One-third of the people who rated my response about plasma considered my response to be "over-rated". So, I thought I'd add another topical example. It's not yet clear if Slashdot will be posting this particular article, but another major misrepresentation of plasma appeared in the news today that illustrates the points I made about the plasma pillars. You can view the article at http://www.physorg.com/news87658350.html.
A light echo was produced when X-ray light generated by gas falling into the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-star"), was reflected off gas clouds near the black hole. While the primary X-rays from the outburst would have reached Earth about 50 years ago, the reflected X-rays took a longer path and arrived in time to be recorded by Chandra.
And from the image caption...
Clear changes in the shapes and brightness of the gas clouds are seen between the 3 different observations in 2002, 2004 and 2005. This behavior agrees with theoretical predictions for a light echo produced by Sagittarius A and helps rule out other interpretations.
You can clearly see in the images that the filaments of *plasma* have changed shape over time as you would expect plasma to do as electricity flows over it. Remember, its kinetic motions are affected by the current and the current affects its kinetic motions -- just like a plasma globe.
Where mainstream astronomers see light traveling 50 light-years and illuminating a cloud of "gas" in space, plasma cosmologist and Electric Universe Theorists see plasma doing the same stuff we've seen it do within laboratories:
The plasmoid is the "generator" that powers the intermittent ejections from a galactic core. In a galactic circuit, electrical power flows inward along the spiral arms, lighting the stars as it goes, and is concentrated and stored in the central plasmoid. When the plasmoid reaches a threshold density, it discharges, usually along the galaxy's spin axis. This process can be replicated in a laboratory with the plasma focus device.
You can see a very detailed picture of the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0504 15milkyway.htm. Far from being some invisible black hole like object, we can see it and it's the same plasma torus that we can generate within laboratories.
The problem for astrophysicists today is that they need to come up with a mechanism that can explain how the gas itself is illuminating in x-rays because x-rays indicate an unusually high amount of energy is being released. And their idealized non-resistive gas laws that they use to understand how gas behaves in space do not allow for x-rays to be produced by the gas except in some very specific situations (like violent collisions). For the center of the Milky Way, the Chandra X-Ray Telescope has imaged temperatures for this gas of both 10-million degrees C and 100-million degrees C. This is anomalous to current theories. From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/040715 space.htm:
This result was unexpected and difficult to explain. The press release describes the problem in greater detail: "Shock waves from supernova explosions are the most likely explanation for heating the 10-million-degree gas, but how the 100-million-degree gas is heated is not known. Ordinary supernova shock waves won't work, and heating by very high-energy particles produces the wrong spectrum of X-rays. Also, the observed Galacti
Quasars are only really far away so long as you ignore the research of Halton Arp, like the rest of astronomy does these days. Arp has imaged quasars that are either connected to or in front of spiral galaxies with much lower redshifts. Their redshifts appear to have non-cosmological components that change in discrete quantized amounts as the quasars move away from their parent galaxies. It was previously argued that his statistics were flawed, but a study has come out recently that supports the correlation between quasars and spiral galaxies. Then, astronomers released a study declaring that the redshifts were not in fact quantized. But in fact, Arp was arguing that there is an inherent component of redshift that is quantized -- not the raw measured value. The desire to discredit Arp has always superseded the desire to maintain objectivity in doing so...
Good ol' electric universe. Proving, once again, that you can fool all of/. all of the time.
If "fooling" people means believing that plasma lab results scale up to universe scales; that plasma consists of mobile ions and electrons that can conduct electricity; and that plasma does not act anything like a *fluid* with ideal conductivity; then I'm proud to be fooled. In fact, that guy Hannes Alfven that recused himself from magnetohydrodynamics was so fooled about electricity flowing in space that he was the first to predict the large-scale filamentary structure of the universe in 1963. He was such a fool that he developed the basic tools that we use today to describe the Van Allen radiation belt twenty years before it was discovered. He was such a complete idiot that he proposed an explanation for the acceleration of cosmic rays that is now known as the Fermi Mechanism -- except that he did it before Fermi. Alfven was so stupid that he played a pivotal role in the development of plasma physics, the physics of charged particle beams and interplanetary and magnetospheric physics. What a complete imbecile! We definitely shouldn't pay any attention to what that guy had to say.
The real problem is that you mainstream'ers are not even aware of all of the assumptions that have been made within traditional astrophysics in order to maintain your gravity-centric conceptions.
There is a pseudoscience. It's called magnetohydrodynamics and it's what we teach astrophysicists in classrooms today.
I never left. What you apparently see as so many words, others read and understand as logic. Like some others, you are quite stubborn about your ignorance. I'm not speaking to people like you any more than I would speak to my couch. The only reason you believe that I don't have much evidence is because you haven't critically read the material yourself. You have blinders on, and only you can take them off.
People are responding that my input is valuable and it is people like you that are having to remind everybody else that we're supposed to believe that this is pseudoscience. I don't think you're going to have much success by ranting about UFO's and conspiracies. You're going to have to come up with some actual material to work with if you care.
I recommend that you block my postings so that you can continue to believe in your nonphysical idealized plasma world. I'm not here to force my ideas upon you. I'm educating those who are ready for it. The rest of you won't take notice until the herd around you has because your most important basis for believing an idea is how many people around you already believe it or if NASA is saying it. It's a very simplistic conception of pseudoscience that I'm fine with you believing.
So, your belief is that arguments should be rated on the basis of popularity rather than logic? Should we vote on science just like we do for our presidents?
Electric Universe Theory is nothing more than the application of plasma physics to cosmology. It is based upon laboratory experiments and is driven by contemporary observational data. It also corresponds with numerous writings by ancient literate astronomical cultures on Earth. It is the astrophysicists that are trying to convince people that the plasma lab results and plasma computer simulations do not apply to large-scale space structures, and that their idealized fluid models with frozen-in-place magnetic fields and perfect conductivity accurately model plasma.
Where plasma cosmologists postulate nothing more than electricity flowing over plasma, bread-and-butter astrophysicists are the ones postulating invisible matter and impossible forces. Plasma, by definition, involves mobile ions and electrons. Why should it not conduct electricity? If you saw a horse with a horn, would you suspect a genetic deformity or a unicorn?
Why can't diffuse plasmas exist? Just because something seems diffuse to us humans, does that mean that it would be too diffuse for large-scale structures within the universe to use it for energy transfer? Why would the universe care how things appear to us?
Plasma represents the state of nearly *all* observable matter within the universe. Why should we not seriously consider cosmologies based upon it? Wouldn't it be irresponsible to *not* do so?
If the man who invented the math that astrophysicists currently use to model plasma recused himself from his own invention during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, shouldn't astrophysicists listen? Or are astrophysicists allowed to make up science as they see fit?
Perhaps people are paying attention because it makes *sense*.
It's actually made of plasma in the glow discharge state. That's the same state of plasma that you see within a neon sign. Plasma can also exist in the arc state, which is like an arc welder (very bright) and in a dark state, which you cannot see (like the electricity that flows through your lamp cord; notice the cord does not brighten). It's resistivity changes throughout these modes depending upon the current density. Plasma is the fourth more common state of matter next to gas, solid and liquid. Thing is, 99%+ of the universe's matter is in the plasma state, which makes it a pretty big deal to understand it. You'd think, in fact, that our theories about how the universe operated would be based upon how plasma acts to a great extent, but astrophysicists have oddly convinced themselves that accurately modeling the properties of plasma is not all that important to understanding the universe.
Since astrophysicists like to incorrectly model plasma as a *fluid* (magnetohydrodynamics), they tend to just vaguely call it "gas and dust" even though it is by definition filled with charged particles like ions and electrons. As you may know, ions and electrons can carry electricity, which makes plasma a very special type of matter. The electricity that flows through plasma can affect its shape, and vice-versa. So, its electrical and mechanical energies are interdependent, and this makes it very complicated. If you've ever seen a novelty plasma globe at Spencer's in the mall, the first thing that probably came to your mind was not... hey, it's fluid! Unfortunately, for the past several decades, astrophysicists have been refusing to admit that plasma can transfer electricity and it's led to all sorts of weird results within astronomy like black holes, neutron stars, dark matter, dark energy, the Big Bang Theory, etc.
This whole article is actually complete bullshit because contrary to what it states, supernovae are likely electrical phenomenon as well. We've imaged many remnants of supernovae (like 1987A) that are bipolar symmetric like an hourglass. This isn't anything like what astrophysicists told us that they should be -- a spherical shell of expanding gas. In fact, it corresponds better to something called Birkeland Currents, which is a plasma physics term that astrophysicists aren't very familiar with. The supernova can become extremely energetic because it is the confluence point for energy arriving from foreign energy sources in the same way that energy created at your power plant ends up being used at your house.
Of course, this isn't the *standard* view and I'm sure that there are people who would consider me to be heretical, or at least misleading you. But so long as the filaments within a novelty plasma globe do not appear to you to act like the water in a similarly shaped fishbowl, then you should not buy much into the rest of astronomy either because this single assumption is so devastating to all of the calculations that are done for the universe that the end result is pretty much garbage. We know enough about space to get probes out to the planets, but that's pretty much it these days. Very few of the pretty pictures we see through our amazing telescopes were actually expected by the theories that we've been pursuing for the past few decades. The scientists spend a bunch of time, in fact, trying to figure out ways to create those pictures *without* electricity because it's considered more appropriate for some strange reason to invent mysterious matters than to assume that electricity can flow over plasma in space (which we can do in the laboratory). You'd never know any of this from the public relations releases though for space articles because people tend to believe whatever it is they are told when it comes to space stuff and there are no "investigative journalists" asking the tough questions in the space industry.
We live in a very strange world. Our reality is basically what we tell ourselves that it is and will continue to be so until a day whe
Cosmic Microwave Background is actually a contentious issue when you get down to the science of it. Many people like to believe that it is a proof of the Big Bang, but it only is insofar as you ignore all of the other potential explanations for it. We zero in on one particular explanation because astrophysicists are so certain that their Big Bang model is true. But in fact, they have made many incorrect assumptions about plasma in order to arrive at their traditional paradigms in the first place. Plasma is *not* an ideal conductor; it in fact has resistance and can conduct electricity even over diffuse flows. Any plasma laboratory experimenter will tell you so, and since space basically *is* plasma, we'd be wise to listen. Astrophysicists choose to disregard laboratory plasma experiments, proclaiming that they do not scale in time *or* space when in fact some plasma researchers have been able to accurately simulate spiral galaxies with electricity over plasma (Peratt) without any imaginary matter. To dismiss laboratory experiments based upon non-idealized plasma science that we already understand quite well and substitute them with invisible matter that we don't know anything about and that was derived from models of the universe based upon idealized plasma science is not only counterproductive. It's nonsensical. Dark matter is nothing more than the error that results from the creation of a bad physical model for plasma.
There are not actually "anomalies" with cosmological redshift.
I suppose that you're going to tell me to not believe any of the work that Halton Arp has done? That the images of high redshift quasars in front of opaque, low redshift spiral galaxies are just due to some sort of accidental imaging? I'm interested in hearing why I should disbelieve my eyes and believe your theory instead? I can clearly see quasars in front of NGC 7319 at the bottom of this page:
There are some objects that we can't get a good spectrum off of, as the previous poster said, and the Sun is irrelevant to cosmological redshift. Tired light is a non-viable idea.
The tired light model does not predict the observed time dilation of high redshift supernova light curves. This time dilation is a consequence of the standard interpretation of the redshift: a supernova that takes 20 days to decay will appear to take 40 days to decay when observed at redshift z=1.
How is that people *know* that redshift is expanding the time it takes for supernova light curves to decay? This appears to *assume* that supernovae are a standard that we can measure things by. That would be interesting because we've seen supernova remnants like 1987A that we didn't understand at all. Many supernovae -- including 1987A and Keppler's Supernova remnant -- exhibit a bipolar configuration that does not follow from the earlier assumptions about supernovae being expanding spherical shells of gas blowing away from a central point. Why would these explosions frequently only come out the sides like an hourglass?
Traditional astrophysics has dug a very deep hole in terms of assumptions in order to maintain a sense of "progress". But in fact, those earlier assumptions were never really validated. If anything, we've been seeing observations that discount those earlier assumptions, and rather than making predictions about future observations, astrophysicists these days spend nearly all of their time trying to postulate ways to fit the observations to those earlier assumptions.
Peer review is meaningless if everybody in your field is operating on incorrect assumptions. And that's exactly what's happening right now within astrophysics. Some time ago, a man named Hannes Alfven, who is today considered the father of plasma physics, founded the field of magnetohydrodynamics. This field treats plasma as a fluid and assumes that currents cannot flow through the plasma because it treats plasma as an ideal conductor with no resistance. This is actually not *anything* like the way that plasma operates in the real world, and since plasma represents 99%+ of all observable matter within the universe, this massively incorrect assumption yields absurd results in astrophysics today. Plasma is in fact electrically conductive and its electrical properties interact with its mechanical motions, and vice-versa. If you've ever seen a novelty plasma globe, then you intuitively know that plasma is not like a fluid. You can tell by looking closely at a plasma globe that the plasma creates filaments and these filaments pair up and twist around one another. These twisting currents are called Birkeland Currents. As the current flow increases through them, they pinch together with increasing force and this pinching action can actually condense matter into a ball. When Hannes Alfven received his nobel prize for plasma physics in the 70's, he recused himself from the field that he created (magnetohydrodynamics) and warned astrophysicists to abandon it, and that the path they were taking would eventually dead-end. But they completely ignored him and continue to do so.
