Point taken, but it actually emphasizes the problem to some extent.
The fact that he is in a field of experts who realize that they have major problems and yet do not actively promote out-of-the-box thinking remains. Nobody with any mainstream credentials in astrophysics is speaking up right now proposing that we are possibly heading in the completely wrong direction. You have to typically go to the fringes to find those opinions. If your theory's validity depends upon the future characterization of particles that do not emit any electromagnetic radiation, then you're lying to yourself if you don't admit that you're at a dead end. Like all other scientists, when you reach a dead end, you go back to your assumptions. Until people with credentials decide that it's more important to promote the advancement of astrophysics than their own problematic theories, then we will continue to add on suppositions to the pile of assumptions that we've generated to this point with little to nothing added to our predictive capabilities.
What he has done is become the spokesperson for scientists. He has sparked a public interest in science that no one else has been able to do since Einstein.
If your way of solving a difficult problem that you cannot solve is to get everybody to believe the same stuff as yourself, then don't be surprised when the problem isn't solved. If Hawking took his media exposure and decided to instead promote out-of-the-box thinking and against-the-mainstream concepts, he would perhaps be less worshiped, but would be more effective in directing the entire field towards a solution of the problem. By maintaining his confidence in his theories despite the numerous anomalies that we've discovered with them over the past ten years or so, he shifts the focus from the problem to himself. Just because he's in a wheelchair, don't imagine that he's some sort of saint. He's profiting off of astrophysics' stagnation, if you ask me. He'd be happy if we kept on believing his theories even if they are wrong so long as we continue to pay him to speak.
Maybe I didn't do a very good job of conveying myself, but I think the point I wished to convey most was that there should be more focus on astrophysical ideas that are less than mainstream. A lot of technically-minded people today believe, either consciously or subconsciously, that it's important to maintain consensus on things like the origins and mechanics of the universe, and that we cannot deviate from the astrophysical assumptions that got us to this point when communicating to the public. I get that sense all the time when posting evidence for against-the-mainstream astrophysical concepts here on the Slashdot forums. People are generally against anything that is not mainstream in astrophysics today. They would rather defer to people like Hawking, who are expert communicators for theories that were largely developed before we could do things like take pictures of the universe in x-rays.
I don't think this situation should or will endure much longer. We need more voices with more dissenting opinions from more fields of expertise speaking out given the fact that nobody seems to be able to solve the problems of dark matter and dark energy. Do I think that Hawking is consulting with non-astrophysicists about what *they* think of the universe in order to solve these problems? No, not at all. He comes off as spending all of his time *telling* people what he and his close astrophysicist friends think. You can tell by listening to his ideas that they are purely astrophysical and religious in origin. Where are the chemists that he's consulting? The nuclear physicists he's meeting with? The plasma physicists he's writing to? The geologists? The mythologists? When you listen to Hawking, you're getting the opinion of one small sector of the scientific community -- the astrophysicists -- and the message largely leaves out all of the assumptions that his ideas depend upon. The reader is made to feel as if there exists consensus and this in the end does more to stifle the future of science. Tell a kid that it's all been or being figured out just fine without them, and he'll probably lose interest in it and become an actor or something. We'd all be a little better off if the mainstream astrophysicists all took a humble pill because dark matter and dark energy cast a very dark shadow on all of the assumptions that got us to the point we're at today. Without a cosmology that can solve those problems, we're back where we were 100 years ago.
You don't have to be an astrophysicist to have beliefs about cosmology. And we shouldn't be looking to Hawking to determine our own beliefs on anything that doesn't have to do specifically with physics (which his message increasingly strays away from). We should all evaluate the evidence for ourselves as time permits rather than worshiping whatever opinion he holds. Somebody on these forums once told me that no scientist was ever completely right (well put) and this means that we shouldn't worship any of them the way we do him. When you become obsessive over a scientist, the person becomes more important than the ideas themselves, and this can only interfere with an objective analysis of his statements.
Clearly, Hawking is taking advantage of the stage he's been given to act as more of an entertainer than a physicist. That's his right, but people should not be under any illusion that he knows the answer more than anybody else right now. There is far too much anomalous data in astrophysics today for anybody to say that they have the answer. People like him will gloss over this fact and leave a sense that we understand more of the universe than we in fact do. But the problems remain and his message is not even very new. In fact, there's really no practical reason for him to be giving these talks other than to make money for himself. People already know his theory very well. It's the basis for every single NASA press release and every single astronomy class taught in every single school in the world. Maybe what we really need is for the astrophysicists to spend more time on the problems, collaborating with the various peoples' of the domains that they work within, and less time demonstrating that they've mastered the art of public relations.
You can't say that you understand dark matter or dark energy until you understand the charged particles that fill all of space.
Few people seem to be interested in taking a look at our earlier assumptions about the charged particles that fill interstellar space (more technically called plasma), but it is a fact that in a controlled laboratory environment, plasma conducts electricity. Plasma has three states: the arc mode, the glow mode and the *dark* mode. Which one you end up with in the laboratory depends upon how much current you pass through it. In other words, once the electrons or protons are stripped from their parent molecules, they can continue to conduct electricity while showing no external signs that it's happening so long as the current density remains low enough to not generate any photons or synchrotron radiation.
Electricity is obviously a force. In fact, it's a lot more physical force than dark matter and dark energy. Mainstream astrophysicists have decided in the case of plasma that the laboratory results do not scale up to galactic scales. This was something they decided without offering much in the way of proof. In other words, even if we see morphologies in the lab associated with electrical plasma that bear striking similarity to things like supernova remnants or "black holes" (and we do), they will continue to insist that electricity does not flow through space enough to play a significant role within our space observations. This decision stems from an earlier assumption in the field, magnetohydrodynamics, that it is oftentimes technically accurate to model space plasma as a fluid. In magnetohydrodynamics, astrophysicists have declared that it will make little difference if they assume that all charge differences within space plasmas can be assumed to *instantly* neutralize. This is quite an assumption that in the textbooks gets tagged with all sorts of limitations to its applicability. But they will hold to it today under a wide range of circumstances because it's currently more in vogue to believe that gravity is the dominant force in the universe. What's especially unusual about this assertion is that we know from the laboratories that plasma's physical interactions can induce currents. By studying Birkeland Currents in the lab, we've learned that not only can the currents induce physical motions, but the physical interactions of plasma can alternatively induce currents. In other words, if you have any sort of violent actions in space involving plasma, if we are to believe our laboratory experiments, these violent actions should induce currents in space. And yet, the astrophysicists continue to model the space plasmas as fluids, which have none of these properties whatsoever. When you consider the pervasiveness of plasma (nearly all visible matter within the universe is in the plasma state), the enormity of this error becomes apparent.
It should come as no surprise that humans are somewhat culturally ignorant of all of this because we exist in a small pocket of non-plasma here on Earth. Our popular culture still holds onto the uniformist view that we can understand deep space by extrapolating from our immediate surroundings -- even though this concept of uniformitarianism has fallen out of favor with most scientists, who increasingly accept evidence for past global catastrophes.
Many, if not all, of the properties of dark matter and dark energy can be explained with the electric force over plasma: dark matter's filamentary nature within the universe, dark energy's repulsive force and the fact that they are dark in the first place. Despite what this NYTimes article says, it's *never* been proven that dark matter and dark energy aren't just the error terms associated with our overly-simplistic space plasma models. Our plasma laboratory experiments at least build an argument saying as much. The real problem is that the mainstream astrophysicists are convinced that they *must* be on the right track, and no observation will shake their confidence. In t
Take the idea of a cosmos born in a primordial fireball and cooling down ever since, apply the discovery of a microwave signal with a temperature that corresponded precisely to the one that was predicted by theorists -- 2.7 degrees above absolute zero -- and you have the universe as we know it.
This is a huge oversimplification that errs in favor of traditional cosmologies. The temperature, 2.7 Kelvin, was not "precisely" predicted. There were in fact numerous predictions. The accepted Big Bang prediction at the time was around 50 Kelvin and the steady state predictions were in fact far closer. If we modify history to our liking, then we impede our own ability to solve the problems we're working on.
The tool the team would be using was a specific type of exploding star, or supernova, that reaches a roughly uniform brightness and so can serve as what astronomers call a standard candle.
This is a problematic assumption. We've discovered several supernova remnants that are bipolar symmetric (like 1987A). This was by no means expected to be left behind from a stellar explosion. Just using common sense, I would guess that the brightness of the supernova might even depend upon your perspective -- where you are located relative to the bipolar structure. To continue to hold onto your assumptions about supernovae behavior in spite of the fact that we've observed unexpected morphologies for supernova remnants is sloppy work. It wouldn't pass as science if we were talking about any domain other than astrophysics. In fact, this sort of reasoning seems to lend more credence to our stellar evolution theories than to our *observations*.
My take...
One would get the sense from reading an article like this that all of the reasonable research options have been exhausted. But mainstream cosmologists do not consider it to be their burden to research alternative cosmologies. There are numerous excuses to avoid researching more down-to-Earth, physical explanations for dark matter and dark energy. Are they valid excuses? One can easily make a case that the existence of dark matter and dark energy infer a problem with our overall analysis. In fact, for every Slashdot article I see on the subject, I always see at least one reasonable person in this forum confident that these must be error terms.
And this is the *real* problem with astrophysics today: the unwillingness to question the assumptions that got us to this point. For instance, it's oftentimes argued that the CMB proves the Big Bang (etc etc etc). But it's rarely mentioned that we chose to believe that based upon some evidence, and that other evidence can be generated, if we desire, that supports alternative explanations for the CMB. If you ignore alternative explanations for the CMB, claim that it's existence proves the Big Bang, and then express wonder at the existence of dark matter and dark energy, then shouldn't you go back and take a look at those alternative explanations for the CMB? Shouldn't the anomalous data involving dark energy and dark matter cast doubt upon the conventional wisdom that got us to this point? If, like this article suggests, we're at the point of believing that dark energy may never be solved, then isn't it time to try to prove alternative cosmologies to the extent that we've funded this one?
