Re: "To answer the is it even worth considering question, though- of course it is. And it has been, at great lengths. And plasma physics play a huge role in even standard cosmology. They just don't play a huge role in large-scale cosmology."
Let me give you a very simple example which I hope you will recognize as an earnest attempt to demonstrate how difficult it is to judge vindications when we are not actively tracking scientific controversies.
Today, for the first time, I noticed that a couple ofgalaxy artists were suddenly drawing the Milky Way's galactic bulge as a pair, as if a memo went out (which I missed). I had never before noticed this, but having learned about Anthony Peratt's galactic simulation as a pair of rotating Birkeland currents, I immediately tuned into this pattern.
To somebody who has not paid any attention to Peratt's simulation, the explanation offered in a July 2016 article would seem good enough to assume the issue is basically settled:
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 stars become elongated, creating a “bar” of stars that runs through the centre and tilts out of the disc’s plane. The combined effect makes the once-flat galaxy look like it has buckled under enormous pressure.
But, hold on just a second. This is a completely ad hoc explanation. Although I have no doubt that somebody somewhere can generate a tweak to the original galactic models -- perhaps involving dark matter -- which can explain with actual numbers why this may occur in the conventional model, the fact of the matter is that this is a completely expected feature when you are modeling a galaxy as an interaction of two Birkeland currents. -- and the choice to refuse to systematically track the Electric Universe controversy has left everybody failing to recognize that this actually vindicates the against-the-mainstream claim.
Jupiter’s poles are a stark contrast to the more familiar orange and white belts and zones encircling the planet at lower latitudes. Its north pole is dominated by a central cyclone surrounded by eight circumpolar cyclones with diameters ranging from 2,500 to 2,900 miles (4,000 to 4,600 kilometers) across. Jupiter’s south pole also contains a central cyclone, but it is surrounded by five cyclones with diameters ranging from 3,500 to 4,300 miles (5,600 to 7,000 kilometers) in diameter. Almost all the polar cyclones, at both poles, are so densely packed that their spiral arms come in contact with adjacent cyclones. However, as tightly spaced as the cyclones are, they have remained distinct, with individual morphologies over the seven months of observations detailed in the paper.
“The question is, why do they not merge?” said Adriani. “We know with Cassini data that Saturn has a single cyclonic vortex at each pole. We are beginning to realize that not all gas giants are created equal.”
Once again, I sprung into action because I have tracked Peratt's work sufficient to understand the inherent geometry of electricity over plasma. In his efforts to explain petroglyphs as z-pinch instab
Look at how narrow your focus has become. We are literally talking about some of the most complex questions man has ever asked, and you're imagining that you can reduce this very complex discussion to this single paper. In any debate like this, there are going to be winners and losers, but to produce a meaningful assessment, we have to look at the full breadth of all of the individual pieces: the claims, the critiques, the sociological patterns, psychological biases, the history of science, yes the validity of the math (but also whether or not it applies), unexpected vindications, basically the whole fabric of what is happening.
For example, here is an unexpected vindication below from this past January. Rather than simply accepting that galaxy experts don't read IEEE, perhaps we should view that admission as reason to suspect that that practice has an effect upon their ability to replicate (and by extension, self-correct).
Abstract: Growing concern that most published results, including those widely agreed upon, may be false are rarely examined against rapidly expanding research production. Replications have only occurred on small scales due to prohibitive expense and limited professional incentive. We introduce a novel, high-throughput replication strategy aligning 51,292 published claims about drug-gene interactions with high-throughput experiments performed through the NIH LINCS L1000 program. We show (1) that unique claims replicate 19% more frequently than at random, while those widely agreed upon replicate 45% more frequently, manifesting collective correction mechanisms in science; but (2) centralized scientific communities perpetuate claims that are less likely to replicate even if widely agreed upon, demonstrating how centralized, overlapping collaborations weaken collective understanding. Decentralized research communities involve more independent teams and use more diverse methodologies, generating the most robust, replicable results. Our findings highlight the importance of science policies that foster decentralized collaboration to promote robust scientific advance.
In other words, when a group of electrical engineers launches a critique of mainstream cosmology, the cosmologists can decide to either collaborate with this group to form new sets of questions and lines of investigation; or, they can just ignore or dismiss the critiques. Historically speaking, the pattern in the astrophysics and cosmology domains has been to centralize and ostracize outsiders:
The Death of $cience: A Companion Study to Martin Lopez Corredoira's The Twilight of the Scientific Age
by Andrew Holster
p.73:
Professional opposition to outsiders crossing boundaries of specialisations is one of the defining features of modern science, and one of the most powerful forces against heterodox thinkers. But combining insights from multiple fields is often the essential ingredient for making progress.
p.77:
Because of the number of severe and unexplained anomalies in modern physics and cosmology, foundational physics is open to revolutionary change. Indeed, I believe it would have gone through such a revolution over the last few decades, were it not for the severe repression of ideas in modern physics. And any such revolution will deeply affect other natural sciences, including theories of mind. Yet while I believe a revolution is immanent, I also think it is unlikely to be made through our present scientific institutions. It will be made by outsiders. The new approach required to advance physics will be attacked from within conventional physics, because it has to revolutionize certain foundational concepts of quantum theory and relativity theory, but this goes profoundly against the interests of professional physicists.
You're adopting a very limited view of the word "methods" that is not in line with what these two sociologists are referring to. The point of the text is to describe the social and evidential processes of science by looking at what they call disputed science.
A review of even just the Amazon reviews would have clarified this. For example:
"The cases laid out by the authors demonstrate how much science and scientific results can be hidden under personal interests, believes (superstition is a better word), wishes and inaccuracy. One example is the "proof" of Einstein's gravitaion theory by Sir Arthur Eddington by systematically dismissing data in conflict with the theory."
Re: "You're doing exactly what you're quoting as the wrong thing to do, and you claim that the right thing to do - based on your quotes - is "studying one side"."
I absolutely do NOT recommend shutting out arguments from any side. What I am proposing is the construction of a social network where information about scientific controversies can over time be aggregated with crowdsourcing. I've recently described the details of this social network I'm advocating for in an article titled Tracking Scientific Controversies.
Constructing such a social network is not in the least equivalent to arguing that one side should be ignored. As the situation stands, academia implies that certain questions should no longer be asked because they are considered "settled science". What I'm arguing is that the public can participate in scientific discourse as a check upon scientific authority by double-checking that their "settled" science is indeed settled. The way we do this is to check for vindications over time of these supposedly settled science claims -- a process which benefits from a diverse crowd (which means that the public can be better at this than the scientific community).
What I am reporting to you right now is that I have been practicing this method for a full decade now for this Electric Universe debate, and what I have found is that you are not being properly informed by science journalists. There have been many vindications and completely legitimate explanations which have not been reported to the public. If you had been tracking the EU with me, you'd know of them. I'm trying to report them to you, and doing so does not in any way suggest that you should only pay attention to one side of the debate.