This is how we end up with terms like "solar wind" -- which is more properly identified as plasma coming from the Sun operating under the influence of the Sun's weak electric field that fills all of the heliosphere, which extends out beyond Pluto. If you can only think in terms of fluids and gravity, then movement of particles in space would look to you like a "wind". But where have we ever seen winds that steadily increase in velocity for millions of miles as the solar wind does? It's *still* accelerating as it moves past the Earth. What can possibly cause that? There is nothing about fluids or gravity that can cause that. In order to explain that, you *must* resort to electrical concepts. It's a stark reminder that our earlier astrophysical assumptions have led us astray.
It's that simple. Electric Universe, the supposed pseudoscience, uses non-idealized plasma physics to understand the universe (plasma cosmology). Traditional astrophysics, the collection of "real" sciences, ignores the possibility that electricity might be flowing over plasma in space because of their earlier assumptions about plasma being a *fluid* with ideal conductivity, and this inherited notion that gravity is the strongest force within the universe. One would expect that astrophysicists would fully understand plasma physics and electrodynamics, but they're taught in school that these things are much less important than gravity, and it appears that they are given nothing more than this "crash course" of magnetohydrodynamics as a substitute. This is in spite of the fact that we now know that electrically conductive plasma fills nearly all of space.
There actually is plenty of evidence for EU Theory. The real problem is that once you are branded as pseudoscience, then nobody will take you seriously. In fact, for every silly notion like black holes, neutron stars, dark matter, dark energy, etc, etc, etc, there is a corresponding simple electrical explanation. Let's look at pulsars and neutron stars, for instance. They have been observed now to "spin" at something like 300 revolutions per second, and people just accept this concept that a star can spin at 300 revolutions per second as if it doesn't bother them at all. But it's ludicrous to start with, and if you actually look at images of the Vela Pulsar, you'll notice that you are seeing filaments coming out of it that look a hell of a lot like sparks (
The real heart of the problem is that we're believing *everything* that we're being told by a group of people without critically thinking about it. People have *total* faith in organizations and people like NASA, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, etc. We are a brand name loyalty culture. In other words, we've been trained by the PR industry since the 20's to believe in the brand rather than questioning the message. Back in the 20's, people only bought the stuff they needed. Buying something that you didn't need didn't seem necessary. So, the PR industry was born here in the United States to convince the public to buy things that they didn't need. This created brand names and this brand name loyalty has seeped into every aspect of our culture. When you think of IBM, you think of guys in suits and mainframe computers. When you think of Nike, you think of shoes, that swoosh symbol and maybe even sweatshops. When you think of black holes, you probably think of Stephen Hawking, his books and maybe some shows you've seen about them on Nova or Discovery Channel. When you think of the Sun, most people imagine a nuclear reaction. And most importantly, when you hear the term "astrophysics", you imagine things that you cannot possibly understand -- and most people don't even try. Your brain switches from critically thinking to listening and memorizing. We've been brainwashed in a sense to not think about what we're being told about space because we've been told that it's just far too complicated to understand. And sure enough, if you try to talk to astrophysicists or intelligent amateur astronomers about it, they will oftentimes try to scare you out of your preposterous notions of electricity in space -- as if you are some sort of threat to them -- by invoking all sorts of exotic physics. You'll oftentimes notice that they don't care if you actually *understand* what they're saying; they would prefer that you don't because then you'll get out of their way so that they can go back to their work. This process has led to conformity within astrophysics, but the problem is that conformity is the enemy of science. The last thing we want to be doing is voting on science. Science is best when scientists are left to believe what they want and pursue those beliefs as they see fit. Some form of peer review is necessary to weed out the pseudoscience, but pseudoscience can accidentally creep into the peer review process itself when the scientists stop *listening* to the other intelligent people around them. And this is where things stand now.
They laughed at Velikovsky even though he made accurate predictions about Jupiter and Venus that were completely unexpected. Carl Sagan frequently claimed in his arguments against Velikovsky that ancient astronomical-literate cultures who recorded the arrival of Venus were not smart enough to accurately understand the movements of planets. They ignored Alfven even though he earned a Nobel Prize and most astrophysicists are to this day so unaware of his recusal from magnetohydrodynamics that they sometimes refer to magnetic reconnections as "Alfvenic reconnection". And they similarly scoffed at Wallace Thornhill's accurate predictions for the Deep Impact mission to comet Tempel 1 even though they have yet to offer any real alternative explanation that can include all of the observations made. When an amateur astronomer coincidentally took a picture of the Space Shuttle Columbia's plasma tail lit up by upper atmosphere lightning at the exact moment that the Shuttle malfunctioned, NASA refused to believe it, arguing that upper atmospheric lightning should not exist and they never heard the lightning on their instruments anyways. Time after time, they've decided that they knew better than the people around them when in fact they might have been wise to listen. Their field is, after all, interdisciplinary.
And so, here we are: pouring millions of dollars into fairy tale imaginary objects that capture the imagination of the public and ma
My personal thoughts are that people who have been trained in Big Bang Theory are "contaminated" insofar as they are oftentimes unable to conceive of electricity in space. But our observations are increasingly telling us otherwise. For instance, there was a big supernova some time ago called 1987A. When we finally had instruments that could image the remnants of that supernova, this is what we found:
Our conventional theory regarding supernovae do not describe that *thing* at all. The problem is that the structure is bipolar symmetric when in fact traditional theory was expecting a shock wave emitted symmetrically in all directions. And those beads... How do those beads have *anything* to do with nuclear fusion? They appear to float out in the middle of nowhere! I highly recommend reading through the story of that link. It's a good example of the problems popping up for conventional astrophysics today. The plasma universe theories continue to be observationally driven, whereas the traditional paradigms are more or less being dragged along by the observations.
Although it is important to understand the basics of astrophysical theories, it is far easier to understand Electric Universe theory. Astrophysics owes a lot of its complexity to the fact that it treats phenomenon as if they are disjointed, isolated bodies. Gravity is too weak to account for many of these observations, so instead of energy transfer, astrophysicists must work with energy accumulated. This isolation forces them to postulate a separate exotic mechanism for just about every phenomenon they observe in space. But space is connected by plasma and that plasma in fact conducts electricity. And many of those exotic phenomenon, like magnetic reconnections for the Sun, can be replicated with just characteristics of plasma in space. So, if you learn about plasma and electricity+magnetism, you basically understand the universe. It's a really simple concept that's just taking a *really* long time to permeate through science and culture right now. In fact, we're approaching 60 years now since Immanuel Velikovsky first proposed it. Hannes Alfven, Ralph Juergens and a handful of other plasma/electricity geniuses have come and gone with little fanfare. When Albert Einstein died, Immanuel Velikovsky's book "Worlds in Collision" was ominously left open on his desk. It's emblematic in a way because we still haven't closed that book.
The www.thunderbolts.info site has a "resources" link that will point you to a collection of books that generally support EU Theory. If you were going to start out with any particular book, I recommend "The Electric Sky". I've found the web useful for checking out the arguments on the astrophysics side. Tim Thompson, for instance, has a webpage that offers the arguments *against* the concept of an Electric Sun. I've read both arguments by now and I'm personally more convinced by Wallace Thornhill's Electric Sun model than Tim Thompson's solar fusion arguments. Tim Thompson is a very intelligent man, but it is clear to me that he's proposing that astrophysicists have more confidence in their models than they actually do. He oftentimes cites the *existence* of peer-reviewed papers as reason to not consider alternative theories. And you will find on his webpage plenty of materials related to magnetic reconnections, which is, as mentioned, completely bunk. Oftentimes, when we evaluate whether or not to believe people on very complicated issues, we consider an issue that they talk about that we already understand. Similarly, when I see somebody even talking about magnetic reconnections, it's a clue to the education that they've had.
However given what you just said there sould be several galaxies aligned by axis and I haven't heard of that (not that I should or would:) ), also I think tha
Actually, it's a big problem to deduce that there was a Big Bang with the z-pinch effect because z-pinch basically recycles matter. Although the astrophysical community still denies his observations, Halton Arp has published results that indicate that some spiral galaxies are ejecting quasars from their centers. He's basically demonstrated images that show high redshift quasars in *front* of opaque, low redshift spiral galaxies and you can easily notice for some specific situations that these quasars tend to align themselves along axes that center at the spiral galaxy. These quasars then apparently trade their ejection velocity for mass as their redshift decreases (for the full story, get Halton Arp's book "Seeing Red"), and they appear to become spiral galaxies themselves. It's a little bit unusual, but the statistics demonstrating the link between quasars and spiral galaxies have since been confirmed by others (keep in mind that Halton Arp made this observation in the 60's and has been ignored since then). Not only does this cast doubt upon using redshift to deduce distance, but when matter is being recycled like that, it becomes impossible to just "rewind" the universe back to a singular point in time or space. The arguments against his observations tend to be unconvincing. I think we're supposed to believe that some sort of gravitational lensing is occurring, but this assumes that the spiral galaxy can be treated like a point source of light (an ideal mathematical entity projected onto reality) and it's not always the case that the quasars appear on symmetric sides of the galaxy. To be honest, any time that somebody tells you to believe their theory over your own eyes, you should be very wary, regardless of the explanation. There has never been an adequate disproof of Halton Arp's findings and yet astrophysicists will tell you with conviction that he must be wrong.
There are many other similar problems with the Big Bang. For a comprehensive review, you might want to check out "The Cult of the Big Bang" by William C Mitchell or "The Big Bang Never Happened" by Lerner. EU Theory is basically a *static* universe theory. It assumes that the universe is infinite in both time and space. There are other potential explanations for redshift that are not being funded as much as the doppler shift explanation (tired light is an example). There have also been numerous anomalies observed with redshifts. Our own Sun varies slightly in redshift over time enough to rule out doppler shift as an explanation and we've observed objects in the sky whose spectral lines are so unusual that redshift is meaningless. There is a tendency to push aside anomalies like this until a later time when somebody can propose an explanation, but in fact, there are enough problems with the traditional paradigms by now that it's long overdue for us to start considering alternative cosmologies. You don't get *any* of this information through the mainstream press because there is no investigative journalism within the space reporting industry. The reporters are incapable of evaluating the statements being made by astrophysicists, which actually oftentimes leads to some rather amusing space articles.
Many of the claimed successes of the BB Theory are in fact oversold as proofs. But because these proofs tend to be extremely mathematical in nature, it can be very difficult for most people to honestly evaluate them. But you can generally find an anti-proof for each of the proofs that are being sold for the BB. You just need to know where to look and be willing to believe that a bunch of people can possibly be wrong. More than anything else, that's probably the biggest hangup for people -- admitting that so many people can be so wrong. Our culture tends to assert more certainty within geology, archaeology and astronomy than is really possible because we oftentimes have no way to validate the results of those fields (conclusions are best guesses) and we cannot perform input-output experiments within those fields. Like astronomy
The real story of how we ended up with dark matter is not widely understood or accepted.
Some time ago, a man named Hannes Alfven, who is today considered the father of plasma physics, founded the field of magnetohydrodynamics, which astrophysicists have been using to model plasma in the universe for several decades now. This field treats plasma as a fluid and assumes that currents cannot flow through the plasma because it treats plasma as an ideal conductor with no resistance. This is actually not *anything* like the way that plasma operates in the real world, and since plasma represents 99%+ of all observable matter within the universe, this massively incorrect assumption yields absurd results in astrophysics today. Plasma is in fact electrically conductive and its electrical properties interact with its mechanical motions, and vice-versa. If you've ever seen a novelty plasma globe, then you intuitively know that plasma is not like a fluid. You can tell by looking closely at a plasma globe that the plasma creates filaments and these filaments pair up and twist around one another. These twisting currents are called Birkeland Currents. As the current flow increases through them, they pinch together with increasing force and this pinching action can actually condense matter into a ball. This is a big deal because there is no good reason to believe that molecules will gravitationally collapse from a diffuse collection of matter in space; in fact, gases obviously expand in a vacuum. Contrary to the more popular beliefs propagated in astrophysics and the media today, the z-pinch effect is likely actually how planets and stars form. Astrophysicists don't understand this because of their earlier assumptions regarding plasma being a fluid with no currents. But we can see strong evidence of Birkeland Currents and Z-Pinches happening through our telescopes.
The thing is, astrophysicists will see what they want to see through the telescope. All observations today are interpreted through mainstream concepts like stellar evolution and Big Bang theory. When an anomaly pops up, it can be a very simple matter to propose a "patch" for the theory to keep it going. Astrophysicists will invoke collisions, black holes, gravitational lensing or malformed electrical theory in order to explain away anomalies. But you will notice that anomalies are discovered nearly every week these days (especially with stellar evolution), and this is a problem because things like collisions should not actually be happening as often as they are being invoked to dismiss the anomalies.
