There are lower fruits to pick than the fusion experiment you discuss. All we have to do is take a look at the pictures that our probes are returning. As is, NASA demonstrates far more interest in the observations that confirm their current theories. There are in fact some very startling images coming back from Mars. Now that they've been placing many of these image databases online, it has really opened up the amount of geologic evidence for Electric Universe Theory within the solar system. Nobody has a monopoly on interpreting these images and I know for a fact that there are qualified geologists who are aligned with the EU group at this point in time that can technically analyze the observed surface features as well as any other mainstream uniformist geologist might. The EU Theorists have all sorts of supporters and researchers, some of which work at prestigious organizations. The problem is that very few of them can attribute their names to their analyses, for doing so would in many cases cause them to lose their jobs. This is no joke. It's a very delicate situation. You have no idea how much hostility exists towards any discussion of electrical terra-forming of planetary bodies. This is not an environment that's conducive to getting at the truth.
So, when you discount the www.thunderbolts.info Picture of the Day's as not meeting the expectations of a peer review process, you incorrectly presume that there is little technical skill available to the theorists. Some of the images that are being studied by the EU Theorists actually have no non-electrical explanation. We can see rilles on numerous planets that follow the topography both up and down. This singular fact should be sufficient to cause alarm for mainstream theorists, and yet, they are satisfied to completely ignore it. There is no tweaking of any mainstream theories that will allow rilles that violate gravity. It should be completely impossible by their own standards.
But more than this, the EU Theorists are having great success right now with reproducing our observations of Martian geology using plasma guns and very simple lab setups. A handful of papers have been published and are in the process of being published right now. Some of these experiments have been extremely low budget. It has been discovered, for instance, that the infamous Martian Spiders can be reproduced simply by dusting fiberglass onto an old VGA monitor and repeatedly discharging the screen with a finger. This process creates the precise morphology of the Martian Spiders down to a very fine level of detail. My understanding is that this paper has been submitted to IEEE, but I do not know if they will accept it.
There are also papers being published in a new emerging field called "plasma mythology". People on Slashdot will of course scoff at any attempts at developing a science of mythology, and it is a real shame because dramatic breakthroughs are occurring in this field. These guys are having some impressive successes in understanding ancient astronomical records, ancient texts and ancient mythologies by going back and re-interpreting everything within the context of a plasma cosmology. It turns out that there are amazing similarities in the descriptions of what ancients saw in the sky across all continents, and the things that they all describe, as if with one voice, are not possible within the context of a gravity-centric universe. They *only* make sense if electricity is playing a bigger role in the universe than is currently thought. And not only that, but they are different than what we see in our current sky -- implying that diffusion of ideas could not have possibly been the cause of the correlation between multiple, distant cultures, for it does not explain things that can be refuted merely by looking up into the sky.
One book in particular, God Star, by Dwardu Cardona, took 40 years to write and includes around 2,000 references. Dwardu's book started out as a bet 40 years ago that the Saturn Theory was so absurd that he woul
I was really trying to speak specifically about the atmosphere of BAUT. It is an extremely hostile environment. That is perhaps one way to get at the truth, but it presumes that mainstream astrophysicists are infallible. EU Theorists propose that mainstream astrophysicists have been improperly educated about plasmas. In that situation, the hostility is really just a barrier to objective consideration of their arguments.
But more than that, the EU Theorists are proposing a whole new approach to understanding the universe. They propose that any attempt to understand the universe must by definition be multi-disciplinary. All sources of information must be treated equally rather than as a hierarchy -- as the status quo does -- with astrophysicists at the top. The hierarchy might not be such a bad idea actually if it wasn't the case that astrophysicists have increasingly found themselves behind desks and at computers rather than in laboratories. But since this isn't the case, the hierarchy has become destructive. Now, it is considered normal for people that only do computer simulations and fiddle with numbers and equations to dictate to the experimenters what reality is. That's a mistake.
Another problem with this approach where we attack the argument instead of the idea is that it tends to favor smart people with mediocre ideas. Sometimes, in fact, mediocre people come up with some pretty smart ideas. We see this all the time in the technology world too.
The real issue at hand here is that the mainstream astrophysicists and enthusiasts today refuse to seriously consider the legitimate issues that Electric Universe Theory proposes. There is so little awareness on the mainstream side that the group as a whole is completely oblivious when an EU Theory is even validated -- which happens far more often than is being accepted. In order to confirm or deny a theory, it's important to first fully digest it. Even if the materials do not meet your typical requirements for mathematics, that does not necessarily imply that they are inherently false and unworthy of consideration. They are still ideas.
This constant insistence on peer review studies is a bit of a cop-out. It is really more of an excuse to prevent consideration of the theory by people who have come to depend upon the status quo. There are plenty of rather simple laboratory experiments that can validate the concept of electrical terra-forming -- especially with respect to Mars. I can go through the list, but few mainstreamers want to even hear about it.
The theory of uniformitarianism is slowly trending out of fashion. It's becoming increasingly acceptable within mainstream geology and archaeology circles that some sort of violent process could have occurred within human history. In other words, catastrophism is gradually being co-opted by the mainstream -- but without any consideration of plasmas, contacting plasma spheres or electrical interactions. It's generally thought that impacts are really just physical collisions, which lead to explosions. But there have been few attempts to actually demonstrate this by inducing an impact of some sort. The one attempt at an impact that has occurred -- the Deep Impact mission -- seemed to suggest a pre-impact flash that would correspond with the conjunction of two plasma spheres. But since other explanations exist, the mainstream astrophysicists gravitate to those other explanations. Rather than follow the anomalous data in an objective manner, they spend more time attempting to conform the data to mainstream theories.
If EU Theory wasn't true, then it would eventually become clear during the course of researching it. However, the sheer number of supportive details suggests that it likely is true. The more I read about it, the more this picture gets filled in. There are certainly gaps in the understanding and mathematical clarity, but there are no anomalies in EU Theory as there are within the mainstream circles. You will surely argue that this is because it's not a mature theory at this point in time, but that's not the point. The theory as a whole works quite well -- oftentimes better than the mainstream theories. There are actually many things that EU Theory explains that the mainstream theories avoid like the plague.
The z-pinch effect of high intensity, parallel current filaments in an arc plasma is very strong. Whatever nuclear fusion is taking place on the Sun is occurring here in the double layer (DL) at the top of the photosphere (not deep within the core). The result of this fusion process are the "metals" that give rise to absorption lines in the Sun's spectrum. Traces of sixty eight of the ninety two natural elements are found in the Sun's atmosphere. Most of the radio frequency noise emitted by the Sun emanates from this region. Radio noise is a well known property of DLs. The electrical power available to be delivered to the plasma at any point is the product of the E-field (Volts per meter) times current density (Amps per square meter). This multiplication operation yields Watts per cubic meter. The current density is relatively constant over the height of the photospheric / chromospheric layers. However, the E-field is by fa
That would be a great starting point. It was deleted from the BAUT Forum shortly after posting it because nobody was willing to be attacked. In the absence of a piñata, the theory does not exist to the people at BAUT. The EU Theorists are seeking individuals who believe that they can debate these points, but nobody's been willing to step up to the plate so far. Go figure...
Arguing that arguments that are not peer-reviewed by mainstream astrophysicists do not count is disingenuous. People who have staked their careers on the mainstream theories will resist every attempt at disruptive paradigm shifts.
There's something that doesn't quite follow with this article. The article states that we are only in danger when the bipolar configuration faces us. However, when the bipolar morphology faces us, it will look just like a sphere. The other lobe will be obstructed by the one closest to us. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but how often do we see spherical objects in space as being identified as a bipolar configuration pointing at us?
Couldn't a person make a pretty convincing argument that the bipolar configuration is in fact the primary configuration of all such objects, and that anything that looks like a sphere to us is in fact just the bipolar configuration pointing at us?
The Bad Astronomy site started out to debunk nutty astronomical theories, like the Electric Universe theory, or the preposterous notion that the moon landing was faked. It's a pretty decent site.
It's interesting that the site is called "Bad Astronomy" -- as if all discussion on that site is meant purely to confirm existing mainstream theories. In fact, if you follow the site closely, you'll notice that they stack the cards very heavily in favor of mainstream theories. There is absolutely no attempt at objectivity. Theories are not evaluated on the basis of their merit alone, but rather how well their creators can withstand a relentless series of withering attacks. This is a trend that I believe was started back in the day of Carl Sagan, when he would call together conferences that had the public relations appearance of being objective, only to place extreme limitations on any speakers that would tend to disagree with any mainstream views. Carl Sagan was particularly disingenuous, however, when the topic came to comets, as he wasn't afraid to contradict his own publications on the subject in order to discredit the big V.
People who do not follow the Electric Universe debate can perhaps be forgiven for not realizing that many of the EU concepts are in the process of being co-opted by the natives of the BAUT forum. You will frequently hear things like:
"Well, we never denied there was electricity in space, but it doesn't do what you think it does, or work in quite the way you think it does."