To the extent that a person only pays attention to one side of a debate, they become subject to it. Once we make a conscious decision to track controversies over time -- which is of course easier if we have help from a community -- then this helps us to treat each side of the debate as an object. The premise of my social network design is that we can actually make people smarter by helping them to make this subject-object transition. If you go to any International Baccalaureate-level high school literature class, that is exactly what you will find the teachers instructing the students how to do: They are inviting the students to interpret the text from competing worldviews. But, notice the problem: Science instruction completely lacks a similar tradition -- and so what we end up with, whenever somebody criticizes modern science in some manner, is an angry mob which defends the claims of science for the very reason that these students have not been trained to transition from subject to object.
The mistake you are making here is to interpret the presentation of critique and competing claims as inherently one-sided. But, the whole point of critique is to make us smarter and wiser about our current worldview, and to provide the possibility for change. It's to replace one single thought with two or more. When we learn about critique and competing ideas, we think at a higher level for the very reason that we stop being subject to the information we've b
Re: "I think the place to look for breakthroughs is in new science, not fields that have been extensively studied like astrophysics.People are doing laboratory scale experiments in quantum entanglement for example, so some breakthrough there is quite possible."
... problem being that we already know that there exist contradictions between some of the established disciplines (large and small scale theories), so the recipe you've provided us with here does not address the possibility of mistakes existing within one of these two domains.
Re: "Over lunch I was laughing with a colleague about how completely absurd the idea was that the universe isn't expanding - it is supported by such a huge wealth of data. At the very least, how could someone explain the supernova red-shift data without cosmological expansion?"
Vindications for Halton Arp which he discusses within his two books (Seeing Red and Quasars, Redshifts, and Controversies), where he goes into great detail about why quasars are not at their redshift-inferred distances:
(1) Alignment of quasar minor axes (vindication of Arp ejection model)
(2) Numerous apparent interactions of objects of wildly different redshifts (not possible with Big Bang, vindication of Arp)
(3) Numerous instances where high-redshift quasars appear aligned with the axes of low-redshift "foreground" galaxies (statistics indicate this occurs far too often for a strict recession velocity interpretation of redshift)
(4) Intervening galaxies are 4 times more prevalent along lines of sight to GRB's than quasars (shouldn't happen if quasars are at extreme distances)
(5) Quasars seemingly observed in front of foreground galaxies (has led to mainstream invocation of transparent sightlines through galactic bulges)
(6) A quasar that exhibits 10x superluminal motions at inferred distance (this is merely the worst case, but the most common examples of this are 2x superluminal; requires invocation of Relativity illusion)
(7) A quasar group so large that it spans 5% of the known universe at inferred distance (not expected from Big Bang theory because it's a violation of the Cosmological Principle that says that the universe is uniform)
(8) No observation of time dilation in quasar variations (no explanation has been accepted, to my knowledge)
(9) Quasars have been shown to exhibit proper motion! (should not be possible at extreme inferred distances, and was once considered a rule for differentiating galactic from extragalactic objects)
(10) Quasar clustering (not expected from Big Bang theory because it's a violation of the Cosmological Principle that says that the universe is uniform)
(11) The Burbidges, Karlsson, the Bamothy's, Depaquit, Peeker and Vigier have all agreed with Halton Arp that there are preferred values for redshift, and numerous investigators have attempted to disprove it only to find the effect in their own dataset (Disproves the Big Bang's recession velocity interpretation for redshift)
Re: "These "fudge factors" fit the data with way more than 5 sigmas."
Absolutely meaningless. You are referring to accuracy and precision when the debate is actually over the interpretation of the physical mechanism.
Re: "Inflation is currently being observed."
Absolutely incorrect. Edwin Hubble was never persuaded, and one of his protege's, Halton Arp, was able to fill a couple of books with all of the exceptions to the assumption that redshift can only have one explanation. Here is a short list of Arp's vindications:
(1) Alignment of quasar minor axes (vindication of Arp ejection model)
(2) Numerous apparent interactions of objects of wildly different redshifts (not possible with Big Bang, vindication of Arp)
(3) Numerous instances where high-redshift quasars appear aligned with the axes of low-redshift "foreground" galaxies (statistics indicate this occurs far too often for a strict recession velocity interpretation of redshift)
(4) Intervening galaxies are 4 times more prevalent along lines of sight to GRB's than quasars (shouldn't happen if quasars are at extreme distances)
(5) Quasars seemingly observed in front of foreground galaxies (has led to mainstream invocation of transparent sightlines through galactic bulges)
(6) A quasar that exhibits 10x superluminal motions at inferred distance (this is merely the worst case, but the most common examples of this are 2x superluminal; requires invocation of Relativity illusion)
(7) A quasar group so large that it spans 5% of the known universe at inferred distance (not expected from Big Bang theory because it's a violation of the Cosmological Principle that says that the universe is uniform)
(8) No observation of time dilation in quasar variations (no explanation has been accepted, to my knowledge)
(9) Quasars have been shown to exhibit proper motion (should not be possible at extreme inferred distances, and was once considered a rule for differentiating galactic from extragalactic objects)
(10) Quasar clustering (not expected from Big Bang theory because it's a violation of the Cosmological Principle that says that the universe is uniform)
(11) The Burbidges, Karlsson, the Bamothy's, Depaquit, Peeker and Vigier have all agreed with Halton Arp that there are preferred values for redshift, and numerous investigators have attempted to disprove it only to find the effect in their own dataset (Disproves the Big Bang's recession velocity interpretation for redshift)
Re: "And the whole Dark Matter issue. You completely ignore data that nearly perfectly matches the theory, but then propose theories that do not match any modern data."
The facts:
(1) Dark matter remains hypothetical; it has never been identified, and yet we are told it must represent a significant fraction of the total universe.
(2) Dark matter instruments have increased in sensitivity by a million times over the past 15 years, yet none has been found.
(3) Galactic rotation curves were produced by plasma physicist Anthony Peratt on government supercomputers in the early 80's by simply modeling the cosmic plasma as laboratory plasmas (capable of holding E-fields and transmitting electrical currents). Those simulations were based upon earlier laboratory work by Winston Bostick which showed the same spiral galaxy forms.
Your statement is a complete mischaracterization of the situation.
Re: "Seems to have no predictive power. I only ever see a) Gravity is wrong b) ??? c) Galaxy is stabilized"
The argument which has been put forward is that gravity is simply a localized force, and does not dominate at the larger scales. This would seem to be a reasonable assessment when you consider the actual distances between stars. If the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, then the next nearest star would typically be about 4 miles away. Put into these terms, it seems extremely unlikely that gravity can ever bridge these vast distances.