When Hannes Alfven received his nobel prize for plasma physics in the 70's, he recused himself from the field that he created (MHD) and warned astrophysicists to abandon it, and that the path they were taking would eventually dead-end. But they completely ignored him and continue to do so. So, now we have mysterious forces tugging on matter throughout the universe that we can't see. This is what we call dark matter. Dark energy is supposed to be matter that can gravitationally repel. Electrical forces can accomplish both of these feats without any mysterious matter. All you have to do is drop the earlier incorrect assumptions about plasma and accept that extremely diffuse plasma flows can and do exist. You will notice over time that the dark matter studies will reveal some details that correspond with the properties of electricity over plasma. For this particular article, it was noticed that the structure of the dark matter was in places filamentary. Filamentary structures are far easier to generate with electricity than with gravity. It was also mentioned that dark matter can exist in the absence of physical matter. This is to be expected with plasma because plasma can consist of just electrons and ions, or it can also be coexisting with or collecting dust.
Some brave scientists and electrical engineers called Electric Universe Theorists are working on understanding the universe in terms of real plasma physics -- which makes p
It's spinning because gravity rules, man! That's what they taught us in astrophysics class, or PE or something... that even though plasma fills all of space and it consists of charged particles, it doesn't actually *do* anything. It *can't* be true that those charged particles in plasma might interact with one another en masse as plasma does in order to move charged particles through fields or voltage differentials in space, or that diffuse flows of energy might exist within the universe. There's no way. That would be lamerz! Definitely, before I'd consider something like that, I'd try to figure out some invisible matter that can pull the arms of spiral galaxies just enough to make them rotate with the rest of the plasma (dark matter) -- even though common sense would say that the large majority of the matter is at the center of the galaxy. And even though it really doesn't make much sense, I'd probably also bet that there are particles that gravitationally *repel* one another (dark energy). But, even though electricity over plasma can actually already do both attraction and repulsion, and even though space *is* plasma, it really *has* to be gravity that does that stuff and there *must* be particles there *somewhere*. I mean, that's what everybody *else* believes. This is ***SLASH-D0T***. And the scientists and those inventors can do *everything* these days. I mean, I heard that they saw stars that spin at the rate of a dentist's drill. And these dark hole things that suck everything in, but they can also have jets where all of that stuff that's sucked in can sometimes come back out and stuff. I wonder what it would be like to go there. Imagine if you had like these two black holes and there were these different dimensions and there was a string that connected them... !... Wouldn't that be cool? We should test it out first with our cat though before we try it ourselves...
I like astronomy. It's very creative. It makes you wonder, like, what's out there? What *is* the universe? Somebody once told me that it was made of plasma, but they also said that in order to make their homework easier, they were allowed to assume that the plasma had no resistance and could not carry currents, and that it was a fluid. It was weird because this isn't *anything* like what real plasma is. Those kids did a lot less homework. But they were kind of weird. They were all alike, and would tell people that they knew *everything*, and they wouldn't really listen when *you* tried to say something. I didn't want to hang out with them, but there were so *many* of them. I heard about these other playgrounds where these really cool people hung out where people didn't all try to be exactly alike and there were lots of smart people and stuff. I think it was a long time ago though.
You wanna hear something fucked up?! I *heard* that we can only see and interact with 4% of the matter of the universe. I know dude!!!!!! It's COM-PLETE-LY crazy! I mean, what *is* that other stuff, man? You know it's OUT THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ha! And you know, sometimes when I'm driving all by myself down the road, and I'm really fucked up on shrooms, I start to wonder... AM I IN IT? I know. I know... Crazy, huh?!
You know, the other day, I was hanging out in my apartment by myself and my furniture all started to move towards one another. No, I wasn't trippin! Good one. No, that's *exactly* what they said happens with gravitational collapse. Matter will just be, like, hanging out and suddenly -- like BAM! -- or maybe slowly or something, when everything else is not happening in a vacuum that can disturb the process and stuff for like millions of years -- things start forming clumps. I was thinking of actually designing a new whippets dispenser that works like this -- you just put a dispenser in open air next to a bubble of nitrous oxide and it will condense and then you inhale. Cool, huh? I invented it
That right there is an example of logic in spite of the mob. What are the currents? Can we detect and measure them? I wonder how many decades it will take to get to the point where we're sending out probes to answer this question. Will I still be alive to see this?
But even without doing that, for now, I'd be somewhat happy to see an explanation for solar system rilles that defy gravity. What is causing canyons on planets where those canyons follow the topography of the land both *up* and down? If you need examples, go to www.thunderbolts.info. Very curious...
I actually enjoy being abused. I think it's comical in a sick sense. It is a weird, yet exciting, feeling when you know that you understand more about what's happening and more about where things are moving in science than the mob that surrounds you.
I do believe in the peer review system. The real problem is that we never made a distinction between the sciences that you can perform input on and those that you cannot. For those sciences that you cannot do much better than uniformitarianism (which is complete speculation), scientists need to learn to learn to live with uncertainty. The thing is, people don't like uncertainty. The mass media wants to *know* what's going on. If your press release doesn't tell a fanciful story, it may not get published. Forget peer review. Why bother when you can just create some color-enhanced images and release them directly to the public? That appears to work just as well as publishing in a journal these days. The fact that all of you guys let it work too this past year means that you can expect to see more of it. I can't wait!
I just explained to you in my previous posting that the entirety of electricity and magnetism as far as astrophysics is concerned is based upon theories that have since been recused by the nobel physics laureate that "discovered" them. That is a very serious allegation that makes the peer review system irrelevant if it is true. Peer review is not a perfect system. It is good, but it is susceptible to problems. Astrophysicists have been interpreting all of their observations through the traditional paradigms for decades now. There is no grant yet, as far as I know, for the theory that proves that the last 50 years have been a huge waste. I'd love to get awarded that grant, but I have a feeling that I shouldn't waste my time.
Actually, they are all being written by myself. And I will continue to write them until people start paying attention because their points are valid and their theory is sound. Their message needs to get out so that the theory can be investigated (I don't want to have to wait until 2018 when the Solar Probe reveals that our solar theories are wrong). The current field of astrophysics is cherry-picking their science to the extent that it is useful to confirm their pre-existing *assumptions*, even when those assumptions appear to be inconsistent with our modern-day observations. They've succeeded in convincing the world that astrophysics is too complicated for most people, and that we should relinquish all of the critical thinking about space to them. This would almost be okay if it weren't that they believe this of other physicists too -- including plasma physicists who have earned nobel prizes and who taught them everything they currently know about electricity in space (Hannes Alfven).
If your point is that since it has to do with electric universe theory then it's not worth reading, then that would imply that reasoning no longer affects your judgment -- and you are in terms of physics, at least, like an old dog unable to learn anything new. In that case, I'm not speaking to you with my postings, and as science oftentimes does, it will wait until the old guard dies off in order to introduce the new ideas. On the other hand, if you are grateful that somebody is taking the time to point out the electric universe perspective so that it can be contrasted with the traditional paradigms whenever its relevant, then you're welcome. Forums like Slashdot are most useful when lots of people who have different ideas about the world get together and compare and contrast their beliefs. Pithy comments and jokes can be fun, but they should take a backseat to real discussions when those discussions are about serious things. And this notion that we should all agree on cosmology is outright dangerous because the chances that we have anything right at this point in time are negligible in light of the fact that new space anomalies pop up on a weekly basis. I will continue to ignore the voices of the mob with hope that people will once again decide that it is okay to think different and have your own opinions about complicated subjects. We didn't get to the point we're at today in science by trying to all think alike.
One of the reasons I'm doing this is so that in the decades to come as astrophysicists finally begin to accept *real* plasma physics into their domain more and more, and people here on Slashdot begin to realize that they were wrong to invoke the term pseudoscience without actually learning about the topic that they were ostracizing, we can all go back over my postings and the responses to them, and we can all *learn* from the experience with the hope that it will never happen again.
Once you guys all realize that all of this business about dark matter, dark energy, neutron stars, black holes, and stellar evolution is all nonsense, it's going to suddenly hit you that you've all been wasting a bunch of time and that you may not live to see the day where we actually understand the mechanics of the universe. The unfortunate thing is that I won't get to know *with* you even though I didn't fall for the bullshit like you guys did.
And another invocation of stellar merging to explain the anomaly.
People, look at what's happening. Read the space news as a critical thinker. There isn't a week that goes by where the concept of stellar evolution isn't violated by some observation. Stellar evolution is an *assumption* that cannot possibly be proven or disproven because we won't be around long enough to see a star go through all of the steps of the process. It is completely based upon the idea that stars are nothing more than thermonuclear reactions. But our observations of the Sun do not support this concept:
1. The solar wind continues to accelerate past all of the planets as if those charged particles are within a weak electric field centered at the Sun.
2. The generation of neutrinos coming from the Sun correlates with the number of sunspots on the Sun's surface. We know that the sunspot cycle is a *magnetic* process on the *surface* of the Sun and the fusion model for the Sun proposes that the neutrinos should be generated within the deep core of the Sun. Those two steps of the process are supposedly separated by hundreds of thousands of years according to the solar fusion model. How is it possible that they are linked?
3. The surface of the Sun is around 6,000 K and the Sun's corona is around 2 million K. How is it possible that the energy generated at the core of the fusion-model Sun makes it to the corona without heating up the Sun's surface? Astrophysicists have proposed a concept called magnetic reconnections, but magnetic reconnections is completely pseudoscience. The concept of a magnetic field reconnecting and generating energy in the process is akin to a gravitational field reconnecting and generating energy. Neither can happen because field lines *never* reconnect any more than lines of latitude or longitude reconnect. Magnetic field lines are a smooth continuum. Furthermore, the points at which it is alleged that reconnection is happening -- the saddle points at the front of the "bow shock" as astrophysicists like to say -- is where the field strength is *zero*. And wherever the field strength is zero, the energy stored there at that point is also *zero*. No energy release can occur from any location at which no energy is stored. The fact that astrophysicists have been getting away with making these absurd statements regarding magnetic reconnections for decades now demonstrates the extent to which their field has run afowl of science. Any electrical engineer that hears about the details of magnetic reconnections should not stand for it, and they deserve some of the blame for not speaking louder about this. Millions of dollars are being poured into this concept right now.
Let me tell you a little story about astrophysics. Hannes Alfven, who is considered the father of plasma physics, and who received a nobel prize for this work, created the entire field of magnetohydrodynamics, which serves as the modern day basis for electricity and magnetism within astrophysics. Alfven proposed early in his career that electric currents do *not* flow through plasmas and that plasmas can be assumed to have "frozen in place" magnetic fields within them. Magnetohydrodynamics treats plasmas as fluids and assumes that they have little resistivity, so they are basically perfect conductors. In his acceptance speech for the nobel prize, he made a point of explaining that these earlier assumptions were certainly wrong, and although they may make things easier for astrophysics students, they will yield incorrect results in the real world. Modern day plasma physics are demonstrating all sorts of very unusual phenomenon, some of which can't even be said to follow Maxwell's Equations. It is now clear that the assumptions that the astrophysicists borrowed many years ago and refuse to revise in light of new findings are *wrong*. Alfven was completely ignored and the picture hasn't changed at all since then. Astrophysics students will tell you outright that electricity exists in space, but that it doesn't r
I don't find this surprising at all. It's the natural result of two things: telling people that the universe has been completely figured out, and telling people what we found is that our immediate surroundings are more-or-less benign and unrelated to the happenings in deeper space.
Both of these assertions are unwarranted, and yet, you get those two messages loud and clear even here on these Slashdot forums from very educated people. It's amazing, but people are so confident in their models for how the universe works. This is in spite of the fact that we have yet to directly observe many of the key features of our theories like gravitationally collapsing nebulas, neutron stars, dark matter or dark energy; in spite of the fact that astronomy is not like the other sciences in that we cannot perform traditional input-output experiments; and in spite of the fact that other theories exist to explain all of our observations. It's my conviction that it is impossible to have absolute certainty about things like cosmology, and that anybody who proposes that things like the Big Bang are without a doubt true because the math works or for any other reason, are offering certainty in a field where uncertainty can never completely be eliminated.
The current paradigms also assert that all of the bodies in space are disconnected and unrelated to one another in any significant way because it is assumed that gravity is the most dominant force in the universe. This is in spite of the fact that the field of plasma physics has significantly matured recently, and astrophysics has been slow to integrate Hannes Alfvene's (as well as others') contributions. We now know that space is filled with charged particles that can conduct electricity over even diffuse plasmas over great distances. We can observe massive magnetic fields in space with our telescopes, and these magnetic fields would require large sustained electrical currents in order to exist. Much of the high-temperature radiation we observe in space these days possesses synchrotron components, which is a clear signal that electricity is a cause.
Because of this context, when we see daily news of massive ice sheets breaking off, we *assume* that it *must* be the result of human activity instead of the space that we live within. When we see high temperatures on Venus, we ignore the fact that *all* literate human cultures note that Venus once did not exist within recent human history. We *assume* that we are so much smarter than them and that they must *all* be wrong, even though they all say the exact same thing. And when our probe sensors return data that indicate that the hot temperatures of Venus are originating from the planet itself, we conclude that those sensors must be faulty because they do not conform to our simplified runaway greenhouse models. When we observe that the Sun's brightness and Neptune's brightness, for instance, are increasing in ways that don't make sense with the traditional models, we ignore them even though that's a clear suggestion that there is external input to those bodies. There appears to in fact be little that can convince us that the plasma that surrounds us in space actually *does* anything even though we can determine in laboratories that this is not true and in computer simulations that it alone can explain the rotational properties of spiral galaxies. We'd rather believe in things like dark matter rather than a suggestion that charge can flow over diffuse plasma in space.