The universe happens in all sciences at once. This is what makes it so complicated. Through the lens of any one particular science, we can formulate theories that explain it. But none of these theories will be correct because they all inevitably ignore our knowledge in all of the other domains. The only *real* way to understand the universe would at least theoretically be to understand and apply *all* sciences simultaneously. By this reasoning, one would somewhat expect that mainstream astrophysicists today are eager listeners... people that are constantly attending conferences for domains foreign to
The Slashdot crew must not be aware that what these studies propose is that *charged particles* can affect cloud formation! Ghasp! Had they known this, then they surely wouldn't have allowed this one to get through...
That would suggest a link between charged particles moving through outer space and weather here on Earth. That would actually lend support to the general ideas proposed by Electric Universe theorists that weather has electrical components. Yikes!
EU theorists argue that the energies inherent to the cosmic rays are in some cases so large that they could not be accounted for even with the result of the annihilation of matter and antimatter. In order to accelerate particles to this extent, it's necessary to subject the charged particles to some sort of sustained electric field. In the EU view, all stars have their own electric fields with their own "solar winds" accelerating away from them as a result of these fields. Cosmic rays that hit the Earth are in fact nothing more than the solar winds of foreign stars that are larger than our own Sun. The energies imparted to those charged particles are enough to overtake our own solar wind such that they reach the Earth. In their view, it's conceivable that cosmic rays can potentially act as a mechanism for distributing energy across the universe in the absence of filamentary plasmas.
It's very interesting to observe in real time how astrophysicists are going to deal with this heretical view and these heretical experimental results. Traditional astrophysicists suddenly find themselves in the difficult position of having to apply their space models, which they've created by imagining what the universe *should* be like and which consistently fail to explain their own telescope observations in a rational way, to a real-world problem that has real consequences for all of us. The traditional views of astrophysicists that the Earth is largely an isolated body whose weather is unaffected by the plasma phenomenon that surrounds it has now been challenged by a peer reviewed study that alleges that charged particles from foreign stars can affect weather here on Earth. What about the other planets? Might cosmic rays be affecting *their* weather too? And what about all of those experiments where people are inducing rain by pumping ions into the atmosphere? Shouldn't we be taking a closer look at those now too?
My guess is that these new findings will be completely ignored or possibly slandered as if there's no tomorrow. To accept that cloud formation and global warming might have electrical components is going to be just far too much for the mainstream. But it should make for an entertaining show.
It's interesting to note that the polar hot spot on Saturn is one of the Electric Universe's testable hypotheses:
[Concerning the polar "hot spot" on Saturn]: "Its compactness is due to the electromagnetic pinch effect where it [electric current] enters Saturn's atmosphere. The hot spot's behavior should be variable, like that on Venus, and correlated with the appearance of Saturn's ring spokes, which are a visible manifestation of a heightened equatorial discharge in that part of Saturn's Faraday motor circuit." [Saturn's Strange Hot Spot Explained http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=1xz2g6 tn ]
I don't have time to respond to all of this just yet, but I did want to excerpt the portion of The Electric Sky that referred to Alfven's 1970 acceptance speech. I wasn't able to find a transcript on the site you directed me to and there is no footnote for the following reference within the book:
In his 1970 acceptance speech of his Nobel Physics Prize in Physics, Alfven pointed out that this idea of "frozen-in" magnetic fields, which he had earlier endorsed, was false. In reality, moving magnetic fields within a plasma create electric currents. This fact is one of the basic concepts embodied in the Electric Sky.
Hannes Alfven was unique among Nobel laureates in taking the opportunity of his acceptance speech to declare that he had been wrong in what he had said previously. Alfven said, "I thought that the frozen-in concept was very good from a pedagogical point of view, and indeed it became very popular. In reality, however, it was not a good pedagogical concept but a dangerous 'pseudo-pedagogical concept.' By 'pseudo-pedagogical' I mean a concept which makes you believe that you understood a phenomenon whereas in reality you have drastically misunderstood it."
When he used the term "classical plasma theory", Alfven was referring pejoratively to this erroneous "frozen-in" idea and its cause -- the false assumption that plasmas are "ideal conductors." When discussing the failure of this so-called classical approach in the search for controlled nuclear fusion, Alfven pointed out that:
The 'thermonuclear crisis' did not affect cosmic plasma physics very much. The development of the theories continued because they largely dealt with phenomena in regions of space where no real check was possible. The fact that the basis of several of the theories had been proven to be false in the laboratory had very little effect. One [astrophysicist] said that this did not necessarily prove that they must also be false in the cosmos. Much work was done in developing these theories, leading to a gigantic structure of speculative theories which had no empirical support
Yes, you have misunderstood. What Tim said, and what your quotes say is that frozen in is an approximation based on the resistivity and lifetime of the plasma. In the strictest sense, fields are not frozen in since there is always a resistance. However, if the field movement is small during the lifetime of the plasma, you can do an approximation and say it is frozen.
On that same topic, Tim Thompson responds:
MHD and "frozen in" are by no means synonymous, and you should not confuse them. Yes, that was the crux of Alfven's later work. That's what I was talking about when I said, "I think you will find that a rift deveolped between Alfven & the astrophysical community". Having developed MHD, Alfven then tried to abaondon it. He was wrong. MHD is applicable almost everywhere, and almost everyone except Alfven saw it. Modern plasma astrophysicists use MHD appropriately, and realize that the closed current models of Alfven are not in fact generally applicable, and are in fact generally wrong (but there are exceptions to every rule, which is why I also said, "One has to study these things on a case by case basis").
I don't see any problem with my assertion except that I should be more specific in referring to the frozen-in concept *within* MHD.
I have to check out for a few days, but I'll take a closer look at your response later.
You obviously know a *LOT* about String Theory and cosmology. It's impressive. Even though this thread is off-topic, I was wondering if you could comment on some things. I can't respond to all of the things you talk about because I'm still learning about some of those topics. But even if we're talking about slightly different things, we can still learn from one another.
String theory itself is a framework (like QFT) which supports many models, where in QFT's case the models are the values of several constants -- the 19 free parameters -- which can be tested experimentally. Experimental testing has revealed that the standard model is wrong, as it predicted a massless neutrino.
Don Scott's assertion is that the changes that have been made to the neutrino model resulted mostly from a need to save the solar fusion model. When faced with a predicament of abandoning the traditional model for the Sun based upon that annoying neutrino deficit, it was decided that it was easier to just change what we know about neutrinos. That led to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) announcement in Canada that neutrinos have mass and can change flavor. The deficit would just be a result of neutrinos changing flavor into one or more of the other types of neutrino before arriving at Earth and these other types would not have been measurable in earlier experiments. You seem to accept these results at face value as a source for data to evaluate other theories. But how did they arrive at their conclusions?
When it was initially announced, it was proclaimed that scientists were 99% confident in their results. One wonders how they arrived at that figure, but nevertheless, it was claimed that the "SNO detector has the capability to determine whether solar neutrinos are changing their type en route to Earth, thus providing answers to questions about neutrino properties and solar energy generation". That's quite a *detector*! I mean, if you have a detector that can provide a history of the particle during its journey to the Earth from the Sun, then you've done something that's certainly never been done before. Is Don Scott wrong here?
One must deduce that in fact what they are saying is that they are *assuming* what the composition of the neutrino flux leaving the Sun is. If this is the case, then they are assuming that their conclusions must be correct.
The report goes on to mention that electron neutrino flux is in fact significantly *lower* than previously reported levels. Oops.
One thing that the report *never* discusses is whether or not the mu-type neutrinos can revert back into electron neutrinos. If this can occur, then by their own logic of neutrino flavors, the number of electron neutrinos leaving the Sun could be even lower than previously thought. This is a glaring omission. In fact, early results from the MINOS experiment (http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/ minos_3-30-06.html) appear to validate this notion that mu-types can transform into electron types, dealing an additional blow to the solar fusion model.
But what continues to be ignored by astrophysicists is the fact that the total neutrino flux coming from the Sun correlates with the sunspot cycle. I'll quote Wallace Thornhill's description of the problem:
Neutrinos carry no electrical charge. Movements of uncharged particles (whether or not they have mass) are unaffected by magnetic fields. Therefore, the customary excuse of hidden "strange magnetic fields that lurk beneath the Sun's surface" cannot be invoked to explain away this correlation between neutrino flux and sunspot number. Quantitative determination of the existence of a correlation between neutrino flux and sunspot number or solar wind intensity would falsify the fusion model once and for all.
For the sake of your own arguments about String Theory, none of this apparently introduces any proble
Your point is very well taken. In researching the publications on this mission, I noticed myself that it was really difficult to understand what was the real purpose of the mission. I remain quite confused.
I'm interested in something else that you mentioned...
Some pretty interesting processes that ultimately result in energy being dumped into the Earth' ionosphere during auroral displays start in the magnetotail. Unfortunately, while thinking about things like magnetic reconnection, magnetic field dipolarizations, current disruption, and substorm current systems gets anyone with a Ph.D. in plasma physics excited, they probably don't mean much of anything to the general public.
I'm specifically interested in what you think of magnetic reconnections. I'm not a physicist, but I spend a lot of time trying to understand issues related to electricity and plasma in space. Don Scott devotes an entire chapter in his book to the concept of magnetic reconnections and his arguments against the science of reconnections seems strong. I obviously cannot excerpt an entire chapter, but I was wondering what you think of the science behind it. It's interesting to me that Alfven was so against the idea and yet it's such a mainstream concept today. What did Alfven see that others today do not? Or to the contrary, what observations have been made since that have confirmed the idea?
In any discussion of the aurora, one might expect that the name Kristian Birkeland might come up. After all, he was the first scientist to ever accurately describe the phenomenon. It's interesting to look back and see why it is that so few people know who Birkeland is.
Birkeland's paper on the aurora, based in part on his brave journey to Northern Norway through 24-hour darkness and temperatures low enough that he nearly died on the trip, marked the first time that anybody (specifically British scientists) decided to start ostracizing the concept of electricity in space. Their legacy of ridiculing electricity in space would continue on for generations to the present day.