The way that cosmology -- and scientific frameworks more generally -- have traditionally operated is that there is a solid foundation of claims which are then supplemented by a variety of -- hopefully peripheral -- conjectures and speculations. To the extent that people think that they can throw away the entire framework (e.g., the core claim that electricity dominates at the larger scales) because of the less supported conjectures and speculations (e.g., Wal Thornhill's suggestion that electrons have structure), you are actually diverging from the established tradition of scientific frameworks. We need to allow theorists some room to propose conjectures, because some of them will end up as actual hypotheses or theories.
There is of course no shortage in mainstream cosmology of unsupported wacky ideas. Countless articles and papers have been written on these questionable topics, but they do not by themselves discount the core claim that gravity might dominate at all scales. The speculations can only be judged as possibly problematic if the solid parts of the theories somehow rest upon the weaker conjectures, as a necessary support.
Re: "I am not bothering to watch the YouTube video"
It appears that the entire argument against electricity in space could basically be summarized with:
I am not bothering to [read/watch] the [paper/book/video].
What is a bit strange is that this is how the person begins their response. It is of course a statement upon the person's rigor, motivation to learn, and overall process for judging disagreements in science., and most people here who are doing this are of course not so honest about it.
The critiques of Robert Goddard were remarkably similar.
This foolish idea of shooting at the Moon is an example of the absurd lengths to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists... For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of the Earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15180 calories... The energy of our most violent explosive -- nitroglycerine -- is less than 1500 colories per gramme. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one tenth of the energy to escape the Earth... hence the proposition appears to be basically unsound.
- A.W. Bickerton, New Zealand Professor of Physics & Chemistry
If you were to actually read what the whistleblower astrophysicists are arguing, you'd observe that they would disagree with your approach. These people are risking their careers in order to convince the public to alter its focus.
The Twilight of the Scientific Age
Martín López Corredoira
Cosmologist / Astrophysicist / Philosopher / Published 50 Academic Papers, Often as Lead / Academic Whistleblower
A superficial view may lead us to think that we live in the golden age of science but the fact is that the present-day results of science are mostly mean, unimportant, or just technical applications of ideas conceived in the past.
There are several reasons to write about this topic. First of all, because I feel that things are not as they seem, and the apparent success of scientific research in our societies, announced with a lot of ballyhoo by the mass media, does not reflect the real state of things.
the more controversial the topic, and the more of a challenge it is to established ideas, and the newer the approach, then the more difficult will be the problems in publishing it, and the higher the probability of its being rejected. Gillies (2008, ch. 2) argues that when a researcher makes an advance which is later seen as a key innovation and a major breakthrough, a peer review may very well judge it to be absurd and of no values. As noted by Van Flandern (1993, ch. 21), peer review in journals interferes with the objective examination of extraordinary ideas on their merits. Maddox (1993), who was editor of the journal Nature, has said that if Newton submitted his theory of gravity to a journal today, it would almost certainly be rejected as being too preposterous to believe. On the one hand, there is a failure to select novel ideas (Brezis, 2007; Horrobin, 1990). On the other hand, the refereeing process trends to conformity.
From my own experiences and those of others, I have observed that doors are opened and offers made to those who are servile and uncritical. A lot of work must be produced, but without any great aspiration towards saying something important. To obtain an academic position, to obtain tenure, to be successful in obtaining research funds, etc. it is necessary to conform.
In the last two decades, I have observed, at least in my speciality, how the number of offers of postdoctoral positions with a free choice of research topic has been much reduced, substituted by positions working on a major project under the orders of senior 'priests'. This is, in my opinion, a huge obstacle for the creativity of young scientists, an unfortunate trend in the present-day bureacratized system. Moreover, among people who are going to develop a topic freely, there is also a strong bias against all the applications which propose topics which are not suitable according to the mainstream of normal science. Certainly, this is the perfect way to uphold the power of tradition and to castrate new ideas. No revolution is possible within this system; only an outsider can do it.
Scientists are educated nowadays in a habit of self-censorship. The system promotes self-repression in the spread of ideas, so most scientists, when writing a paper, think something like 'I think this and that, but I cannot say so in my paper because this will not pass the referee's control, so I will not say it'. This causes serious harm to creativity among people who dare to think new things.
... scientists have to choose between developing their own ideas freely or being constrained by subjects which allow academic success.
The situation is that society is drowned in ideas and information without assimilating any of it, and only a few ideas, those selected by the establishment, will make some impact. We are in the era of mass
Alfvén's Programme in Solar System Physics by Stephen G. Brush, IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Vol. 20, No. 6, Dec 1992
According to some scientists and philosophers of science, a theory is or should be judged by its ability to make successful predictions. This paper examines a case from the history of recent science -- the research of Hannes Alfvén and his colleagues on solar system physics -- in order to see whether scientists actually follow this policy. Tests of seven predictions are considered: magnetic braking magnetohydrodynamic waves, field-aligned ('Birkeland') currents, critical ionization velocity and the rings of Uranus, jet streams, electrostatic double layers, and partial corotation ('2/3 effect')...
... It is found that the success or failure of these predictions had essentially no effect on the acceptance of Alfvén's theories, even though concepts such as ‘Alfvén waves' have become firmly entrenched in space physics. Perhaps the importance of predictions in such has been exaggerated: if a theory is not acceptable to the scientific community, it may not gain any credit from successful predictions.
Re: "I am willing to admit filaments exist but they are streams of charged ions from the stars. These are moving through the magnetic field of the star or vice versa, so of course they have a current. This doesn't give rise to a force holding the galaxy together."
Alfvén's Programme in Solar System Physics by Stephen G. Brush, IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Vol. 20, No. 6, Dec 1992
According to some scientists and philosophers of science, a theory is or should be judged by its ability to make successful predictions. This paper examines a case from the history of recent science -- the research of Hannes Alfvén and his colleagues on solar system physics -- in order to see whether scientists actually follow this policy. Tests of seven predictions are considered: magnetic braking magnetohydrodynamic waves, field-aligned ('Birkeland') currents, critical ionization velocity and the rings of Uranus, jet streams, electrostatic double layers, and partial corotation ('2/3 effect')...
... It is found that the success or failure of these predictions had essentially no effect on the acceptance of Alfvén's theories, even though concepts such as ‘Alfvén waves' have become firmly entrenched in space physics. Perhaps the importance of predictions in such has been exaggerated: if a theory is not acceptable to the scientific community, it may not gain any credit from successful predictions.
Tracking controversies does not imply that a person is "obsessed" with them, and when somebody demonstrates with a large number of examples that the tech community has a bias against electricity in space, they are hardly "ranting". If the science journalists were reporting on this subject in the properly objective manner, these ideas would have been mainstream many years ago.
By your own logic, Don Scott, author of The Electric Sky is an academic insider. So, you've managed to profoundly confuse the conversation with this approach of calling anybody who has a PhD an insider.