The apathy amongst our kids is not a random result. It's the result of telling them to *listen* instead of telling them to *think* and *imagine*. We've basically convinced them that the universe that they'll have access to is boring and that the only interesting stuff happening that they'll ever come close to even touching is here on the surface of Earth -- and we've done this in order to satisfy our own desires to feel *certain* about our surroundings in space.
I think what you're missing is the fact that the EU Theorists' material is extremely compelling -- far more than you are aware of. I exposed you to just the materials that relate to comets. They have managed to run a common thread through just about every single modern-day observation that we have, and where NASA scientists oftentimes proclaim surprise or invoke exotic or shaky theories to support their observations, the electrical explanations far more often than not easily follow. So long as you don't expose yourself to the theory, you will continue to not realize this. This is your own choice. I don't need to see the actual equations in order to draw conclusions. There is plenty of material out there that summarizes and compares the material on a meta level. I'm more interested in reading material that compares the various explanations, and this is what the EU Theorists already do. They already integrate the history of our beliefs into their explanations. And by necessity, they always first introduce the traditional theories and then demonstrate why they are wrong. If their arguments were weak, it would be transparent even without the math. There are plenty of books that do this as well. The layperson can develop a very detailed picture of both sides of the argument and even evaluate which is correct without digging too deeply down to the math of both sides in this particular situation because the observations are oftentimes *pictures* that you can look at and interpret.
When I see a supernova remnant, for instance, that is bipolar symmetric, I can understand that that was not predicted by traditional theory. When I see photographs of craters and rilles that cannot possibly be explained with traditional paradigms, I can understand that with my *eyes*. When I see pictures of low-redshift quasars in front of spiral galaxies, I can realize that there are other components to redshifts. When I see data to suggest that Titan is extremely similar to Venus in many respects, it is difficult for me to believe that this is merely by chance. When I see Lichtenberg figures on Mars' south pole that are seasonally covered and revealed, I am not at all convinced that these are geysers. When NASA suggests that the lightning and intense storms on Saturn are due to shadows from its rings, I can deduce that this is nonsense without actually knowing much more than the approximate distance from Saturn to the Sun. Nearly every ancient culture of the world associates the planet Venus with attributes that we would today attribute to comets. I can decide for myself without any math that that is too much of a coincidence.
There are in fact many situations where common sense reigns. To assert that normal people cannot make good decisions about which theories to believe based upon observations of the debate between the two sides is simplistic. It makes for great philosophy of science discussions, but it completely ignores the huge number of problems that the traditional gravity-driven paradigms are having in explaining our observations. I refuse to accept the traditional paradigm because I've seen the fundamental points being proposed by both sides and the EU material is more compelling. This notion that only astrophysicists who can check all of the math can decide may have been true some time ago before we had lots of pictures of what was going on in the universe, but times have changed. The pictures are in and they're not supporting those early assumptions. Haven't you noticed that the Big Bang Theory and even things like stellar evolution are constantly changing to fit the observations? Just this week it was announced that stars that should be exploding are in fact not. This is just the latest in a very long list of "anomalies" that are accumulating. Each time we send a probe out, we expect to find more answers and all we get instead are more questions. If you cannot see this, then it is in fact *you* that are not being objective about it.
Certainly, some issues require additional attention.
This may sound backwards, but I've found it far more informative to read the history of the debate and to go over the debate itself rather than trying to just sift through astrophysical papers. The technical arguments for me are just one part of the entire decision-making process and I'm really not very interested in learning any of the math at the moment. I want to see how we got to the point of having a dominant paradigm in the first place and I want to get a better feel for what sort of certainties we can feel about various theories because it's very hard to get a straight answer on that from the mainstream physicists.
I do also plan on eventually performing an exhaustive analysis of the relevant threads on the "Bad Astronomy and Universe Today" forums. I am interested in being fair later on, but right now, I'm especially anxious to finally learn the remainder of the EU story.
It's worth noting that few people actually learn both sides of the argument. Carl Sagan's rebuttal to "Worlds in Collision" reached millions of people and was reprinted numerous times, apparently in spite of numerous technical problems with his arguments that some people believe he should have been aware of. This lack of objectivity spans back to the beginning of the catastrophism debate itself.
My personal belief is that when good arguments are falling on deaf ears, the need to fix that more immediate problem can outweigh the need to create a balanced picture involving both sides of the debate. On the other hand, I've also noticed that if somebody was able to understand *both* sides of the debate in depth, then that person would be uniquely capable of winning more people over.
I'm about to enter a new phase of investigation. I just purchased a significant library of EU Theory that I'm going to move through over the next couple of months. So, I'm going to fade back out for a while and then reappear with a more detailed picture of the situation. I have a lot of reading to do.
There is precedent for EM activity in thermally driven systems, eg, thunder storms.
You know about upper-atmosphere lightning right? Scientists have observed lightning to something like 40 miles above the surface of the Earth, which is basically the border into space. This sort of a finding should cause people to question the notion that the Earth is electrically isolated and that thunderstorms are merely self-contained electrical systems. It is just as possible that they are merely a leg of the process of charge transfer between the planet and its surrounding space plasma. The Earth's storm clouds could merely be the failure points in a leaky capacitor.
If the comet were neutrally charged, then being immersed in a neutral solar wind isn't going to affect it's overall charge. But if it does acquire a collective charge, then part of the solar wind (the opposite charged component) will be attracted and the other part repelled. This creates a net charge leakage. And that will in turn stabalize the overall charge in time. In a similar fashion, if there was a net charge on the Heliopause boundary between the solar wind and the interstellar medium, then there would be leakage of charge to the interstellar medium.
That sounds right. I think what's being argued is that the overall charge accumulation for most comets is far greater than the leakage current. This would explain why some of the asteroids in that prior link have been noticed to suddenly develop cometary tails and then lose them just as quickly. In those cases, the leakage currents are significant compared to the overall charge accumulation.
First, what bright flash prior to physical impact? That's a misinterpretation of the experiment results. They just stated that there were two flashes (and interpreted both to happen after the impact). I doubt the timing can be that certain. Plus, the flashes were consistent with the type of collision. Second, what would induces pre-collision flashing yet have no impact on the probe traveling through this weird electromagnetic environment?
If there is an explanation for the double flash, then it was generated post-observation. This is probably as objective as we're going to get on the double flash and impact timing (from wiki, "Electric Universe"):
"As the impactor entered the nucleus, or shortly thereafter, a brilliant flash, lasting less than two tenths of a second, appeared probably as the impactor and part of Tempel 1 vaporized. The first flash was followed by a second presumably originating deeper within the comet. The second flash was brighter still and it momentarily saturated some pixels in the instruments on the flyby spacecraft"[43]. Deep Impact co-investigator Pete Schultz said "First you see a small flash, and then there's a delay. Then there's a big flash, and then the whole thing breaks loose," Schultz notes. This explosion pattern does not precisely match any of the simulations that attempted to model how the comet would react when hit with the spacecraft. Schultz says they will use the data collected today to figure out how the structure of the comet led to the impact pattern they witnessed.[44]" Proponents of EU assert that the double-flash was due to electrical discharge to the spacecraft, but other more conventional explanations (such as vaporization of the impactor followed by spallation of a hot dust cloud) are at least as plausible.
The EU guys also noted that the first-person perspective of the video exhibited white spots that would support the notion that discharges were happening between the projectile and the comet's surface prior to impact. These whitespots corresponded precisely with where electrical arcing would place them --- on the rims of craters and on the wall of cliffs rising above flat valley floors.
How are the observations inconsistent with the claim that comets have a crust of high melting point material thermally insulating volatiles under the surface?
From the Electric Comet document:
One of the observations leading to the dirty snowball theory of comets was that most of the periodic comets begin to grow tails at about the same distance from the Sun, between Jupiter and Mars. The determining factor was thought to be the distance at which the comet became hot enough for water and other volatile substances to evaporate into space, creating the coma, or "head," and tail of the comet.
But this general pattern did not hold up. In fact, four years after the comet Hale-Bopp left the inner solar system, it was still active. It displayed a coma, a fan-shaped dust tail, and an ion tail--even though it was farther fr
Regardless though, the writing that I witnessed in those links seemed to have many of the hallmarks of Crank Science in them. A touch of persecution, nobody believes, experts ignore the facts, etc. All of this makes me wonder how objectively the proponents of EU are examining their own data.
Well, you have to admit that there are a lot of surface features of planets within the immediate solar system that do not easily lend themselves to explanation using the traditional mechanisms. Many times, the same feature on two different planets will get two different explanations. It makes sense that if you're seeing things like rilles and lichtenberg figures all over the planets, then you might want to consider that electricity is playing a common role on all of those planets. This has never even really been on the radar since the Velikovsky affair, and NASA will oftentimes resort to absurd speculation just to avoid admitting that electrical things are happening. The Martian "spiders" are probably the classic example. A study was done of them and its conclusions were that they are one of the most engimatic features of the entire solar system. But in truth, if you saw the same thing in your front yard, you'd look at it and in 2 seconds infer that a lightning bolt must have hit your yard. When NASA noticed St Elmo's Fire -- an eerie electrical glow -- on the tips of tall mountains on Venus, they were quick to announce that Venetian mountains were capped in Fool's Gold (Iron Pyrite). Many of the planets have unusual features at their poles. Venus actually has a pair of vortexes connected by a line and Saturn has an ominous hurricane-like eye at one of its poles, for instance. The EU Theorists have a lot say about these sorts of things, but conventional theory is quite silent on them because they don't naturally follow. The fact that there is a common thread that runs through all of the least understood phenomenon within the universe hints to us that we should take a more serious look at this possible explanation.
Electric Universe Theory is, to be blunt, strange. You do gain a deeper appreciation for it though the more you read about it. It's inescapable that most theories that challenge the traditional paradigms will come off as "crank science". But in truth, once you understand the EU perspective, it's actually somewhat reversed. EU Theory is generally supported by the most contemporary observations, whereas the gravity-driven universe tends to be based upon assumptions that were developed before we even had the ability to image the phenomenon in question. It shouldn't surprise us that our initial guesses at how the universe works may be wrong. For instance, the concept of a gravitationally collapsing cloud of dust and gas is a very simplistic idea that does not naturally follow from our observations of variations of planets and their atmospheres. We can see extreme similarities between "planets" like Titan and Venus. Traditional paradigms don't allow us to consider that these planets may actually be related. However, if planets are formed with the plasma z-pinch effect as is being proposed for EU Theory, then these sorts of similarities would be the natural end result of a common source and common possible timeframe for their creation.
I increasingly see EU Theory as the logical alternative to traditional theory. It makes for a great mechanism for learning about how the universe works, and by questioning the mainstream mantras, you actually get a deeper understanding than you'd likely get if you merely memorized things like stellar evolution and Big Bang Theory. In other words, I think the two theories complement one another from the perspective of the student. Teaching it to kids in school would be a great mechanism for getting kids to think more about the problems. It's clear to me that once more people know about EU Theory that more people will start to *think* about the Big Bang. This, to me, is the current problem. People are accepting a lot of what they're being told wit
I've looked over the EM/plasma theories before. The cosmological scale theories might have a grain of truth, but the Solar System scale theories (eg, that comets are highly charged objects) contradict both what we see and our models of electromagnitism. Comets formed from existing material. It's quite possible that pre-solar system collisions and supernova created the features seen in the above comet material. But it's not plausible to explain this with an exotic theory that has stable highly charged objects (immersed in the solar wind which would drain away the charge) and huge, unobserved voltage potentials
In my many adventures through the forums of Slashdot talking to people about Electric Universe Theory, I've run into a few people who half-educated themselves on the theory itself. It's not really any fault of your own. There is an overwhelming amount of material to go through. It took me three months of my free time to actually become even quasi-proficient in what the theory says. It appears that the problem with EU Theory isn't the theory itself -- but rather satisfying peoples' expectations that they be taught the mechanics of the universe in three hours or less while simultaneously fending off the amazingly hostile attacks from advocates of the mainstream. It appears that the desire by advocates of the gravity-dominant universe to keep out all serious competitors is stronger than any objective desire on their part to learn the truth of the universe. It is imperative that people with an interest in EU Theory not cave in to this posturing which does nothing more than limit the choices of cosmologies available to the public. There is in fact still no serious problem with Electric Universe Theory.
I agree that the faraway observations are strongest, but there is no problem with the electromagnetism of EU-style cometary theory when you understand how plasma behaves. Many people make the mistake of assuming that EU Theory is advocating an electrostatic model for cometary and planetary interactions. In fact, the solar wind would not necessarily "drain away" charge from any other plasma or body in space any more than the plasma of space would drain away the solar wind's charge. That's because plasmas naturally form what are called double-layers. From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0510 31plasma.htm:
Plasmas form double layers between regions of different densities, temperatures or magnetic field strengths. A double layer:
(a) consists of two layers of opposite charge
(b) tends to form cellular structures with the double layer as the "cell wall." (eg. magnetosphere, photosphere, heliosphere)
(c) can form in filamentary current channels known as "Birkeland currents" (see below);
(d) can explode, as discovered in mercury rectifiers used in high-power direct-current transmission lines;
(e) can accelerate charged particles, in opposite directions up to velocities approaching the speed of light.
This is not actually exotic theory. These are fundamentals of electrodynamics and plasma physics.