The story of the rejection of electricity in space sounds strikingly similar to the situation that persists today when electricity is implicated in anything that has to do with our space observations. From Don Scott's The Electric Sky:
A particularly tenacious English mathematician, Sydney Chapman, who was interested in geomagnetism, continually denigrated Birkeland and criticized his work for half a century. Chapman's ideas about auroras involved the kinetic theory of neutral gases and a "dynamo" which he said was driven by tidal flows in Earth's ionosphere. Fifteen years after Birkeland's death, Chapman admitted that plasma from the Sun caused the auroras. But he continued to belittle Birkeland's work.
As late as 1967, Chapman said that Birkeland's "direct observational contributions to auroral knowledge were slight." An American scientist and electrical engineer, Alex Dessler, a former editor of the presigious journal, Geophysical Research Letters, questioned Chapman about Birkeland. "I asked him whether Birkeland's work had any influence on him at all. He glanced at me and said, 'How could it? It was all wrong.'"
With the advent of high altitude rockets and satellite technology, Birkeland's explanation of the aurora was found to be correct. Today Birkeland is acknowledged as having been the first scientist to accurately determine, through heroic observation in the field, laboratory experimentation, and theoretical description, the correct cause of the auroral displays -- electric current from the Sun flowing in plasma and causing that plasma to emit light.
[...]
Lucy Jago says of this pioneer, "Birkeland now has a crater on the Moon named after him, which, together with Birkeland Currents and the wider acceptance of his work, should prevent his memory from fading, but rejection of his theories probably slowed the advance of geomagnetic and auroral physics for nearly half a century."
Hannes Alfven also tried to convince Chapman of Birkeland's reasoning about the aurora:
One of the conflicts in early 20th Century astronomy was between Sydney Chapman and Hannés Alfvén. Alfvén, following Birkeland's lead, believed the auroras to be powered by charged particles from the Sun. Chapman developed a mathematically elegant theory showing that the auroras were generated entirely in the Earth's magnetosphere by buffeting of the solar wind. Chapman refused to give Alfvén's ideas a hearing. At conferences, rather than address particular points of the theory, Chapman would state that he and his colleagues disagreed with Alfvén and that a paper explaining it all was in process. On one occasion, when Chapman was a guest of Alfvén's in Sweden, Alfvén built a replica of Birkeland's terrella experiment, which produced auroras on a magnetized sphere suspended in a vacuum. Alfvén hoped that if Chapman could see how plasma behaves in the laboratory, he would be more amenable to discussing it. Chapman refused to look at the experiment.
Few people that ridicule Electric Universe Theory and Plasma Cosmology today realize that they follow in the footsteps of the confident Sydney Chapman. After all, how would they know about the story? Few people today, including NASA's discussion of this probe on their website, link the name Kristian Birkeland to the aurora.
The exact thoughts that you're having right now have been had by many intelligent people before you. You are not aware of it because these thoughts are against the mainstream views. But there is an evolving awareness that has been *very* slowly forming over the last few decades. Although you don't realize it, many people think exactly like you.
There is a group of engineers and physicists out there who have been trying in vain to convince the world that we should first check the accuracy of our plasma models and our early assumptions about space *before* we suppose the existence of additional dimensions or pervasive, invisible matters and forces. These people can explain all of our modern day observations and anomalies without those oddities and just using slight adjustments to our assumptions regarding how plasma acts in space. These people are suggesting that the existence of dark matter suggests a modeling error and the differences between quantum theory and the general theory of relativity suggest that we should be re-evaluating our early assumptions about those fields.
The group of people who have believed this over time have made important contributions to the field of plasma physics. They have made numerous astronomical predictions that have turned out to be true. One of them even invented the field that modern-day astrophysicists now use to describe plasma in space (which he later recused himself from, but which astrophysicists continue to use).
These people have been ridiculed. Their message has over time been obscenely slandered. And even when they turned out to be right, they have been ignored.
We are making a huge mistake in assuming that our early astrophysical assumptions are right even though those early assumptions have never been validated to an extent that we would expect of other fields and even though we continue to make anomalous observations on a regular basis. The unwillingness to admit that even people like Einstein can be wrong is wasting a lot of time, resources and thoughts. Einstein never stopped doubting himself, but when he died, we more or less stopped doubting him.
When Einstein died, a book was left open on his desk. It was titled, "Worlds in Collision" and was written by a man named Immanuel Velikovsky. Velikovsky started the Catastrophist movement, which has evolved into the Electric Universe Theory and Plasma Cosmology. For the horrible act of suggesting that astrophysicists' early assumptions decades ago may have been wrong, these people continue to be ostracized by the scientific community. People are so sure that these guys are wrong that even on these Slashdot forums, you will find bold statements about EU Theory being made by people who are not even aware of what the theory says. Little do they know that all it says is that plasma has been incorrectly modeled in magnetohydrodynamics and that all of the strange things we are observing in space are the result of the error terms. The signs are everywhere: on the Moon, on Mars, on Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Io, the Sun, in the Hubble images we know so well, and on and on and on. A qualitative theory now exists that can explain *everything* we've observed in space without the need to defy physical laws or rely upon invisible forces or matters. The only reason that the quest for a theory of everything seems so complicated is because our incorrect models have led us to infer disjointed, unrelated explanations for stars, planets and interstellar space. The field of plasma physics already offers us all of the tools we need to understand these phenomenon and we'd be wise to listen since 99.99% of all observable matter in space is in the plasma state. Traditional astrophysicists try to convince us that plasma physics does not scale to universal scales for the sole reason that they don't want to admit that electricity can be flowing over large-scale plasmas. But plasma experts can describe numerous, if not all, anomalous space observations using electricity. Theories must be evaluated on
Sounds like the physicists want to try to tweak it rather than junk it, even if it fails the experiment.
"The peer review system is satisfactory during quiescent times, but not during a revolution in a discipline such as astrophysics, when the establishment seeks to preserve the status quo." -- Hannes Alfven
Maybe we can finally move on. And maybe the physicists can take their field back. Hopefully, they didn't lose the keys to the the labs that have been abandoned for years now.
What I havent seen in the book is an explanation for is why some asteriods leave plasma trails and show themselves as a comet and others dont? Or do they all behave like that?
To answer your previous question...
Ever since the Thunderbolts guys recently reorganized their website, the Electric Comet document has become harder to find. You can view it at http://www.thunderbolts.info/pdf/ElectricComet.pdf. This document covers just about all of the questions you might have about electric comets. What you won't get from this document are the opinions of those people who disagree with electrical explanations for comets. You can find lots of those views on the Slashdot forums, NASA press releases and on mainstream websites. By process of elimination, you will notice that the electrical explanations for comets are the only ones that explain *all* of the various observational anomalies that occur with non-electrical attempts to explain comets.
If you've read "The Electric Sky", then you will notice that Wallace Thornhill predicted the results of the Deep Impact mission. As you learn more about the history of electricity in space debates, you will notice that there is a history of accurate predictions by people who believed that electricity flowed through space, and that in just about each case, the predictions are downplayed by traditional astrophysicists. For instance, Immanuel Velikovsky was able to predict that the surface of Venus would be extremely hot at a time when everybody unanimously believed that the surface of Venus would be fairly similar in temperature to the Earth's. When he then accurately predicted that Jupiter would be emitting radio waves, it was claimed that his accurate predictions were pure luck. Hannes Alfven similarly made a slew of successful predictions related to space plasmas and his success with predictions was overwhelmingly ignored. It appears that contrary to popular belief, a theory's predictive capabilities actually have little to do with its acceptance amongst astrophysicists today because our most popular theories in astrophysics today tend to have after-the-fact, retrospective origins.
That's pretty funny. I sincerely apologize. I've never actually met *anybody* on Slashdot who has read an EU book.
Everybody agrees that quantitative support is lacking, but they're proposing that a complex, interconnected system of transmission lines and loads is occurring. You cannot start to analyze those "circuits" until you understand the transmission line characteristics. That means that we're pretty much starting from scratch. Very little that we've learned about gravity is going to help us to understand the characteristics of electrical plasma. The idealized fluid equations used in magnetohydrodynamics are completely different from the resistive electrical plasma equations.
I've also seen it mentioned that they have no idea how much of an impact cosmic rays (the solar winds of foreign stars) are having upon the system. Cosmic rays could potentially be distributing energy outside of transmission lines. If you've ever seen an unprocessed space image before, the rawest of space images is filled with extremely bright cosmic rays going in every single direction. There have even been mainstream scientific papers addressing the possibility that cosmic rays are affecting global warming here on Earth. When our own solar wind changes, the number of cosmic rays from foreign stars that reach the planet Earth can change. Apparently, correlation studies have demonstrated that there is a link between cosmic rays hitting the Earth's atmosphere and the generation of certain types of clouds in the Earth's atmosphere. These different cloud types can change the amount of heat reaching the surface of the Earth. This could potentially explain why the temperature of the Earth's surface has been increasing while the temperature of the Earth's lower atmosphere has remained the same over the past few decades.
Don Scott did a minimalist treatment of rilles (canyons) in the solar system in his book because that topic is covered in great detail online on their www.thunderbolts.info site. That particular issue is best treated when you can present a lot of images and discuss each one in detail. That would have taken up a hundred pages in itself. If you go to their website (Picture of the Day --> Subject Archive), you'll see plenty of evidence that rilles are electrical phenomenon. The most convincing attribute is that many rilles have been observed that follow the terrain both down and up. This single characteristic rules out all of the traditional explanations. You'll also see plenty of evidence that rilles are oftentimes related to round craters. I recommend that if you haven't gone through the www.thunderbolts.info archive of pictures of the day that you might want to consider doing this next. It's basically a whole book to itself.
I think we'll probably see more details on the Electric Sun idea as time moves forward. Although it was postulated by Ralph Juergens, I don't think anybody's actually attempted to thoroughly investigate it until Wallace Thornhill. I think we're seeing the very beginning of that process. You should also be aware of the Solar Probe mission in 2018. It's a long time from now, but NASA is putting together a mission to try to understand magnetic reconnections and the solar wind by sending a probe as close to the corona as technology can accomplish. I've asked Talbott what he thought the data would say, but he never got back to me.