This conveniently ignores the fact that Einstein never even mentioned electrodynamics, except in his correspondence with (that expletive) V, and that James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that e-fields and b-fields are inseparable. Astrophysics continues to be the only field of science where magnetic fields are treated as if they are independent entities that can exist in the absence of electric currents and electric fields. People would be wise to consider that it is now an established fact that there exists an interstellar magnetic field whose origin remains unknown. There is little doubt that the mainstreamers will eventually attempt to explain that this magnetic field has been frozen in place for billions of years, but there will subsequently be very little effort to validate this concept. Its mathematical postulation will be considered adequate to explain the finding until the time comes when it is accidentally discovered that this theory is incorrect. By the time that it is discovered that there may in fact be an interstellar current associated with this interstellar magnetic field, the mainstream astrophysicists will claim that either it is insufficient to actually do anything other than induce the magnetic field, or that they had always suspected that it was the case in the first place. No mention of EU Theory will follow.
And that is how mainstream astrophysics more-or-less works today.
When two plasmaspheres meet, there is no doubt that there is an electrical connection that occurs. There is no other explanation for rilles on planets that move both up and down with the terrain -- a phenomenon that is quite common throughout the solar system. But more than that, fringe scientists are having great success with explaining our observations of Mars with electrical terraforming. The mainstream is completely oblivious to this fact due to their electrical blinders. You can replicate all of the features of Martian Spiders, for instance, with some fiberglass dusted onto old CRT monitor and your finger. Charge the screen up and repeat the discharge at the same location, and you'll see Martian spiders.
The more you research the issue of planetary interactions and electricity in space, the stranger the story gets. There is no bottom to this story and there is no lack of evidence to demonstrate that something very strange happened within recent human history. If you have doubts, then drop the $60 - $70 required to purchase "God Star" by Dwardu Cardona. You may be initially turned off by the prospect of reading a book based upon comparative mythology, but that book is revolutionary. Dwardu leaves no stone unturned. There will come a day when that book turns all of science upside down and people won't know what to believe anymore. Comparative mythology will eventually reveal the origins of religion. This threat will induce a lot of people to resist the new findings.
It turns out that the reason we haven't been able to understand mythology and ancient astronomical records up to this point is because we've been interpreting them through the lens of a gravity-centric universe. If you accept that electricity over plasma could be a playing a role within planetary interactions and so on (as it does within the laboratory), all of the ancient texts can be re-interpreted within this context and they all amazingly correspond with one another. Let me repeat that: ALL OF THE ANCIENT WRITINGS SAY THE SAME THING. They all describe the same sequence of events, and the story of this sequence of events is embedded within our culture all around us without our knowing. To say the least, the story they tell is very, very strange. I couldn't possibly do it justice without sounding like a lunatic. You have to read the evidence and the story at the same time to avoid immediately rejecting it.
No, its not! CO2 Lags temperature not the other way around, solar activity on the other hadn *leads* temperature.
The scariest part of this whole debate are the number of consensuses that have been reached (all of them prematurely) in order to get to this point... that Venus is a typical example of a runaway greenhouse effect; that the unusual weather systems of other planets have no bearing whatsoever upon understanding our own (as if we are somehow the prototypical weather system); that warming on the other planets is not related to the warming on our own (and different reasons are postulated for each particular case); that we can see into the Sun with helioseismology and it validates our current theories of the Sun; and that the Sun is nothing but a thermonuclear reactor (even though there is plenty of quality evidence that violates even this idea), among numerous others.
I mean, for God's sake, the entire field of astrophysics is highly speculative and interpretive. The fact that numerous important proofs for the Big Bang sit untouched (due to, once again, consensus) while promoters of the theory loudly denounce any alternative cosmologies is absolutely shameful. Those religious adherents to the Church of the Big Bang might want to consider some self-doubt once in a while like this intelligent (and objective) fellow...
Scientists still don't even understand the origins of lightning! Or, for that matter, why lightning has been observed to exist in the upper atmosphere. Why in the world would lightning be connecting to the edge of space? Doesn't electricity generally take the shortest path between its source and destination? Don't climate researchers tell us that lightning is the result of more terrestrial processes?
The interpretive sciences are in a horrible state right now. They have allowed themselves to be taken in by the uniformitarians of a few decades ago, and are slowly waking up to the fact that they were had. That somebody can even look at Valles Marineris on Mars and continue to believe in uniformitarianism is amazing to me. That canyon is just far too deep to be the result of some sort of gradual erosion process. Much the same can be said of our own Grand Canyon, which continues to defy (non-electrical, at least) explanations. An overhead shot of the Grand Canyon is clearly and undoubtedly, a Lichtenberg figure. It doesn't get any easier than this, folks.
And yet, no matter how much logic you inject into these sorts of things, the mainstream astrophysicists and mainstream global warming enthusiasts will always scream into their keyboards that they are right and that the rest of us are either crackpots or shills for oil companies. And to be honest, the people here on Slashdot tend to be the worst offenders.
So, flame away, guys. Tell me that I'm a crackpot, a nut, whatever you want. But when you're older and you realize that you shouted falsehoods and misled or ridiculed others, and that you yourself reached a premature consensus, all I ask is that you at least do something to make up for the damage you've caused. If you guys are proven wrong, don't hide behind your online anonymity. Try to make sure that this garbage never happens again. It's the least you guys can do if and when it's demonstrated that you are wrong. If and when we demonstrate that mainstream interpretive sciences have run amok, teach people the story of how premature consensus almost destroyed science and admit your role in it.
You're falling into the same trap religious nuts fall into when insisting I have to prove that God doesn't exist. Specifically, crackpot pseudo-logic.
"God Star" contains around 2,000 references. That would place it into a unique category as far as religious materials go...;). I got to meet the author, Dwardu Cardona, last week and he would be quite entertained to hear that his book is like the rantings of a religious nut. It is in fact a very scholarly work that demonstrates, without much remaining doubt, that the most educated astronomical cultures of the world also believed that Saturn was the Earth's primieval Sun. This was a universal motif that appears in every single culture. The Efe and Dogon tribes of remote Brazil who have no contact with the outside world understand that Saturn has a ring system that is very different from the transient ring that sometimes appears around the moon, and that Saturn has nine visible moons. Not even Galileo could determine that with his telescope. But this is really just the tip of the iceberg, a small fact in a huge sea of evidence that all correlates to one single story -- a story which, when told, will spell the end of the mainstream cosmology.
If I may offer some advice, it's generally wise to avoid commenting on subjects that you have no firsthand information about. This is called mob mentality and displays that you've lost the ability to objectively act on arguments. You've allowed yourself to reach a conclusion before observing all sides of the debate. You've succumbed to preferences and prejudices for interpretations of the data, and it's caused you to ask the wrong questions. The search for life on Mars is a rather poor attempt to revive sagging interest in the space sciences. EU Theory, ironically enough, will induce an increase in space sciences funding.
Also, it is not the purpose of the Electric Universe Theorists to convince people to believe them. They are quite clear that they want nothing more than people to read their materials and evaluate them for themselves. The allegation by the mainstream astrophysical community is, on the other hand, that they are right about their interpretations of space observations, and that only they are qualified to decide what is and isn't true. It could be argued quite easily that, in fact, much of the mainstream theories are based upon pseudo-logic. Where EU Theory relies upon laboratory plasma physics, the mainstream theories will invent unseen particles and forces to represent observations in space. This is hardly good science.
It is unfortunate that people like you have decided to judge the evidence before observing it, and you know not the effect that you are having upon science. Once you realize the damage that you've done, I have no doubt that you will avoid speaking of it to those around you and you will develop mechanisms for psychologically rationalizing it to yourself. The level of guilt that you will (and rightly should) experience will induce you to become defensive about it, and may even induce you to refuse to believe the evidence even when it becomes overwhelming. You will become less interested in understanding the truth and more interested in convincing people that you acted on the basis of the information available to you. You will set aside the memory of receiving this explicit notice as if it never happened.
The reason that you don't find the EU materials convincing is because you have not read them yourself. Then, what happens is that you and others like yourself go out onto forums like these and proclaim that this theory is nonsense on the basis of a complete lack of information. You act as if the fact that we *can* create proofs for the Big Bang implies that we cannot do the same for any other cosmology. This is a wrong approach. The point is that we should create proofs for multiple cosmologies and then compare those proofs on the basis of new observations. It would be very easy to convince ourselves of something that is not true if we in fact do not do this. The plasma cosmology proof has not been adequately investigated to the point that we are sure that it is wrong. We have not applied the same standard of "theory refinement" to plasma cosmology that we have the more mainstream theories. Halton Arp's thesis of quasar ejection, for instance, has in fact recently been confirmed by a new set of statistics (and yet nobody is interested in pursuing it any further). Any objective observer would admit that electrical and magnetic phenomenon are *increasing* in importance within astrophysics today.
Let me be extremely clear on this: there currently exists no argument that can disqualify Electric Universe Theory. If you believe that you have one, then you should proclaim it right here and now so that I can forward it to the theorists themselves, and we can consider their response. Tim Thompson's Electric Sun paper has been fully and completely rebutted: http://www.electric-cosmos.org/Rejoinder.htm.
