It has been a wonderful joy watching the people here on Slashdot completely misunderstand the Electric Universe debate. It will be even more fun 20 years from now when you guys are claiming that you never actually argued against electricity over plasmas in space, but that the Electric Universe is still wrong!
Your confidence in the Standard Model is glowing. The problem however with your overwhelming agreement of it is that it is to the detriment of your own investigation into alternative explanations and additional information that can shed light on these types of matters.
If somebody was reading your well-informed post, you might come off as an expert. However, it's not that you've read everything. It's that you've permitted yourself to believe the things that you have read first before investigating alternative explanations to the extent that you did this one. Your confidence and tone are evidence for it.
The fact that you categorize people on the basis of their scientific beliefs is a blatant admission that you will not carefully consider their arguments. It may work for establishing some sort of credentials here on Slashdot, but don't be fooled into thinking that this approach will help you to solve the most difficult mysteries known to man. The truth will be had by listening to people; not by some simplistic system of ignoring them.
The fact is that, regardless of your apparent confidence, intelligent people can and do disagree on experimental results and consensus views -- even on experiments that occurred a hundred years ago. This is not "pathological skepticism". This is the real world where we are not all clones of one another. It is healthy. It is good. There is nothing wrong with it. If people can present evidence to support an argument, then they deserve to be heard out.
I don't agree with everything that Oliver Manuel says, but I also don't think it's at all relevant that he's retired. People don't just automatically expire like copyrights. It also shouldn't matter whether or not Oliver was trained to be just like credentialed astrophysicists. The astrophysical community still has a lot of work to get its house in order; with your apparent wisdom, you should know that so long as that's the case, there will always be outsiders trying to help out. Whether or not you agree, it's within the *public's* best interest that it is so.
I'm going to diverge here to a subject which really bugs the crap out of me every time I run into one of you guys who possess so much confidence in the Standard Model.
One of the most prominent mistakes that your whole crew is making is your combined insistence that ancient people were all silly, simple-minded idiots who spent lots of time telling stories and drawing images that had no significant -- as in possessing great power over them -- meaning. You guys all just assume that these people were scared of their own shadow, the weather, earthquakes, whatever. It's quite a dramatic assumption that you don't even attempt to prove. Some would rightly use the term "uniformitarian" to describe it (which is a dirty word in our own circles). There exists plenty of literature on the subject that strongly suggests that this assumption is baseless, and even complete and utter nonsense. In the process of this assumption, you guys just set aside a mountain of information that has accumulated about ancient stories -- some approaching the level of actual eyewitness accounts of events within the sky. Some of the accounts are far more detailed than you know -- to the point of describing the fine detail of what happens when two planets "interact". Rather than listen to the people who witnessed it firsthand, you guys invent your own mathematics and simulations to suit your own perceived gravity-centric universe.
Most of you guys still think that the flood was a local phenomenon inspired by the Bible or more generally by religion. It is a glaring example of your lack of concern for thoroughness on topics that you don't believe are worthy of your attention. Notice that you possess this belief because it is consensus; it's not that you actually ever personally checked in with an expert in mythology to ask them how many cultures recount a flood, and what the chances are that all of those cultures could have possibly been told a story about a
Slashdot should have ran the more interesting story pertaining to nuclear decay rates that came up this week, which my nuclear physicist associate (Oliver Manuel) forwarded to me...
Seach the Firehose for "decay rate" and you'll find my submission, which was rejected (not complaining actually, just a bit confused).
And it's not even that this result is the first time it's been noticed. Russian researcher Simon Schnoll has performed *thousands* of simple geiger counter isotope decay rate experiments and noticed the same exact thing -- that there is an astrophysical influence to decay rates...
The idea that nuclear decay rates might not be random is pretty paradigm-changing. We can doubt the results, but shouldn't we at least be talking about it? It seems to me like a very important finding.
Isn't this even more pertinent to the concept of anthropogenic warming than the absolute dating article Slashdot went with???
I'm surprised the electric universe otaku haven't jumped in to claim credit for this yet.
I've moved on to better things now. Phase 1 of my research is done, and I'm now bringing together all of the work I've done into a series of papers. The point of my immersion here was to understand how people here attempt to understand complicated issues (mainly in the space sciences), and how they act towards novel scientific paradigms. This is called "investigative journalism". It's increasingly a very rare phenomenon these days -- especially in the sciences -- so it's understandable if you've never heard of it. In my own personal opinion, the world would be a far better place if there were more people like myself who actually dug into issues related to the space sciences sufficient to penetrate the superficial appearance of things. In my view, science is not a spectator's sport. We *must* get our hands dirty and get down to business through argumentation in order to understand the cultural context for our scientific beliefs.
This new phase of my research will involve writing up multi-disciplinary papers based upon the research I've done to date. I have plenty of access to scientists, so all of my work will be vetted. I'm very satisfied with the progress that I've been making so far in this regard, and I hope that the people here on Slashdot did not get so annoyed by my presence that they won't consider reading the results of my research. Some of you guys will be surprised to see your own arguments in these papers. And I can tell you right now that it's not all that hard to demonstrate that pseudo-skepticism is endemic on this forum and in American culture in general. I've found at least one genius listed on www.crank.net, and nobody appears to realize it, or care. By performing an in-depth case study of this particular man, I will demonstrate beyond any doubt that the philosophy science predominant here (pseudo-skepticism) is faulty. The idea that we may be culturally blacklisting geniuses *hopefully* disturbs you somewhat.
This second phase though is still just temporary. The culmination of my investigations and immersions into these papers merely represents a starting point for the remainder of my work. My approach is ultimately a systemic approach to understanding some of the most perplexing issues in science today, and it would be foolish to put all of this work into *understanding* these issues without eventually getting my hands dirty and eventually participating in them in some manner. And it's at this point, much further down the road, where the true rewards of my systemic approach will bear fruit in the form of a laboratory. The process of interviewing people listed on crank.net will assist with identifying the people who should run the laboratory. The ultimate irony of the situation is that the blacklist that you guys refer to for exemplifying your philosophical approach will serve as our starting point for identifying talent.
For me, philosophy of science cannot be separated from the science itself. And in my own personal opinion, those who believe that peer review is a perfect institution do not really understand what philosophy of science really is. The inferential step does not become perfect just because a bunch of people agree upon it. The cultural context within which science exists is *incredibly* important to the health of science itself. I'm not interested in debating these points at this time. The time for two-way conversation is over, and now it's my turn for some monologue, to explain what I've discovered in these papers that I'm writing up.
I'm working my way to the same level of knowledge and understanding of science as everybody else here, but I'm being far more philosophically rigorous in my approach than the traditional scientific education. The standard methodology involves memorizing a lot of facts deemed to be the scientific consensus, and every once in a while throwing in some philosophy of science here
Argument from authority. Not everyone holds Peratt or his work in the esteem you do. Peratt has no background in astronomy, astrophysics, or cosmology. Neither do Scott or Thornhill, and Talbott certainly doesn't. It doesn't surprise me at all that one proponent of a plasma cosmology associates with other proponents of a plasma cosmology. You think The Great Anthony Peratt, Student Of The Great Hannes Alfvén, is so prestigious he could not possibly associate with a pile of bunk, so anything he associates with is therefore not bunk. I think that Anthony Peratt is one cosmology dabbler associating with other cosmology dabblers based on a shared but incorrect and ultimately uninteresting cosmology. Authority has no bearing on fact, truth, or reality.