Your next choice of book depends upon your interest. There is a lot of material. I've gone through about half of the "Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky" book. It's dry material and a little bit wordy, but it will fill in a lot of the historical context for how we got to this point. I'm currently slowly moving through Ginenthal's other book, "The Extinction of the Mammoth". The amount of material to absorb is somewhat overwhelming. In addition to all of the books at www.thunderbolts.info, I'm also trying to understand all of the alternative redshift theories out there and historical context for people like Birkeland, Alfve
They oughta try to simulate the behaviour of these asteriods in a lab by subjecting it to the same conditions in space with plasma and see if they can get them to break like that one that split for no apparent reason. At least try to reproduce it all on a small scale.
We see plasma break apart solid state matter all of the time on a small scale. You can do it at home by turning your arc welder up on a piece of metal until it snaps the metal. Or, when you run too much electricity through a capacitor, a catastrophic leak can occur and damage the structure of the cap.
By the way, I do a much better impersonation of Big Bangers than you do of EU proponents. I have a *lot* more silly material to work with. Thing is, you'd actually have to read the theory in order to make fun of it, so that makes it much harder for you guys. It must be somewhat frustrating.
If you ever decide to learn what EU Theory actually says, I recommend Don Scott's new book, The Electric Sky. But if you're the kind of person that values popular opinion over critical analysis and independent thinking, then you might want to skip it. In order to objectively learn the truth about plasma in space these days, it seems you have to be quite impervious to ridicule. Who would have ever thought that playground bullying would be so commonplace in a forum about science and technology? It surprises me every day.
When it eventually becomes apparent that all of you guys are wrong (if you are lucky enough for this to happen to you instead of your children), people will be entertained by going back through my interactions with all of you. I've always wondered how *I* would feel if I actually realized that I had possibly dissuaded others from reading about a subject because I assumed that it was wrong only to find out that it was in fact *me* that was wrong. I suppose that my level of guilt would depend upon the consequences of being wrong. But you can't know the consequences of being wrong without actually learning what the theory says, so it's an interesting predicament for all of you guys. It's one of the more fascinating dramas unfolding in science today.
Sounds to me like a back-door way to sneak in more of that Electric Universe nonsense, where the most studied, most well understood of the fundamental forces, the one that is most frequently used to do astronomical observations with terrific accuracy, is also simultaneously mysterious and ephemeral, not well understood, and oddly enough denied by main-stream astronomy.
It's always interesting to see people who have not read the details of Electrical Universe Theory talk about it. In fact, I've never witnessed such a willingness amongst intelligent people to misrepresent a subject that they know so little about. I'm determined to be here the day that all of the veteran Slashdotters who frequently regurgitate other peoples' slanders of EU Theory realize that maybe they should have actually read what it said before convincing others that it's wrong.
It's true to say that we understand electricity and magnetism quite well. It's certainly less accurate to assume that we completely understand how plasma deals with those things. Plasma physics is still an active field. Hannes Alfven liked to comment that although Maxwell's Equations are accepted as rule of law amongst scientists, the plasma apparently doesn't always pay attention to our rules.
It's a fact that few people actually investigate how it is that astrophysicists came to the conclusion that electricity does not flow through space even though everybody unanimously believes that it's an absurd idea. If you ever decide to investigate it, you might be surprised by what you find. It turns out that magnetohydrodynamics, the field that astrophysicists use to model plasma and other conductive fluids in space, accomplishes its tricks by modeling plasma as a magnetized fluid. They get away with this by asserting that plasma in space is ideally conductive -- meaning it has no resistance whatsoever even over great distances. This assumption applies even to plasmas that extend for light years in space. Consider what they're saying for a second: that inequalities in the charge of a plasma that extends for light years can "readily" neutralize themselves.
Now, consider another fact. Plasma's physical motions and interactions can induce currents, and the currents through plasma can induce physical motions. 99.99% of all space is matter in the plasma state. In order to conclude that electricity does not flow over this plasma in space, you must conclude that the plasma within the universe, which represents 99.99% of all matter, never violently interacts.
If you clean your house by sweeping everything under the rug whenever visitors come over, it might seem that your house is quite clean to the people you're showing it to. But over time, all of the crap under the rug will build up. You can hope that people will not pay attention to the lumps in the rug, but they're still there no matter how hard you wish they weren't. Contemporary astronomy is rancid with anomalies that have been swept under the rug in preparation for public consumption (we wouldn't want to confuse them, right?). It never ceases to amaze me how uncritical Slashdotters are when it comes to accepting these processed space stories. It appears that there's little effort to validate any of the *interpretation* or question any of the *assumptions* these days of space press releases in the Slashdot forums. It's especially unusual to me that Slashdot's audience, programmers, are not able to recognize the absence of an input in astronomy. Coders spend all day changing their code to get the right output, and act as if astronomers are able to do the same thing. Astronomy (like archaeology and geology) is output-only, and for that reason, it is highly susceptible to incorrect interpretations, assumptions, prejudices and preferences. There are limits to certainty in astronomy, and the only way to really evaluate problems is to analyze the observational anomalies. If you're skeptical and paying attention, you'll realize that this is not being done. Anomalies these days i
Actually, you may be onto something. Maybe the gravitational pull of Jupiter would make it really easy to push objects into one of its rocky moons. Thing is, if the goal is to understand impacts just as much as nudging, Mars is currently the only planet where we could have ring-side seats in place ready to observe the collision.
Astronomers expected the encounter to be a trivial event. "You won't see anything. The comet crash will probably amount to nothing more than a bunch of pebbles falling into an ocean 500 million miles from Earth." Then came the encounter and an about face. As reported by Sky & Telescope, "When Fragment 'A' hit the giant planet, it threw up a fireball so unexpectedly bright that it seemed to knock the world's astronomical community off its feet."
[...]
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) detected a flare-up of fragment "G" of Shoemaker-Levy long before impact at a distance of 2.3 million miles from Jupiter. For the electrical theorists this flash would occur as the fragment crossed Jupiter's plasma sheath, or magnetosphere boundary. Thornhill comments: "A plasma sheath, or 'double layer', is a region of strong electric field, so the outburst there of an electrified comet nucleus is expected.
[...]
Just after the impact of SL-9 fragment "K", HST detected unusual auroral activity that was brighter than Jupiter's normal aurora and outside their normal area. Radiation belts were disrupted. There were unexpectedly bright X-ray emissions at the time of impact. But one mystery was never explained satisfactorily: Early impact events were hidden from the Earth behind Jupiter's limb. However, the Galileo spacecraft was positioned 150 million miles away from Jupiter at an angle that gave it a ringside seat for these events. But Earth-based observatories saw some of the impacts start at the same time Galileo did. "In effect, we are seeing something we didn't think we had any right to see," said Dr. Andrew Ingersoll of Caltech. "...it seems clear that something was happening high enough to be seen beyond the curve of the planet," said Galileo Project scientist Dr. Torrence Johnson of JPL.
If we could easily push asteroids into a planet why not just push them away when they approach Earth?
Shouldn't we be trying?
Do we really need to know the composition of an asteroid before trying to nudge one?
Seems to me that we just need to know to what extent nudging works, and what sort of complications will arise when we try it. I guess I'm just not sure what the impediment is to trying this right now. I would guess that we'd want to do numerous test runs before expecting that the system works anyways. Is it that we cannot generate enough thrust to displace the orbit or a typical asteroid?
I don't understand why, when you're trying to understand asteroid collisions with the Earth, you don't perform asteroid collisions with other planets? It seems to me that the very first thing you'd want to do when trying to understand a collision would be to nudge asteroids of varying compositions into a distant planet where probes are on standby to observe the collisions.
We like to think that we know so much about the collisions already based upon our models for what happens, but these are all assumptions. The few events that seem to have involved surviving witnesses (like the Great Chicago Fire, which appears to have been the result of Earth passing through cometary debris) indicated *electrical* phenomenon at the sites of impact -- things like ball lightning, high fragmentation and a rain of smaller particulates. Sudden electrical discharges occurred between metal objects in peoples' homes, St Elmo's Fire electrically illuminated structures, and electrical surges between coins in one man's pockets were enough to kill him. It seems to me that we should be first trying to validate our *assumptions* about impacts because based upon at least these apparent eyewitness accounts, our assumptions may be flawed. What was it about that cometary debris that induced so much electrical activity on the surface of the planet?
There are lots of reasons to suspect that our knowledge of impacts is less than we believe. For instance, we *assume* that the reason that nearly all impact craters are round is because the kinetic impact creates an explosion. But there are other potential plasma-based explanations that have been ignored. When two plasmaspheres come into contact, for instance, it is known that electrical interactions can occur. If a significant electrical discharge happens between the ground and the object, then a round crater would form. It may turn out, in fact, that this is the key to disrupting them. We just don't yet know.
Even though Mars is not an ideal replication of the Earth's atmosphere, we could still learn things by observing such collisions. It would provide interpretable data where there currently is very little to speak of. And the spectacle of colliding large bodies in space would surely renew interest by younger kids in space.
I think most people would agree that papers like this are based upon so many assumptions that they are pretty much worthless, regardless of which cosmology you believe in. It's just a product of our affinity for math and our desire to feel like we have more confidence in some sciences than we can actually achieve in the absence of input-output experiments (ie, to varying degrees, astronomy, geology and archaeology).
But it's interesting to note that the biggest single assumption in this type of logic is that the universe is not infinite in time and space. In a static electric universe, without a beginning to base your calculations upon, chances are high that neither stars nor galaxies have determinable ages. The entire system is essentially "transient" and papers like this are completely meaningless. As painful as it is to imagine it, aliens could have started seeding the universe an infinite amount of time ago. It's possible that not even they could tell you when they started. This is of course no more painful though than imagining what happened before the Big Bang.