There is something else that you need to know. Astrophysics is not the only way to solve this problem. We have alternate techniques for figuring out how the universe operates. Man has been writing down in great detail what he has seen in the sky for around 10,000 years now. Nobody has been able to understand what was being said up until 1994 when Talbott met Wal Thornhill. It is because of the concept of a gravity-centric universe that mythology has not made any sense whatsoever. What you fail to realize is that within the context of plasma cosmology, mythology tells one single story which completely correlates with plasma physics. Tens of thousands of references exist to support this point and they all tell the same exact story. This new "datapoint" can be used to identify with fairly high confidence which cosmology is correct, for to claim that these witnesses are speaking gibberish would require that all of the people of the ancient world would have to simultaneously be wrong, and coincidentally all be wrong in the same way. They may all live on different continents, but they all speak with one single voice. I already know that you will not believe this. Don't bother going into it. I only tell you this so that later, when you see this phenomenon unfolding around you, you will realize that you have not fully or fairly considered both sides of the argument.
Enjoy your gravity-centric universe while it lasts. We're just trying to figure out the right way to introduce the materials right now. The new mythological findings are relatively impenetrable. If you want a headstart on what I'm talking about, then read "God Star" by Dwardu Cardona. But, believing that you guys can understand the universe with equations alone, I'm quite sure that you will not -- and I'm completely fine with that. This is probably a good place to end this conversation. People who exhibit such strong preferences and prejudices about data have allowed themselves to become emotionally involved in their belief systems and have no right to understand the universe -- which cares little what you think about it.
Calling somebody a crank doesn't excuse you or anybody else from considering evidence. It's not some sort of magic spell that can be cast to convince people that mainstream views are correct. There is an obligation amongst serious scientists to actually witness and consider alternative lines of reasoning when the traditional ones are failing to offer convincing explanations.
In truth, cranks are people that cling to their beliefs in the face of all counterarguments or evidence presented to them. I have not offered here that electricity *IS* the cause. I've merely stated that it should be considered. In disagreeing that we should even look at the evidence, you've actually demonstrated yourself to be the crank in this particular instance.
People tend to ignore it as a consideration, but we'd be very wise to include within the range of possibilities that this is a fulgarite-type of material. The Martian blueberries, the Martian spiders, the cleansing of the rover solar panels and the apparent enigmatic fields of geysers that appear at Mars' South Pole can all be explained by various electrical explanations in addition to the ideas that have been proposed so far. We've seen quite clearly dust devils burn the surface of the planet with luminous lightning bolt cores. We've seen that leading and trailing edges of massive dust storms consist of filamentary "streamers" (ie, armies of dust devils). We can create Martian blueberries and domed Martian craters using nothing more than a plasma gun within the laboratory (see CJ Ransom's work).
This past week, I witnessed a very simple demonstration of Martian Spiders by an amateur scientist (Zane Parker) that involved nothing more than an old CRT monitor, fiberglass dust and a human finger. By spreading fiberglass dust upon this charged surface, it is possible to create Lichtenberg-like figures that precisely mimic the primary features of Martian Spiders. This paper has been submitted to IEEE for consideration, but it remains to be seen if it will be accepted.
It is my personal belief that NASA scientists have made a huge mistake in brushing aside arguments for large amounts of electrical terra-forming on Mars. Many of the observations that superficially appear to support the notion of water on Mars' non-polar regions can also be explained in electrical terms. Scientists investigating these phenomenon would be very wise to read and consider the interpretations found in the Picture of the Day Archives at www.thunderbolts.info. Just because these explanations are less popular than those involving water does not require that they are so wrong that they should not be considered as a possibility. Anybody who fully investigates the science behind plasmas and the features of Mars will quite clearly see that the Thunderbolts crew's explanations may possibly have merit. It's very unfortunate that people have allowed themselves to ignore the fact that these people have had some success (where others have clearly failed) in duplicating these features within the laboratory.
The reason why we don't see life everywhere around us is that one of these steps is so improbable or difficult that only very few, if any, aspiring colonizers of space make it past that crucial step and go extinct. The question is, are we, homo sapiens, already beyond this step?
The problem with astrophysics today is the concept of uniformitarianism. It was decided back around the 70's in the Carl Sagan era that scientists would all agree that catastrophism was an absurd concept and that the planet's history is something that we can easily rewind and understand. Over time, geologists have come to realize that the consensus was wrong: catastrophic events have in fact shaped our history. There is strong evidence that something very impressive and likely devastating happened around 10k - 20k years ago, during human history. The consensus of uniformitarianism has proved to be wrong. The big question has now become: what was the event? Mainstream astrophysicists like to think that they have a monopoly on declaring what this event was, but astrophysical science lacks a control variable. For this reason, much of astrophysics is more speculative than the rest of science. There are many instances when the astrophysicists should be bringing a wide variety of experts together so that they can listen, rather than talking as much as they do.
When the mainstream astrophysicists of the 70's threw away catastrophism, they also threw away the idea that planets can accumulate and trade charge as they move through space and during encounters with foreign objects. They threw away all of the evidence associated with the extinction of the mammoths. They stopped asking about the enigma of the Grand Canyon. They stopped asking how it can be that dinosaurs were so large, and with that discarded question, any motivation for further enhancing our understanding of gravity. As a replacement, they adopted the simplistic belief that collisions are the only result of close encounters in space. In doing this, they completely threw away early man's fascination with thunderbolts in mythology. Now, when they notice the signature of a violent event all over North America, but no impact crater to represent it, they speculate that it must have just broken up in the atmosphere. They're ignoring all of the previous debate even though their findings frequently support the catastrophist points all of the time.
As plasma physics evolved into a more mature science, they continued to ignore these developments. When it was noticed that comets, for instance, do not contain significant amounts of water on their surfaces, they insisted that the water must reside inside of the comet's dry, hard asteroid-like shell. They continue to insist that comets are dirty snowballs because they observe streams of OH coming off of them. What they fail to mention to people is that OH is merely the combination of Hydrogen protons from the solar wind with oxygen atoms that are being electrically machined off of the comet (oxygen is one of the most common elements in the universe). Cometary comas can be seen to be on the order of millions of miles wide. No chemical reaction or sublimation can explain that. When we impacted Comet Tempel 1 with an impactor, there were *two* flashes and the pre-impact images clearly show spots of whiteout where electrical activity was occurring. The dust cloud generated was so fine that it had to have been the result of a sputtering-like process, and the crater morphologies on comets precisely match what we see happen in the lab with electrical machining. Wallace Thornhill predicted all of the Deep Impact mission results based upon his Electric Universe Theory -- results which NASA continues to struggle with to this day.
In examining Mars, the astrophysicists once again are doing their best to ignore electrical effects. Much of the geological evidence for water on Mars can be attributed to electrical effects. NASA fails to mention in this particular article that fulgarites (
It's interesting how NASA always delivers just one single interpretation of the data. My understanding is that lightning, which we've viewed to exist on Mars already, could generate fulgarites -- also known as non-crystalline silica.
I encourage you, if you or others have any specific technical problems with that text, to propose them right here and now. I will promptly forward them to the theorists themselves, and if your challenges are serious, you can reasonably expect a response within 1 - 2 week.
It's as simple as that. Fire away.... Or, was this a bluff?
When it comes to challenges, they are very eager to answer anybody with doubts. The problem is that Slashdot people tend not to actually propose legitimate challenges. They rarely leave the world of vague assertions. People on Slashdot typically prefer to attack their credentials rather than their statements.
If you are interested, for instance, you can see a rebuttal to Tim Thompson's challenge to The Electric Sun Hypothesis here:
Queue Electric Universe pseudo-science in 3... 2... 1...
Because, of course, electrical engineers and comparative mythologists make great astrophysicists!
Spoken like a true Slashdotter who has not read what the Electric Universe Theory actually says.
You guys seem to forget that Einstein worked at a Swiss patent office when he first detailed his theory of relativity. By your own reasoning, you would have ridiculed him too.
The problem with your reasoning is that you're so detached from what is being said that garbage is coming out of your mouth. Rather than regurgitating the stuff everybody around you is saying, you should really pick up a copy of the theory ("The Electric Sky" by Don Scott) and evaluate the material on your own. By assuming that the people around you are always right, you are continuing an ugly Slashdot Forum tradition that can also be observed in clans of monkeys.
That article ignores a lot of the points brought up by the documentary. For instance, how is it possible that the weather forecaster in the documentary could have been having success predicting the weather based upon sunspots if the cosmic ray link is "discredited"? Is it true that water vapor would have a dramatically larger greenhouse effect than co2? Is there an 800 year lag with temperature preceding co2 when you zoom into Al Gore's correlation curves?
The only technical information it contains is:
So is the sun responsible now?
Some sceptics say so and probably it played the major role until quite recently. But over the past three decades, solar activity has scarcely risen, while temperatures have shot up - a fact disguised in the film. What has gone up is CO2 and even top sceptic Nigel Lawson admits it is "highly likely" that the gas has "played a significant part" in global warming this century.
It's really hard to get objective information on this stuff.