You're doing a great job of summarizing the problem of how cosmology is worked on these days: as a hierarchical system with astrophysicists at the top. This system might work better if the education was specifically geared towards maintaining more objectivity and neutrality with regards to the interpretation of space observations. But, in fact, the bulk of the training that you hold in such high regard is geared towards one particular cosmology, and blends assumptions and speculative research (like helioseismology) in with agreed-upon facts. To argue that people must all be cast within the same mold before they can have a legitimate opinion on the biggest questions of the universe is self-defeating and blatantly antithetical to the history of science. We need outsiders and skeptics in *ALL* interpretive natural science disciplines commenting on *ALL* interpretations at *ALL* times in order to keep fresh ideas coming in and innovation moving forward.
The observations are consistent with the model Scott seeks to discredit, so he attacks the idea that observations' consistency with a model lends credibility to the model.
If the history of science is to act as a guide in any manner, then consistency of data with a model -- in some regard -- should *never* act as an excuse to avoid investigating and developing alternative models. That's the same exact mistake that was made with the "action at a distance" paradigm, the two fluid model for electricity and magnetism, at the time of James Maxwell. The model worked perfectly down to every detail. The inconvenient truth of the situation, however, for all of Michael Faraday's critics was that the model was just plain wrong. In the same manner, Don Scott's assertions are perfectly legitimate for him to make. He's doing nothing more than pointing out an implicit assumption within the numerous public relations releases on the topic. People who like to think of themselves as maintaining some amount of neutrality on the issue of cosmology actually prefer that the assumptions be stripped from the facts so that they can evaluate on their own whether or not to agree with the interpretations.
you don't take "Wrong!" for an answer. Neither do Scott, Thornhill, Talbott, or any of the Thunderbolts forum denizens.
That's because your own assertions that they are wrong tend to be heavily laden with your own form of speculation and assumptions. We are skeptics. Skeptics rate information on the basis of certainty, and lots of assumptions within theories demands that we lower our certainty.
Scott's "Electric Sun" hypothesis is nourished by Scott's misapplication of physics, logic, or both. Other writings of his (and Thornhill's) are similar in this regard. Tim Thompson has addressed (some of) the ways in which these ideas are broken, and that rejoinder is just more broken ideas. There is nothing new, and I'm no more interested than I suspect Tim Thompson, APODNereid, or anyone else is in expending such effort on entrenched, deaf ears with so little willingness or ability to see why it carries weight.
And yet, you are willing to spend time explaining your *beliefs* on the issue.
Nereid, if your allegations about the Electric Universe were even remotely true, then there's no way in hell that people like Anthony Peratt would associate themselves with these ideas. Your arguments constitute a complete non sequiter when placed into that context. In fact, every time that you pretend that the issues are as simple as this juvenile short list of hypotheses, a person could be forgiven for interpreting your statements as blatant obfuscations and malicious in intent. There is an actual debate here to be had, and the real action is far above the playing field that you've laid out for yourself. If you want to impress somebody, then why don't you find a problem within the rejoinder to Tim Thompson...
This is the level of detail that I would expect to see from you before I would ever consider forwarding something on to anybody. Short of a detailed refutation of these sorts of arguments (and demanding that we be your library assistant will not cut it), you're beneath our radars.
ps -- I'm amazed that you insist on pointing out the problems with EU within comments attached to a story titled, "Could We Find a Door to a Parallel Universe?" Who's the pseudoscience, here? The topic of the article was about some astrophysicist who wastes a bunch of time trying to invent imaginary matters that would allow him to manipulate wormholes! The particular thread that I commented on was started by a person who was ridiculing astrophysics for how absurd it has become. Are you just completely oblivious to what's happening around you?
Nereid, I looked through a handful of your "heart of 'electric comet' model" materials, and it's all just proclamations that this or that is not referenced in a peer review journal. Then, I looked at your "actualistic v prophetic" response, this included...
Which surely leads to a bit of a dilemma for EU proponents, doesn't it? I mean, what is all this quantum theory stuff if not "prophetic computer-code style instructions for how to build a universe from scratch"? One simply can NOT work with this except through fifty-two weeks of Sundays of math, math, and still more math - "common sense" and "intuition" are quite unreliable guides. Yet every new lab experiment to test this stuff results in yet more medals for the theory.
I think that you vastly underestimate what you're up against here. You're just not even trying to get it. You're acting as though you can argue against it without actually getting it, by hacking little pieces off of it. The only real way to attack an idea is to go straight to the heart: figure out what it's saying -- what's the meat? -- and go straight for it. Your refusal to actually fully understand it prevents this from happening. You have no clue what the Electric Universe even says about quantum mechanics, do you? And yet, you consistently believe that you can figure out what is right and what is wrong without actually first learning what is being said. It's really absurd.
Tim Thompson and ScienceApologist were *far* more compelling than yourself. Tim Thompson could at least explain his perspective using facts. He excelled at throwing up flack and then lending it more weight than it deserved. ScienceApologist was also very educated. He impressed me many times. You just bore the reader with unimportant criticisms. It's a bland technique. All it does is induce the reader to stop reading. If you wanted to actually be read, you'd be far more concise.
I'm somewhat curious too who's paying for all of this? Don't I pay your salary? You've been responding to my posts at ALL HOURS OF THE DAY! And you responded something like 14 times to one of my prior postings. Does your boss know that you spend your time this way? Or are you just an intern or something? Does NASA really have the budget for you to be spending all of this time online? The timestamps are right there for all to see.
The state of modern astrophysics is very healthy, thank you.
You guys are unable to locate 95% of the universe's supposed matter. The conventional theories can't adequately explain why planets appear to frequently have hotspots at their poles. There remains no explanation within the conventional theories for why the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets. There are all sorts of enigmatic craters and rilles on the rocky planets, including one just found on Mercury last week that is quite similar to the Tycho crater on the Moon (another crater which remains a mystery to this day). I've yet to see any credible attempt to explain why the Deep Impact impactor generated two flashes at the time of impact nor the fact that lightning is frequently photographed leading into space these days. Shouldn't that affect our certainty that storms are closed electrical systems? All conventional attempts to understand the enigmatic Stardust mission data have resulted in just more assertions that the results are not representative of all comets. There's been no attempt to understand how it might be possible for experimental results like these to occur:
If we can see elements popping into existence within simple ball lightning laboratory experiments, then one has to wonder about the implications for stars.
What's ultimately really silly about how science operates these days is that there is far too much eagerness to cast aside alternative competing theories that challenge the conventional ones. This problem is called pseudo-skepticism ("fake skepticism") -- the process of having a bias within your skepticism. Skepticism is supposed to be a philosophy of science concept, an information filter, that is applied to all information we are exposed to, equally. It is a way of being that allows people to evaluate the certainty associated with information. When it is applied with a bias, where conventional wisdom is favored, it leads to a problem: the "mainstream" ends up simply unaware of alternative sets of interpretations for their data, and they frequently just end up ignoring these alternative theories. So, this is why people like yourself ultimately look quite silly: because you don't even have enough information to competently argue that the new data we see on a daily basis are discriminatingly supportive of the conventional theories against the Electric Universe. You can't possibly know that until you understand the "big picture" of what is being stated about the Electric Universe. For every piece of evidence you point out that you say demonstrates your own set of theories, you actually aren't even capable of identifying at the current moment whether or not the data fits into this other challenging set of theories too. And this is ultimately why I'm in some manners a bit more capable of identifying the situation than yourself. You've allowed your education to blind you; you thought that you were going to school to learn *what* to believe rather than how to think.
There are some "skeptics" (as you call them), and they have no difficulty getting their works published; however the so-called skeptics you have been so vocal in promoting elsewhere in Slashdot are only marginalised by their continued inability to put together a coherent presentation, much less a consistent, quantitative one.
Nereid, we will eventually make our own laboratories, and we will make the technologies based upon EU that you argue so much against. The money will eventually come in.