I've also seen it mentioned amongst people who are aware of Electric Universe Theory that the more you understand plasma, the more the plasma of the universe appears to constitute a living organism. The fact that plasma can form double-layers to "protect" its charge suggests parts of a living entity. And if Chip Arp is correct, the notion that spiral galaxies can "spit" out quasars might be the process by which the organism spreads out of its original domain. The stars are the organism's cells and mobile charged particles act as the nutrients for the plasma, which would ironically be like the organism's blood. Within this context, the rocky planets are a rare, harmless non-plasma pocket where we humans, like tiny viruses, can multiply and possibly expand.
Taking the idea one step further, another strange curiosity of EU Theory is that all of the plasma phenomenon within the universe we've observed thus far are actually electrical loads and transmission lines. Once you've become acquainted with the theory, you begin to wonder what is in fact the *source* of the power. You'd have to conclude that we're likely not in range to view the source, but this is a very interesting question. It's the EU Theory version of asking how old the Big Bang Universe is.
Weird shit. Once the public starts to learn more about plasma, I think it's inevitable that it will become a popular topic for strange ideas like this.
I love the fact that people believed that ball lightning was caused by mini black holes. It's such a sign of the times that people would look at something that's obviously some sort of plasma phenomenon and imagine that it's a black hole... that people would use their idealized non-resistive mathematical magnetohydrodynamic plasma models that lead to concepts like black holes and dark matter in space to try to describe real world objects that clearly have more to do with plasma. People don't realize that we can describe the entire universe with just the non-idealized properties of plasma *without* the need for things like black holes. Black holes are the result of *ignoring* electricity over plasma in space. In order to compensate for the idealization that plasma in space is not conducting electricity, you have to assume a virtually infinite mass to describe some objects in space. But if you drop the assumption that plasma in space is an ideal conductor with frozen-in magnetic fields, you end up with plasma that can exert electrical forces upon matter in space. And since plasma represents the state of 99%+ of all observable matter in space, this idealization leads to a very significant error term -- in fact, around 95%.
Anybody who is interested in space today needs to learn about plasma. You cannot understand the universe without understanding plasma because the universe basically *is* plasma. The only parts that are *not* plasma are the rocky bodies in space like the planets and the asteroids. If you see articles about space that are not referring specifically to plasma, then it is likely bullshit. There is nothing important happening in space that has anything to do with gases or collections of gas and dust because plasma acts differently than those things. Namely, it includes ions and electrons, which obviously can conduct electricity. It is our (unfortunate) choice to ignore this fact in astrophysics and space articles today.
If people were in the mood to learn from their mistakes, they'd see that it was silly that anybody ever even proposed that mini black holes were causing ball lightning and they might reflect on whether or not this same type of mistake might be happening for bigger balls of plasma in space. As is, it currently appears that people are in denial about plasma's role in the universe. So long as that represents the mood of amateur and professional scientists, there will continue to be mysterious forces and dark particles within the universe and we will continue to be surprised by our observations of electricity over filamentary plasmas in space.
People are getting far too caught up in blacklisting theories because they are out of the mainstream. It's not important that it's called Electric Universe Theory or Plasma Cosmology, or that there aren't many other people who believe in it. Science should not be a popularity contest. What's important is the science that it is based upon. EU Theory and Plasma Cosmology are based upon non-idealized plasma physics. Traditional astrophysics today is based upon an idealized form of plasma physics called magnetohydrodynamics. There is no good reason to assume that electricity does not flow in space over plasma. However, there are decades of research in plasma physics that suggest that in fact electricity can and does flow over plasma in space, and once you take this into consideration, things like black holes are unnecessary. When people call EU Theory a pseudoscience like creationism or UFO's, they're basically stating that they do not believe that astrophysics should have to pay any attention to plasma physics when it doesn't suit their gravity-centric conceptions for the universe. We do not in fact have the luxury of cherry-picking the laws of nature. The laboratory tells us how plasma operates and our job is to learn from it and apply what we learn in the laboratory to our observations of space. Just because astrophysicists currently like the idea of black holes and don't like the idea of electricity over plasma in space doesn't mean that they are right to choose the black hole explanation. Many intelligent people have warned that this is a huge mistake. Time will prove them right.
Slashdot Mirror
Point taken, but it actually emphasizes the problem to some extent.
The fact that he is in a field of experts who realize that they have major problems and yet do not actively promote out-of-the-box thinking remains. Nobody with any mainstream credentials in astrophysics is speaking up right now proposing that we are possibly heading in the completely wrong direction. You have to typically go to the fringes to find those opinions. If your theory's validity depends upon the future characterization of particles that do not emit any electromagnetic radiation, then you're lying to yourself if you don't admit that you're at a dead end. Like all other scientists, when you reach a dead end, you go back to your assumptions. Until people with credentials decide that it's more important to promote the advancement of astrophysics than their own problematic theories, then we will continue to add on suppositions to the pile of assumptions that we've generated to this point with little to nothing added to our predictive capabilities.
If your way of solving a difficult problem that you cannot solve is to get everybody to believe the same stuff as yourself, then don't be surprised when the problem isn't solved. If Hawking took his media exposure and decided to instead promote out-of-the-box thinking and against-the-mainstream concepts, he would perhaps be less worshiped, but would be more effective in directing the entire field towards a solution of the problem. By maintaining his confidence in his theories despite the numerous anomalies that we've discovered with them over the past ten years or so, he shifts the focus from the problem to himself. Just because he's in a wheelchair, don't imagine that he's some sort of saint. He's profiting off of astrophysics' stagnation, if you ask me. He'd be happy if we kept on believing his theories even if they are wrong so long as we continue to pay him to speak.
Call me an asshole, but it's what I think.
Maybe I didn't do a very good job of conveying myself, but I think the point I wished to convey most was that there should be more focus on astrophysical ideas that are less than mainstream. A lot of technically-minded people today believe, either consciously or subconsciously, that it's important to maintain consensus on things like the origins and mechanics of the universe, and that we cannot deviate from the astrophysical assumptions that got us to this point when communicating to the public. I get that sense all the time when posting evidence for against-the-mainstream astrophysical concepts here on the Slashdot forums. People are generally against anything that is not mainstream in astrophysics today. They would rather defer to people like Hawking, who are expert communicators for theories that were largely developed before we could do things like take pictures of the universe in x-rays.
I don't think this situation should or will endure much longer. We need more voices with more dissenting opinions from more fields of expertise speaking out given the fact that nobody seems to be able to solve the problems of dark matter and dark energy. Do I think that Hawking is consulting with non-astrophysicists about what *they* think of the universe in order to solve these problems? No, not at all. He comes off as spending all of his time *telling* people what he and his close astrophysicist friends think. You can tell by listening to his ideas that they are purely astrophysical and religious in origin. Where are the chemists that he's consulting? The nuclear physicists he's meeting with? The plasma physicists he's writing to? The geologists? The mythologists? When you listen to Hawking, you're getting the opinion of one small sector of the scientific community -- the astrophysicists -- and the message largely leaves out all of the assumptions that his ideas depend upon. The reader is made to feel as if there exists consensus and this in the end does more to stifle the future of science. Tell a kid that it's all been or being figured out just fine without them, and he'll probably lose interest in it and become an actor or something. We'd all be a little better off if the mainstream astrophysicists all took a humble pill because dark matter and dark energy cast a very dark shadow on all of the assumptions that got us to the point we're at today. Without a cosmology that can solve those problems, we're back where we were 100 years ago.
You don't have to be an astrophysicist to have beliefs about cosmology. And we shouldn't be looking to Hawking to determine our own beliefs on anything that doesn't have to do specifically with physics (which his message increasingly strays away from). We should all evaluate the evidence for ourselves as time permits rather than worshiping whatever opinion he holds. Somebody on these forums once told me that no scientist was ever completely right (well put) and this means that we shouldn't worship any of them the way we do him. When you become obsessive over a scientist, the person becomes more important than the ideas themselves, and this can only interfere with an objective analysis of his statements.
Clearly, Hawking is taking advantage of the stage he's been given to act as more of an entertainer than a physicist. That's his right, but people should not be under any illusion that he knows the answer more than anybody else right now. There is far too much anomalous data in astrophysics today for anybody to say that they have the answer. People like him will gloss over this fact and leave a sense that we understand more of the universe than we in fact do. But the problems remain and his message is not even very new. In fact, there's really no practical reason for him to be giving these talks other than to make money for himself. People already know his theory very well. It's the basis for every single NASA press release and every single astronomy class taught in every single school in the world. Maybe what we really need is for the astrophysicists to spend more time on the problems, collaborating with the various peoples' of the domains that they work within, and less time demonstrating that they've mastered the art of public relations.
You can't say that you understand dark matter or dark energy until you understand the charged particles that fill all of space.
Few people seem to be interested in taking a look at our earlier assumptions about the charged particles that fill interstellar space (more technically called plasma), but it is a fact that in a controlled laboratory environment, plasma conducts electricity. Plasma has three states: the arc mode, the glow mode and the *dark* mode. Which one you end up with in the laboratory depends upon how much current you pass through it. In other words, once the electrons or protons are stripped from their parent molecules, they can continue to conduct electricity while showing no external signs that it's happening so long as the current density remains low enough to not generate any photons or synchrotron radiation.
Electricity is obviously a force. In fact, it's a lot more physical force than dark matter and dark energy. Mainstream astrophysicists have decided in the case of plasma that the laboratory results do not scale up to galactic scales. This was something they decided without offering much in the way of proof. In other words, even if we see morphologies in the lab associated with electrical plasma that bear striking similarity to things like supernova remnants or "black holes" (and we do), they will continue to insist that electricity does not flow through space enough to play a significant role within our space observations. This decision stems from an earlier assumption in the field, magnetohydrodynamics, that it is oftentimes technically accurate to model space plasma as a fluid. In magnetohydrodynamics, astrophysicists have declared that it will make little difference if they assume that all charge differences within space plasmas can be assumed to *instantly* neutralize. This is quite an assumption that in the textbooks gets tagged with all sorts of limitations to its applicability. But they will hold to it today under a wide range of circumstances because it's currently more in vogue to believe that gravity is the dominant force in the universe. What's especially unusual about this assertion is that we know from the laboratories that plasma's physical interactions can induce currents. By studying Birkeland Currents in the lab, we've learned that not only can the currents induce physical motions, but the physical interactions of plasma can alternatively induce currents. In other words, if you have any sort of violent actions in space involving plasma, if we are to believe our laboratory experiments, these violent actions should induce currents in space. And yet, the astrophysicists continue to model the space plasmas as fluids, which have none of these properties whatsoever. When you consider the pervasiveness of plasma (nearly all visible matter within the universe is in the plasma state), the enormity of this error becomes apparent.