I wonder if these future weather forecasts factor in the effects of sunspots and cosmic rays?
Of the people out there that are *very* familiar with the technical aspects of global warming, I'm very curious what you guys think about the correlation between sunspots and global temperatures? Have you guys seen "The Great Global Warming Swindle" documentary that talks about research that demonstrates an 800 year gap between co2 and temperature (where temperature changes *precede* co2 changes)?
I'm really curious what the rebuttal to that is. Please no hostile responses. Just trying to use my analytical mind to figure out what to believe based upon the evidence (since I don't put much stock in consensus science)...
The purpose of dark matter is to explain why spiral galaxies can rotate as a fixed plate. Until you can actually observe the particles or somehow conclude that they do indeed exist (and speculative NASA press releases with colorized images do not count), we should avoid further speculation about their role.
We cannot prove that dark matter exists with thought experiments. It requires the construction of equipment or laboratory work, or possibly even careful interpretation of observations. But, regardless of how many astrophysicists need PhD's, we should not encourage any further speculation about dark matter until it is demonstrated to exist -- for everything these new theories touch will themselves turn into speculation, and we will confuse ourselves more than we already have about the level of confidence we can place in our theories. What if we do decide to invest lots of astrophysicists into thought experiments about dark matter's role in the universe? Then, you will have effectively created a group that will lobby for the existence of dark matter even when the weight of the evidence is against it.
In other words, speculations should be based upon some sort of observation. Dropping hints about what a dark matter star might look like is just a clever way of trying to stake out terrain within the astrophysics community.
I followed up on this a little bit more and it appears that quasi-neutrality is a *modeling* tool that only demonstrates the impossibility of charge separation and electric currents in plasmas, if and only if cosmic plasma is treated as a pseudo-plasma, as defined here:
Under many circumstances, it is quite legitimate to assume plasmas have infinite electrical conductivity, which makes charge separation and electric currents impossible. In practice, however, space behaves as a *real* plasma that may have finite electrical conductivity, charge separation and electric currents.
The heliospheric current sheet is an example of a real plasma in space, in which three trillian amps of current flows throughout our own Solar System:
We can opt to believe that this is somehow an aberration and/or that this phenomenon does not scale to larger scales for galaxies, but Anthony Peratt has written papers explaining that electrical plasma phenomenon do appear to in fact scale over vast scales, and can quite easily explain why spiral galaxies rotate as a fixed plate. We'd be wise to seriously consider this as an explanation, in fact, before supposing the existence of particles that have never been directly observed (dark matter), even after 20 years of trying (colored NASA press releases don't count). To argue that EU materials are a "flagrant abuse of plasma physics" appears to be suggesting that the equations that are currently being used to model plasmas take precedence over the physical phenomenon of plasmas that we observe within laboratories and even space (which Hannes Alfven liked to say did not always understand the beauty of the equations themselves).
Lastly, I'd like to direct you to the following recent discovery:
It's emitting synchrotron radiation, so we know that there are double layers present and that this is electrical in nature.
If you actually pay close attention to what's happening, you will in fact notice that as time moves forward, the evidence for electricity in space continues to expand. At this rate, you won't find yourself in the majority with your beliefs about electricity in space for too many more years.
Ultimately, it's a real tragedy that the truth about how space plasmas behave requires so much representation and vigorous defense. Wikipedia refuses to even *define* Electric Universe Theory for curious individuals (or even Plasma Cosmology for that matter). Check it out:
My guess is that many of the people on Slashdot who have formulated their opinions did so by consulting other critics who wrote the previous Electric Universe pages on wiki or Tim Thompson's five-year-old attempt to debunk the Electric Sun Hypothesis (which has since been responded to in full here: http://www.electric-cosmos.org/Rejoinder.htm).
What's missing from the entire picture is a desire to even understand what is actually being said by the EU Theorists themselves. Don Scott's book, "The Electric Sky", is the first time that the theory has been codified in full. But the critics have had their way by now to such an extent that nobody even wants to read Don Scott's book -- which stands as an extremely compelling book that I challenge anybody to read and then subsequently ignore.
There is something outright Orwellian when we extract definitions from our public encyclopedia. It's also extremely surreal because the roles are in fact reversed. Mainstream astrophysics does not even work without the assistance of unseen particles and forces (which are inherently untestable), whereas Electric Universe Theory tries to convince people that we should be using laboratory plasma physics to understand the universe. *Completely* backwards.
That this band of about five guys cannot fight off the world does not really say much at all about whether or not they may be right or wrong. It's a bit much like that movie, 300. I'm pretty sure if they started presenting more math for people (which we are in fact pushing them to do), people would find something else to quibble about.
Electric Universe Theory is based upon Plasma Cosmology, which there are numerous scientific papers available on (and they have math for you). Plasma cosmology has fallen out of favor lately largely because of all of the commotion regarding the cosmic microwave background, which is perceived by many to be proof of the Big Bang. What you need to understand however is that the piece of equipment that was used in measuring the cosmic microwave background was created exclusively for that experiment. As a test, it was pointed at the moon and there were noticeable errors in the results that it generated. These errors were dismissed. It is in fact a very simple matter to create your own piece of equipment that will generate the now-infamous black body curve when pointed at space. And what we've noticed so far is that the galaxies that are near us are not all creating the "shadows" that are required for this to be a light source that is at the edge of the cosmos. Plasma cosmologists have been saying for some time now that this light could easily be a local source. It is all of the commotion regarding the Big Bang that has induced attempts to prove that it is so, but the proof has not been as simple as those people would have liked it to be.
What EU Theorists are saying that's different from plasma cosmologists is that mathematics is not the only tool that we can use to understand the universe. In fact, we should analyze *all* sources of information, including mythology and ancient writings, to see if there are unexplainable correlations between statements and ideas that originate from ancient peoples separated by vast oceans. What they found is that, when you throw away all of the junk, you are left with some disturbing correlations. A lot of ancient cave art and mythological symbols bear striking resemblances to morphologies we observe within laboratory plasma physics. Astrophysicists will scoff at this type of research as it infringes upon the monopoly they exert over cosmology and it appears to them to be too speculative. However, we learn every week that goes by that in fact much of astrophysics is in fact overly-speculative. Just last week, we discovered that the entire field of helioseismology has been turned upside down due to a solar oxygen crisis (these ratios were used to understand how the sun "rings"). And we see unusual supernova remnants (like 1987A) that correlate precisely with *electrical* plasmas from the laboratory. The consensus that comets are dirty snowballs becomes increasingly unsupported with every mission we send to them that does not find water or ice on the surface. The presence of OH in cometary tails is just as easily explainable with electric machining as it is for sublimation. The pervasiveness of the hourglass morphology in space suggests electrical plasma z-pinches, which we observe within laboratory plasma physics. We do not even need dark matter to generate spiral galaxies that rotate as fixed plates. Anthony Peratt has published computer simulations and laboratory physics experiments that demonstrate that electrical plasmas will do the exact same thing and generate the precise spiral galaxy morphology.
I can relate to requiring math in papers. But the existence of math does not really prove anything. In fact, it is the math itself that is causing problems for modeling plasmas in space. Astrophysicists have been using the *wrong* sets of equations to model plasmas in space.
The www.thunderbolts.info site is tailored for a wide audience. But do not infer that because of that that there is no math behind what you see there. We are talking about laboratory plasma physics here and electrodynamics. These people are no strangers to math. They've just decided to drop the math for that site so that they can be more inclusive.
And when you get down to it, the math is in fact inconsequential. The real problem for people on Slashdot is the allegation that electrical forces are dominant in the universe.
Yeah, I screwed up there with what you quoted. That's what I get for posting around 25 postings in one day.
Inherent in your analysis is the assumption that the anomalies we are seeing that we call dark matter are the result of unknown forces or particles rather than yet-unknown (or rather, unaccepted) errors in how we are modeling the matter that makes up space. I get a lot of responses styled like yours here on Slashdot. There tends to be very little discussion that specifically relates to plasmas, and yet we know that space more or less *is* a large plasma. Any slight error in how you model plasmas in space will generate very large error terms. I'm most curious why it is that astrophysicists feel that they can model plasmas in space as fluids under such a wide range of circumstances when laboratory plasma physicists cannot do the same? I've been told that in the lab, the behavior of plasmas is determined almost entirely by the electrical currents that flow through them and that gases become plasmas with less than 1% ionization. We are told by astrophysicists that plasmas will *instantaneously* neutralize themselves in space and that plasmas in space have frozen-in-place magnetic fields. These concepts might be useful for doing math problems, but in the process of making the math easier, have we basically reduced our ability to accurately model the physical phenomenon? These are the questions at the heart of the validity of EU Theory. If you have any challenges on these concepts, I can pass them on to the EU Theorists directly and we can see what they say. It's the lack of a response to these legitimate questions that leads a lot of people to believe in EU Theory. If the mainstream astrophysicists want to nip this in the bud (because the movement is currently expanding), they'd be wise to enter into the EU fray a little bit more than they currently do.