(the Earth and Moon vary enough in their orbits that we should experience some of this phenomena, but we don't).
Well, if you mean that we should see the Earth's coma and tail like in a comet, that would require that the plasma surrounding the Earth be in the glow discharge mode. In reality, plasmas can and do exist in non-glow states much like a transistor has multiple operating regions. The Earth's magnetosphere exists in this state except when the aurora occurs.
This story is very typical of space stories these days. You get some speculation from some scientists about what they expect that they should be seeing, tenuously based upon some weak observational data. A public release is put together and the news story gains steam because it invokes some concept that tickles the imagination of the public (gigantic black holes and stars, for instance). Then, when better observations come in and suggest that maybe we shouldn't be so sure of our prior speculation, there is little effort to correct the record.
It was interesting to observe that this (probable) garbage made it onto Slashdot, whereas the Stardust mission results (with actual data) did not. It seems that the space news cycle is caught in a competition to make the most outlandish claim possible in order to get the attention of the public these days. Investigating anomalies within the current paradigms has taken a backseat to wild speculation. There's little interest anymore in questioning the early assumptions that got us to this point in the first place:
Our conviction in stellar birth by way of gravitational collapse survives observations of R Corona Australis, which is generating enigmatic x-rays and 100 million degree F temperatures at a very early stage of the supposed collapse (http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050 304starbirth.htm).
Our conviction in our theories about supernovae survived observations of Supernova 1987A (see pictures at http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0601 24solar3.htm), which defied traditional theories about supernovae in nearly every single respect. Even though plasma physics tells us that we can understand the structure we see in those images down to the number of beads in the smaller ring, we continue to ignore those explanations because they involve electricity in space.
Our conviction in the theory of black holes was not dampened at all by the associated problems with generating the observed quasar jet 3C273 (http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=9kpgc 4td), which extends 100,000 light years -- even though the lifetime of the X-ray producing particles is only about 100 years.
And then there's the Stardust mission -- which when combined with the results of the Deep Impact mission indicate quite clearly that our early assumptions about comets were quite wrong. Scientists are now apparently trying to invent scenarios for how it could be that comets would contain exotic meteorite particles as well as particles that have clearly been formed under intense heat. Perhaps they should consider that these initial speculations were wrong in the first place. I doubt we'll see any such sanity though. More likely, we'll see additional new speculations to support the earlier unsupported speculations.
There increasingly seems to be far less glory these days in doing the homework that we'll be graded on and far more interest in fantasizing about multi-dimensional space and gigantic black holes.
Slashdot Mirror
And from the image caption ...
You can clearly see in the images that the filaments of *plasma* have changed shape over time as you would expect plasma to do as electricity flows over it. Remember, its kinetic motions are affected by the current and the current affects its kinetic motions -- just like a plasma globe.
Where mainstream astronomers see light traveling 50 light-years and illuminating a cloud of "gas" in space, plasma cosmologist and Electric Universe Theorists see plasma doing the same stuff we've seen it do within laboratories:
From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0604 05plasmoid.htm:
You can see a very detailed picture of the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0504 15milkyway.htm. Far from being some invisible black hole like object, we can see it and it's the same plasma torus that we can generate within laboratories.
The problem for astrophysicists today is that they need to come up with a mechanism that can explain how the gas itself is illuminating in x-rays because x-rays indicate an unusually high amount of energy is being released. And their idealized non-resistive gas laws that they use to understand how gas behaves in space do not allow for x-rays to be produced by the gas except in some very specific situations (like violent collisions). For the center of the Milky Way, the Chandra X-Ray Telescope has imaged temperatures for this gas of both 10-million degrees C and 100-million degrees C. This is anomalous to current theories. From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/040715 space.htm:
Quasars are only really far away so long as you ignore the research of Halton Arp, like the rest of astronomy does these days. Arp has imaged quasars that are either connected to or in front of spiral galaxies with much lower redshifts. Their redshifts appear to have non-cosmological components that change in discrete quantized amounts as the quasars move away from their parent galaxies. It was previously argued that his statistics were flawed, but a study has come out recently that supports the correlation between quasars and spiral galaxies. Then, astronomers released a study declaring that the redshifts were not in fact quantized. But in fact, Arp was arguing that there is an inherent component of redshift that is quantized -- not the raw measured value. The desire to discredit Arp has always superseded the desire to maintain objectivity in doing so ...
2 11thirtyyears.htm
6 10arptest.htm
1 06universe-arp.htm
8 fingers-god.htm
NGC7603:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050
NGC7319:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050
Quasar as Proto-Galaxies:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050
The Fingers of God:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/04101
And of course, Seeing Red by Halton Arp.
Good ol' electric universe. Proving, once again, that you can fool all of /. all of the time.
If "fooling" people means believing that plasma lab results scale up to universe scales; that plasma consists of mobile ions and electrons that can conduct electricity; and that plasma does not act anything like a *fluid* with ideal conductivity; then I'm proud to be fooled. In fact, that guy Hannes Alfven that recused himself from magnetohydrodynamics was so fooled about electricity flowing in space that he was the first to predict the large-scale filamentary structure of the universe in 1963. He was such a fool that he developed the basic tools that we use today to describe the Van Allen radiation belt twenty years before it was discovered. He was such a complete idiot that he proposed an explanation for the acceleration of cosmic rays that is now known as the Fermi Mechanism -- except that he did it before Fermi. Alfven was so stupid that he played a pivotal role in the development of plasma physics, the physics of charged particle beams and interplanetary and magnetospheric physics. What a complete imbecile! We definitely shouldn't pay any attention to what that guy had to say.
The real problem is that you mainstream'ers are not even aware of all of the assumptions that have been made within traditional astrophysics in order to maintain your gravity-centric conceptions.
There is a pseudoscience. It's called magnetohydrodynamics and it's what we teach astrophysicists in classrooms today.
I never left. What you apparently see as so many words, others read and understand as logic. Like some others, you are quite stubborn about your ignorance. I'm not speaking to people like you any more than I would speak to my couch. The only reason you believe that I don't have much evidence is because you haven't critically read the material yourself. You have blinders on, and only you can take them off.
People are responding that my input is valuable and it is people like you that are having to remind everybody else that we're supposed to believe that this is pseudoscience. I don't think you're going to have much success by ranting about UFO's and conspiracies. You're going to have to come up with some actual material to work with if you care.
I recommend that you block my postings so that you can continue to believe in your nonphysical idealized plasma world. I'm not here to force my ideas upon you. I'm educating those who are ready for it. The rest of you won't take notice until the herd around you has because your most important basis for believing an idea is how many people around you already believe it or if NASA is saying it. It's a very simplistic conception of pseudoscience that I'm fine with you believing.
So, your belief is that arguments should be rated on the basis of popularity rather than logic? Should we vote on science just like we do for our presidents?
Electric Universe Theory is nothing more than the application of plasma physics to cosmology. It is based upon laboratory experiments and is driven by contemporary observational data. It also corresponds with numerous writings by ancient literate astronomical cultures on Earth. It is the astrophysicists that are trying to convince people that the plasma lab results and plasma computer simulations do not apply to large-scale space structures, and that their idealized fluid models with frozen-in-place magnetic fields and perfect conductivity accurately model plasma.
Where plasma cosmologists postulate nothing more than electricity flowing over plasma, bread-and-butter astrophysicists are the ones postulating invisible matter and impossible forces. Plasma, by definition, involves mobile ions and electrons. Why should it not conduct electricity? If you saw a horse with a horn, would you suspect a genetic deformity or a unicorn?
Why can't diffuse plasmas exist? Just because something seems diffuse to us humans, does that mean that it would be too diffuse for large-scale structures within the universe to use it for energy transfer? Why would the universe care how things appear to us?
Plasma represents the state of nearly *all* observable matter within the universe. Why should we not seriously consider cosmologies based upon it? Wouldn't it be irresponsible to *not* do so?
If the man who invented the math that astrophysicists currently use to model plasma recused himself from his own invention during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, shouldn't astrophysicists listen? Or are astrophysicists allowed to make up science as they see fit?
Perhaps people are paying attention because it makes *sense*.
It's actually made of plasma in the glow discharge state. That's the same state of plasma that you see within a neon sign. Plasma can also exist in the arc state, which is like an arc welder (very bright) and in a dark state, which you cannot see (like the electricity that flows through your lamp cord; notice the cord does not brighten). It's resistivity changes throughout these modes depending upon the current density. Plasma is the fourth more common state of matter next to gas, solid and liquid. Thing is, 99%+ of the universe's matter is in the plasma state, which makes it a pretty big deal to understand it. You'd think, in fact, that our theories about how the universe operated would be based upon how plasma acts to a great extent, but astrophysicists have oddly convinced themselves that accurately modeling the properties of plasma is not all that important to understanding the universe.
... hey, it's fluid! Unfortunately, for the past several decades, astrophysicists have been refusing to admit that plasma can transfer electricity and it's led to all sorts of weird results within astronomy like black holes, neutron stars, dark matter, dark energy, the Big Bang Theory, etc.
Since astrophysicists like to incorrectly model plasma as a *fluid* (magnetohydrodynamics), they tend to just vaguely call it "gas and dust" even though it is by definition filled with charged particles like ions and electrons. As you may know, ions and electrons can carry electricity, which makes plasma a very special type of matter. The electricity that flows through plasma can affect its shape, and vice-versa. So, its electrical and mechanical energies are interdependent, and this makes it very complicated. If you've ever seen a novelty plasma globe at Spencer's in the mall, the first thing that probably came to your mind was not
This whole article is actually complete bullshit because contrary to what it states, supernovae are likely electrical phenomenon as well. We've imaged many remnants of supernovae (like 1987A) that are bipolar symmetric like an hourglass. This isn't anything like what astrophysicists told us that they should be -- a spherical shell of expanding gas. In fact, it corresponds better to something called Birkeland Currents, which is a plasma physics term that astrophysicists aren't very familiar with. The supernova can become extremely energetic because it is the confluence point for energy arriving from foreign energy sources in the same way that energy created at your power plant ends up being used at your house.
Of course, this isn't the *standard* view and I'm sure that there are people who would consider me to be heretical, or at least misleading you. But so long as the filaments within a novelty plasma globe do not appear to you to act like the water in a similarly shaped fishbowl, then you should not buy much into the rest of astronomy either because this single assumption is so devastating to all of the calculations that are done for the universe that the end result is pretty much garbage. We know enough about space to get probes out to the planets, but that's pretty much it these days. Very few of the pretty pictures we see through our amazing telescopes were actually expected by the theories that we've been pursuing for the past few decades. The scientists spend a bunch of time, in fact, trying to figure out ways to create those pictures *without* electricity because it's considered more appropriate for some strange reason to invent mysterious matters than to assume that electricity can flow over plasma in space (which we can do in the laboratory). You'd never know any of this from the public relations releases though for space articles because people tend to believe whatever it is they are told when it comes to space stuff and there are no "investigative journalists" asking the tough questions in the space industry.
We live in a very strange world. Our reality is basically what we tell ourselves that it is and will continue to be so until a day whe
There are not actually "anomalies" with cosmological redshift.
I suppose that you're going to tell me to not believe any of the work that Halton Arp has done? That the images of high redshift quasars in front of opaque, low redshift spiral galaxies are just due to some sort of accidental imaging? I'm interested in hearing why I should disbelieve my eyes and believe your theory instead? I can clearly see quasars in front of NGC 7319 at the bottom of this page:
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/arp.htm
What is your explanation for these observations?
There are some objects that we can't get a good spectrum off of, as the previous poster said, and the Sun is irrelevant to cosmological redshift. Tired light is a non-viable idea.
I'm curious about this link you sent to me (http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/tiredlit.htm) because it appears to draw conclusions on the basis of assumptions about supernovas:
How is that people *know* that redshift is expanding the time it takes for supernova light curves to decay? This appears to *assume* that supernovae are a standard that we can measure things by. That would be interesting because we've seen supernova remnants like 1987A that we didn't understand at all. Many supernovae -- including 1987A and Keppler's Supernova remnant -- exhibit a bipolar configuration that does not follow from the earlier assumptions about supernovae being expanding spherical shells of gas blowing away from a central point. Why would these explosions frequently only come out the sides like an hourglass?
Traditional astrophysics has dug a very deep hole in terms of assumptions in order to maintain a sense of "progress". But in fact, those earlier assumptions were never really validated. If anything, we've been seeing observations that discount those earlier assumptions, and rather than making predictions about future observations, astrophysicists these days spend nearly all of their time trying to postulate ways to fit the observations to those earlier assumptions.
Peer review is meaningless if everybody in your field is operating on incorrect assumptions. And that's exactly what's happening right now within astrophysics. Some time ago, a man named Hannes Alfven, who is today considered the father of plasma physics, founded the field of magnetohydrodynamics. This field treats plasma as a fluid and assumes that currents cannot flow through the plasma because it treats plasma as an ideal conductor with no resistance. This is actually not *anything* like the way that plasma operates in the real world, and since plasma represents 99%+ of all observable matter within the universe, this massively incorrect assumption yields absurd results in astrophysics today. Plasma is in fact electrically conductive and its electrical properties interact with its mechanical motions, and vice-versa. If you've ever seen a novelty plasma globe, then you intuitively know that plasma is not like a fluid. You can tell by looking closely at a plasma globe that the plasma creates filaments and these filaments pair up and twist around one another. These twisting currents are called Birkeland Currents. As the current flow increases through them, they pinch together with increasing force and this pinching action can actually condense matter into a ball. When Hannes Alfven received his nobel prize for plasma physics in the 70's, he recused himself from the field that he created (magnetohydrodynamics) and warned astrophysicists to abandon it, and that the path they were taking would eventually dead-end. But they completely ignored him and continue to do so.