On the importance of learning the context of science...
The Golem: What You Should Know About Science
Collins / Pinch
citizens as citizens need understand only controversial science. One reviewer argues: 'it is quite easy to think of political science. One reviewer argues: 'it is quite easy to think of political decisions with a scientific side to them where the science is noncontroversial' and offers as an example the effect on medical institutions of the development of a predictive test for Huntingdon's disease. But if the science is non-controversial, why do those running the medical institutions need to understand the deep nature of the science that gave rise to the results? If the test is uncontroversially valid they can make their decisions without understanding how agreement about the test was reached. Thus, while thanking our reviewers for the many generous comments about the importance, the informativeness, and they style of the book, we stand by our claim that 'For citizens who want to take part in the democratic processes of a technological society, all the science they need to know about is controversial.' For this purpose, The Golem represents science properly...
Science and the citizen
The debate about the public understanding of science is equally confounded by confusion over method and content. What should be explained is methods of science, but what most people concerned with the issues want the public to know about is the truth about the natural world -- that is, what the powerful believe to be the truth about the natural world. The laudable reason for concern with public understanding is that scientific and technological issues figure more and more in the political process. Citizens, when they vote, need to know enough to come to some decision about whether they prefer more coal mines or more nuclear power stations, more corn or clearer rivers, more tortured animals or more healthy children, or whether these really are the choices. Perhaps there are novel solutions: wave power, organic farming, drug testing without torture. The 'public understanders', as we might call them, seem to think that if the person in the street knows more science -- as opposed to more about science -- they will be able to make more sensible decisions about these things...
How strange that they should think this; it ranks among the great fallacies of our age. Why? -- because PhDs and professors are found on all sides in these debates. The arguments have largely been invented in universities. Thus, all sides have expertise way beyond what can ever be hoped of the person in the street, and all sides know how to argue their case clearly and without obvious fallacies. Why such debates are unresolvable, in spite of all this expertise, is what we have tried to show in the descriptive chapters of this book. That is, we have shown that scientists at the research front cannot settle their deep disagreements through better experimentation, more knowledge, more advanced theories, or clearer thinking. It is ridiculous to expect the general public to do better...
We agree with the public understanders that the citizen needs to be informed enough to vote on technical issues, but the information needed is not about the content of science; it is about the relationship of experts to politicians, to the media, and to the rest of us. The citizen has great experience in the matter of how to cope with divided expertise -- isn't this what party politics is? What the citizen cannot do is cope with divided expertise pretending to be something else. Instead of one question -- 'Who to believe?' -- there are two questions -- 'Who to believe?' and 'Are scientists and technologists Gods or charlatans?'. The second question is what makes the whole debate so unstable because, as we have argued, there are only two positions available...
One perfectly legitimate way to explain why it is rare that outsiders of a well-established field can make major contributions is with gatekeeping. In fact, that is exactly one of the points made by Dr. Gerald Pollack of the University of Washington.
Cellular and Molecular Biology 51, 815-820 (2005)
Revitalizing Science In A Risk-averse Culture: Reflections On The Syndrome And Prescriptions For Its Cure
G.H. Pollack
... A half-century ago, breakthroughs were fairly common events that could be counted on to occur from time to time on an unpredictable but not infrequent basis. Pioneering such breakthroughs were scientific heroes -- legendary figures such as Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Richard Feynman, James Watson, Francis Crick, and others, names familiar even to lay people...
But things have changed. While the past 30 years have brought a great outpouring of scientific results, breakthroughs are less common. Modern equivalents of Pauling, Salk, and Watson-Crick are not easy to identify. Considering the massive investment in science today, why is it that scientific heroes have become so scarce? Why so few conceptual breakthroughs? I refer to realized breakthroughs such as the biochemical nature of heredity or the polio vaccine, not incipient breakthroughs whose realization seems always just around the corner. Can you name more than a handful of realized breakthroughs that have come during the past three decades?
Some argue that this settling down is all but inevitable. After all, science today is far more complicated than it has been, often requiring teams of investigators and large groups to pursue effectively. Others argue that there is simply not much more to be discovered -- that the breakthroughs have had their heyday and we need content ourselves with merely filling in the gaps. Thus, breakthroughs might not be expected to occur on an everyday basis.
Perhaps some of this is true -- but a significant role may also be played by another factor: the growing aversion to risk taking. Although funding agencies have much to be proud of for past achievements, it is broadly perceived that they have become less agile in dealing with proposals that dissent from orthodoxy...
Challengers of the status quo rarely succeed in today’s scientific climate. Hence, those approaches most apt to generate conceptual breakthroughs are throttled before they can emerge from the scientific womb.
The funding agencies worldwide are aware of this problem. Several agencies have held recent workshops to deal with the issue, and some measures have been taken over and above existing remedial programs. In the US, for example, the term 'high risk' now permeates review guidelines. And, both the NSF and the NIH have established special programs to encourage novel approaches...
These institutional responses acknowledge the problem. Yet, it is broadly felt that the responses are nominal. Few dissenters from orthodoxy report any more success than before. The reviewers are largely the same, and have not abruptly changed their well-honed views. Admonishing them to be 'less conservative' comes with no guarantee that they will be. Thus, effective action has yet to be taken.
Re: "You need to make testable predictions that differ from the current model."
There are many examples of observations at the level of planetary --> intergalactic scales which are expected in an electrical cosmology, but not in a gravitational one (and realize that it is acknowledged that gravity dominates at the smaller scales). To give a few examples...
1. The failure of the solar wind to appreciably decelerate even as it passes the Earth's orbit. In the laboratory, we accelerate charged particles with an electric field. Basic physics is suggestive of the idea that the Sun is the center of an electric field, and it extends outwards to the heliopause.
2. The fact that galactic rotation curves are easily produced by modeling the cosmic plasma as laboratory plasma. The reason it is so is because the spiral arms trace out electric currents. Very simple physics compared to the dark matter conjecture. In fact, Winston Bostick produced spiral galaxy forms in the plasma laboratory many, many years ago, and Anthony Peratt created his supercomputer simulations as a reaction to that former experimental work.
3. The CMB itself can be argued to be evidence for electric currents in space, because
As for the unexpected bell-curve shape of this signal, it could very well result from the signal passing through the heliopause, but even if that proves to be problematic, it's not at all scientific to rush to judge that this is evidence for a creation event.
4. The layering of the ionosphere is evidence that the Earth has a net charge to it. Why? Because we can do the experiment in the laboratory: Set up a metal sphere in a vacuum, and pump it full of charge until the charge density becomes very high. What happens? Layering of charge. These are actually called double layers in the plasma laboratory, and they are recognized as electrodynamic phenomena (which is likely why astrophysicists have so far refused to catalog double layers as astrophysical entities, even though they've been observed in the Van Allen radiation belts).