And by the way, point me to your comet document when it's ready. I'm very eager to see what you come up with!
It's the natural result of allowing mathematicians to take over physics. They could care less about physicality.
We shouldn't be surprised. Where are the critics and the skeptics? Nobody seems to care about the stories being right. The public's love affair with gadgets is obscuring their contemplation of the complex philosophical questions associated with astrophysical interpretations. Consensus has become an ideal within science, and the skeptics are marginalized as having no value. The public evaluates its science largely on the basis of popularity. It's a very dangerous long-term situation for a country that expects innovation to continue as it has for many decades now.
We need an attitude adjustment. We (as in popular science) know *nothing* about what's going on in space. We are reminded of it nearly every single day. There are far too many surprises and enigmatic observations. And dark matter and dark energy are being used as fudge factors for things like gravitational lensing. This is a sinking ship, and the smart ones will start looking elsewhere right now.
Nereid, you've given me absolutely nothing to work with here. You're doing nothing more than pointing out what you disagree with. If you have a problem, for instance, with my statement regarding the continued acceleration of the solar wind, then perhaps you should present the basis for your problem, and I'll forward it on to Don, Wal, Dave and the others. You have to understand though that I'm a filter for those guys. I value the work that they do, and wouldn't dream of wasting their time with vague assertions.
What you guys consistently just don't get is that these guys are acting as true Pyrrhonian sceptics. They refuse to accept claims of certainty in the absence of substantial proof, and they rightfully question all dogmatic assertions like "redshift always indicates a Doppler Shift" or "the CMB is evidence for a Big Bang". This is very different from "academic scepticism", which is a more nitpicking form of scepticism that basically leads to nowhere real fast. This is scepticism for the sake of questioning authoritarianism. From "Empires of Belief" by Stuart Sim (page 8):
Scepticism is essentially an argument against authority, contesting the assumptions on which this is based and the power that flows from these. That is certainly how we want it to operate in the new century, causing institutional and govenrmental authority in particular to be extremely circumspect in its ways and constantly aware of the possibility of challenge from within its own domain. Unless it is kept under constant scrutiny, such authority has a distinct tendency to become authoritarian and to strive to maintain its power base at all costs: scepticism will form the basis of that scrutiny, the perpetual source of dissent.
Hopefully, you realize that these are philosophical issues that demand attention regardless of the discipline.
What you guys need to realize is that there are no dogmatic assertions within the Electric Universe. Although the claims certainly appear to you as though they are invalid, none of them are based upon any principle or central criterion taken to be beyond doubt. They all follow from laboratory experiences or unadulterated observation. In fact, that is the fundamental principle of the Electric Universe, for if something can be disproven within the laboratory, then it is effectively invalid. By contrast, the conventional paradigms are founded on the fundamental basis that the universe had an origin in time, and then works its way outwards from there. This is an act of faith, not all that different from Creationism to be honest, and hopefully you guys do not disrespect people for not agreeing with your leap of faith. You perceive it to be more than an act of faith because there is mathematics to support it. But this is silly because we can generate mathematics to demonstrate different cosmologies -- many of them in fact quite absurd. Mathematics is no infallible litmus test.
The primary problem with the conventional paradigm is the underlying philosophical approach that has become standard protocol within your discipline. Let's take the example of magnetic reconnection: there is little interest in legitimately testing the claims of magnetic reconnection against competing theories. The fact that exploding double layers are excluded as a possible cause for the observations introduces a very serious problem of creating a complete set of interpretations for observations. You guys are allowing assumptions to creep into your conclusions by virtue of restricting interpretations to those that lend support to the conventional theories. It's this lack of rigor that is most damning about the conventional paradigms, and I'm afraid that the only way to address it is to just be more rigorous -- which ultimately means, God forbid, testing aspects of your competing paradigms (exploding double layers) relative to your own interpretations (magnetic reconnection) in an honest manner. In fact, this complacency is a direct result of the lack of scepti
why don't you guys focus on explaining why comets and asteroids are surprisingly similar in composition? You're denying the antecedent. The veracity of the mainstream understanding of comets is not contingent on their dissimilarity with asteroids. The electric comet hypothesis, however, is contingent on their being essentially identical objects differentiated by their orbits and the alleged physical consequences of their orbits on them (or lack thereof). Even if "dirty snowballs" turn out typically to be "snowy dirtballs", they still contain water ice and undergo outgassing consistent with the mainstream concept.
The instruments are picking up traces of OH coming off of the comets. The H are simply protons from the solar wind and the O is coming from silicates within the comet's body. Oxygen, of course, is one of the most common atoms in the universe. It's not rocket science and your "outgassing" is nothing but electrical machining.
You saw the two flashes. You presumably also saw the whiteouts in the video as the Deep Impact impactor approached. You saw Comet Holmes suddenly enlarge to a *sphere* with hardly a discernible tail and coma to about the size of the Sun. That you are so quick to just look at the structure of that unusual object and say "outgassing" is testament to your inclination to side with theory over common sense and observation.
I'll bet you thought about saying "why comets and asteroids are identical in composition except for the effects of arcing and 'electrical machining'" instead of just "surprisingly similar". I think you sense just how dubious the EC explanation for water detection is. Calling that article "support" for the electric comet hypothesis is just a disingenuous argumentation tactic.
Disingenuous argumentation tactic? You're kidding right? What about comet theory has gone as expected? Comets continue to be shrouded in mystery through the lens of conventional theories.
What is dubious? Please, explain which parts of the Electric Comet document are incorrect...
This is why I initially came to Slashdot: to learn what was wrong with the Electric Universe theory through immersion. The problem is that you guys never back your allegations up with hard, painful facts. Bring it. "It" is certainly long overdue by now. I'm an open-minded individual. I *want* to be convinced.
The electric comet hypothesis can only be supported by the available measurements if the investigator says "the hypothesis is supported by any result we encounter" (or misinterprets/fabricates known phenomena). Do you remember hearing Don Scott, in a radio interview in which he made his "predicted observations" about an approaching comet, that "[irrefutably electrical phenomena will happen], or maybe nothing at all"? I do.
So what. I'm pretty sure he was worried about what sort of charge density differential he was going to get between the two items. I would have been too.
Scott's and Thornhill's "predictions" in their literature, media and publicity materials are of this same kind everywhere you look. Not one of them is unambiguously supported by any analysis I've ever seen, and I've read far more than the dumbed-down press releases and Thunderbolts hand-waving you and other EU hobbyists have lobbed around in support of the electric comet idea.
EU is a conceptual framework and methodology. It emphasizes laboratory work with plasmas (Hannes Alfven's "actualistic approach") over prophetic computer-code style instructions for how to build a universe from scratch. There is certainly a place in science for such scientific work, even if you refuse to acknowledge or appreciate the value, and even if you don't appreciate the work of Thornhill, Talbott, Peratt and others. It's the concepts and
Nereid, rather than speculating about something that supposedly happened 13 or 14 billion years ago, why don't you guys focus on explaining why comets and asteroids are surprisingly similar in composition? Once again, we see additional support for electric cometary theory...
What's completely amazing about your arguments that there is no real debate here is that you are actually *losing* the debate with each week that goes by!
You're acting like a child. Nobody can *force* you to consider something, and people who behave like that are brats! And even if somebody was to show you the things that you ask for, you'd just argue with them ad infinitum over really silly things. The point is that you no longer value objectivity. You view astrophysical interpretations as if they are statements of facts. Like much of the remainder of your own discipline, you frequently ignore the huge number of assumptions involved within these theories. This is not an effective strategy for getting at the truth.