This is how we end up with terms like "solar wind" -- which is more properly identified as plasma coming from the Sun operating under the influence of the Sun's weak electric field that fills all of the heliosphere, which extends out beyond Pluto. If you can only think in terms of fluids and gravity, then movement of particles in space would look to you like a "wind". But where have we ever seen winds that steadily increase in velocity for millions of miles as the solar wind does? It's *still* accelerating as it moves past the Earth. What can possibly cause that? There is nothing about fluids or gravity that can cause that. In order to explain that, you *must* resort to electrical concepts. It's a stark reminder that our earlier astrophysical assumptions have led us astray.
It's that simple. Electric Universe, the supposed pseudoscience, uses non-idealized plasma physics to understand the universe (plasma cosmology). Traditional astrophysics, the collection of "real" sciences, ignores the possibility that electricity might be flowing over plasma in space because of their earlier assumptions about plasma being a *fluid* with ideal conductivity, and this inherited notion that gravity is the strongest force within the universe. One would expect that astrophysicists would fully understand plasma physics and electrodynamics, but they're taught in school that these things are much less important than gravity, and it appears that they are given nothing more than this "crash course" of magnetohydrodynamics as a substitute. This is in spite of the fact that we now know that electrically conductive plasma fills nearly all of space.
There actually is plenty of evidence for EU Theory. The real problem is that once you are branded as pseudoscience, then nobody will take you seriously. In fact, for every silly notion like black holes, neutron stars, dark matter, dark energy, etc, etc, etc, there is a corresponding simple electrical explanation. Let's look at pulsars and neutron stars, for instance. They have been observed now to "spin" at something like 300 revolutions per second, and people just accept this concept that a star can spin at 300 revolutions per second as if it doesn't bother them at all. But it's ludicrous to start with, and if you actually look at images of the Vela Pulsar, you'll notice that you are seeing filaments coming out of it that look a hell of a lot like sparks (
LOL! Well put.
The real heart of the problem is that we're believing *everything* that we're being told by a group of people without critically thinking about it. People have *total* faith in organizations and people like NASA, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, etc. We are a brand name loyalty culture. In other words, we've been trained by the PR industry since the 20's to believe in the brand rather than questioning the message. Back in the 20's, people only bought the stuff they needed. Buying something that you didn't need didn't seem necessary. So, the PR industry was born here in the United States to convince the public to buy things that they didn't need. This created brand names and this brand name loyalty has seeped into every aspect of our culture. When you think of IBM, you think of guys in suits and mainframe computers. When you think of Nike, you think of shoes, that swoosh symbol and maybe even sweatshops. When you think of black holes, you probably think of Stephen Hawking, his books and maybe some shows you've seen about them on Nova or Discovery Channel. When you think of the Sun, most people imagine a nuclear reaction. And most importantly, when you hear the term "astrophysics", you imagine things that you cannot possibly understand -- and most people don't even try. Your brain switches from critically thinking to listening and memorizing. We've been brainwashed in a sense to not think about what we're being told about space because we've been told that it's just far too complicated to understand. And sure enough, if you try to talk to astrophysicists or intelligent amateur astronomers about it, they will oftentimes try to scare you out of your preposterous notions of electricity in space -- as if you are some sort of threat to them -- by invoking all sorts of exotic physics. You'll oftentimes notice that they don't care if you actually *understand* what they're saying; they would prefer that you don't because then you'll get out of their way so that they can go back to their work. This process has led to conformity within astrophysics, but the problem is that conformity is the enemy of science. The last thing we want to be doing is voting on science. Science is best when scientists are left to believe what they want and pursue those beliefs as they see fit. Some form of peer review is necessary to weed out the pseudoscience, but pseudoscience can accidentally creep into the peer review process itself when the scientists stop *listening* to the other intelligent people around them. And this is where things stand now.
They laughed at Velikovsky even though he made accurate predictions about Jupiter and Venus that were completely unexpected. Carl Sagan frequently claimed in his arguments against Velikovsky that ancient astronomical-literate cultures who recorded the arrival of Venus were not smart enough to accurately understand the movements of planets. They ignored Alfven even though he earned a Nobel Prize and most astrophysicists are to this day so unaware of his recusal from magnetohydrodynamics that they sometimes refer to magnetic reconnections as "Alfvenic reconnection". And they similarly scoffed at Wallace Thornhill's accurate predictions for the Deep Impact mission to comet Tempel 1 even though they have yet to offer any real alternative explanation that can include all of the observations made. When an amateur astronomer coincidentally took a picture of the Space Shuttle Columbia's plasma tail lit up by upper atmosphere lightning at the exact moment that the Shuttle malfunctioned, NASA refused to believe it, arguing that upper atmospheric lightning should not exist and they never heard the lightning on their instruments anyways. Time after time, they've decided that they knew better than the people around them when in fact they might have been wise to listen. Their field is, after all, interdisciplinary.
And so, here we are: pouring millions of dollars into fairy tale imaginary objects that capture the imagination of the public and ma
My personal thoughts are that people who have been trained in Big Bang Theory are "contaminated" insofar as they are oftentimes unable to conceive of electricity in space. But our observations are increasingly telling us otherwise. For instance, there was a big supernova some time ago called 1987A. When we finally had instruments that could image the remnants of that supernova, this is what we found:
... How do those beads have *anything* to do with nuclear fusion? They appear to float out in the middle of nowhere! I highly recommend reading through the story of that link. It's a good example of the problems popping up for conventional astrophysics today. The plasma universe theories continue to be observationally driven, whereas the traditional paradigms are more or less being dragged along by the observations.
:) ), also I think tha
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0601 24solar3.htm
Our conventional theory regarding supernovae do not describe that *thing* at all. The problem is that the structure is bipolar symmetric when in fact traditional theory was expecting a shock wave emitted symmetrically in all directions. And those beads
Although it is important to understand the basics of astrophysical theories, it is far easier to understand Electric Universe theory. Astrophysics owes a lot of its complexity to the fact that it treats phenomenon as if they are disjointed, isolated bodies. Gravity is too weak to account for many of these observations, so instead of energy transfer, astrophysicists must work with energy accumulated. This isolation forces them to postulate a separate exotic mechanism for just about every phenomenon they observe in space. But space is connected by plasma and that plasma in fact conducts electricity. And many of those exotic phenomenon, like magnetic reconnections for the Sun, can be replicated with just characteristics of plasma in space. So, if you learn about plasma and electricity+magnetism, you basically understand the universe. It's a really simple concept that's just taking a *really* long time to permeate through science and culture right now. In fact, we're approaching 60 years now since Immanuel Velikovsky first proposed it. Hannes Alfven, Ralph Juergens and a handful of other plasma/electricity geniuses have come and gone with little fanfare. When Albert Einstein died, Immanuel Velikovsky's book "Worlds in Collision" was ominously left open on his desk. It's emblematic in a way because we still haven't closed that book.
The www.thunderbolts.info site has a "resources" link that will point you to a collection of books that generally support EU Theory. If you were going to start out with any particular book, I recommend "The Electric Sky". I've found the web useful for checking out the arguments on the astrophysics side. Tim Thompson, for instance, has a webpage that offers the arguments *against* the concept of an Electric Sun. I've read both arguments by now and I'm personally more convinced by Wallace Thornhill's Electric Sun model than Tim Thompson's solar fusion arguments. Tim Thompson is a very intelligent man, but it is clear to me that he's proposing that astrophysicists have more confidence in their models than they actually do. He oftentimes cites the *existence* of peer-reviewed papers as reason to not consider alternative theories. And you will find on his webpage plenty of materials related to magnetic reconnections, which is, as mentioned, completely bunk. Oftentimes, when we evaluate whether or not to believe people on very complicated issues, we consider an issue that they talk about that we already understand. Similarly, when I see somebody even talking about magnetic reconnections, it's a clue to the education that they've had.
However given what you just said there sould be several galaxies aligned by axis and I haven't heard of that (not that I should or would
Actually, it's a big problem to deduce that there was a Big Bang with the z-pinch effect because z-pinch basically recycles matter. Although the astrophysical community still denies his observations, Halton Arp has published results that indicate that some spiral galaxies are ejecting quasars from their centers. He's basically demonstrated images that show high redshift quasars in *front* of opaque, low redshift spiral galaxies and you can easily notice for some specific situations that these quasars tend to align themselves along axes that center at the spiral galaxy. These quasars then apparently trade their ejection velocity for mass as their redshift decreases (for the full story, get Halton Arp's book "Seeing Red"), and they appear to become spiral galaxies themselves. It's a little bit unusual, but the statistics demonstrating the link between quasars and spiral galaxies have since been confirmed by others (keep in mind that Halton Arp made this observation in the 60's and has been ignored since then). Not only does this cast doubt upon using redshift to deduce distance, but when matter is being recycled like that, it becomes impossible to just "rewind" the universe back to a singular point in time or space. The arguments against his observations tend to be unconvincing. I think we're supposed to believe that some sort of gravitational lensing is occurring, but this assumes that the spiral galaxy can be treated like a point source of light (an ideal mathematical entity projected onto reality) and it's not always the case that the quasars appear on symmetric sides of the galaxy. To be honest, any time that somebody tells you to believe their theory over your own eyes, you should be very wary, regardless of the explanation. There has never been an adequate disproof of Halton Arp's findings and yet astrophysicists will tell you with conviction that he must be wrong.
There are many other similar problems with the Big Bang. For a comprehensive review, you might want to check out "The Cult of the Big Bang" by William C Mitchell or "The Big Bang Never Happened" by Lerner. EU Theory is basically a *static* universe theory. It assumes that the universe is infinite in both time and space. There are other potential explanations for redshift that are not being funded as much as the doppler shift explanation (tired light is an example). There have also been numerous anomalies observed with redshifts. Our own Sun varies slightly in redshift over time enough to rule out doppler shift as an explanation and we've observed objects in the sky whose spectral lines are so unusual that redshift is meaningless. There is a tendency to push aside anomalies like this until a later time when somebody can propose an explanation, but in fact, there are enough problems with the traditional paradigms by now that it's long overdue for us to start considering alternative cosmologies. You don't get *any* of this information through the mainstream press because there is no investigative journalism within the space reporting industry. The reporters are incapable of evaluating the statements being made by astrophysicists, which actually oftentimes leads to some rather amusing space articles.
Many of the claimed successes of the BB Theory are in fact oversold as proofs. But because these proofs tend to be extremely mathematical in nature, it can be very difficult for most people to honestly evaluate them. But you can generally find an anti-proof for each of the proofs that are being sold for the BB. You just need to know where to look and be willing to believe that a bunch of people can possibly be wrong. More than anything else, that's probably the biggest hangup for people -- admitting that so many people can be so wrong. Our culture tends to assert more certainty within geology, archaeology and astronomy than is really possible because we oftentimes have no way to validate the results of those fields (conclusions are best guesses) and we cannot perform input-output experiments within those fields. Like astronomy
The real story of how we ended up with dark matter is not widely understood or accepted.
Some time ago, a man named Hannes Alfven, who is today considered the father of plasma physics, founded the field of magnetohydrodynamics, which astrophysicists have been using to model plasma in the universe for several decades now. This field treats plasma as a fluid and assumes that currents cannot flow through the plasma because it treats plasma as an ideal conductor with no resistance. This is actually not *anything* like the way that plasma operates in the real world, and since plasma represents 99%+ of all observable matter within the universe, this massively incorrect assumption yields absurd results in astrophysics today. Plasma is in fact electrically conductive and its electrical properties interact with its mechanical motions, and vice-versa. If you've ever seen a novelty plasma globe, then you intuitively know that plasma is not like a fluid. You can tell by looking closely at a plasma globe that the plasma creates filaments and these filaments pair up and twist around one another. These twisting currents are called Birkeland Currents. As the current flow increases through them, they pinch together with increasing force and this pinching action can actually condense matter into a ball. This is a big deal because there is no good reason to believe that molecules will gravitationally collapse from a diffuse collection of matter in space; in fact, gases obviously expand in a vacuum. Contrary to the more popular beliefs propagated in astrophysics and the media today, the z-pinch effect is likely actually how planets and stars form. Astrophysicists don't understand this because of their earlier assumptions regarding plasma being a fluid with no currents. But we can see strong evidence of Birkeland Currents and Z-Pinches happening through our telescopes.
The thing is, astrophysicists will see what they want to see through the telescope. All observations today are interpreted through mainstream concepts like stellar evolution and Big Bang theory. When an anomaly pops up, it can be a very simple matter to propose a "patch" for the theory to keep it going. Astrophysicists will invoke collisions, black holes, gravitational lensing or malformed electrical theory in order to explain away anomalies. But you will notice that anomalies are discovered nearly every week these days (especially with stellar evolution), and this is a problem because things like collisions should not actually be happening as often as they are being invoked to dismiss the anomalies.