As an outsider looking in, it appears to me that astrophysicists have been too quick to draw conclusions. Speculations that supernovae, for instance, represent "standard candles" formulates the basis of vast amounts of what we think we know about cosmology, and yet, we still identify unexpected supernovae remnant morphologies and problems with the standard solar model on an almost monthly basis (oxygen ratios, etc). My understanding is that there is still no general acceptance on the precise mechanism that makes stars explode. How then can you say with any confidence that you are seeing "standard candles"? When the solar oxygen crisis was divulged last week, hardly anybody on the Slashdot forum recognized that those ratios are crucial for the entire field of helioseismology because gas concentrations allows us to know how the Sun should ring. Helioseismology isn't even a form of seismology. In traditional geo-seismology, *we* are the ones that are pounding on the ground. We are providing the input to the system, and so we know what the results mean. But in helioseismology, we are just interpreting the vibrations that we observe -- for which we have no part in the input. The fact that it is even called seismology is somewhat of a problem. Astrophysicists like to portray their science as a standard science, and they have done a great job of making the public forget that it is instead still an interpretive science.
We see this happen all the time these days: earlier speculations and assumptions in astrophysics will be demonstrated to be incorrect, and entire fields that depend upon those speculations and assumptions will then be thrown into chaos. But the public continues to be told that there is no problem whatsoever -- that the standard models are just fine. Well, no, at some point in time, the standard models are no longer just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
There are lower fruits to pick than the fusion experiment you discuss. All we have to do is take a look at the pictures that our probes are returning. As is, NASA demonstrates far more interest in the observations that confirm their current theories. There are in fact some very startling images coming back from Mars. Now that they've been placing many of these image databases online, it has really opened up the amount of geologic evidence for Electric Universe Theory within the solar system. Nobody has a monopoly on interpreting these images and I know for a fact that there are qualified geologists who are aligned with the EU group at this point in time that can technically analyze the observed surface features as well as any other mainstream uniformist geologist might. The EU Theorists have all sorts of supporters and researchers, some of which work at prestigious organizations. The problem is that very few of them can attribute their names to their analyses, for doing so would in many cases cause them to lose their jobs. This is no joke. It's a very delicate situation. You have no idea how much hostility exists towards any discussion of electrical terra-forming of planetary bodies. This is not an environment that's conducive to getting at the truth.
So, when you discount the www.thunderbolts.info Picture of the Day's as not meeting the expectations of a peer review process, you incorrectly presume that there is little technical skill available to the theorists. Some of the images that are being studied by the EU Theorists actually have no non-electrical explanation. We can see rilles on numerous planets that follow the topography both up and down. This singular fact should be sufficient to cause alarm for mainstream theorists, and yet, they are satisfied to completely ignore it. There is no tweaking of any mainstream theories that will allow rilles that violate gravity. It should be completely impossible by their own standards.
But more than this, the EU Theorists are having great success right now with reproducing our observations of Martian geology using plasma guns and very simple lab setups. A handful of papers have been published and are in the process of being published right now. Some of these experiments have been extremely low budget. It has been discovered, for instance, that the infamous Martian Spiders can be reproduced simply by dusting fiberglass onto an old VGA monitor and repeatedly discharging the screen with a finger. This process creates the precise morphology of the Martian Spiders down to a very fine level of detail. My understanding is that this paper has been submitted to IEEE, but I do not know if they will accept it.
There are also papers being published in a new emerging field called "plasma mythology". People on Slashdot will of course scoff at any attempts at developing a science of mythology, and it is a real shame because dramatic breakthroughs are occurring in this field. These guys are having some impressive successes in understanding ancient astronomical records, ancient texts and ancient mythologies by going back and re-interpreting everything within the context of a plasma cosmology. It turns out that there are amazing similarities in the descriptions of what ancients saw in the sky across all continents, and the things that they all describe, as if with one voice, are not possible within the context of a gravity-centric universe. They *only* make sense if electricity is playing a bigger role in the universe than is currently thought. And not only that, but they are different than what we see in our current sky -- implying that diffusion of ideas could not have possibly been the cause of the correlation between multiple, distant cultures, for it does not explain things that can be refuted merely by looking up into the sky.
One book in particular, God Star, by Dwardu Cardona, took 40 years to write and includes around 2,000 references. Dwardu's book started out as a bet 40 years ago that the Saturn Theory was so absurd that he woul
I was really trying to speak specifically about the atmosphere of BAUT. It is an extremely hostile environment. That is perhaps one way to get at the truth, but it presumes that mainstream astrophysicists are infallible. EU Theorists propose that mainstream astrophysicists have been improperly educated about plasmas. In that situation, the hostility is really just a barrier to objective consideration of their arguments.
But more than that, the EU Theorists are proposing a whole new approach to understanding the universe. They propose that any attempt to understand the universe must by definition be multi-disciplinary. All sources of information must be treated equally rather than as a hierarchy -- as the status quo does -- with astrophysicists at the top. The hierarchy might not be such a bad idea actually if it wasn't the case that astrophysicists have increasingly found themselves behind desks and at computers rather than in laboratories. But since this isn't the case, the hierarchy has become destructive. Now, it is considered normal for people that only do computer simulations and fiddle with numbers and equations to dictate to the experimenters what reality is. That's a mistake.
Another problem with this approach where we attack the argument instead of the idea is that it tends to favor smart people with mediocre ideas. Sometimes, in fact, mediocre people come up with some pretty smart ideas. We see this all the time in the technology world too.
The real issue at hand here is that the mainstream astrophysicists and enthusiasts today refuse to seriously consider the legitimate issues that Electric Universe Theory proposes. There is so little awareness on the mainstream side that the group as a whole is completely oblivious when an EU Theory is even validated -- which happens far more often than is being accepted. In order to confirm or deny a theory, it's important to first fully digest it. Even if the materials do not meet your typical requirements for mathematics, that does not necessarily imply that they are inherently false and unworthy of consideration. They are still ideas.
This constant insistence on peer review studies is a bit of a cop-out. It is really more of an excuse to prevent consideration of the theory by people who have come to depend upon the status quo. There are plenty of rather simple laboratory experiments that can validate the concept of electrical terra-forming -- especially with respect to Mars. I can go through the list, but few mainstreamers want to even hear about it.
The theory of uniformitarianism is slowly trending out of fashion. It's becoming increasingly acceptable within mainstream geology and archaeology circles that some sort of violent process could have occurred within human history. In other words, catastrophism is gradually being co-opted by the mainstream -- but without any consideration of plasmas, contacting plasma spheres or electrical interactions. It's generally thought that impacts are really just physical collisions, which lead to explosions. But there have been few attempts to actually demonstrate this by inducing an impact of some sort. The one attempt at an impact that has occurred -- the Deep Impact mission -- seemed to suggest a pre-impact flash that would correspond with the conjunction of two plasma spheres. But since other explanations exist, the mainstream astrophysicists gravitate to those other explanations. Rather than follow the anomalous data in an objective manner, they spend more time attempting to conform the data to mainstream theories.
If EU Theory wasn't true, then it would eventually become clear during the course of researching it. However, the sheer number of supportive details suggests that it likely is true. The more I read about it, the more this picture gets filled in. There are certainly gaps in the understanding and mathematical clarity, but there are no anomalies in EU Theory as there are within the mainstream circles. You will surely argue that this is because it's not a mature theory at this point in time, but that's not the point. The theory as a whole works quite well -- oftentimes better than the mainstream theories. There are actually many things that EU Theory explains that the mainstream theories avoid like the plague.
The idea that EU Theory says that there is no fusion occurring on stars is btw false. From http://www.electric-cosmos.org/sun.htm:
Why not respond to this ...
...
...
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/Rejoinder.htm
That would be a great starting point. It was deleted from the BAUT Forum shortly after posting it because nobody was willing to be attacked. In the absence of a piñata, the theory does not exist to the people at BAUT. The EU Theorists are seeking individuals who believe that they can debate these points, but nobody's been willing to step up to the plate so far. Go figure
Arguing that arguments that are not peer-reviewed by mainstream astrophysicists do not count is disingenuous. People who have staked their careers on the mainstream theories will resist every attempt at disruptive paradigm shifts.
Feel free to talk to me like an adult, btw
There's something that doesn't quite follow with this article. The article states that we are only in danger when the bipolar configuration faces us. However, when the bipolar morphology faces us, it will look just like a sphere. The other lobe will be obstructed by the one closest to us. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but how often do we see spherical objects in space as being identified as a bipolar configuration pointing at us?
Couldn't a person make a pretty convincing argument that the bipolar configuration is in fact the primary configuration of all such objects, and that anything that looks like a sphere to us is in fact just the bipolar configuration pointing at us?
It's interesting that the site is called "Bad Astronomy" -- as if all discussion on that site is meant purely to confirm existing mainstream theories. In fact, if you follow the site closely, you'll notice that they stack the cards very heavily in favor of mainstream theories. There is absolutely no attempt at objectivity. Theories are not evaluated on the basis of their merit alone, but rather how well their creators can withstand a relentless series of withering attacks. This is a trend that I believe was started back in the day of Carl Sagan, when he would call together conferences that had the public relations appearance of being objective, only to place extreme limitations on any speakers that would tend to disagree with any mainstream views. Carl Sagan was particularly disingenuous, however, when the topic came to comets, as he wasn't afraid to contradict his own publications on the subject in order to discredit the big V.