5. The Earth is observed to electrically interact with the Sun every 8 minutes. You didn't recognize this as an electric current because the scientists called it either a "magnetic portal" or a "flux transfer event", but it is obvious that the magnetic field is caused by an electric current. What we've yet to see any acknowledgement of from mainstream scientists is that these discharges every 8 minutes might be acting as a feedback which stabilizes our solar system.
during a 2005 flyby of Saturn's moon Hyperion, the spacecraft was briefly bathed in a beam of electrons coming from the moon's electrostatically charged surface
The scientists referred to it as an "electrostatic shock", but this was an obvious violation of Debye screening, which should have limited the electrostatic discharges in this region to 10 meters. Incidentally, the researchers sat on the news of this event for a full 9 years before reporting it to the public.
In each case, we see something happening which is expected for electricity in space, but u
Re: "Ok explain to me how the electric universe works on materials that are not magnetic. Gravity works on everything that has mass. Take me same physics problem and explain how it works on non ionized carbon."
You seem to be asking how electric forces at the largest scales can influence the structure of the universe, even when we are talking about neutral matter.
If you've played with an electrostatic lifter, then you basically already know the answer to this question: The air in the atmosphere is of course an insulator, yet the application of an electric field induces a movement of this neutral air such that it can temporarily raise the lifter.
So, what is going on there? What appears to be happening is that the movement of the charged particles is exerting a drag upon the neutrals. In the plasma laboratory, you may see this mentioned as an "ion sump" or part of a larger process known as "Marklund convection". There would seem to be little discussion of this phenomenon in astrophysics circles, yet notice this observation from Herschel:
the material along filaments is not at all static: astronomers have detected what appear to be accretion flows, with the most prominent filaments drawing matter from their surroundings through a network of smaller filaments.
At the point where we are talking about a complex field of accretions along filaments, it's important to realize that we have really strayed rather far from the original idea of gravitational accretion, as it was portrayed within the textbooks; and people need to be cognizant of the tendency to push parameters in simulations towards unrealistic numbers, in order to replicate these observations with gravity.
It's worth noting, further, that plasma is widely acknowledged as the most common state for matter. It's important to never forget this even as you observe radio astronomers discussing neutral HI filaments. The instruments detect the neutral matter, but this should not be confused as meaning that this region is dominated -- either in terms of its forces or by the percentage of matter present -- by neutral matter. The Marklund convection process can easily explain why the cores of these electrodynamic plasma filaments should be neutral, and it is arguably a better fit for the morphology of these accretion fields revealed by the Herschel observations.
Re: "It's a lot like claiming your theory about perpetual motion cars has been vindicated because you slightly miscalculated your car's fuel economy."
This really seems quite unfair. All you've done is misstated the breadth of the claims. There were 10 main points presented in the first comment, so what does it mean that people are so enthusiastic when somebody misstates the breadth of the presented argument?
Because there is an observable bias in the tech community against electricity in space -- and if you look at the nature of the rebuttals that are being put forward, it's easy to see that the rejections generally do not base upon the technical merits. There is a sense that people feel a bit too strongly that electricity in space cannot do anything of any importance, in the light of their refusal to actually learn the details of the debate. This has been going on for a very long time now, and these strong feelings are increasingly out-of-sync with the actual observational trends.
Again, we see somebody arguing that the best way to understand the debate is to learn just one side of it. The reality of the situation is that the math is in service to the concepts and models of the framework, so when we change frameworks, the math can also -- and quite dramatically -- change. This cannot, by itself, be a complete process for judging scientific controversies.
An excellent place to learn about the numerous scientific papers which relate to this subject is at Ian Tresman's site here.
However, learning the subject in this manner could be slightly confusing, as it can be difficult for people to learn new frameworks. Our tendency is to view the world through the lens of the theories we know. So, other sites have been constructed to help with this difficult process of switching frameworks. There are three sites which have been created for this purpose of facilitating the transition: here, here and here.
There have also been a couple of essential books published on these subjects: The Electric Sky offers a technical discussion for laypeople, whereas Anthony Peratt's Physics of the Plasma Universe can be used to understand some of the more technical details at a specialist science level. That said, it is also important to read Halton Arp's published work.
A couple of very good documentaries have also been created to try to convey these ideas -- like here and here.
Many of us who follow these matters also keep personal libraries of papers which relate to these subjects. These libraries involve literally thousands of scientific papers, but they are typically hidden behind paywalls. So, whatever point you think you are making, it would seem that what is really happening is that you've failed to even identify the sources where these models are discussed.
The reality of the situation is that you did not make it to first base, but this did not stop you from going online to criticize these ideas which you did not learn about.
Re: "If your theory cannot explain observations that current theory can easily explain and make valid predictions then your theory is complete bullshit. But dumbassed like you are too stupid to understand that."
Put another way, what you are saying is that all frameworks must elaborate in the same sequence as those which preceded them.
But, the fact of the matter is that this has never been true: Since each framework begins with a fundamentally different hypothesis and starting-point assumptions, it is obvious that they will exhibit differing inferential coverage.
Why exactly does a layperson have to explain this to an "actual physicist"? If I had to guess, it's probably because you have spent so much time at the model level of thinking that you've lost touch with what it is like to think at the level of competing frameworks.
It's really quite remarkable that such a statement is being made amongst people who would apparently work in the tech industry. I mean, we've not seen such hostility directed at electricity since the days of Edison electrocuting animals.
I think the mistake that is being made here occurs at the point where, having ignored all of the technical points which have been made, you then assume that everybody else has also ignored the same technical arguments as yourself. But, not everybody who will be reading through these comments will be as lazy as yourself, and they will plainly observe that this statement you've made here is really speaking to what you have decided to learn about -- not the actual data that is today available to us.
Let me be absolutely clear on this: With this approach of arguing against things you refuse to actually read about -- which is really more widespread than you are realizing -- our species does not stand a chance of unraveling the mysteries of the Universe.
Slashdot Mirror
Re: "To answer the is it even worth considering question, though- of course it is. And it has been, at great lengths. And plasma physics play a huge role in even standard cosmology. They just don't play a huge role in large-scale cosmology."
Let me give you a very simple example which I hope you will recognize as an earnest attempt to demonstrate how difficult it is to judge vindications when we are not actively tracking scientific controversies.
Today, for the first time, I noticed that a couple of galaxy artists were suddenly drawing the Milky Way's galactic bulge as a pair, as if a memo went out (which I missed). I had never before noticed this, but having learned about Anthony Peratt's galactic simulation as a pair of rotating Birkeland currents, I immediately tuned into this pattern.