When Hannes Alfven received his nobel prize for plasma physics in the 70's, he recused himself from the field that he created (MHD) and warned astrophysicists to abandon it, and that the path they were taking would eventually dead-end. But they completely ignored him and continue to do so. So, now we have mysterious forces tugging on matter throughout the universe that we can't see. This is what we call dark matter. Dark energy is supposed to be matter that can gravitationally repel. Electrical forces can accomplish both of these feats without any mysterious matter. All you have to do is drop the earlier incorrect assumptions about plasma and accept that extremely diffuse plasma flows can and do exist. You will notice over time that the dark matter studies will reveal some details that correspond with the properties of electricity over plasma. For this particular article, it was noticed that the structure of the dark matter was in places filamentary. Filamentary structures are far easier to generate with electricity than with gravity. It was also mentioned that dark matter can exist in the absence of physical matter. This is to be expected with plasma because plasma can consist of just electrons and ions, or it can also be coexisting with or collecting dust.
Some brave scientists and electrical engineers called Electric Universe Theorists are working on understanding the universe in terms of real plasma physics -- which makes p
It's spinning because gravity rules, man! That's what they taught us in astrophysics class, or PE or something ... that even though plasma fills all of space and it consists of charged particles, it doesn't actually *do* anything. It *can't* be true that those charged particles in plasma might interact with one another en masse as plasma does in order to move charged particles through fields or voltage differentials in space, or that diffuse flows of energy might exist within the universe. There's no way. That would be lamerz! Definitely, before I'd consider something like that, I'd try to figure out some invisible matter that can pull the arms of spiral galaxies just enough to make them rotate with the rest of the plasma (dark matter) -- even though common sense would say that the large majority of the matter is at the center of the galaxy. And even though it really doesn't make much sense, I'd probably also bet that there are particles that gravitationally *repel* one another (dark energy). But, even though electricity over plasma can actually already do both attraction and repulsion, and even though space *is* plasma, it really *has* to be gravity that does that stuff and there *must* be particles there *somewhere*. I mean, that's what everybody *else* believes. This is ***SLASH-D0T***. And the scientists and those inventors can do *everything* these days. I mean, I heard that they saw stars that spin at the rate of a dentist's drill. And these dark hole things that suck everything in, but they can also have jets where all of that stuff that's sucked in can sometimes come back out and stuff. I wonder what it would be like to go there. Imagine if you had like these two black holes and there were these different dimensions and there was a string that connected them ... ! ... Wouldn't that be cool? We should test it out first with our cat though before we try it ourselves ...
... AM I IN IT? I know. I know ... Crazy, huh?!
I like astronomy. It's very creative. It makes you wonder, like, what's out there? What *is* the universe? Somebody once told me that it was made of plasma, but they also said that in order to make their homework easier, they were allowed to assume that the plasma had no resistance and could not carry currents, and that it was a fluid. It was weird because this isn't *anything* like what real plasma is. Those kids did a lot less homework. But they were kind of weird. They were all alike, and would tell people that they knew *everything*, and they wouldn't really listen when *you* tried to say something. I didn't want to hang out with them, but there were so *many* of them. I heard about these other playgrounds where these really cool people hung out where people didn't all try to be exactly alike and there were lots of smart people and stuff. I think it was a long time ago though.
You wanna hear something fucked up?! I *heard* that we can only see and interact with 4% of the matter of the universe. I know dude!!!!!! It's COM-PLETE-LY crazy! I mean, what *is* that other stuff, man? You know it's OUT THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ha! And you know, sometimes when I'm driving all by myself down the road, and I'm really fucked up on shrooms, I start to wonder
You know, the other day, I was hanging out in my apartment by myself and my furniture all started to move towards one another. No, I wasn't trippin! Good one. No, that's *exactly* what they said happens with gravitational collapse. Matter will just be, like, hanging out and suddenly -- like BAM! -- or maybe slowly or something, when everything else is not happening in a vacuum that can disturb the process and stuff for like millions of years -- things start forming clumps. I was thinking of actually designing a new whippets dispenser that works like this -- you just put a dispenser in open air next to a bubble of nitrous oxide and it will condense and then you inhale. Cool, huh? I invented it
That right there is an example of logic in spite of the mob. What are the currents? Can we detect and measure them? I wonder how many decades it will take to get to the point where we're sending out probes to answer this question. Will I still be alive to see this?
...
But even without doing that, for now, I'd be somewhat happy to see an explanation for solar system rilles that defy gravity. What is causing canyons on planets where those canyons follow the topography of the land both *up* and down? If you need examples, go to www.thunderbolts.info. Very curious
I actually enjoy being abused. I think it's comical in a sick sense. It is a weird, yet exciting, feeling when you know that you understand more about what's happening and more about where things are moving in science than the mob that surrounds you.
I do believe in the peer review system. The real problem is that we never made a distinction between the sciences that you can perform input on and those that you cannot. For those sciences that you cannot do much better than uniformitarianism (which is complete speculation), scientists need to learn to learn to live with uncertainty. The thing is, people don't like uncertainty. The mass media wants to *know* what's going on. If your press release doesn't tell a fanciful story, it may not get published. Forget peer review. Why bother when you can just create some color-enhanced images and release them directly to the public? That appears to work just as well as publishing in a journal these days. The fact that all of you guys let it work too this past year means that you can expect to see more of it. I can't wait!
I just explained to you in my previous posting that the entirety of electricity and magnetism as far as astrophysics is concerned is based upon theories that have since been recused by the nobel physics laureate that "discovered" them. That is a very serious allegation that makes the peer review system irrelevant if it is true. Peer review is not a perfect system. It is good, but it is susceptible to problems. Astrophysicists have been interpreting all of their observations through the traditional paradigms for decades now. There is no grant yet, as far as I know, for the theory that proves that the last 50 years have been a huge waste. I'd love to get awarded that grant, but I have a feeling that I shouldn't waste my time.
Actually, they are all being written by myself. And I will continue to write them until people start paying attention because their points are valid and their theory is sound. Their message needs to get out so that the theory can be investigated (I don't want to have to wait until 2018 when the Solar Probe reveals that our solar theories are wrong). The current field of astrophysics is cherry-picking their science to the extent that it is useful to confirm their pre-existing *assumptions*, even when those assumptions appear to be inconsistent with our modern-day observations. They've succeeded in convincing the world that astrophysics is too complicated for most people, and that we should relinquish all of the critical thinking about space to them. This would almost be okay if it weren't that they believe this of other physicists too -- including plasma physicists who have earned nobel prizes and who taught them everything they currently know about electricity in space (Hannes Alfven).
If your point is that since it has to do with electric universe theory then it's not worth reading, then that would imply that reasoning no longer affects your judgment -- and you are in terms of physics, at least, like an old dog unable to learn anything new. In that case, I'm not speaking to you with my postings, and as science oftentimes does, it will wait until the old guard dies off in order to introduce the new ideas. On the other hand, if you are grateful that somebody is taking the time to point out the electric universe perspective so that it can be contrasted with the traditional paradigms whenever its relevant, then you're welcome. Forums like Slashdot are most useful when lots of people who have different ideas about the world get together and compare and contrast their beliefs. Pithy comments and jokes can be fun, but they should take a backseat to real discussions when those discussions are about serious things. And this notion that we should all agree on cosmology is outright dangerous because the chances that we have anything right at this point in time are negligible in light of the fact that new space anomalies pop up on a weekly basis. I will continue to ignore the voices of the mob with hope that people will once again decide that it is okay to think different and have your own opinions about complicated subjects. We didn't get to the point we're at today in science by trying to all think alike.
One of the reasons I'm doing this is so that in the decades to come as astrophysicists finally begin to accept *real* plasma physics into their domain more and more, and people here on Slashdot begin to realize that they were wrong to invoke the term pseudoscience without actually learning about the topic that they were ostracizing, we can all go back over my postings and the responses to them, and we can all *learn* from the experience with the hope that it will never happen again.
Once you guys all realize that all of this business about dark matter, dark energy, neutron stars, black holes, and stellar evolution is all nonsense, it's going to suddenly hit you that you've all been wasting a bunch of time and that you may not live to see the day where we actually understand the mechanics of the universe. The unfortunate thing is that I won't get to know *with* you even though I didn't fall for the bullshit like you guys did.
And another invocation of stellar merging to explain the anomaly.
People, look at what's happening. Read the space news as a critical thinker. There isn't a week that goes by where the concept of stellar evolution isn't violated by some observation. Stellar evolution is an *assumption* that cannot possibly be proven or disproven because we won't be around long enough to see a star go through all of the steps of the process. It is completely based upon the idea that stars are nothing more than thermonuclear reactions. But our observations of the Sun do not support this concept:
1. The solar wind continues to accelerate past all of the planets as if those charged particles are within a weak electric field centered at the Sun.
2. The generation of neutrinos coming from the Sun correlates with the number of sunspots on the Sun's surface. We know that the sunspot cycle is a *magnetic* process on the *surface* of the Sun and the fusion model for the Sun proposes that the neutrinos should be generated within the deep core of the Sun. Those two steps of the process are supposedly separated by hundreds of thousands of years according to the solar fusion model. How is it possible that they are linked?
3. The surface of the Sun is around 6,000 K and the Sun's corona is around 2 million K. How is it possible that the energy generated at the core of the fusion-model Sun makes it to the corona without heating up the Sun's surface? Astrophysicists have proposed a concept called magnetic reconnections, but magnetic reconnections is completely pseudoscience. The concept of a magnetic field reconnecting and generating energy in the process is akin to a gravitational field reconnecting and generating energy. Neither can happen because field lines *never* reconnect any more than lines of latitude or longitude reconnect. Magnetic field lines are a smooth continuum. Furthermore, the points at which it is alleged that reconnection is happening -- the saddle points at the front of the "bow shock" as astrophysicists like to say -- is where the field strength is *zero*. And wherever the field strength is zero, the energy stored there at that point is also *zero*. No energy release can occur from any location at which no energy is stored. The fact that astrophysicists have been getting away with making these absurd statements regarding magnetic reconnections for decades now demonstrates the extent to which their field has run afowl of science. Any electrical engineer that hears about the details of magnetic reconnections should not stand for it, and they deserve some of the blame for not speaking louder about this. Millions of dollars are being poured into this concept right now.
Let me tell you a little story about astrophysics. Hannes Alfven, who is considered the father of plasma physics, and who received a nobel prize for this work, created the entire field of magnetohydrodynamics, which serves as the modern day basis for electricity and magnetism within astrophysics. Alfven proposed early in his career that electric currents do *not* flow through plasmas and that plasmas can be assumed to have "frozen in place" magnetic fields within them. Magnetohydrodynamics treats plasmas as fluids and assumes that they have little resistivity, so they are basically perfect conductors. In his acceptance speech for the nobel prize, he made a point of explaining that these earlier assumptions were certainly wrong, and although they may make things easier for astrophysics students, they will yield incorrect results in the real world. Modern day plasma physics are demonstrating all sorts of very unusual phenomenon, some of which can't even be said to follow Maxwell's Equations. It is now clear that the assumptions that the astrophysicists borrowed many years ago and refuse to revise in light of new findings are *wrong*. Alfven was completely ignored and the picture hasn't changed at all since then. Astrophysics students will tell you outright that electricity exists in space, but that it doesn't r
I don't find this surprising at all. It's the natural result of two things: telling people that the universe has been completely figured out, and telling people what we found is that our immediate surroundings are more-or-less benign and unrelated to the happenings in deeper space.
Both of these assertions are unwarranted, and yet, you get those two messages loud and clear even here on these Slashdot forums from very educated people. It's amazing, but people are so confident in their models for how the universe works. This is in spite of the fact that we have yet to directly observe many of the key features of our theories like gravitationally collapsing nebulas, neutron stars, dark matter or dark energy; in spite of the fact that astronomy is not like the other sciences in that we cannot perform traditional input-output experiments; and in spite of the fact that other theories exist to explain all of our observations. It's my conviction that it is impossible to have absolute certainty about things like cosmology, and that anybody who proposes that things like the Big Bang are without a doubt true because the math works or for any other reason, are offering certainty in a field where uncertainty can never completely be eliminated.
The current paradigms also assert that all of the bodies in space are disconnected and unrelated to one another in any significant way because it is assumed that gravity is the most dominant force in the universe. This is in spite of the fact that the field of plasma physics has significantly matured recently, and astrophysics has been slow to integrate Hannes Alfvene's (as well as others') contributions. We now know that space is filled with charged particles that can conduct electricity over even diffuse plasmas over great distances. We can observe massive magnetic fields in space with our telescopes, and these magnetic fields would require large sustained electrical currents in order to exist. Much of the high-temperature radiation we observe in space these days possesses synchrotron components, which is a clear signal that electricity is a cause.
Because of this context, when we see daily news of massive ice sheets breaking off, we *assume* that it *must* be the result of human activity instead of the space that we live within. When we see high temperatures on Venus, we ignore the fact that *all* literate human cultures note that Venus once did not exist within recent human history. We *assume* that we are so much smarter than them and that they must *all* be wrong, even though they all say the exact same thing. And when our probe sensors return data that indicate that the hot temperatures of Venus are originating from the planet itself, we conclude that those sensors must be faulty because they do not conform to our simplified runaway greenhouse models. When we observe that the Sun's brightness and Neptune's brightness, for instance, are increasing in ways that don't make sense with the traditional models, we ignore them even though that's a clear suggestion that there is external input to those bodies. There appears to in fact be little that can convince us that the plasma that surrounds us in space actually *does* anything even though we can determine in laboratories that this is not true and in computer simulations that it alone can explain the rotational properties of spiral galaxies. We'd rather believe in things like dark matter rather than a suggestion that charge can flow over diffuse plasma in space.