Our discussions here are completely meaningless because ultimately, one of us is right. A reasonably intelligent person can tell that the way to figure it out is to first read what is being said. And a reasonably intelligent person can see that you value feeling and sounding right over actually being right, because to prioritize *being* right, a person has to be willing to admit that they can be wrong -- even on the big questions. And they have to *try* to be objective and lead an honest personal investigation into the theory before they actually start to argue against it. You totally skipped the first step!
Not being honest with yourself in your profession creates a dangerous situation for yourself. You could wake up on any particular morning and come to find that a new paradigm-changing observation has been made, and that your paradigm lost out. The chances are far higher than you realize. That you guys think you are seeing evidence for a primordial explosion 14 *billion* years ago is so silly when you can't even explain simple things like the temperature distributions for planets. If you can't explain why Saturn has a hot north pole, for instance, then why in the world are you guys trying to argue about something that supposedly happened 14 billion years ago? The CMB arguments are so much weaker than you accept. Observations of stellar fissioning or planetary expulsion will turn them into a relic virtually *overnight*.
I'm going to go back to more productive things for now. I'll leave you with one last thing. All that a person can be asked for in life is to be warned of a great, horrible mistake that they're making. I've offered you a warning. That you refuse to consider it with an open mind is your own problem. When the day comes and those observations of fissioning or expulsion come in (and trust me, they certainly will), you have to realize that your entire discipline will be "shaken up", and people will be evaluated on an individual basis. Those who can be demonstrated to have caused the greatest harm will be let go first. Nereid, you need to make sure that you are not causing *harm* to human progress. This should be a greater concern to you than sounding and feeling right. It's what the public will care about when they start counting up all of the money that you guys have wasted, and when heads start rolling!
Nereid, you are a very silly person. If the arguments were truly that simple, I'd actually agree with you completely. But, time and time again, your efforts are directed at convincing people who don't know any better that there is no workable cosmology being presented. You act as if there is only one possible cosmology that can possibly be created and that has evidence that supports it. No matter how you spin it, many very intelligent people have backed the plasma-based cosmology approach. For you to spin this as if it is my own garage invention is condescending to your supposed audience. I can tell that you have not read the materials because you consistently assume that the arguments are less powerful than they actually are. You do not see the big picture of what is being argued and why it is logical. You don't see the actual argument because you're unable to read what it says without disagreeing with it. The irony is that you'd do a far better job of arguing the case if you actually read the materials. But the thing is, I think you can't possibly stand to read them. And if you read them, you might "accidentally" see the logic to it, and your objections to it would give way to more nuanced feeling towards it. It's only by keeping yourself ignorant of the meat of the arguments that you can maintain your intense opposition to it. You're basically no different than the regular person in this regard. And in my own mind, it makes you less qualified to do what you do. The public expects people like yourself to maintain a level of objectivity. When they finally come to understand how you guys have been conducting yourselves, they are not going to like it one bit. You guys don't appreciate the rate of change that can happen within science. You've become very comfortable with the situation that is going on right now for no other reason than because it has been going on for quite a while. But the telescopes are getting better. The gravy train is almost over for you guys. I recommend milking it for all it's worth while you still can.
You just don't get it, and you will not until you see it happening with your own eyes. Until that very moment, you will fight like a rabid animal.
Did you try to understand it? or even bother to read it?
Are you just now figuring out right now that I don't read your messages?
You appear to not realize that you are interjecting into my own conversations. Normally, that would be considered to be rude, but you come from BAUT, where it's normal to be rude to people that you disagree with.
Yes, that's the one. If you look carefully at the image, you can see that there is still a slight connective filament between them in the infrared. That suggests that the red dwarf has yet to achieve an electromagnetically stable orbit -- which probably means that the expulsion did not occur all that long ago. I'm not asserting certainty here; this is my own personal speculation based upon what I already know. But I think that I am right here.
It is possible that the connection between these two bodies pulses in a rhythmic EM fashion. You guys erroneously assume that this pulsing is the result of a rotating lighthouse type of effect in spite of the rapid rates that have been observed with the pulses. Instead, pulsars are just bodies in space that are trying to achieve electromagnetic stability, and for whatever reason, an electromagnetic resonance erupts. Plasmas in space can become highly electrical. It shouldn't surprise you though really. We've observed the Sun and Earth connect with huge magnetic ropes by now. Your true problem is your willingness to just explain it away as a secondary force, and your refusal to consider that bodies in space can and do acquire and trade electrical charges -- oftentimes violently. You're seeing it right here, although you will surely deny it since it does not appear in your textbooks.
I'm not interested in hearing the garbage that you've been taught, btw. I'm educating you on what the EU says here. If you want to change the nature of the conversation to interpreting observations through the context of EU, I'd be glad to oblige you on that. The EU does a pretty good job of explaining nearly all of our modern observations in a conceptual fashion (certainly far better than you realize) without resorting to dark matters or forces. But I will *never* respond to your constant barrage of condescension, and I will expect a sincere apology from all of you jackasses when the day comes when you guys observe firsthand a planetary expulsion or stellar fissioning (I am a technical writer btw, and I will be writing about all of this down the road). To be honest, I'll be laughing because you guys are really destroying your own careers. You're letting this small group of scientists hoard some of the greatest discoveries ever made just because you can't man-up (or woman-up in your case, eh?) to the fact that you may be wrong. Humans are defined by our fallibility. There's nothing about mathematics that changes that. It's our psychology that's screwed up and that screws up our theories.
The telescopes are getting there. We don't have much longer to wait. I'm betting on 2 or 3 years, which is why this is so exciting. If I were you, I'd start putting away some savings. There will come a day when you are not so proud of the APOD in APODNereid, and you will suddenly find that you're famous -- but not in the way that you imagined. I don't have much sympathy for you though by now. You've been so horribly rude to me and others over time that you actually don't even deserve the footnote that you will get in the history of science. You've really wasted a lot of our time trying to get the word out, and you've generated a lot of excuses for people here on Slashdot to continue to believe in your fairy tale gravity-centric universe. Slashdot, the company, has to go along with what their user base wants to hear about. But, it's people like you that convince the user base to ignore alternative cosmologies. You really have no idea how much of a negative impact you have upon science's forward momentum. You think that your education and position somehow insulates you from the possibility of being wrong. But you truly do deceive yourself, Nereid. Your story will be that of a Greek Tragedy because I'm quite sure that this stuff is going to completely unravel right before our eyes. The paradigm change is going to result from a sequence of images, and it will be very dramatic when it occurs. Such is the nature of a catastrophic universe; it typically appears quiescent and stable, and then one day, somebody will be pointing a telescope in the right direction at the right time, and the images will not be explainable within the conventional paradigms.
It's real hubris to say that one's own bunch of subjective interpretations of *other* subjective, human interpretations recorded by said humans as mythology are more reliable windows to understanding the physical universe than are actual, physical observations or theories consistent with those observations.
more reliable? Not quite. You'd like it if it were true though, huh? We merely admit human testimony into the set of data that we're willing to consider. We do it far more carefully than you imagine, and it *never* supercedes direct observation.