People who do not follow the Electric Universe debate can perhaps be forgiven for not realizing that many of the EU concepts are in the process of being co-opted by the natives of the BAUT forum. You will frequently hear things like:
"Well, we never denied there was electricity in space, but it doesn't do what you think it does, or work in quite the way you think it does."
This conveniently ignores the fact that Einstein never even mentioned electrodynamics, except in his correspondence with (that expletive) V, and that James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that e-fields and b-fields are inseparable. Astrophysics continues to be the only field of science where magnetic fields are treated as if they are independent entities that can exist in the absence of electric currents and electric fields. People would be wise to consider that it is now an established fact that there exists an interstellar magnetic field whose origin remains unknown. There is little doubt that the mainstreamers will eventually attempt to explain that this magnetic field has been frozen in place for billions of years, but there will subsequently be very little effort to validate this concept. Its mathematical postulation will be considered adequate to explain the finding until the time comes when it is accidentally discovered that this theory is incorrect. By the time that it is discovered that there may in fact be an interstellar current associated with this interstellar magnetic field, the mainstream astrophysicists will claim that either it is insufficient to actually do anything other than induce the magnetic field, or that they had always suspected that it was the case in the first place. No mention of EU Theory will follow.
And that is how mainstream astrophysics more-or-less works today.
When two plasmaspheres meet, there is no doubt that there is an electrical connection that occurs. There is no other explanation for rilles on planets that move both up and down with the terrain -- a phenomenon that is quite common throughout the solar system. But more than that, fringe scientists are having great success with explaining our observations of Mars with electrical terraforming. The mainstream is completely oblivious to this fact due to their electrical blinders. You can replicate all of the features of Martian Spiders, for instance, with some fiberglass dusted onto old CRT monitor and your finger. Charge the screen up and repeat the discharge at the same location, and you'll see Martian spiders.
The more you research the issue of planetary interactions and electricity in space, the stranger the story gets. There is no bottom to this story and there is no lack of evidence to demonstrate that something very strange happened within recent human history. If you have doubts, then drop the $60 - $70 required to purchase "God Star" by Dwardu Cardona. You may be initially turned off by the prospect of reading a book based upon comparative mythology, but that book is revolutionary. Dwardu leaves no stone unturned. There will come a day when that book turns all of science upside down and people won't know what to believe anymore. Comparative mythology will eventually reveal the origins of religion. This threat will induce a lot of people to resist the new findings.
It turns out that the reason we haven't been able to understand mythology and ancient astronomical records up to this point is because we've been interpreting them through the lens of a gravity-centric universe. If you accept that electricity over plasma could be a playing a role within planetary interactions and so on (as it does within the laboratory), all of the ancient texts can be re-interpreted within this context and they all amazingly correspond with one another. Let me repeat that: ALL OF THE ANCIENT WRITINGS SAY THE SAME THING. They all describe the same sequence of events, and the story of this sequence of events is embedded within our culture all around us without our knowing. To say the least, the story they tell is very, very strange. I couldn't possibly do it justice without sounding like a lunatic. You have to read the evidence and the story at the same time to avoid immediately rejecting it.
The scariest part of this whole debate are the number of consensuses that have been reached (all of them prematurely) in order to get to this point
I mean, for God's sake, the entire field of astrophysics is highly speculative and interpretive. The fact that numerous important proofs for the Big Bang sit untouched (due to, once again, consensus) while promoters of the theory loudly denounce any alternative cosmologies is absolutely shameful. Those religious adherents to the Church of the Big Bang might want to consider some self-doubt once in a while like this intelligent (and objective) fellow
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0705/0705.246
Scientists still don't even understand the origins of lightning! Or, for that matter, why lightning has been observed to exist in the upper atmosphere. Why in the world would lightning be connecting to the edge of space? Doesn't electricity generally take the shortest path between its source and destination? Don't climate researchers tell us that lightning is the result of more terrestrial processes?
The interpretive sciences are in a horrible state right now. They have allowed themselves to be taken in by the uniformitarians of a few decades ago, and are slowly waking up to the fact that they were had. That somebody can even look at Valles Marineris on Mars and continue to believe in uniformitarianism is amazing to me. That canyon is just far too deep to be the result of some sort of gradual erosion process. Much the same can be said of our own Grand Canyon, which continues to defy (non-electrical, at least) explanations. An overhead shot of the Grand Canyon is clearly and undoubtedly, a Lichtenberg figure. It doesn't get any easier than this, folks.
And yet, no matter how much logic you inject into these sorts of things, the mainstream astrophysicists and mainstream global warming enthusiasts will always scream into their keyboards that they are right and that the rest of us are either crackpots or shills for oil companies. And to be honest, the people here on Slashdot tend to be the worst offenders.
So, flame away, guys. Tell me that I'm a crackpot, a nut, whatever you want. But when you're older and you realize that you shouted falsehoods and misled or ridiculed others, and that you yourself reached a premature consensus, all I ask is that you at least do something to make up for the damage you've caused. If you guys are proven wrong, don't hide behind your online anonymity. Try to make sure that this garbage never happens again. It's the least you guys can do if and when it's demonstrated that you are wrong. If and when we demonstrate that mainstream interpretive sciences have run amok, teach people the story of how premature consensus almost destroyed science and admit your role in it.
Some self-doubt never hurt nobody ...
2 v1.pdf
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0705/0705.246
"God Star" contains around 2,000 references. That would place it into a unique category as far as religious materials go
If I may offer some advice, it's generally wise to avoid commenting on subjects that you have no firsthand information about. This is called mob mentality and displays that you've lost the ability to objectively act on arguments. You've allowed yourself to reach a conclusion before observing all sides of the debate. You've succumbed to preferences and prejudices for interpretations of the data, and it's caused you to ask the wrong questions. The search for life on Mars is a rather poor attempt to revive sagging interest in the space sciences. EU Theory, ironically enough, will induce an increase in space sciences funding.
Also, it is not the purpose of the Electric Universe Theorists to convince people to believe them. They are quite clear that they want nothing more than people to read their materials and evaluate them for themselves. The allegation by the mainstream astrophysical community is, on the other hand, that they are right about their interpretations of space observations, and that only they are qualified to decide what is and isn't true. It could be argued quite easily that, in fact, much of the mainstream theories are based upon pseudo-logic. Where EU Theory relies upon laboratory plasma physics, the mainstream theories will invent unseen particles and forces to represent observations in space. This is hardly good science.
It is unfortunate that people like you have decided to judge the evidence before observing it, and you know not the effect that you are having upon science. Once you realize the damage that you've done, I have no doubt that you will avoid speaking of it to those around you and you will develop mechanisms for psychologically rationalizing it to yourself. The level of guilt that you will (and rightly should) experience will induce you to become defensive about it, and may even induce you to refuse to believe the evidence even when it becomes overwhelming. You will become less interested in understanding the truth and more interested in convincing people that you acted on the basis of the information available to you. You will set aside the memory of receiving this explicit notice as if it never happened.
The reason that you don't find the EU materials convincing is because you have not read them yourself. Then, what happens is that you and others like yourself go out onto forums like these and proclaim that this theory is nonsense on the basis of a complete lack of information. You act as if the fact that we *can* create proofs for the Big Bang implies that we cannot do the same for any other cosmology. This is a wrong approach. The point is that we should create proofs for multiple cosmologies and then compare those proofs on the basis of new observations. It would be very easy to convince ourselves of something that is not true if we in fact do not do this. The plasma cosmology proof has not been adequately investigated to the point that we are sure that it is wrong. We have not applied the same standard of "theory refinement" to plasma cosmology that we have the more mainstream theories. Halton Arp's thesis of quasar ejection, for instance, has in fact recently been confirmed by a new set of statistics (and yet nobody is interested in pursuing it any further). Any objective observer would admit that electrical and magnetic phenomenon are *increasing* in importance within astrophysics today.
Let me be extremely clear on this: there currently exists no argument that can disqualify Electric Universe Theory. If you believe that you have one, then you should proclaim it right here and now so that I can forward it to the theorists themselves, and we can consider their response. Tim Thompson's Electric Sun paper has been fully and completely rebutted: http://www.electric-cosmos.org/Rejoinder.htm.
There is something else that you need to know. Astrophysics is not the only way to solve this problem. We have alternate techniques for figuring out how the universe operates. Man has been writing down in great detail what he has seen in the sky for around 10,000 years now. Nobody has been able to understand what was being said up until 1994 when Talbott met Wal Thornhill. It is because of the concept of a gravity-centric universe that mythology has not made any sense whatsoever. What you fail to realize is that within the context of plasma cosmology, mythology tells one single story which completely correlates with plasma physics. Tens of thousands of references exist to support this point and they all tell the same exact story. This new "datapoint" can be used to identify with fairly high confidence which cosmology is correct, for to claim that these witnesses are speaking gibberish would require that all of the people of the ancient world would have to simultaneously be wrong, and coincidentally all be wrong in the same way. They may all live on different continents, but they all speak with one single voice. I already know that you will not believe this. Don't bother going into it. I only tell you this so that later, when you see this phenomenon unfolding around you, you will realize that you have not fully or fairly considered both sides of the argument.