To somebody who has not paid any attention to Peratt's simulation, the explanation offered in a July 2016 article would seem good enough to assume the issue is basically settled:
But, hold on just a second. This is a completely ad hoc explanation. Although I have no doubt that somebody somewhere can generate a tweak to the original galactic models -- perhaps involving dark matter -- which can explain with actual numbers why this may occur in the conventional model, the fact of the matter is that this is a completely expected feature when you are modeling a galaxy as an interaction of two Birkeland currents. -- and the choice to refuse to systematically track the Electric Universe controversy has left everybody failing to recognize that this actually vindicates the against-the-mainstream claim.
You think that's just a coincidence? Okay, let's go back a few days to the release of these new pictures from the Juno spacecraft of one of Jupiter's poles in infrared. The article states:
Once again, I sprung into action because I have tracked Peratt's work sufficient to understand the inherent geometry of electricity over plasma. In his efforts to explain petroglyphs as z-pinch instab
Look at how narrow your focus has become. We are literally talking about some of the most complex questions man has ever asked, and you're imagining that you can reduce this very complex discussion to this single paper. In any debate like this, there are going to be winners and losers, but to produce a meaningful assessment, we have to look at the full breadth of all of the individual pieces: the claims, the critiques, the sociological patterns, psychological biases, the history of science, yes the validity of the math (but also whether or not it applies), unexpected vindications, basically the whole fabric of what is happening.
For example, here is an unexpected vindication below from this past January. Rather than simply accepting that galaxy experts don't read IEEE, perhaps we should view that admission as reason to suspect that that practice has an effect upon their ability to replicate (and by extension, self-correct).
Centralized "big science" communities more likely generate non-replicable results
In other words, when a group of electrical engineers launches a critique of mainstream cosmology, the cosmologists can decide to either collaborate with this group to form new sets of questions and lines of investigation; or, they can just ignore or dismiss the critiques. Historically speaking, the pattern in the astrophysics and cosmology domains has been to centralize and ostracize outsiders:
The Death of $cience: A Companion Study to Martin Lopez Corredoira's The Twilight of the Scientific Age
by Andrew Holster
You're adopting a very limited view of the word "methods" that is not in line with what these two sociologists are referring to. The point of the text is to describe the social and evidential processes of science by looking at what they call disputed science.
A review of even just the Amazon reviews would have clarified this. For example:
Re: "You're doing exactly what you're quoting as the wrong thing to do, and you claim that the right thing to do - based on your quotes - is "studying one side"."
I absolutely do NOT recommend shutting out arguments from any side. What I am proposing is the construction of a social network where information about scientific controversies can over time be aggregated with crowdsourcing. I've recently described the details of this social network I'm advocating for in an article titled Tracking Scientific Controversies.
Constructing such a social network is not in the least equivalent to arguing that one side should be ignored. As the situation stands, academia implies that certain questions should no longer be asked because they are considered "settled science". What I'm arguing is that the public can participate in scientific discourse as a check upon scientific authority by double-checking that their "settled" science is indeed settled. The way we do this is to check for vindications over time of these supposedly settled science claims -- a process which benefits from a diverse crowd (which means that the public can be better at this than the scientific community).
What I am reporting to you right now is that I have been practicing this method for a full decade now for this Electric Universe debate, and what I have found is that you are not being properly informed by science journalists. There have been many vindications and completely legitimate explanations which have not been reported to the public. If you had been tracking the EU with me, you'd know of them. I'm trying to report them to you, and doing so does not in any way suggest that you should only pay attention to one side of the debate.
To the extent that a person only pays attention to one side of a debate, they become subject to it. Once we make a conscious decision to track controversies over time -- which is of course easier if we have help from a community -- then this helps us to treat each side of the debate as an object. The premise of my social network design is that we can actually make people smarter by helping them to make this subject-object transition. If you go to any International Baccalaureate-level high school literature class, that is exactly what you will find the teachers instructing the students how to do: They are inviting the students to interpret the text from competing worldviews. But, notice the problem: Science instruction completely lacks a similar tradition -- and so what we end up with, whenever somebody criticizes modern science in some manner, is an angry mob which defends the claims of science for the very reason that these students have not been trained to transition from subject to object.
The mistake you are making here is to interpret the presentation of critique and competing claims as inherently one-sided. But, the whole point of critique is to make us smarter and wiser about our current worldview, and to provide the possibility for change. It's to replace one single thought with two or more. When we learn about critique and competing ideas, we think at a higher level for the very reason that we stop being subject to the information we've b
Re: "I think the place to look for breakthroughs is in new science, not fields that have been extensively studied like astrophysics.People are doing laboratory scale experiments in quantum entanglement for example, so some breakthrough there is quite possible."
... problem being that we already know that there exist contradictions between some of the established disciplines (large and small scale theories), so the recipe you've provided us with here does not address the possibility of mistakes existing within one of these two domains.
Re: "Over lunch I was laughing with a colleague about how completely absurd the idea was that the universe isn't expanding - it is supported by such a huge wealth of data. At the very least, how could someone explain the supernova red-shift data without cosmological expansion?"
Vindications for Halton Arp which he discusses within his two books (Seeing Red and Quasars, Redshifts, and Controversies), where he goes into great detail about why quasars are not at their redshift-inferred distances:
(1) Alignment of quasar minor axes (vindication of Arp ejection model)
(2) Numerous apparent interactions of objects of wildly different redshifts (not possible with Big Bang, vindication of Arp)
(3) Numerous instances where high-redshift quasars appear aligned with the axes of low-redshift "foreground" galaxies (statistics indicate this occurs far too often for a strict recession velocity interpretation of redshift)
(4) Intervening galaxies are 4 times more prevalent along lines of sight to GRB's than quasars (shouldn't happen if quasars are at extreme distances)
(5) Quasars seemingly observed in front of foreground galaxies (has led to mainstream invocation of transparent sightlines through galactic bulges)
(6) A quasar that exhibits 10x superluminal motions at inferred distance (this is merely the worst case, but the most common examples of this are 2x superluminal; requires invocation of Relativity illusion)
(7) A quasar group so large that it spans 5% of the known universe at inferred distance (not expected from Big Bang theory because it's a violation of the Cosmological Principle that says that the universe is uniform)
(8) No observation of time dilation in quasar variations (no explanation has been accepted, to my knowledge)
(9) Quasars have been shown to exhibit proper motion! (should not be possible at extreme inferred distances, and was once considered a rule for differentiating galactic from extragalactic objects)
(10) Quasar clustering (not expected from Big Bang theory because it's a violation of the Cosmological Principle that says that the universe is uniform)
(11) The Burbidges, Karlsson, the Bamothy's, Depaquit, Peeker and Vigier have all agreed with Halton Arp that there are preferred values for redshift, and numerous investigators have attempted to disprove it only to find the effect in their own dataset (Disproves the Big Bang's recession velocity interpretation for redshift)
Re: "These "fudge factors" fit the data with way more than 5 sigmas."
Absolutely meaningless. You are referring to accuracy and precision when the debate is actually over the interpretation of the physical mechanism.
Re: "Inflation is currently being observed."