You guys ignore virtually the whole lot of human writings and stories for thousands of years! And why? In part, because it doesn't make sense within your paradigm. When traditional astronomers see things that they don't understand in mythology, rather than question their own assumptions, they assume that the writings are garbage. That's a far stronger case for hubris. An honest, objective group of people would try and listen a little bit harder. At this point though, there is no longer *any* evidence of historical value that can induce you to question your own mathematics because you've worked yourself into such a frenzy over ridiculing the field of comparative mythology that you're no longer being rational about it. It doesn't even make sense that people would just write down garbage for thousands of years. You guys have over-reacted to a concern about accuracy in mythology by over-emphasizing mathematics. You could control that, so you decided it was a better way to try to understand the universe. It makes sense, but what you underestimated was the power of human psychology to penetrate the process of peer review. Your math eventually *became* both your mythology and scripture when you persisted in your astrophysical assumptions as you observed evidence that they were being violated. You guys made the mistake of listening to some of the loudest voices in the room (like Sagan and Lyell). When people like Tesla and Velikovsky came by and proposed ideas that were far ahead of their time, the group's natural response was to squash or ignore them out of fear. Your favored set of theories over time became less physical and more metaphysical until now things like dark energy and dark matter are required to keep the thing moving forward. When the spiral arms of galaxies were observed to rotate unusually, everybody should have taken a very deep breath and reconsidered the fundamental force of the universe. It was never done. You should not be surprised when you eventually realize that the younger kids are not interested in the horribly stitched-together beast that you're offering them. It's just not an effective tool for understanding our surroundings anymore. Astrophysics is a complete and utter mess! We don't even get clear and concise explanations for what gravity and mass are!
The ancient people are your relatives in a sense. And you are essentially shitting on their graves, to be honest. It's the ultimate form of not listening to your parents! In a sense, it's all juvenile behavior.
It's similar hubris for self-labeled "plasma physicists" (and even the occasional *actual* plasma physicist) to claim that a superficial resemblance of a few plasma effects they've seen in their work or models they've done on computers supersede the observations (of which they are largely unaware) of astronomers, cosmologists, astrophysicists, geophysicists, meteorologists, and planetary scientists, and moreover the theories developed in those fields that are consistent with the phenomena said "plasma physicists" misinterpret, misunderstand, or just don't know about.
I really wish you'd drop this Anon format for writing. I want to observe your reaction the day that astrophysicists observe in extreme detail a planet being born from a star, or a star fissioning into two stars. That day will mark a new humble beginning for you. You won't be able to deny it any longer. Ei
Apparently not enough to motivate you to actually investigate why they think that, but enough to make you email a mythologist for his opinion on modern physics
"If occasionally, historical evidence does not square with formulated laws, it should be remembered that a law is but a deduction from experience and experiment, and therefore laws must conform with historical facts, not facts with laws." -- Immanuel Velikovsky
You're the only ones who think there is even a problem in the first place.
It is absolutely ASTOUNDING that you look past the fact that the conventional theories don't understand 95% of the universe! Time and time again, I have to help you guys perform a reality check. Understanding just 5% of something in any discipline other than astrophysics typically means that you do not understand it at all! You guys think that you have created this theory that is above reproach -- even by people who work within plasma laboratories. What you've actually done is confused the masses and induced them to become apathetic about space!
FROM WHERE DOES YOUR CONFIDENCE ARISE???
Grad students are flocking to the www.thunderbolts.info site and Thunderbolts.info is doubling the BAUT Forum's traffic in unique vistors as of December. The January 2008 issue of Astronomy Magazine has a feature on whether or not Jupiter is powered by a Z-pinch. You're not paying attention to what's happening. Why are *grad* students flocking to the Thunderbolts site?
Science isn't actually about truth or explanation or classification, it's about experiment and observation.
The apparent problem is that you appear to not realize that laboratory plasma physicists are the ones arguing for the Electric Universe concepts against the mathematicians who play with beautiful equations all day long. Kristian Birkeland was the world's first laboratory astrophysicist. It was Hannes Alfven -- a man who was intimately familiar with the laboratory -- who argued against mathematical constructs like "frozen-in place magnetic fields", the supposed perfect conductivity of plasmas and magnetic reconnection. Somewhere along the way, it seems, you were convinced that black is white. We're saying the same thing; you're just talking about the wrong people. When Einstein admitted that not even he could understand physics anymore, that should have been your cue that physics was taken over by mathematicians. You somehow missed it.
Of course there's no reason a theory has to make "sense" or be "beautiful" either, but if a theory is not testable, it's no better than poetry
And of course that's very true. But once again, I fear that you think that you are talking about the Electric Universe. EU is highly testable. We could build an impulse current laboratory where we can replicate Tesla's findings. Birkeland built a Terrella to understand the aurora (and when Alfven built a replica for Sydney Chapman, he refused to even look at the thing, btw). We can fire plasma guns at physical objects and model comets and electrical cratering. We can study the scalability of plasmas, and people have done so. What they've found is that we do not need to postulate that the universe is filled with 95% invisible matters. They can generate spiral galaxies with the proper rotation curves using nothing more than the characteristics of laboratory plasmas. The galactic rotation curves in simulations *only* become confused once you propose that the electromagnetic forces of plasmas to be secondary, rather than the driving, organizing force.
The problem isn't that Electric Universe isn't testable. It's that people like yourself haven't *read* the evidence that clearly points out what has been tested in it, and what future tests that have been proposed for it. I don't know if you're aware of this, but people tend to only read those things which they already agree with. We make a decision about what we want to believe, and then go from there. You are doing just that right here.
This article has very little to do with magentic reconnection nor the lack of electricity (it seem to just posit that MHD-waves can carry energy from the surface to chromosphere and they were observed). Of course since MHD-waves are essentially only present in electrically conducting fluids (like plasma or seawater), I doubt anyone but you has the impression that people are ignoring electrical currents (or electricity as you are calling it).;^)
It's so funny to see you guys try to diminish and nuance the situation until it is utterly meaningless. People on Slashdot spend so much time trying to parse semantics that they are quite willing to give a pass on the meat of the conversation. I clearly realize that electricity plays a role within astrophysical theories. The issue, as you likely realize, is that we constantly see it argued that it plays a subservient role. Astrophysicists are constantly telling us, "Yeah, it's there, but it doesn't *DO* anything. At least, not what you say!" You know how many times I've heard that?
The real question is this: At what point in your astrophysical models does the universe start being a closed electrical system? And why? In the days of Chapman, it was argued that the Earth was electrically closed. Birkeland turned out to be right. It is still argued to this day that thunderstorms are a closed system near the ground. And yet, this flies in the face of the numerous recent photographs of upper-atmospheric lightning leading straight into space. Currently, as it stands, the belief is that we can have electrical connections between the Sun and the Earth ("magnetic ropes"). Why? Because they've been observed to exist! Well, how much thought have you put into it? Where does it stop? We see jets in space that are highly collimated over tens of thousands of light years. Isn't it possible that these are also Birkeland Currents? What is stopping it? Every time that you see a "black hole" shooting a jet at another galaxy, ask yourself: are they fighting, or are they cooperating? What looks like a violent blast to one person can quite reasonably be argued to be a connective filament between two galaxies to another person. Who can say that they are right when the issue is rarely even discussed? Do we believe things in astrophysics for no better reason than because they can no longer be denied? What keeps our solar system quasi-neutral? There is after all a pervasive magnetic field that sweeps through the whole thing, right? Within the Electric Universe, a galaxy can be generally approximated as a homopolar motor, where current travels down the arms across the disc based upon the movement of charges through the axis. And the axes of galaxies furthermore connect up to create a vast electrical network. Who's to say that they are wrong? The observations can certainly be interpreted that way, and nobody has any right to ridicule them for stating it!
It's called creative problem solving. And before we always default to just what we've been taught in school, we'd be wise to exercise it more often when we consider the big questions in science. There are powerful arguments to be made that the entire universe is electrically connected, and that there are no closed systems anywhere. For God's sake, we see terraced craters all over the friggin place, and terraced craters can be formed with rotating Birkeland Currents. And even more than that, we also see craters that have little "c" copyright signs in them (one was imaged on Mercury just this past week), suggesting that the same force was only able to perform a half rotation before it was cut off. That certainly makes more sense than a "c"-shaped lava tube inside of a crater. All of the clues are right before us to assemble a competing cosmology to the conventional theories. Why is it not done? Whatever the reason, it's certainly not because it *cannot* be done. The Plasma Universe point of view is incredibly effective at describing planetary features within our local solar system. Whether or not people here realize it matters little.
