algebra is screaming at you that gravity is a "localized" force, starting at the interstellar scale.
Re: "General relativity works very well and is empirically verified by things like GPS satellites"
There are plenty of rebuttals online to this thoughtless claim. I encourage you to look them up. They're not difficult to find.
Re: "Because it is mysticism instead they claim that all things are plasma (because complex nuanced positions are hard to sell)"
All that I can say is: Welcome to the Space Age -- a revolution which is, apparently, still playing out.
Quantum Statistics of Nonideal Plasmas
On the specific issue of magnetic reconnection, I was really referring to the fact that there are two separate sides to that debate -- and the astrophysicists, if pressed, would have a difficult time explaining the opposing arguments.
In my opinion, a huge aspect to this problem is the institutional aversion to telling certain awkward stories that relate to these topics. The mistaken assumption of empty interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic space is perhaps a prime example of a story which academics and science journalists seem to treat as sort of "rated X" insofar as they generally refuse to place any importance on it. Yet, it can be traced back to the selection of numerous theories in the early 1900's. For example,
Eddington explicitly refers to the assumption is his choice of models for powering the Sun:
Although I don't have an authoritative source on hand, it can also be shown that Sydney Chapman used the assumption to reject Kristian Birkeland's proposal that the aurora originated with the Sun.
These are remarkable historical observations insofar as we today know that this assumption was incorrect (And more than that, the mistaken assumption was hiding from Eddington an alternative potential power source.)
The thing about this is that it's rare to see anybody connecting the dots between this former mistaken assumption and the theories which "won out" as popular today -- yet, it is also remarkably easy to show that it did in fact play a part. And there can be little doubt that even Einstein's work could also be implicated as basing on it, for the first instrumented probes were not actually sent to space until 1958 -- 3 years after his death. So, can it be that Einstein was simply working with what he had available to him? The question would seem to be valid, for once plasma is introduced into the conversation, then we can without a doubt formulate alternative hypotheses for all sorts of cosmological observations.
The mainstream would be wise to start telling the story of this mistake, for it is extremely important. I try to explain why here.
There is actually some merit to these claims that astrophysicists are not cultured in the observations of laboratory plasmas. When it comes to double layers, plasma pinches and the numerous forms of plasma instabilities, the very specific geometries of filamentation in plasmas (just last week observed at Jupiter's pole, and not a single astrophysicist acknowledged it!), the simple fact that microwaves are produced by electron beams (and hence a CMB can be explained with electricity in space just as easily as a creation event), the concept of quasi-neutrality (and what it really means for conduction in plasmas), the by-now handful of observable violations of Debye screening, the fact that the ionosphere behaves as a plasma with less than 1% ionization, an understanding of the history of the Birkeland current idea, the history of the empty vacuum of space mistake, the history of Alfven's rejection of MHD in his 1970 Nobel acceptance speech, the concept of Marklund convection, the observation of critical ionization velocities associated with HI hydrogen filaments, and a full appreciation of both sides of the magnetic reconnection event ...
... when it comes to each of these topics, it is easy to demonstrate that astrophysicists have not been trained sufficient to reason about these matters in the astrophysical context. They're struggling to identify the points of contention because they've been left with the impression that there is no real debate to be had here.
The argument is not that astrophysicists don't know anything about plasmas. What they know is MHD -- and what has been put forward is the fact that that should not be assumed to always be the proper tool for interpreting astronomical plasmas.
They already know who I am because after I was maliciously attacked last week for my electricity in space post, they are the ones who restored my karma. When I complained that I was being down-voted by an angry mob, they agreed. So, it would seem that you've not fully tuned into the situation here.
It's just a conceptual label. The core claim of the Electric Universe -- the most important -- is simply that we can model cosmic plasmas as laboratory plasmas. Astrophysicists disagree, and instead model them as fluids subject to gravity. Yet, there is no fluid model which can ever accurately explain the behaviors of electricity and magnetism -- so where we see cosmic plasmas conducting, realize that the models in widespread use by astrophysicists today cannot explain this. By contrast, astrophysicists have rigidly stuck to claims that Debye shielding and quasi-neutrality undermine the notion of electricity in space. The recent announcements that electric currents travel along AGN (black hole) jets is an unacknowledged admission that Debye shielding and quasi-neutrality are meaningless conjectures. And those of us who have paid attention to concepts from the plasma laboratory understand that plasma double layers will make Debye shielding and quasi-neutrality meaningless (double layers are what allow the formation of complex macroscopic charge structures in plasmas). But, even though double layers have been definitively observed within both the plasma laboratory and even the Van Allen radiation belts, astrophysicists have refused to classify them as astrophysical entities. There have been a number of observations in recent years where scientists expressed surprise by some observation which was readily explainable with laboratory plasma physics concepts like double layers.
Those who are following the debate can see clearly how this is playing out; those who refuse to track it lack the context necessary to judge the debate's trajectory -- and these are the same people, imo, who have come to accept space as mysterious. Much of the mystery is actually introduced by the idea that gravity is dominating at the larger scales. The electrical cosmology approach generally treats gravity as a localized force which becomes irrelevant at the interstellar scale.
To go into more detail would take many more pages.
The EU arguments about cosmic plasmas can -- and actually have been -- put into mathematical terms by people who have no relation to the Electric Universe at all.
Re: "I have no idea what it is, specifically, that you're upset about that people won't accept as science."
Sort of. What I am actually arguing for is that people should track controversies over time. We need to crowdsource information about controversies, and what I promise is that if we do finally create such a system, it would boost the rate of innovation in the sciences across all disciplines.
The debate over electricity in space is merely a piece of a larger puzzle which speaks to our awkward interactions with scientific claims. That's at least how I view it. It is not the end of the story, and there is a lot of progress which can be made from merely studying the ways that people interact with scientific controversies. This is what I've been doing for 12 years now, and it's how I will design the social network which will eventually fix these problems.
It's important to stress that this is not an idea I came up with last night. My approach was to embed myself into the Thunderbolts Group, and then over the course of many years, I ran their claims directly against their biggest critics + the public. By observing the reactions to the same claims, many times over, you start to observe patterns. The point is not to say that this is all that is important; the point is that the social processes play an inordinate role in how people come to these conclusions. There is very little engagement with actual claims and technical details happening -- and this should to some extent alarm people -- because it should be clear that this is how groupthink can emerge.
There is nothing at all rigorous about judging something to be "meritless", and then acting upon that judgment by ostracizing anybody who conveys the important message that you have missed some important details since your decision. That's human behavior at its worst, and in terms of process, it should be rid from our academic institutions.
Truthfully, there is no need at all to judge cosmological claims. What is this pressing need to identify a solution? Is something about to happen? There is only need to -- as a group -- track the ideas over time -- so that we can then base our eventual judgment upon their actual performance rather than a handful of mistake-ridden un-reviewed critiques (the "debunkers").
What is really so compelling anyways about suggesting that the universe sprang into existence from nothing? This is nothing more than the original creation story told by the Catholic church, dressed up in mathematical formulae -- which apparently is sufficient to greatly impress some people.
Anthony L. Peratt, ‘Dean of the Plasma Dissidents’, The World & I, May 1988, p.190-197
You might consider what role this has played in the idea's popularity.