Absolutely incorrect. Edwin Hubble was never persuaded, and one of his protege's, Halton Arp, was able to fill a couple of books with all of the exceptions to the assumption that redshift can only have one explanation. Here is a short list of Arp's vindications:
(1) Alignment of quasar minor axes (vindication of Arp ejection model)
(2) Numerous apparent interactions of objects of wildly different redshifts (not possible with Big Bang, vindication of Arp)
(3) Numerous instances where high-redshift quasars appear aligned with the axes of low-redshift "foreground" galaxies (statistics indicate this occurs far too often for a strict recession velocity interpretation of redshift)
(4) Intervening galaxies are 4 times more prevalent along lines of sight to GRB's than quasars (shouldn't happen if quasars are at extreme distances)
(5) Quasars seemingly observed in front of foreground galaxies (has led to mainstream invocation of transparent sightlines through galactic bulges)
(6) A quasar that exhibits 10x superluminal motions at inferred distance (this is merely the worst case, but the most common examples of this are 2x superluminal; requires invocation of Relativity illusion)
(7) A quasar group so large that it spans 5% of the known universe at inferred distance (not expected from Big Bang theory because it's a violation of the Cosmological Principle that says that the universe is uniform)
(8) No observation of time dilation in quasar variations (no explanation has been accepted, to my knowledge)
(9) Quasars have been shown to exhibit proper motion (should not be possible at extreme inferred distances, and was once considered a rule for differentiating galactic from extragalactic objects)
(10) Quasar clustering (not expected from Big Bang theory because it's a violation of the Cosmological Principle that says that the universe is uniform)
(11) The Burbidges, Karlsson, the Bamothy's, Depaquit, Peeker and Vigier have all agreed with Halton Arp that there are preferred values for redshift, and numerous investigators have attempted to disprove it only to find the effect in their own dataset (Disproves the Big Bang's recession velocity interpretation for redshift)
Re: "And the whole Dark Matter issue. You completely ignore data that nearly perfectly matches the theory, but then propose theories that do not match any modern data."
The facts:
(1) Dark matter remains hypothetical; it has never been identified, and yet we are told it must represent a significant fraction of the total universe.
(2) Dark matter instruments have increased in sensitivity by a million times over the past 15 years, yet none has been found.
(3) Galactic rotation curves were produced by plasma physicist Anthony Peratt on government supercomputers in the early 80's by simply modeling the cosmic plasma as laboratory plasmas (capable of holding E-fields and transmitting electrical currents). Those simulations were based upon earlier laboratory work by Winston Bostick which showed the same spiral galaxy forms.
Your statement is a complete mischaracterization of the situation.
Re: "Seems to have no predictive power. I only ever see a) Gravity is wrong b) ??? c) Galaxy is stabilized"
The argument which has been put forward is that gravity is simply a localized force, and does not dominate at the larger scales. This would seem to be a reasonable assessment when you consider the actual distances between stars. If the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, then the next nearest star would typically be about 4 miles away. Put into these terms, it seems extremely unlikely that gravity can ever bridge these vast distances.
Re: "what about the new version of
The way that cosmology -- and scientific frameworks more generally -- have traditionally operated is that there is a solid foundation of claims which are then supplemented by a variety of -- hopefully peripheral -- conjectures and speculations. To the extent that people think that they can throw away the entire framework (e.g., the core claim that electricity dominates at the larger scales) because of the less supported conjectures and speculations (e.g., Wal Thornhill's suggestion that electrons have structure), you are actually diverging from the established tradition of scientific frameworks. We need to allow theorists some room to propose conjectures, because some of them will end up as actual hypotheses or theories.
There is of course no shortage in mainstream cosmology of unsupported wacky ideas. Countless articles and papers have been written on these questionable topics, but they do not by themselves discount the core claim that gravity might dominate at all scales. The speculations can only be judged as possibly problematic if the solid parts of the theories somehow rest upon the weaker conjectures, as a necessary support.
Re: "I am not bothering to watch the YouTube video"
It appears that the entire argument against electricity in space could basically be summarized with:
What is a bit strange is that this is how the person begins their response. It is of course a statement upon the person's rigor, motivation to learn, and overall process for judging disagreements in science., and most people here who are doing this are of course not so honest about it.
The critiques of Robert Goddard were remarkably similar.
- A.W. Bickerton, New Zealand Professor of Physics & Chemistry
Learn the math!
If you were to actually read what the whistleblower astrophysicists are arguing, you'd observe that they would disagree with your approach. These people are risking their careers in order to convince the public to alter its focus.
The Twilight of the Scientific Age
Martín López Corredoira
Cosmologist / Astrophysicist / Philosopher / Published 50 Academic Papers, Often as Lead / Academic Whistleblower
Alfvén's Programme in Solar System Physics by Stephen G. Brush, IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Vol. 20, No. 6, Dec 1992
Re: "I am willing to admit filaments exist but they are streams of charged ions from the stars. These are moving through the magnetic field of the star or vice versa, so of course they have a current. This doesn't give rise to a force holding the galaxy together."
Alfvén's Programme in Solar System Physics by Stephen G. Brush, IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Vol. 20, No. 6, Dec 1992
Tracking controversies does not imply that a person is "obsessed" with them, and when somebody demonstrates with a large number of examples that the tech community has a bias against electricity in space, they are hardly "ranting". If the science journalists were reporting on this subject in the properly objective manner, these ideas would have been mainstream many years ago.
By your own logic, Don Scott, author of The Electric Sky is an academic insider. So, you've managed to profoundly confuse the conversation with this approach of calling anybody who has a PhD an insider.
On the importance of learning the context of science ...
The Golem: What You Should Know About Science
Collins / Pinch
One perfectly legitimate way to explain why it is rare that outsiders of a well-established field can make major contributions is with gatekeeping. In fact, that is exactly one of the points made by Dr. Gerald Pollack of the University of Washington.
Cellular and Molecular Biology 51, 815-820 (2005)
Revitalizing Science In A Risk-averse Culture: Reflections On The Syndrome And Prescriptions For Its Cure G.H. Pollack
Re: "You need to make testable predictions that differ from the current model."
There are many examples of observations at the level of planetary --> intergalactic scales which are expected in an electrical cosmology, but not in a gravitational one (and realize that it is acknowledged that gravity dominates at the smaller scales). To give a few examples ...
1. The failure of the solar wind to appreciably decelerate even as it passes the Earth's orbit. In the laboratory, we accelerate charged particles with an electric field. Basic physics is suggestive of the idea that the Sun is the center of an electric field, and it extends outwards to the heliopause.
2. The fact that galactic rotation curves are easily produced by modeling the cosmic plasma as laboratory plasma. The reason it is so is because the spiral arms trace out electric currents. Very simple physics compared to the dark matter conjecture. In fact, Winston Bostick produced spiral galaxy forms in the plasma laboratory many, many years ago, and Anthony Peratt created his supercomputer simulations as a reaction to that former experimental work.