It's actually non-controversial enough that we can just look it up in wikipedia. There are multiple references to the unsolved acceleration problem there...
I pulled my data from "The Electric Sky", and they reference Peter Gallagher's conference on the subject, "Seminar on Observations and Modeling of the Corona and Solar Wind - Big Bear Solar Observatory". They appear to have published a slide from his presentation., which is where I got the numbers from.
As far as I know, this 'Electric Universe' idea (EU) has no basis, either in terms of quantitatively matching any significant subset of the relevant observations, or in terms of the underlying theory (ask an EU proponent about how much experimental support there is for the EU idea of what supports the Sun against gravitational collapse, to take just one example; or to characterise the current which powers the Sun, in terms of charge carriers, flux, speeds, and so on, and how well this characterisation matches what inter-planetary probes such as Ulysses or Galileo or Cassini have detected).
What people on Slashdot need to realize is that Nereid refuses to actually read what the Electric Universe says from one of the books that have been written on it, and yet viciously maintains that it cannot possibly be true. Caveat Emptor!
If the Electric Universe framework and Tesla's rumoured theories (little to nothing was published, leaving rumours and eyewitnesses as the main source of information) are correct, they'll stand up to testing and be accepted as valid.
If they're not, they'll wither and die leaving only a handful of crank scientists supporting them.
You are quite correct, but I urge you to look closer at the linked-to material to get a better picture of the level of detail that in fact persists about Tesla. It is more than we have all been assuming for some time now. Tesla ran high-voltage impulse currents down thin wire filaments, and this induced electrical explosions that included pressure waves. This is pretty much a textbook explanation of the "pinch" effect. The greatest surprise is that the pressure waves had no problem moving through a copper Faraday cage. And this cannot be inconsequential or any minor matter.
Slashdot Mirror
It has been a wonderful joy watching the people here on Slashdot completely misunderstand the Electric Universe debate. It will be even more fun 20 years from now when you guys are claiming that you never actually argued against electricity over plasmas in space, but that the Electric Universe is still wrong!
Your confidence in the Standard Model is glowing. The problem however with your overwhelming agreement of it is that it is to the detriment of your own investigation into alternative explanations and additional information that can shed light on these types of matters.
If somebody was reading your well-informed post, you might come off as an expert. However, it's not that you've read everything. It's that you've permitted yourself to believe the things that you have read first before investigating alternative explanations to the extent that you did this one. Your confidence and tone are evidence for it.
The fact that you categorize people on the basis of their scientific beliefs is a blatant admission that you will not carefully consider their arguments. It may work for establishing some sort of credentials here on Slashdot, but don't be fooled into thinking that this approach will help you to solve the most difficult mysteries known to man. The truth will be had by listening to people; not by some simplistic system of ignoring them.
The fact is that, regardless of your apparent confidence, intelligent people can and do disagree on experimental results and consensus views -- even on experiments that occurred a hundred years ago. This is not "pathological skepticism". This is the real world where we are not all clones of one another. It is healthy. It is good. There is nothing wrong with it. If people can present evidence to support an argument, then they deserve to be heard out.
I don't agree with everything that Oliver Manuel says, but I also don't think it's at all relevant that he's retired. People don't just automatically expire like copyrights. It also shouldn't matter whether or not Oliver was trained to be just like credentialed astrophysicists. The astrophysical community still has a lot of work to get its house in order; with your apparent wisdom, you should know that so long as that's the case, there will always be outsiders trying to help out. Whether or not you agree, it's within the *public's* best interest that it is so.
I'm going to diverge here to a subject which really bugs the crap out of me every time I run into one of you guys who possess so much confidence in the Standard Model.
One of the most prominent mistakes that your whole crew is making is your combined insistence that ancient people were all silly, simple-minded idiots who spent lots of time telling stories and drawing images that had no significant -- as in possessing great power over them -- meaning. You guys all just assume that these people were scared of their own shadow, the weather, earthquakes, whatever. It's quite a dramatic assumption that you don't even attempt to prove. Some would rightly use the term "uniformitarian" to describe it (which is a dirty word in our own circles). There exists plenty of literature on the subject that strongly suggests that this assumption is baseless, and even complete and utter nonsense. In the process of this assumption, you guys just set aside a mountain of information that has accumulated about ancient stories -- some approaching the level of actual eyewitness accounts of events within the sky. Some of the accounts are far more detailed than you know -- to the point of describing the fine detail of what happens when two planets "interact". Rather than listen to the people who witnessed it firsthand, you guys invent your own mathematics and simulations to suit your own perceived gravity-centric universe.
Most of you guys still think that the flood was a local phenomenon inspired by the Bible or more generally by religion. It is a glaring example of your lack of concern for thoroughness on topics that you don't believe are worthy of your attention. Notice that you possess this belief because it is consensus; it's not that you actually ever personally checked in with an expert in mythology to ask them how many cultures recount a flood, and what the chances are that all of those cultures could have possibly been told a story about a
Slashdot should have ran the more interesting story pertaining to nuclear decay rates that came up this week, which my nuclear physicist associate (Oliver Manuel) forwarded to me ...
Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance
Seach the Firehose for "decay rate" and you'll find my submission, which was rejected (not complaining actually, just a bit confused).
And it's not even that this result is the first time it's been noticed. Russian researcher Simon Schnoll has performed *thousands* of simple geiger counter isotope decay rate experiments and noticed the same exact thing -- that there is an astrophysical influence to decay rates ...
Russian Discovery Challenges Existence of 'Absolute Time'
The idea that nuclear decay rates might not be random is pretty paradigm-changing. We can doubt the results, but shouldn't we at least be talking about it? It seems to me like a very important finding.
Isn't this even more pertinent to the concept of anthropogenic warming than the absolute dating article Slashdot went with???
Hey, buddy. I said it's over. Get over it.
I'm not interested anymore. You guys had your chance to make your case. I know how you feel by now, ya think?
I've moved on to better things now. Phase 1 of my research is done, and I'm now bringing together all of the work I've done into a series of papers. The point of my immersion here was to understand how people here attempt to understand complicated issues (mainly in the space sciences), and how they act towards novel scientific paradigms. This is called "investigative journalism". It's increasingly a very rare phenomenon these days -- especially in the sciences -- so it's understandable if you've never heard of it. In my own personal opinion, the world would be a far better place if there were more people like myself who actually dug into issues related to the space sciences sufficient to penetrate the superficial appearance of things. In my view, science is not a spectator's sport. We *must* get our hands dirty and get down to business through argumentation in order to understand the cultural context for our scientific beliefs.
This new phase of my research will involve writing up multi-disciplinary papers based upon the research I've done to date. I have plenty of access to scientists, so all of my work will be vetted. I'm very satisfied with the progress that I've been making so far in this regard, and I hope that the people here on Slashdot did not get so annoyed by my presence that they won't consider reading the results of my research. Some of you guys will be surprised to see your own arguments in these papers. And I can tell you right now that it's not all that hard to demonstrate that pseudo-skepticism is endemic on this forum and in American culture in general. I've found at least one genius listed on www.crank.net, and nobody appears to realize it, or care. By performing an in-depth case study of this particular man, I will demonstrate beyond any doubt that the philosophy science predominant here (pseudo-skepticism) is faulty. The idea that we may be culturally blacklisting geniuses *hopefully* disturbs you somewhat.