It should come as no surprise that humans are somewhat culturally ignorant of all of this because we exist in a small pocket of non-plasma here on Earth. Our popular culture still holds onto the uniformist view that we can understand deep space by extrapolating from our immediate surroundings -- even though this concept of uniformitarianism has fallen out of favor with most scientists, who increasingly accept evidence for past global catastrophes.
Many, if not all, of the properties of dark matter and dark energy can be explained with the electric force over plasma: dark matter's filamentary nature within the universe, dark energy's repulsive force and the fact that they are dark in the first place. Despite what this NYTimes article says, it's *never* been proven that dark matter and dark energy aren't just the error terms associated with our overly-simplistic space plasma models. Our plasma laboratory experiments at least build an argument saying as much. The real problem is that the mainstream astrophysicists are convinced that they *must* be on the right track, and no observation will shake their confidence. In t
This is a huge oversimplification that errs in favor of traditional cosmologies. The temperature, 2.7 Kelvin, was not "precisely" predicted. There were in fact numerous predictions. The accepted Big Bang prediction at the time was around 50 Kelvin and the steady state predictions were in fact far closer. If we modify history to our liking, then we impede our own ability to solve the problems we're working on.
This is a problematic assumption. We've discovered several supernova remnants that are bipolar symmetric (like 1987A). This was by no means expected to be left behind from a stellar explosion. Just using common sense, I would guess that the brightness of the supernova might even depend upon your perspective -- where you are located relative to the bipolar structure. To continue to hold onto your assumptions about supernovae behavior in spite of the fact that we've observed unexpected morphologies for supernova remnants is sloppy work. It wouldn't pass as science if we were talking about any domain other than astrophysics. In fact, this sort of reasoning seems to lend more credence to our stellar evolution theories than to our *observations*.
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... people that are constantly attending conferences for domains foreign to
My take
One would get the sense from reading an article like this that all of the reasonable research options have been exhausted. But mainstream cosmologists do not consider it to be their burden to research alternative cosmologies. There are numerous excuses to avoid researching more down-to-Earth, physical explanations for dark matter and dark energy. Are they valid excuses? One can easily make a case that the existence of dark matter and dark energy infer a problem with our overall analysis. In fact, for every Slashdot article I see on the subject, I always see at least one reasonable person in this forum confident that these must be error terms.
And this is the *real* problem with astrophysics today: the unwillingness to question the assumptions that got us to this point. For instance, it's oftentimes argued that the CMB proves the Big Bang (etc etc etc). But it's rarely mentioned that we chose to believe that based upon some evidence, and that other evidence can be generated, if we desire, that supports alternative explanations for the CMB. If you ignore alternative explanations for the CMB, claim that it's existence proves the Big Bang, and then express wonder at the existence of dark matter and dark energy, then shouldn't you go back and take a look at those alternative explanations for the CMB? Shouldn't the anomalous data involving dark energy and dark matter cast doubt upon the conventional wisdom that got us to this point? If, like this article suggests, we're at the point of believing that dark energy may never be solved, then isn't it time to try to prove alternative cosmologies to the extent that we've funded this one?
The universe happens in all sciences at once. This is what makes it so complicated. Through the lens of any one particular science, we can formulate theories that explain it. But none of these theories will be correct because they all inevitably ignore our knowledge in all of the other domains. The only *real* way to understand the universe would at least theoretically be to understand and apply *all* sciences simultaneously. By this reasoning, one would somewhat expect that mainstream astrophysicists today are eager listeners
It's completely impressive that people can write so many articles about plasma without directly referring to it. I see this over and over.
Is this a competition? Is there a prize?
The Slashdot crew must not be aware that what these studies propose is that *charged particles* can affect cloud formation! Ghasp! Had they known this, then they surely wouldn't have allowed this one to get through ...
That would suggest a link between charged particles moving through outer space and weather here on Earth. That would actually lend support to the general ideas proposed by Electric Universe theorists that weather has electrical components. Yikes!
EU theorists argue that the energies inherent to the cosmic rays are in some cases so large that they could not be accounted for even with the result of the annihilation of matter and antimatter. In order to accelerate particles to this extent, it's necessary to subject the charged particles to some sort of sustained electric field. In the EU view, all stars have their own electric fields with their own "solar winds" accelerating away from them as a result of these fields. Cosmic rays that hit the Earth are in fact nothing more than the solar winds of foreign stars that are larger than our own Sun. The energies imparted to those charged particles are enough to overtake our own solar wind such that they reach the Earth. In their view, it's conceivable that cosmic rays can potentially act as a mechanism for distributing energy across the universe in the absence of filamentary plasmas.
It's very interesting to observe in real time how astrophysicists are going to deal with this heretical view and these heretical experimental results. Traditional astrophysicists suddenly find themselves in the difficult position of having to apply their space models, which they've created by imagining what the universe *should* be like and which consistently fail to explain their own telescope observations in a rational way, to a real-world problem that has real consequences for all of us. The traditional views of astrophysicists that the Earth is largely an isolated body whose weather is unaffected by the plasma phenomenon that surrounds it has now been challenged by a peer reviewed study that alleges that charged particles from foreign stars can affect weather here on Earth. What about the other planets? Might cosmic rays be affecting *their* weather too? And what about all of those experiments where people are inducing rain by pumping ions into the atmosphere? Shouldn't we be taking a closer look at those now too?
My guess is that these new findings will be completely ignored or possibly slandered as if there's no tomorrow. To accept that cloud formation and global warming might have electrical components is going to be just far too much for the mainstream. But it should make for an entertaining show.
I have to check out for a few days, but I'll take a closer look at your response later.
String theory itself is a framework (like QFT) which supports many models, where in QFT's case the models are the values of several constants -- the 19 free parameters -- which can be tested experimentally. Experimental testing has revealed that the standard model is wrong, as it predicted a massless neutrino.
Don Scott's assertion is that the changes that have been made to the neutrino model resulted mostly from a need to save the solar fusion model. When faced with a predicament of abandoning the traditional model for the Sun based upon that annoying neutrino deficit, it was decided that it was easier to just change what we know about neutrinos. That led to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) announcement in Canada that neutrinos have mass and can change flavor. The deficit would just be a result of neutrinos changing flavor into one or more of the other types of neutrino before arriving at Earth and these other types would not have been measurable in earlier experiments. You seem to accept these results at face value as a source for data to evaluate other theories. But how did they arrive at their conclusions?
When it was initially announced, it was proclaimed that scientists were 99% confident in their results. One wonders how they arrived at that figure, but nevertheless, it was claimed that the "SNO detector has the capability to determine whether solar neutrinos are changing their type en route to Earth, thus providing answers to questions about neutrino properties and solar energy generation". That's quite a *detector*! I mean, if you have a detector that can provide a history of the particle during its journey to the Earth from the Sun, then you've done something that's certainly never been done before. Is Don Scott wrong here?
One must deduce that in fact what they are saying is that they are *assuming* what the composition of the neutrino flux leaving the Sun is. If this is the case, then they are assuming that their conclusions must be correct.
The report goes on to mention that electron neutrino flux is in fact significantly *lower* than previously reported levels. Oops.
One thing that the report *never* discusses is whether or not the mu-type neutrinos can revert back into electron neutrinos. If this can occur, then by their own logic of neutrino flavors, the number of electron neutrinos leaving the Sun could be even lower than previously thought. This is a glaring omission. In fact, early results from the MINOS experiment (http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/ minos_3-30-06.html) appear to validate this notion that mu-types can transform into electron types, dealing an additional blow to the solar fusion model.
But what continues to be ignored by astrophysicists is the fact that the total neutrino flux coming from the Sun correlates with the sunspot cycle. I'll quote Wallace Thornhill's description of the problem:
For the sake of your own arguments about String Theory, none of this apparently introduces any proble
Your point is very well taken. In researching the publications on this mission, I noticed myself that it was really difficult to understand what was the real purpose of the mission. I remain quite confused.
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I'm interested in something else that you mentioned
Some pretty interesting processes that ultimately result in energy being dumped into the Earth' ionosphere during auroral displays start in the magnetotail. Unfortunately, while thinking about things like magnetic reconnection, magnetic field dipolarizations, current disruption, and substorm current systems gets anyone with a Ph.D. in plasma physics excited, they probably don't mean much of anything to the general public.
I'm specifically interested in what you think of magnetic reconnections. I'm not a physicist, but I spend a lot of time trying to understand issues related to electricity and plasma in space. Don Scott devotes an entire chapter in his book to the concept of magnetic reconnections and his arguments against the science of reconnections seems strong. I obviously cannot excerpt an entire chapter, but I was wondering what you think of the science behind it. It's interesting to me that Alfven was so against the idea and yet it's such a mainstream concept today. What did Alfven see that others today do not? Or to the contrary, what observations have been made since that have confirmed the idea?
Birkeland's paper on the aurora, based in part on his brave journey to Northern Norway through 24-hour darkness and temperatures low enough that he nearly died on the trip, marked the first time that anybody (specifically British scientists) decided to start ostracizing the concept of electricity in space. Their legacy of ridiculing electricity in space would continue on for generations to the present day.