3. The CMB itself can be argued to be evidence for electric currents in space, because
As for the unexpected bell-curve shape of this signal, it could very well result from the signal passing through the heliopause, but even if that proves to be problematic, it's not at all scientific to rush to judge that this is evidence for a creation event.
4. The layering of the ionosphere is evidence that the Earth has a net charge to it. Why? Because we can do the experiment in the laboratory: Set up a metal sphere in a vacuum, and pump it full of charge until the charge density becomes very high. What happens? Layering of charge. These are actually called double layers in the plasma laboratory, and they are recognized as electrodynamic phenomena (which is likely why astrophysicists have so far refused to catalog double layers as astrophysical entities, even though they've been observed in the Van Allen radiation belts).
5. The Earth is observed to electrically interact with the Sun every 8 minutes. You didn't recognize this as an electric current because the scientists called it either a "magnetic portal" or a "flux transfer event", but it is obvious that the magnetic field is caused by an electric current. What we've yet to see any acknowledgement of from mainstream scientists is that these discharges every 8 minutes might be acting as a feedback which stabilizes our solar system.
6. The Cassini spacecraft was struck in 2005 by an electric current from Hyperion, even though it was a full 1,200 miles away from the small object.
The scientists referred to it as an "electrostatic shock", but this was an obvious violation of Debye screening, which should have limited the electrostatic discharges in this region to 10 meters. Incidentally, the researchers sat on the news of this event for a full 9 years before reporting it to the public.
In each case, we see something happening which is expected for electricity in space, but u
The map is not the territory. You've devised a test for the analogy which says nothing about its application.
Re: "Ok explain to me how the electric universe works on materials that are not magnetic. Gravity works on everything that has mass. Take me same physics problem and explain how it works on non ionized carbon."
You seem to be asking how electric forces at the largest scales can influence the structure of the universe, even when we are talking about neutral matter.
If you've played with an electrostatic lifter, then you basically already know the answer to this question: The air in the atmosphere is of course an insulator, yet the application of an electric field induces a movement of this neutral air such that it can temporarily raise the lifter.
So, what is going on there? What appears to be happening is that the movement of the charged particles is exerting a drag upon the neutrals. In the plasma laboratory, you may see this mentioned as an "ion sump" or part of a larger process known as "Marklund convection". There would seem to be little discussion of this phenomenon in astrophysics circles, yet notice this observation from Herschel:
At the point where we are talking about a complex field of accretions along filaments, it's important to realize that we have really strayed rather far from the original idea of gravitational accretion, as it was portrayed within the textbooks; and people need to be cognizant of the tendency to push parameters in simulations towards unrealistic numbers, in order to replicate these observations with gravity.
It's worth noting, further, that plasma is widely acknowledged as the most common state for matter. It's important to never forget this even as you observe radio astronomers discussing neutral HI filaments. The instruments detect the neutral matter, but this should not be confused as meaning that this region is dominated -- either in terms of its forces or by the percentage of matter present -- by neutral matter. The Marklund convection process can easily explain why the cores of these electrodynamic plasma filaments should be neutral, and it is arguably a better fit for the morphology of these accretion fields revealed by the Herschel observations.
Re: "It's a lot like claiming your theory about perpetual motion cars has been vindicated because you slightly miscalculated your car's fuel economy."
This really seems quite unfair. All you've done is misstated the breadth of the claims. There were 10 main points presented in the first comment, so what does it mean that people are so enthusiastic when somebody misstates the breadth of the presented argument?
Because there is an observable bias in the tech community against electricity in space -- and if you look at the nature of the rebuttals that are being put forward, it's easy to see that the rejections generally do not base upon the technical merits. There is a sense that people feel a bit too strongly that electricity in space cannot do anything of any importance, in the light of their refusal to actually learn the details of the debate. This has been going on for a very long time now, and these strong feelings are increasingly out-of-sync with the actual observational trends.
Yes, it very much has the feeling of a time capsule -- as if nothing at all has occurred in the intervening years!
Again, we see somebody arguing that the best way to understand the debate is to learn just one side of it. The reality of the situation is that the math is in service to the concepts and models of the framework, so when we change frameworks, the math can also -- and quite dramatically -- change. This cannot, by itself, be a complete process for judging scientific controversies.
Re: "Where are the mathematical models?"
An excellent place to learn about the numerous scientific papers which relate to this subject is at Ian Tresman's site here.
However, learning the subject in this manner could be slightly confusing, as it can be difficult for people to learn new frameworks. Our tendency is to view the world through the lens of the theories we know. So, other sites have been constructed to help with this difficult process of switching frameworks. There are three sites which have been created for this purpose of facilitating the transition: here, here and here.
There have also been a couple of essential books published on these subjects: The Electric Sky offers a technical discussion for laypeople, whereas Anthony Peratt's Physics of the Plasma Universe can be used to understand some of the more technical details at a specialist science level. That said, it is also important to read Halton Arp's published work.
A couple of very good documentaries have also been created to try to convey these ideas -- like here and here.
Many of us who follow these matters also keep personal libraries of papers which relate to these subjects. These libraries involve literally thousands of scientific papers, but they are typically hidden behind paywalls. So, whatever point you think you are making, it would seem that what is really happening is that you've failed to even identify the sources where these models are discussed.
The reality of the situation is that you did not make it to first base, but this did not stop you from going online to criticize these ideas which you did not learn about.
Re: "If your theory cannot explain observations that current theory can easily explain and make valid predictions then your theory is complete bullshit. But dumbassed like you are too stupid to understand that."
Put another way, what you are saying is that all frameworks must elaborate in the same sequence as those which preceded them.
But, the fact of the matter is that this has never been true: Since each framework begins with a fundamentally different hypothesis and starting-point assumptions, it is obvious that they will exhibit differing inferential coverage.
Why exactly does a layperson have to explain this to an "actual physicist"? If I had to guess, it's probably because you have spent so much time at the model level of thinking that you've lost touch with what it is like to think at the level of competing frameworks.
Re: "NO DATA THAT BACK THEIR MODELS"
It's really quite remarkable that such a statement is being made amongst people who would apparently work in the tech industry. I mean, we've not seen such hostility directed at electricity since the days of Edison electrocuting animals.
I think the mistake that is being made here occurs at the point where, having ignored all of the technical points which have been made, you then assume that everybody else has also ignored the same technical arguments as yourself. But, not everybody who will be reading through these comments will be as lazy as yourself, and they will plainly observe that this statement you've made here is really speaking to what you have decided to learn about -- not the actual data that is today available to us.
Let me be absolutely clear on this: With this approach of arguing against things you refuse to actually read about -- which is really more widespread than you are realizing -- our species does not stand a chance of unraveling the mysteries of the Universe.