This second phase though is still just temporary. The culmination of my investigations and immersions into these papers merely represents a starting point for the remainder of my work. My approach is ultimately a systemic approach to understanding some of the most perplexing issues in science today, and it would be foolish to put all of this work into *understanding* these issues without eventually getting my hands dirty and eventually participating in them in some manner. And it's at this point, much further down the road, where the true rewards of my systemic approach will bear fruit in the form of a laboratory. The process of interviewing people listed on crank.net will assist with identifying the people who should run the laboratory. The ultimate irony of the situation is that the blacklist that you guys refer to for exemplifying your philosophical approach will serve as our starting point for identifying talent.
For me, philosophy of science cannot be separated from the science itself. And in my own personal opinion, those who believe that peer review is a perfect institution do not really understand what philosophy of science really is. The inferential step does not become perfect just because a bunch of people agree upon it. The cultural context within which science exists is *incredibly* important to the health of science itself. I'm not interested in debating these points at this time. The time for two-way conversation is over, and now it's my turn for some monologue, to explain what I've discovered in these papers that I'm writing up.
I'm working my way to the same level of knowledge and understanding of science as everybody else here, but I'm being far more philosophically rigorous in my approach than the traditional scientific education. The standard methodology involves memorizing a lot of facts deemed to be the scientific consensus, and every once in a while throwing in some philosophy of science here
You're doing a great job of summarizing the problem of how cosmology is worked on these days: as a hierarchical system with astrophysicists at the top. This system might work better if the education was specifically geared towards maintaining more objectivity and neutrality with regards to the interpretation of space observations. But, in fact, the bulk of the training that you hold in such high regard is geared towards one particular cosmology, and blends assumptions and speculative research (like helioseismology) in with agreed-upon facts. To argue that people must all be cast within the same mold before they can have a legitimate opinion on the biggest questions of the universe is self-defeating and blatantly antithetical to the history of science. We need outsiders and skeptics in *ALL* interpretive natural science disciplines commenting on *ALL* interpretations at *ALL* times in order to keep fresh ideas coming in and innovation moving forward.
If the history of science is to act as a guide in any manner, then consistency of data with a model -- in some regard -- should *never* act as an excuse to avoid investigating and developing alternative models. That's the same exact mistake that was made with the "action at a distance" paradigm, the two fluid model for electricity and magnetism, at the time of James Maxwell. The model worked perfectly down to every detail. The inconvenient truth of the situation, however, for all of Michael Faraday's critics was that the model was just plain wrong. In the same manner, Don Scott's assertions are perfectly legitimate for him to make. He's doing nothing more than pointing out an implicit assumption within the numerous public relations releases on the topic. People who like to think of themselves as maintaining some amount of neutrality on the issue of cosmology actually prefer that the assumptions be stripped from the facts so that they can evaluate on their own whether or not to agree with the interpretations.
That's because your own assertions that they are wrong tend to be heavily laden with your own form of speculation and assumptions. We are skeptics. Skeptics rate information on the basis of certainty, and lots of assumptions within theories demands that we lower our certainty.
And yet, you are willing to spend time explaining your *beliefs* on the issue.
Nereid, if your allegations about the Electric Universe were even remotely true, then there's no way in hell that people like Anthony Peratt would associate themselves with these ideas. Your arguments constitute a complete non sequiter when placed into that context. In fact, every time that you pretend that the issues are as simple as this juvenile short list of hypotheses, a person could be forgiven for interpreting your statements as blatant obfuscations and malicious in intent. There is an actual debate here to be had, and the real action is far above the playing field that you've laid out for yourself. If you want to impress somebody, then why don't you find a problem within the rejoinder to Tim Thompson ...
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/Rejoinder.htm
This is the level of detail that I would expect to see from you before I would ever consider forwarding something on to anybody. Short of a detailed refutation of these sorts of arguments (and demanding that we be your library assistant will not cut it), you're beneath our radars.
ps -- I'm amazed that you insist on pointing out the problems with EU within comments attached to a story titled, "Could We Find a Door to a Parallel Universe?" Who's the pseudoscience, here? The topic of the article was about some astrophysicist who wastes a bunch of time trying to invent imaginary matters that would allow him to manipulate wormholes! The particular thread that I commented on was started by a person who was ridiculing astrophysics for how absurd it has become. Are you just completely oblivious to what's happening around you?
I think that you vastly underestimate what you're up against here. You're just not even trying to get it. You're acting as though you can argue against it without actually getting it, by hacking little pieces off of it. The only real way to attack an idea is to go straight to the heart: figure out what it's saying -- what's the meat? -- and go straight for it. Your refusal to actually fully understand it prevents this from happening. You have no clue what the Electric Universe even says about quantum mechanics, do you? And yet, you consistently believe that you can figure out what is right and what is wrong without actually first learning what is being said. It's really absurd.
Tim Thompson and ScienceApologist were *far* more compelling than yourself. Tim Thompson could at least explain his perspective using facts. He excelled at throwing up flack and then lending it more weight than it deserved. ScienceApologist was also very educated. He impressed me many times. You just bore the reader with unimportant criticisms. It's a bland technique. All it does is induce the reader to stop reading. If you wanted to actually be read, you'd be far more concise.
I'm somewhat curious too who's paying for all of this? Don't I pay your salary? You've been responding to my posts at ALL HOURS OF THE DAY! And you responded something like 14 times to one of my prior postings. Does your boss know that you spend your time this way? Or are you just an intern or something? Does NASA really have the budget for you to be spending all of this time online? The timestamps are right there for all to see.
You guys are unable to locate 95% of the universe's supposed matter. The conventional theories can't adequately explain why planets appear to frequently have hotspots at their poles. There remains no explanation within the conventional theories for why the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets. There are all sorts of enigmatic craters and rilles on the rocky planets, including one just found on Mercury last week that is quite similar to the Tycho crater on the Moon (another crater which remains a mystery to this day). I've yet to see any credible attempt to explain why the Deep Impact impactor generated two flashes at the time of impact nor the fact that lightning is frequently photographed leading into space these days. Shouldn't that affect our certainty that storms are closed electrical systems? All conventional attempts to understand the enigmatic Stardust mission data have resulted in just more assertions that the results are not representative of all comets. There's been no attempt to understand how it might be possible for experimental results like these to occur:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0101/0101089.pdf
If we can see elements popping into existence within simple ball lightning laboratory experiments, then one has to wonder about the implications for stars.
What's ultimately really silly about how science operates these days is that there is far too much eagerness to cast aside alternative competing theories that challenge the conventional ones. This problem is called pseudo-skepticism ("fake skepticism") -- the process of having a bias within your skepticism. Skepticism is supposed to be a philosophy of science concept, an information filter, that is applied to all information we are exposed to, equally. It is a way of being that allows people to evaluate the certainty associated with information. When it is applied with a bias, where conventional wisdom is favored, it leads to a problem: the "mainstream" ends up simply unaware of alternative sets of interpretations for their data, and they frequently just end up ignoring these alternative theories. So, this is why people like yourself ultimately look quite silly: because you don't even have enough information to competently argue that the new data we see on a daily basis are discriminatingly supportive of the conventional theories against the Electric Universe. You can't possibly know that until you understand the "big picture" of what is being stated about the Electric Universe. For every piece of evidence you point out that you say demonstrates your own set of theories, you actually aren't even capable of identifying at the current moment whether or not the data fits into this other challenging set of theories too. And this is ultimately why I'm in some manners a bit more capable of identifying the situation than yourself. You've allowed your education to blind you; you thought that you were going to school to learn *what* to believe rather than how to think.