The story of the rejection of electricity in space sounds strikingly similar to the situation that persists today when electricity is implicated in anything that has to do with our space observations. From Don Scott's The Electric Sky:
Hannes Alfven also tried to convince Chapman of Birkeland's reasoning about the aurora:
Few people that ridicule Electric Universe Theory and Plasma Cosmology today realize that they follow in the footsteps of the confident Sydney Chapman. After all, how would they know about the story? Few people today, including NASA's discussion of this probe on their website, link the name Kristian Birkeland to the aurora.
The exact thoughts that you're having right now have been had by many intelligent people before you. You are not aware of it because these thoughts are against the mainstream views. But there is an evolving awareness that has been *very* slowly forming over the last few decades. Although you don't realize it, many people think exactly like you.
There is a group of engineers and physicists out there who have been trying in vain to convince the world that we should first check the accuracy of our plasma models and our early assumptions about space *before* we suppose the existence of additional dimensions or pervasive, invisible matters and forces. These people can explain all of our modern day observations and anomalies without those oddities and just using slight adjustments to our assumptions regarding how plasma acts in space. These people are suggesting that the existence of dark matter suggests a modeling error and the differences between quantum theory and the general theory of relativity suggest that we should be re-evaluating our early assumptions about those fields.
The group of people who have believed this over time have made important contributions to the field of plasma physics. They have made numerous astronomical predictions that have turned out to be true. One of them even invented the field that modern-day astrophysicists now use to describe plasma in space (which he later recused himself from, but which astrophysicists continue to use).
These people have been ridiculed. Their message has over time been obscenely slandered. And even when they turned out to be right, they have been ignored.
We are making a huge mistake in assuming that our early astrophysical assumptions are right even though those early assumptions have never been validated to an extent that we would expect of other fields and even though we continue to make anomalous observations on a regular basis. The unwillingness to admit that even people like Einstein can be wrong is wasting a lot of time, resources and thoughts. Einstein never stopped doubting himself, but when he died, we more or less stopped doubting him.
When Einstein died, a book was left open on his desk. It was titled, "Worlds in Collision" and was written by a man named Immanuel Velikovsky. Velikovsky started the Catastrophist movement, which has evolved into the Electric Universe Theory and Plasma Cosmology. For the horrible act of suggesting that astrophysicists' early assumptions decades ago may have been wrong, these people continue to be ostracized by the scientific community. People are so sure that these guys are wrong that even on these Slashdot forums, you will find bold statements about EU Theory being made by people who are not even aware of what the theory says. Little do they know that all it says is that plasma has been incorrectly modeled in magnetohydrodynamics and that all of the strange things we are observing in space are the result of the error terms. The signs are everywhere: on the Moon, on Mars, on Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Io, the Sun, in the Hubble images we know so well, and on and on and on. A qualitative theory now exists that can explain *everything* we've observed in space without the need to defy physical laws or rely upon invisible forces or matters. The only reason that the quest for a theory of everything seems so complicated is because our incorrect models have led us to infer disjointed, unrelated explanations for stars, planets and interstellar space. The field of plasma physics already offers us all of the tools we need to understand these phenomenon and we'd be wise to listen since 99.99% of all observable matter in space is in the plasma state. Traditional astrophysicists try to convince us that plasma physics does not scale to universal scales for the sole reason that they don't want to admit that electricity can be flowing over large-scale plasmas. But plasma experts can describe numerous, if not all, anomalous space observations using electricity. Theories must be evaluated on
Sounds like the physicists want to try to tweak it rather than junk it, even if it fails the experiment.
"The peer review system is satisfactory during quiescent times, but not during a revolution in a discipline such as astrophysics, when the establishment seeks to preserve the status quo."
-- Hannes Alfven
Maybe we can finally move on. And maybe the physicists can take their field back. Hopefully, they didn't lose the keys to the the labs that have been abandoned for years now.
What I havent seen in the book is an explanation for is why some asteriods leave plasma trails and show themselves as a comet and others dont? Or do they all behave like that?
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f . This document covers just about all of the questions you might have about electric comets. What you won't get from this document are the opinions of those people who disagree with electrical explanations for comets. You can find lots of those views on the Slashdot forums, NASA press releases and on mainstream websites. By process of elimination, you will notice that the electrical explanations for comets are the only ones that explain *all* of the various observational anomalies that occur with non-electrical attempts to explain comets.
To answer your previous question
Ever since the Thunderbolts guys recently reorganized their website, the Electric Comet document has become harder to find. You can view it at http://www.thunderbolts.info/pdf/ElectricComet.pd
If you've read "The Electric Sky", then you will notice that Wallace Thornhill predicted the results of the Deep Impact mission. As you learn more about the history of electricity in space debates, you will notice that there is a history of accurate predictions by people who believed that electricity flowed through space, and that in just about each case, the predictions are downplayed by traditional astrophysicists. For instance, Immanuel Velikovsky was able to predict that the surface of Venus would be extremely hot at a time when everybody unanimously believed that the surface of Venus would be fairly similar in temperature to the Earth's. When he then accurately predicted that Jupiter would be emitting radio waves, it was claimed that his accurate predictions were pure luck. Hannes Alfven similarly made a slew of successful predictions related to space plasmas and his success with predictions was overwhelmingly ignored. It appears that contrary to popular belief, a theory's predictive capabilities actually have little to do with its acceptance amongst astrophysicists today because our most popular theories in astrophysics today tend to have after-the-fact, retrospective origins.
That's pretty funny. I sincerely apologize. I've never actually met *anybody* on Slashdot who has read an EU book.
Everybody agrees that quantitative support is lacking, but they're proposing that a complex, interconnected system of transmission lines and loads is occurring. You cannot start to analyze those "circuits" until you understand the transmission line characteristics. That means that we're pretty much starting from scratch. Very little that we've learned about gravity is going to help us to understand the characteristics of electrical plasma. The idealized fluid equations used in magnetohydrodynamics are completely different from the resistive electrical plasma equations.
I've also seen it mentioned that they have no idea how much of an impact cosmic rays (the solar winds of foreign stars) are having upon the system. Cosmic rays could potentially be distributing energy outside of transmission lines. If you've ever seen an unprocessed space image before, the rawest of space images is filled with extremely bright cosmic rays going in every single direction. There have even been mainstream scientific papers addressing the possibility that cosmic rays are affecting global warming here on Earth. When our own solar wind changes, the number of cosmic rays from foreign stars that reach the planet Earth can change. Apparently, correlation studies have demonstrated that there is a link between cosmic rays hitting the Earth's atmosphere and the generation of certain types of clouds in the Earth's atmosphere. These different cloud types can change the amount of heat reaching the surface of the Earth. This could potentially explain why the temperature of the Earth's surface has been increasing while the temperature of the Earth's lower atmosphere has remained the same over the past few decades.
Don Scott did a minimalist treatment of rilles (canyons) in the solar system in his book because that topic is covered in great detail online on their www.thunderbolts.info site. That particular issue is best treated when you can present a lot of images and discuss each one in detail. That would have taken up a hundred pages in itself. If you go to their website (Picture of the Day --> Subject Archive), you'll see plenty of evidence that rilles are electrical phenomenon. The most convincing attribute is that many rilles have been observed that follow the terrain both down and up. This single characteristic rules out all of the traditional explanations. You'll also see plenty of evidence that rilles are oftentimes related to round craters. I recommend that if you haven't gone through the www.thunderbolts.info archive of pictures of the day that you might want to consider doing this next. It's basically a whole book to itself.
I think we'll probably see more details on the Electric Sun idea as time moves forward. Although it was postulated by Ralph Juergens, I don't think anybody's actually attempted to thoroughly investigate it until Wallace Thornhill. I think we're seeing the very beginning of that process. You should also be aware of the Solar Probe mission in 2018. It's a long time from now, but NASA is putting together a mission to try to understand magnetic reconnections and the solar wind by sending a probe as close to the corona as technology can accomplish. I've asked Talbott what he thought the data would say, but he never got back to me.
Your next choice of book depends upon your interest. There is a lot of material. I've gone through about half of the "Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky" book. It's dry material and a little bit wordy, but it will fill in a lot of the historical context for how we got to this point. I'm currently slowly moving through Ginenthal's other book, "The Extinction of the Mammoth". The amount of material to absorb is somewhat overwhelming. In addition to all of the books at www.thunderbolts.info, I'm also trying to understand all of the alternative redshift theories out there and historical context for people like Birkeland, Alfve
They oughta try to simulate the behaviour of these asteriods in a lab by subjecting it to the same conditions in space with plasma and see if they can get them to break like that one that split for no apparent reason. At least try to reproduce it all on a small scale.
We see plasma break apart solid state matter all of the time on a small scale. You can do it at home by turning your arc welder up on a piece of metal until it snaps the metal. Or, when you run too much electricity through a capacitor, a catastrophic leak can occur and damage the structure of the cap.
By the way, I do a much better impersonation of Big Bangers than you do of EU proponents. I have a *lot* more silly material to work with. Thing is, you'd actually have to read the theory in order to make fun of it, so that makes it much harder for you guys. It must be somewhat frustrating.
If you ever decide to learn what EU Theory actually says, I recommend Don Scott's new book, The Electric Sky. But if you're the kind of person that values popular opinion over critical analysis and independent thinking, then you might want to skip it. In order to objectively learn the truth about plasma in space these days, it seems you have to be quite impervious to ridicule. Who would have ever thought that playground bullying would be so commonplace in a forum about science and technology? It surprises me every day.
When it eventually becomes apparent that all of you guys are wrong (if you are lucky enough for this to happen to you instead of your children), people will be entertained by going back through my interactions with all of you. I've always wondered how *I* would feel if I actually realized that I had possibly dissuaded others from reading about a subject because I assumed that it was wrong only to find out that it was in fact *me* that was wrong. I suppose that my level of guilt would depend upon the consequences of being wrong. But you can't know the consequences of being wrong without actually learning what the theory says, so it's an interesting predicament for all of you guys. It's one of the more fascinating dramas unfolding in science today.
Sounds to me like a back-door way to sneak in more of that Electric Universe nonsense, where the most studied, most well understood of the fundamental forces, the one that is most frequently used to do astronomical observations with terrific accuracy, is also simultaneously mysterious and ephemeral, not well understood, and oddly enough denied by main-stream astronomy.