The apathy amongst our kids is not a random result. It's the result of telling them to *listen* instead of telling them to *think* and *imagine*. We've basically convinced them that the universe that they'll have access to is boring and that the only interesting stuff happening that they'll ever come close to even touching is here on the surface of Earth -- and we've done this in order to satisfy our own desires to feel *certain* about our surroundings in space.
I think what you're missing is the fact that the EU Theorists' material is extremely compelling -- far more than you are aware of. I exposed you to just the materials that relate to comets. They have managed to run a common thread through just about every single modern-day observation that we have, and where NASA scientists oftentimes proclaim surprise or invoke exotic or shaky theories to support their observations, the electrical explanations far more often than not easily follow. So long as you don't expose yourself to the theory, you will continue to not realize this. This is your own choice. I don't need to see the actual equations in order to draw conclusions. There is plenty of material out there that summarizes and compares the material on a meta level. I'm more interested in reading material that compares the various explanations, and this is what the EU Theorists already do. They already integrate the history of our beliefs into their explanations. And by necessity, they always first introduce the traditional theories and then demonstrate why they are wrong. If their arguments were weak, it would be transparent even without the math. There are plenty of books that do this as well. The layperson can develop a very detailed picture of both sides of the argument and even evaluate which is correct without digging too deeply down to the math of both sides in this particular situation because the observations are oftentimes *pictures* that you can look at and interpret.
When I see a supernova remnant, for instance, that is bipolar symmetric, I can understand that that was not predicted by traditional theory. When I see photographs of craters and rilles that cannot possibly be explained with traditional paradigms, I can understand that with my *eyes*. When I see pictures of low-redshift quasars in front of spiral galaxies, I can realize that there are other components to redshifts. When I see data to suggest that Titan is extremely similar to Venus in many respects, it is difficult for me to believe that this is merely by chance. When I see Lichtenberg figures on Mars' south pole that are seasonally covered and revealed, I am not at all convinced that these are geysers. When NASA suggests that the lightning and intense storms on Saturn are due to shadows from its rings, I can deduce that this is nonsense without actually knowing much more than the approximate distance from Saturn to the Sun. Nearly every ancient culture of the world associates the planet Venus with attributes that we would today attribute to comets. I can decide for myself without any math that that is too much of a coincidence.
There are in fact many situations where common sense reigns. To assert that normal people cannot make good decisions about which theories to believe based upon observations of the debate between the two sides is simplistic. It makes for great philosophy of science discussions, but it completely ignores the huge number of problems that the traditional gravity-driven paradigms are having in explaining our observations. I refuse to accept the traditional paradigm because I've seen the fundamental points being proposed by both sides and the EU material is more compelling. This notion that only astrophysicists who can check all of the math can decide may have been true some time ago before we had lots of pictures of what was going on in the universe, but times have changed. The pictures are in and they're not supporting those early assumptions. Haven't you noticed that the Big Bang Theory and even things like stellar evolution are constantly changing to fit the observations? Just this week it was announced that stars that should be exploding are in fact not. This is just the latest in a very long list of "anomalies" that are accumulating. Each time we send a probe out, we expect to find more answers and all we get instead are more questions. If you cannot see this, then it is in fact *you* that are not being objective about it.
Certainly, some issues require additional attention.
This may sound backwards, but I've found it far more informative to read the history of the debate and to go over the debate itself rather than trying to just sift through astrophysical papers. The technical arguments for me are just one part of the entire decision-making process and I'm really not very interested in learning any of the math at the moment. I want to see how we got to the point of having a dominant paradigm in the first place and I want to get a better feel for what sort of certainties we can feel about various theories because it's very hard to get a straight answer on that from the mainstream physicists.
I do also plan on eventually performing an exhaustive analysis of the relevant threads on the "Bad Astronomy and Universe Today" forums. I am interested in being fair later on, but right now, I'm especially anxious to finally learn the remainder of the EU story.
It's worth noting that few people actually learn both sides of the argument. Carl Sagan's rebuttal to "Worlds in Collision" reached millions of people and was reprinted numerous times, apparently in spite of numerous technical problems with his arguments that some people believe he should have been aware of. This lack of objectivity spans back to the beginning of the catastrophism debate itself.
My personal belief is that when good arguments are falling on deaf ears, the need to fix that more immediate problem can outweigh the need to create a balanced picture involving both sides of the debate. On the other hand, I've also noticed that if somebody was able to understand *both* sides of the debate in depth, then that person would be uniquely capable of winning more people over.
I'm about to enter a new phase of investigation. I just purchased a significant library of EU Theory that I'm going to move through over the next couple of months. So, I'm going to fade back out for a while and then reappear with a more detailed picture of the situation. I have a lot of reading to do.
There is precedent for EM activity in thermally driven systems, eg, thunder storms.
You know about upper-atmosphere lightning right? Scientists have observed lightning to something like 40 miles above the surface of the Earth, which is basically the border into space. This sort of a finding should cause people to question the notion that the Earth is electrically isolated and that thunderstorms are merely self-contained electrical systems. It is just as possible that they are merely a leg of the process of charge transfer between the planet and its surrounding space plasma. The Earth's storm clouds could merely be the failure points in a leaky capacitor.
That sounds right. I think what's being argued is that the overall charge accumulation for most comets is far greater than the leakage current. This would explain why some of the asteroids in that prior link have been noticed to suddenly develop cometary tails and then lose them just as quickly. In those cases, the leakage currents are significant compared to the overall charge accumulation.
First, what bright flash prior to physical impact? That's a misinterpretation of the experiment results. They just stated that there were two flashes (and interpreted both to happen after the impact). I doubt the timing can be that certain. Plus, the flashes were consistent with the type of collision. Second, what would induces pre-collision flashing yet have no impact on the probe traveling through this weird electromagnetic environment?
If there is an explanation for the double flash, then it was generated post-observation. This is probably as objective as we're going to get on the double flash and impact timing (from wiki, "Electric Universe"):
The EU guys also noted that the first-person perspective of the video exhibited white spots that would support the notion that discharges were happening between the projectile and the comet's surface prior to impact. These whitespots corresponded precisely with where electrical arcing would place them --- on the rims of craters and on the wall of cliffs rising above flat valley floors.
How are the observations inconsistent with the claim that comets have a crust of high melting point material thermally insulating volatiles under the surface?
From the Electric Comet document:
Regardless though, the writing that I witnessed in those links seemed to have many of the hallmarks of Crank Science in them. A touch of persecution, nobody believes, experts ignore the facts, etc. All of this makes me wonder how objectively the proponents of EU are examining their own data.
Well, you have to admit that there are a lot of surface features of planets within the immediate solar system that do not easily lend themselves to explanation using the traditional mechanisms. Many times, the same feature on two different planets will get two different explanations. It makes sense that if you're seeing things like rilles and lichtenberg figures all over the planets, then you might want to consider that electricity is playing a common role on all of those planets. This has never even really been on the radar since the Velikovsky affair, and NASA will oftentimes resort to absurd speculation just to avoid admitting that electrical things are happening. The Martian "spiders" are probably the classic example. A study was done of them and its conclusions were that they are one of the most engimatic features of the entire solar system. But in truth, if you saw the same thing in your front yard, you'd look at it and in 2 seconds infer that a lightning bolt must have hit your yard. When NASA noticed St Elmo's Fire -- an eerie electrical glow -- on the tips of tall mountains on Venus, they were quick to announce that Venetian mountains were capped in Fool's Gold (Iron Pyrite). Many of the planets have unusual features at their poles. Venus actually has a pair of vortexes connected by a line and Saturn has an ominous hurricane-like eye at one of its poles, for instance. The EU Theorists have a lot say about these sorts of things, but conventional theory is quite silent on them because they don't naturally follow. The fact that there is a common thread that runs through all of the least understood phenomenon within the universe hints to us that we should take a more serious look at this possible explanation.
Electric Universe Theory is, to be blunt, strange. You do gain a deeper appreciation for it though the more you read about it. It's inescapable that most theories that challenge the traditional paradigms will come off as "crank science". But in truth, once you understand the EU perspective, it's actually somewhat reversed. EU Theory is generally supported by the most contemporary observations, whereas the gravity-driven universe tends to be based upon assumptions that were developed before we even had the ability to image the phenomenon in question. It shouldn't surprise us that our initial guesses at how the universe works may be wrong. For instance, the concept of a gravitationally collapsing cloud of dust and gas is a very simplistic idea that does not naturally follow from our observations of variations of planets and their atmospheres. We can see extreme similarities between "planets" like Titan and Venus. Traditional paradigms don't allow us to consider that these planets may actually be related. However, if planets are formed with the plasma z-pinch effect as is being proposed for EU Theory, then these sorts of similarities would be the natural end result of a common source and common possible timeframe for their creation.
I increasingly see EU Theory as the logical alternative to traditional theory. It makes for a great mechanism for learning about how the universe works, and by questioning the mainstream mantras, you actually get a deeper understanding than you'd likely get if you merely memorized things like stellar evolution and Big Bang Theory. In other words, I think the two theories complement one another from the perspective of the student. Teaching it to kids in school would be a great mechanism for getting kids to think more about the problems. It's clear to me that once more people know about EU Theory that more people will start to *think* about the Big Bang. This, to me, is the current problem. People are accepting a lot of what they're being told wit
In my many adventures through the forums of Slashdot talking to people about Electric Universe Theory, I've run into a few people who half-educated themselves on the theory itself. It's not really any fault of your own. There is an overwhelming amount of material to go through. It took me three months of my free time to actually become even quasi-proficient in what the theory says. It appears that the problem with EU Theory isn't the theory itself -- but rather satisfying peoples' expectations that they be taught the mechanics of the universe in three hours or less while simultaneously fending off the amazingly hostile attacks from advocates of the mainstream. It appears that the desire by advocates of the gravity-dominant universe to keep out all serious competitors is stronger than any objective desire on their part to learn the truth of the universe. It is imperative that people with an interest in EU Theory not cave in to this posturing which does nothing more than limit the choices of cosmologies available to the public. There is in fact still no serious problem with Electric Universe Theory.
I agree that the faraway observations are strongest, but there is no problem with the electromagnetism of EU-style cometary theory when you understand how plasma behaves. Many people make the mistake of assuming that EU Theory is advocating an electrostatic model for cometary and planetary interactions. In fact, the solar wind would not necessarily "drain away" charge from any other plasma or body in space any more than the plasma of space would drain away the solar wind's charge. That's because plasmas naturally form what are called double-layers. From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0510 31plasma.htm:
This is not actually exotic theory. These are fundamentals of electrodynamics and plasma physics.
(the Earth and Moon vary enough in their orbits that we should experience some of this phenomena, but we don't).
Well, if you mean that we should see the Earth's coma and tail like in a comet, that would require that the plasma surrounding the Earth be in the glow discharge mode. In reality, plasmas can and do exist in non-glow states much like a transistor has multiple operating regions. The Earth's magnetosphere exists in this state except when the aurora occurs.
If you go to the page at http://www.thunderbolts.info/t
This story is very typical of space stories these days. You get some speculation from some scientists about what they expect that they should be seeing, tenuously based upon some weak observational data. A public release is put together and the news story gains steam because it invokes some concept that tickles the imagination of the public (gigantic black holes and stars, for instance). Then, when better observations come in and suggest that maybe we shouldn't be so sure of our prior speculation, there is little effort to correct the record.
0 304starbirth.htm).
1 24solar3.htm), which defied traditional theories about supernovae in nearly every single respect. Even though plasma physics tells us that we can understand the structure we see in those images down to the number of beads in the smaller ring, we continue to ignore those explanations because they involve electricity in space.
c 4td), which extends 100,000 light years -- even though the lifetime of the X-ray producing particles is only about 100 years.
It was interesting to observe that this (probable) garbage made it onto Slashdot, whereas the Stardust mission results (with actual data) did not. It seems that the space news cycle is caught in a competition to make the most outlandish claim possible in order to get the attention of the public these days. Investigating anomalies within the current paradigms has taken a backseat to wild speculation. There's little interest anymore in questioning the early assumptions that got us to this point in the first place:
Our conviction in stellar birth by way of gravitational collapse survives observations of R Corona Australis, which is generating enigmatic x-rays and 100 million degree F temperatures at a very early stage of the supposed collapse (http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/05
Our conviction in our theories about supernovae survived observations of Supernova 1987A (see pictures at http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060
Our conviction in the theory of black holes was not dampened at all by the associated problems with generating the observed quasar jet 3C273 (http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=9kpg
And then there's the Stardust mission -- which when combined with the results of the Deep Impact mission indicate quite clearly that our early assumptions about comets were quite wrong. Scientists are now apparently trying to invent scenarios for how it could be that comets would contain exotic meteorite particles as well as particles that have clearly been formed under intense heat. Perhaps they should consider that these initial speculations were wrong in the first place. I doubt we'll see any such sanity though. More likely, we'll see additional new speculations to support the earlier unsupported speculations.
There increasingly seems to be far less glory these days in doing the homework that we'll be graded on and far more interest in fantasizing about multi-dimensional space and gigantic black holes.