Enjoy your gravity-centric universe while it lasts. We're just trying to figure out the right way to introduce the materials right now. The new mythological findings are relatively impenetrable. If you want a headstart on what I'm talking about, then read "God Star" by Dwardu Cardona. But, believing that you guys can understand the universe with equations alone, I'm quite sure that you will not -- and I'm completely fine with that. This is probably a good place to end this conversation. People who exhibit such strong preferences and prejudices about data have allowed themselves to become emotionally involved in their belief systems and have no right to understand the universe -- which cares little what you think about it.
Calling somebody a crank doesn't excuse you or anybody else from considering evidence. It's not some sort of magic spell that can be cast to convince people that mainstream views are correct. There is an obligation amongst serious scientists to actually witness and consider alternative lines of reasoning when the traditional ones are failing to offer convincing explanations.
In truth, cranks are people that cling to their beliefs in the face of all counterarguments or evidence presented to them. I have not offered here that electricity *IS* the cause. I've merely stated that it should be considered. In disagreeing that we should even look at the evidence, you've actually demonstrated yourself to be the crank in this particular instance.
People tend to ignore it as a consideration, but we'd be very wise to include within the range of possibilities that this is a fulgarite-type of material. The Martian blueberries, the Martian spiders, the cleansing of the rover solar panels and the apparent enigmatic fields of geysers that appear at Mars' South Pole can all be explained by various electrical explanations in addition to the ideas that have been proposed so far. We've seen quite clearly dust devils burn the surface of the planet with luminous lightning bolt cores. We've seen that leading and trailing edges of massive dust storms consist of filamentary "streamers" (ie, armies of dust devils). We can create Martian blueberries and domed Martian craters using nothing more than a plasma gun within the laboratory (see CJ Ransom's work).
This past week, I witnessed a very simple demonstration of Martian Spiders by an amateur scientist (Zane Parker) that involved nothing more than an old CRT monitor, fiberglass dust and a human finger. By spreading fiberglass dust upon this charged surface, it is possible to create Lichtenberg-like figures that precisely mimic the primary features of Martian Spiders. This paper has been submitted to IEEE for consideration, but it remains to be seen if it will be accepted.
It is my personal belief that NASA scientists have made a huge mistake in brushing aside arguments for large amounts of electrical terra-forming on Mars. Many of the observations that superficially appear to support the notion of water on Mars' non-polar regions can also be explained in electrical terms. Scientists investigating these phenomenon would be very wise to read and consider the interpretations found in the Picture of the Day Archives at www.thunderbolts.info. Just because these explanations are less popular than those involving water does not require that they are so wrong that they should not be considered as a possibility. Anybody who fully investigates the science behind plasmas and the features of Mars will quite clearly see that the Thunderbolts crew's explanations may possibly have merit. It's very unfortunate that people have allowed themselves to ignore the fact that these people have had some success (where others have clearly failed) in duplicating these features within the laboratory.
The problem with astrophysics today is the concept of uniformitarianism. It was decided back around the 70's in the Carl Sagan era that scientists would all agree that catastrophism was an absurd concept and that the planet's history is something that we can easily rewind and understand. Over time, geologists have come to realize that the consensus was wrong: catastrophic events have in fact shaped our history. There is strong evidence that something very impressive and likely devastating happened around 10k - 20k years ago, during human history. The consensus of uniformitarianism has proved to be wrong. The big question has now become: what was the event? Mainstream astrophysicists like to think that they have a monopoly on declaring what this event was, but astrophysical science lacks a control variable. For this reason, much of astrophysics is more speculative than the rest of science. There are many instances when the astrophysicists should be bringing a wide variety of experts together so that they can listen, rather than talking as much as they do.
When the mainstream astrophysicists of the 70's threw away catastrophism, they also threw away the idea that planets can accumulate and trade charge as they move through space and during encounters with foreign objects. They threw away all of the evidence associated with the extinction of the mammoths. They stopped asking about the enigma of the Grand Canyon. They stopped asking how it can be that dinosaurs were so large, and with that discarded question, any motivation for further enhancing our understanding of gravity. As a replacement, they adopted the simplistic belief that collisions are the only result of close encounters in space. In doing this, they completely threw away early man's fascination with thunderbolts in mythology. Now, when they notice the signature of a violent event all over North America, but no impact crater to represent it, they speculate that it must have just broken up in the atmosphere. They're ignoring all of the previous debate even though their findings frequently support the catastrophist points all of the time.
As plasma physics evolved into a more mature science, they continued to ignore these developments. When it was noticed that comets, for instance, do not contain significant amounts of water on their surfaces, they insisted that the water must reside inside of the comet's dry, hard asteroid-like shell. They continue to insist that comets are dirty snowballs because they observe streams of OH coming off of them. What they fail to mention to people is that OH is merely the combination of Hydrogen protons from the solar wind with oxygen atoms that are being electrically machined off of the comet (oxygen is one of the most common elements in the universe). Cometary comas can be seen to be on the order of millions of miles wide. No chemical reaction or sublimation can explain that. When we impacted Comet Tempel 1 with an impactor, there were *two* flashes and the pre-impact images clearly show spots of whiteout where electrical activity was occurring. The dust cloud generated was so fine that it had to have been the result of a sputtering-like process, and the crater morphologies on comets precisely match what we see happen in the lab with electrical machining. Wallace Thornhill predicted all of the Deep Impact mission results based upon his Electric Universe Theory -- results which NASA continues to struggle with to this day.
In examining Mars, the astrophysicists once again are doing their best to ignore electrical effects. Much of the geological evidence for water on Mars can be attributed to electrical effects. NASA fails to mention in this particular article that fulgarites (
It's interesting how NASA always delivers just one single interpretation of the data. My understanding is that lightning, which we've viewed to exist on Mars already, could generate fulgarites -- also known as non-crystalline silica.
Do we have any geologists here? Am I wrong?
I encourage you, if you or others have any specific technical problems with that text, to propose them right here and now. I will promptly forward them to the theorists themselves, and if your challenges are serious, you can reasonably expect a response within 1 - 2 week.
... Or, was this a bluff?
It's as simple as that. Fire away.
When it comes to challenges, they are very eager to answer anybody with doubts. The problem is that Slashdot people tend not to actually propose legitimate challenges. They rarely leave the world of vague assertions. People on Slashdot typically prefer to attack their credentials rather than their statements.
If you are interested, for instance, you can see a rebuttal to Tim Thompson's challenge to The Electric Sun Hypothesis here:
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/Rejoinder.htm
You guys seem to forget that Einstein worked at a Swiss patent office when he first detailed his theory of relativity. By your own reasoning, you would have ridiculed him too.
The problem with your reasoning is that you're so detached from what is being said that garbage is coming out of your mouth. Rather than regurgitating the stuff everybody around you is saying, you should really pick up a copy of the theory ("The Electric Sky" by Don Scott) and evaluate the material on your own. By assuming that the people around you are always right, you are continuing an ugly Slashdot Forum tradition that can also be observed in clans of monkeys.
The only technical information it contains is:It's really hard to get objective information on this stuff.
I wonder if these future weather forecasts factor in the effects of sunspots and cosmic rays?
...
Of the people out there that are *very* familiar with the technical aspects of global warming, I'm very curious what you guys think about the correlation between sunspots and global temperatures? Have you guys seen "The Great Global Warming Swindle" documentary that talks about research that demonstrates an 800 year gap between co2 and temperature (where temperature changes *precede* co2 changes)?
I'm really curious what the rebuttal to that is. Please no hostile responses. Just trying to use my analytical mind to figure out what to believe based upon the evidence (since I don't put much stock in consensus science)
I wanted to let you know that your response is very appreciated. Thank you for spending time on it.
The purpose of dark matter is to explain why spiral galaxies can rotate as a fixed plate. Until you can actually observe the particles or somehow conclude that they do indeed exist (and speculative NASA press releases with colorized images do not count), we should avoid further speculation about their role.
We cannot prove that dark matter exists with thought experiments. It requires the construction of equipment or laboratory work, or possibly even careful interpretation of observations. But, regardless of how many astrophysicists need PhD's, we should not encourage any further speculation about dark matter until it is demonstrated to exist -- for everything these new theories touch will themselves turn into speculation, and we will confuse ourselves more than we already have about the level of confidence we can place in our theories. What if we do decide to invest lots of astrophysicists into thought experiments about dark matter's role in the universe? Then, you will have effectively created a group that will lobby for the existence of dark matter even when the weight of the evidence is against it.
In other words, speculations should be based upon some sort of observation. Dropping hints about what a dark matter star might look like is just a clever way of trying to stake out terrain within the astrophysics community.