It's always interesting to see people who have not read the details of Electrical Universe Theory talk about it. In fact, I've never witnessed such a willingness amongst intelligent people to misrepresent a subject that they know so little about. I'm determined to be here the day that all of the veteran Slashdotters who frequently regurgitate other peoples' slanders of EU Theory realize that maybe they should have actually read what it said before convincing others that it's wrong.
It's true to say that we understand electricity and magnetism quite well. It's certainly less accurate to assume that we completely understand how plasma deals with those things. Plasma physics is still an active field. Hannes Alfven liked to comment that although Maxwell's Equations are accepted as rule of law amongst scientists, the plasma apparently doesn't always pay attention to our rules.
It's a fact that few people actually investigate how it is that astrophysicists came to the conclusion that electricity does not flow through space even though everybody unanimously believes that it's an absurd idea. If you ever decide to investigate it, you might be surprised by what you find. It turns out that magnetohydrodynamics, the field that astrophysicists use to model plasma and other conductive fluids in space, accomplishes its tricks by modeling plasma as a magnetized fluid. They get away with this by asserting that plasma in space is ideally conductive -- meaning it has no resistance whatsoever even over great distances. This assumption applies even to plasmas that extend for light years in space. Consider what they're saying for a second: that inequalities in the charge of a plasma that extends for light years can "readily" neutralize themselves.
Now, consider another fact. Plasma's physical motions and interactions can induce currents, and the currents through plasma can induce physical motions. 99.99% of all space is matter in the plasma state. In order to conclude that electricity does not flow over this plasma in space, you must conclude that the plasma within the universe, which represents 99.99% of all matter, never violently interacts.
If you clean your house by sweeping everything under the rug whenever visitors come over, it might seem that your house is quite clean to the people you're showing it to. But over time, all of the crap under the rug will build up. You can hope that people will not pay attention to the lumps in the rug, but they're still there no matter how hard you wish they weren't. Contemporary astronomy is rancid with anomalies that have been swept under the rug in preparation for public consumption (we wouldn't want to confuse them, right?). It never ceases to amaze me how uncritical Slashdotters are when it comes to accepting these processed space stories. It appears that there's little effort to validate any of the *interpretation* or question any of the *assumptions* these days of space press releases in the Slashdot forums. It's especially unusual to me that Slashdot's audience, programmers, are not able to recognize the absence of an input in astronomy. Coders spend all day changing their code to get the right output, and act as if astronomers are able to do the same thing. Astronomy (like archaeology and geology) is output-only, and for that reason, it is highly susceptible to incorrect interpretations, assumptions, prejudices and preferences. There are limits to certainty in astronomy, and the only way to really evaluate problems is to analyze the observational anomalies. If you're skeptical and paying attention, you'll realize that this is not being done. Anomalies these days i
As for the cometary impact on Jupiter though, people seem to have conveniently forgotten that the Shoemaker-Levy-9 encounter with Jupiter caused more questions than answers. From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060
If we could easily push asteroids into a planet why not just push them away when they approach Earth?
Shouldn't we be trying?
Do we really need to know the composition of an asteroid before trying to nudge one?
Seems to me that we just need to know to what extent nudging works, and what sort of complications will arise when we try it. I guess I'm just not sure what the impediment is to trying this right now. I would guess that we'd want to do numerous test runs before expecting that the system works anyways. Is it that we cannot generate enough thrust to displace the orbit or a typical asteroid?
I don't understand why, when you're trying to understand asteroid collisions with the Earth, you don't perform asteroid collisions with other planets? It seems to me that the very first thing you'd want to do when trying to understand a collision would be to nudge asteroids of varying compositions into a distant planet where probes are on standby to observe the collisions.
We like to think that we know so much about the collisions already based upon our models for what happens, but these are all assumptions. The few events that seem to have involved surviving witnesses (like the Great Chicago Fire, which appears to have been the result of Earth passing through cometary debris) indicated *electrical* phenomenon at the sites of impact -- things like ball lightning, high fragmentation and a rain of smaller particulates. Sudden electrical discharges occurred between metal objects in peoples' homes, St Elmo's Fire electrically illuminated structures, and electrical surges between coins in one man's pockets were enough to kill him. It seems to me that we should be first trying to validate our *assumptions* about impacts because based upon at least these apparent eyewitness accounts, our assumptions may be flawed. What was it about that cometary debris that induced so much electrical activity on the surface of the planet?
There are lots of reasons to suspect that our knowledge of impacts is less than we believe. For instance, we *assume* that the reason that nearly all impact craters are round is because the kinetic impact creates an explosion. But there are other potential plasma-based explanations that have been ignored. When two plasmaspheres come into contact, for instance, it is known that electrical interactions can occur. If a significant electrical discharge happens between the ground and the object, then a round crater would form. It may turn out, in fact, that this is the key to disrupting them. We just don't yet know.
Even though Mars is not an ideal replication of the Earth's atmosphere, we could still learn things by observing such collisions. It would provide interpretable data where there currently is very little to speak of. And the spectacle of colliding large bodies in space would surely renew interest by younger kids in space.
I think most people would agree that papers like this are based upon so many assumptions that they are pretty much worthless, regardless of which cosmology you believe in. It's just a product of our affinity for math and our desire to feel like we have more confidence in some sciences than we can actually achieve in the absence of input-output experiments (ie, to varying degrees, astronomy, geology and archaeology).
But it's interesting to note that the biggest single assumption in this type of logic is that the universe is not infinite in time and space. In a static electric universe, without a beginning to base your calculations upon, chances are high that neither stars nor galaxies have determinable ages. The entire system is essentially "transient" and papers like this are completely meaningless. As painful as it is to imagine it, aliens could have started seeding the universe an infinite amount of time ago. It's possible that not even they could tell you when they started. This is of course no more painful though than imagining what happened before the Big Bang.
I've also seen it mentioned amongst people who are aware of Electric Universe Theory that the more you understand plasma, the more the plasma of the universe appears to constitute a living organism. The fact that plasma can form double-layers to "protect" its charge suggests parts of a living entity. And if Chip Arp is correct, the notion that spiral galaxies can "spit" out quasars might be the process by which the organism spreads out of its original domain. The stars are the organism's cells and mobile charged particles act as the nutrients for the plasma, which would ironically be like the organism's blood. Within this context, the rocky planets are a rare, harmless non-plasma pocket where we humans, like tiny viruses, can multiply and possibly expand.
Taking the idea one step further, another strange curiosity of EU Theory is that all of the plasma phenomenon within the universe we've observed thus far are actually electrical loads and transmission lines. Once you've become acquainted with the theory, you begin to wonder what is in fact the *source* of the power. You'd have to conclude that we're likely not in range to view the source, but this is a very interesting question. It's the EU Theory version of asking how old the Big Bang Universe is.
Weird shit. Once the public starts to learn more about plasma, I think it's inevitable that it will become a popular topic for strange ideas like this.
I love the fact that people believed that ball lightning was caused by mini black holes. It's such a sign of the times that people would look at something that's obviously some sort of plasma phenomenon and imagine that it's a black hole ... that people would use their idealized non-resistive mathematical magnetohydrodynamic plasma models that lead to concepts like black holes and dark matter in space to try to describe real world objects that clearly have more to do with plasma. People don't realize that we can describe the entire universe with just the non-idealized properties of plasma *without* the need for things like black holes. Black holes are the result of *ignoring* electricity over plasma in space. In order to compensate for the idealization that plasma in space is not conducting electricity, you have to assume a virtually infinite mass to describe some objects in space. But if you drop the assumption that plasma in space is an ideal conductor with frozen-in magnetic fields, you end up with plasma that can exert electrical forces upon matter in space. And since plasma represents the state of 99%+ of all observable matter in space, this idealization leads to a very significant error term -- in fact, around 95%.
Anybody who is interested in space today needs to learn about plasma. You cannot understand the universe without understanding plasma because the universe basically *is* plasma. The only parts that are *not* plasma are the rocky bodies in space like the planets and the asteroids. If you see articles about space that are not referring specifically to plasma, then it is likely bullshit. There is nothing important happening in space that has anything to do with gases or collections of gas and dust because plasma acts differently than those things. Namely, it includes ions and electrons, which obviously can conduct electricity. It is our (unfortunate) choice to ignore this fact in astrophysics and space articles today.
If people were in the mood to learn from their mistakes, they'd see that it was silly that anybody ever even proposed that mini black holes were causing ball lightning and they might reflect on whether or not this same type of mistake might be happening for bigger balls of plasma in space. As is, it currently appears that people are in denial about plasma's role in the universe. So long as that represents the mood of amateur and professional scientists, there will continue to be mysterious forces and dark particles within the universe and we will continue to be surprised by our observations of electricity over filamentary plasmas in space.
People are getting far too caught up in blacklisting theories because they are out of the mainstream. It's not important that it's called Electric Universe Theory or Plasma Cosmology, or that there aren't many other people who believe in it. Science should not be a popularity contest. What's important is the science that it is based upon. EU Theory and Plasma Cosmology are based upon non-idealized plasma physics. Traditional astrophysics today is based upon an idealized form of plasma physics called magnetohydrodynamics. There is no good reason to assume that electricity does not flow in space over plasma. However, there are decades of research in plasma physics that suggest that in fact electricity can and does flow over plasma in space, and once you take this into consideration, things like black holes are unnecessary. When people call EU Theory a pseudoscience like creationism or UFO's, they're basically stating that they do not believe that astrophysics should have to pay any attention to plasma physics when it doesn't suit their gravity-centric conceptions for the universe. We do not in fact have the luxury of cherry-picking the laws of nature. The laboratory tells us how plasma operates and our job is to learn from it and apply what we learn in the laboratory to our observations of space. Just because astrophysicists currently like the idea of black holes and don't like the idea of electricity over plasma in space doesn't mean that they are right to choose the black hole explanation. Many intelligent people have warned that this is a huge mistake. Time will prove them right.