I followed up on this a little bit more and it appears that quasi-neutrality is a *modeling* tool that only demonstrates the impossibility of charge separation and electric currents in plasmas, if and only if cosmic plasma is treated as a pseudo-plasma, as defined here:
l asma
e ric_current_sheet
c over-plasma-stretching-6-million-light-years-acros s/
http://www.plasma-universe.com/index.php/Pseudo-p
Under many circumstances, it is quite legitimate to assume plasmas have infinite electrical conductivity, which makes charge separation and electric currents impossible. In practice, however, space behaves as a *real* plasma that may have finite electrical conductivity, charge separation and electric currents.
The heliospheric current sheet is an example of a real plasma in space, in which three trillian amps of current flows throughout our own Solar System:
http://www.plasma-universe.com/index.php/Heliosph
We can opt to believe that this is somehow an aberration and/or that this phenomenon does not scale to larger scales for galaxies, but Anthony Peratt has written papers explaining that electrical plasma phenomenon do appear to in fact scale over vast scales, and can quite easily explain why spiral galaxies rotate as a fixed plate. We'd be wise to seriously consider this as an explanation, in fact, before supposing the existence of particles that have never been directly observed (dark matter), even after 20 years of trying (colored NASA press releases don't count). To argue that EU materials are a "flagrant abuse of plasma physics" appears to be suggesting that the equations that are currently being used to model plasmas take precedence over the physical phenomenon of plasmas that we observe within laboratories and even space (which Hannes Alfven liked to say did not always understand the beauty of the equations themselves).
Lastly, I'd like to direct you to the following recent discovery:
http://caribjournal.com/2007/04/22/scientists-dis
It's emitting synchrotron radiation, so we know that there are double layers present and that this is electrical in nature.
If you actually pay close attention to what's happening, you will in fact notice that as time moves forward, the evidence for electricity in space continues to expand. At this rate, you won't find yourself in the majority with your beliefs about electricity in space for too many more years.
Ultimately, it's a real tragedy that the truth about how space plasmas behave requires so much representation and vigorous defense. Wikipedia refuses to even *define* Electric Universe Theory for curious individuals (or even Plasma Cosmology for that matter). Check it out:
o r_deletion/Electric_universe_(concept)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_f
My guess is that many of the people on Slashdot who have formulated their opinions did so by consulting other critics who wrote the previous Electric Universe pages on wiki or Tim Thompson's five-year-old attempt to debunk the Electric Sun Hypothesis (which has since been responded to in full here: http://www.electric-cosmos.org/Rejoinder.htm).
What's missing from the entire picture is a desire to even understand what is actually being said by the EU Theorists themselves. Don Scott's book, "The Electric Sky", is the first time that the theory has been codified in full. But the critics have had their way by now to such an extent that nobody even wants to read Don Scott's book -- which stands as an extremely compelling book that I challenge anybody to read and then subsequently ignore.
There is something outright Orwellian when we extract definitions from our public encyclopedia. It's also extremely surreal because the roles are in fact reversed. Mainstream astrophysics does not even work without the assistance of unseen particles and forces (which are inherently untestable), whereas Electric Universe Theory tries to convince people that we should be using laboratory plasma physics to understand the universe. *Completely* backwards.
That this band of about five guys cannot fight off the world does not really say much at all about whether or not they may be right or wrong. It's a bit much like that movie, 300. I'm pretty sure if they started presenting more math for people (which we are in fact pushing them to do), people would find something else to quibble about.
Electric Universe Theory is based upon Plasma Cosmology, which there are numerous scientific papers available on (and they have math for you). Plasma cosmology has fallen out of favor lately largely because of all of the commotion regarding the cosmic microwave background, which is perceived by many to be proof of the Big Bang. What you need to understand however is that the piece of equipment that was used in measuring the cosmic microwave background was created exclusively for that experiment. As a test, it was pointed at the moon and there were noticeable errors in the results that it generated. These errors were dismissed. It is in fact a very simple matter to create your own piece of equipment that will generate the now-infamous black body curve when pointed at space. And what we've noticed so far is that the galaxies that are near us are not all creating the "shadows" that are required for this to be a light source that is at the edge of the cosmos. Plasma cosmologists have been saying for some time now that this light could easily be a local source. It is all of the commotion regarding the Big Bang that has induced attempts to prove that it is so, but the proof has not been as simple as those people would have liked it to be.
What EU Theorists are saying that's different from plasma cosmologists is that mathematics is not the only tool that we can use to understand the universe. In fact, we should analyze *all* sources of information, including mythology and ancient writings, to see if there are unexplainable correlations between statements and ideas that originate from ancient peoples separated by vast oceans. What they found is that, when you throw away all of the junk, you are left with some disturbing correlations. A lot of ancient cave art and mythological symbols bear striking resemblances to morphologies we observe within laboratory plasma physics. Astrophysicists will scoff at this type of research as it infringes upon the monopoly they exert over cosmology and it appears to them to be too speculative. However, we learn every week that goes by that in fact much of astrophysics is in fact overly-speculative. Just last week, we discovered that the entire field of helioseismology has been turned upside down due to a solar oxygen crisis (these ratios were used to understand how the sun "rings"). And we see unusual supernova remnants (like 1987A) that correlate precisely with *electrical* plasmas from the laboratory. The consensus that comets are dirty snowballs becomes increasingly unsupported with every mission we send to them that does not find water or ice on the surface. The presence of OH in cometary tails is just as easily explainable with electric machining as it is for sublimation. The pervasiveness of the hourglass morphology in space suggests electrical plasma z-pinches, which we observe within laboratory plasma physics. We do not even need dark matter to generate spiral galaxies that rotate as fixed plates. Anthony Peratt has published computer simulations and laboratory physics experiments that demonstrate that electrical plasmas will do the exact same thing and generate the precise spiral galaxy morphology.
I can relate to requiring math in papers. But the existence of math does not really prove anything. In fact, it is the math itself that is causing problems for modeling plasmas in space. Astrophysicists have been using the *wrong* sets of equations to model plasmas in space.
The www.thunderbolts.info site is tailored for a wide audience. But do not infer that because of that that there is no math behind what you see there. We are talking about laboratory plasma physics here and electrodynamics. These people are no strangers to math. They've just decided to drop the math for that site so that they can be more inclusive.
And when you get down to it, the math is in fact inconsequential. The real problem for people on Slashdot is the allegation that electrical forces are dominant in the universe.
Yeah, I screwed up there with what you quoted. That's what I get for posting around 25 postings in one day.
Inherent in your analysis is the assumption that the anomalies we are seeing that we call dark matter are the result of unknown forces or particles rather than yet-unknown (or rather, unaccepted) errors in how we are modeling the matter that makes up space. I get a lot of responses styled like yours here on Slashdot. There tends to be very little discussion that specifically relates to plasmas, and yet we know that space more or less *is* a large plasma. Any slight error in how you model plasmas in space will generate very large error terms. I'm most curious why it is that astrophysicists feel that they can model plasmas in space as fluids under such a wide range of circumstances when laboratory plasma physicists cannot do the same? I've been told that in the lab, the behavior of plasmas is determined almost entirely by the electrical currents that flow through them and that gases become plasmas with less than 1% ionization. We are told by astrophysicists that plasmas will *instantaneously* neutralize themselves in space and that plasmas in space have frozen-in-place magnetic fields. These concepts might be useful for doing math problems, but in the process of making the math easier, have we basically reduced our ability to accurately model the physical phenomenon? These are the questions at the heart of the validity of EU Theory. If you have any challenges on these concepts, I can pass them on to the EU Theorists directly and we can see what they say. It's the lack of a response to these legitimate questions that leads a lot of people to believe in EU Theory. If the mainstream astrophysicists want to nip this in the bud (because the movement is currently expanding), they'd be wise to enter into the EU fray a little bit more than they currently do.
As an outsider looking in, it appears to me that astrophysicists have been too quick to draw conclusions. Speculations that supernovae, for instance, represent "standard candles" formulates the basis of vast amounts of what we think we know about cosmology, and yet, we still identify unexpected supernovae remnant morphologies and problems with the standard solar model on an almost monthly basis (oxygen ratios, etc). My understanding is that there is still no general acceptance on the precise mechanism that makes stars explode. How then can you say with any confidence that you are seeing "standard candles"? When the solar oxygen crisis was divulged last week, hardly anybody on the Slashdot forum recognized that those ratios are crucial for the entire field of helioseismology because gas concentrations allows us to know how the Sun should ring. Helioseismology isn't even a form of seismology. In traditional geo-seismology, *we* are the ones that are pounding on the ground. We are providing the input to the system, and so we know what the results mean. But in helioseismology, we are just interpreting the vibrations that we observe -- for which we have no part in the input. The fact that it is even called seismology is somewhat of a problem. Astrophysicists like to portray their science as a standard science, and they have done a great job of making the public forget that it is instead still an interpretive science.
We see this happen all the time these days: earlier speculations and assumptions in astrophysics will be demonstrated to be incorrect, and entire fields that depend upon those speculations and assumptions will then be thrown into chaos. But the public continues to be told that there is no problem whatsoever -- that the standard models are just fine. Well, no, at some point in time, the standard models are no longer just fine.