Nereid, we will eventually make our own laboratories, and we will make the technologies based upon EU that you argue so much against. The money will eventually come in.
And by the way, point me to your comet document when it's ready. I'm very eager to see what you come up with!
It's the natural result of allowing mathematicians to take over physics. They could care less about physicality.
We shouldn't be surprised. Where are the critics and the skeptics? Nobody seems to care about the stories being right. The public's love affair with gadgets is obscuring their contemplation of the complex philosophical questions associated with astrophysical interpretations. Consensus has become an ideal within science, and the skeptics are marginalized as having no value. The public evaluates its science largely on the basis of popularity. It's a very dangerous long-term situation for a country that expects innovation to continue as it has for many decades now.
We need an attitude adjustment. We (as in popular science) know *nothing* about what's going on in space. We are reminded of it nearly every single day. There are far too many surprises and enigmatic observations. And dark matter and dark energy are being used as fudge factors for things like gravitational lensing. This is a sinking ship, and the smart ones will start looking elsewhere right now.
What you guys consistently just don't get is that these guys are acting as true Pyrrhonian sceptics. They refuse to accept claims of certainty in the absence of substantial proof, and they rightfully question all dogmatic assertions like "redshift always indicates a Doppler Shift" or "the CMB is evidence for a Big Bang". This is very different from "academic scepticism", which is a more nitpicking form of scepticism that basically leads to nowhere real fast. This is scepticism for the sake of questioning authoritarianism. From "Empires of Belief" by Stuart Sim (page 8):
Hopefully, you realize that these are philosophical issues that demand attention regardless of the discipline.
What you guys need to realize is that there are no dogmatic assertions within the Electric Universe. Although the claims certainly appear to you as though they are invalid, none of them are based upon any principle or central criterion taken to be beyond doubt. They all follow from laboratory experiences or unadulterated observation. In fact, that is the fundamental principle of the Electric Universe, for if something can be disproven within the laboratory, then it is effectively invalid. By contrast, the conventional paradigms are founded on the fundamental basis that the universe had an origin in time, and then works its way outwards from there. This is an act of faith, not all that different from Creationism to be honest, and hopefully you guys do not disrespect people for not agreeing with your leap of faith. You perceive it to be more than an act of faith because there is mathematics to support it. But this is silly because we can generate mathematics to demonstrate different cosmologies -- many of them in fact quite absurd. Mathematics is no infallible litmus test.
The primary problem with the conventional paradigm is the underlying philosophical approach that has become standard protocol within your discipline. Let's take the example of magnetic reconnection: there is little interest in legitimately testing the claims of magnetic reconnection against competing theories. The fact that exploding double layers are excluded as a possible cause for the observations introduces a very serious problem of creating a complete set of interpretations for observations. You guys are allowing assumptions to creep into your conclusions by virtue of restricting interpretations to those that lend support to the conventional theories. It's this lack of rigor that is most damning about the conventional paradigms, and I'm afraid that the only way to address it is to just be more rigorous -- which ultimately means, God forbid, testing aspects of your competing paradigms (exploding double layers) relative to your own interpretations (magnetic reconnection) in an honest manner. In fact, this complacency is a direct result of the lack of scepti
The instruments are picking up traces of OH coming off of the comets. The H are simply protons from the solar wind and the O is coming from silicates within the comet's body. Oxygen, of course, is one of the most common atoms in the universe. It's not rocket science and your "outgassing" is nothing but electrical machining.
You saw the two flashes. You presumably also saw the whiteouts in the video as the Deep Impact impactor approached. You saw Comet Holmes suddenly enlarge to a *sphere* with hardly a discernible tail and coma to about the size of the Sun. That you are so quick to just look at the structure of that unusual object and say "outgassing" is testament to your inclination to side with theory over common sense and observation.
Disingenuous argumentation tactic? You're kidding right? What about comet theory has gone as expected? Comets continue to be shrouded in mystery through the lens of conventional theories.
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What is dubious? Please, explain which parts of the Electric Comet document are incorrect
http://www.thunderbolts.info/pdf/ElectricComet.pdf
This is why I initially came to Slashdot: to learn what was wrong with the Electric Universe theory through immersion. The problem is that you guys never back your allegations up with hard, painful facts. Bring it. "It" is certainly long overdue by now. I'm an open-minded individual. I *want* to be convinced.
So what. I'm pretty sure he was worried about what sort of charge density differential he was going to get between the two items. I would have been too.
EU is a conceptual framework and methodology. It emphasizes laboratory work with plasmas (Hannes Alfven's "actualistic approach") over prophetic computer-code style instructions for how to build a universe from scratch. There is certainly a place in science for such scientific work, even if you refuse to acknowledge or appreciate the value, and even if you don't appreciate the work of Thornhill, Talbott, Peratt and others. It's the concepts and
Nereid, rather than speculating about something that supposedly happened 13 or 14 billion years ago, why don't you guys focus on explaining why comets and asteroids are surprisingly similar in composition? Once again, we see additional support for electric cometary theory ...
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13224-comet-samples-are-surprisingly-asteroidlike.html
What's completely amazing about your arguments that there is no real debate here is that you are actually *losing* the debate with each week that goes by!
You're acting like a child. Nobody can *force* you to consider something, and people who behave like that are brats! And even if somebody was to show you the things that you ask for, you'd just argue with them ad infinitum over really silly things. The point is that you no longer value objectivity. You view astrophysical interpretations as if they are statements of facts. Like much of the remainder of your own discipline, you frequently ignore the huge number of assumptions involved within these theories. This is not an effective strategy for getting at the truth.
Our discussions here are completely meaningless because ultimately, one of us is right. A reasonably intelligent person can tell that the way to figure it out is to first read what is being said. And a reasonably intelligent person can see that you value feeling and sounding right over actually being right, because to prioritize *being* right, a person has to be willing to admit that they can be wrong -- even on the big questions. And they have to *try* to be objective and lead an honest personal investigation into the theory before they actually start to argue against it. You totally skipped the first step!
Not being honest with yourself in your profession creates a dangerous situation for yourself. You could wake up on any particular morning and come to find that a new paradigm-changing observation has been made, and that your paradigm lost out. The chances are far higher than you realize. That you guys think you are seeing evidence for a primordial explosion 14 *billion* years ago is so silly when you can't even explain simple things like the temperature distributions for planets. If you can't explain why Saturn has a hot north pole, for instance, then why in the world are you guys trying to argue about something that supposedly happened 14 billion years ago? The CMB arguments are so much weaker than you accept. Observations of stellar fissioning or planetary expulsion will turn them into a relic virtually *overnight*.
I'm going to go back to more productive things for now. I'll leave you with one last thing. All that a person can be asked for in life is to be warned of a great, horrible mistake that they're making. I've offered you a warning. That you refuse to consider it with an open mind is your own problem. When the day comes and those observations of fissioning or expulsion come in (and trust me, they certainly will), you have to realize that your entire discipline will be "shaken up", and people will be evaluated on an individual basis. Those who can be demonstrated to have caused the greatest harm will be let go first. Nereid, you need to make sure that you are not causing *harm* to human progress. This should be a greater concern to you than sounding and feeling right. It's what the public will care about when they start counting up all of the money that you guys have wasted, and when heads start rolling!
Nereid, you are a very silly person. If the arguments were truly that simple, I'd actually agree with you completely. But, time and time again, your efforts are directed at convincing people who don't know any better that there is no workable cosmology being presented. You act as if there is only one possible cosmology that can possibly be created and that has evidence that supports it. No matter how you spin it, many very intelligent people have backed the plasma-based cosmology approach. For you to spin this as if it is my own garage invention is condescending to your supposed audience. I can tell that you have not read the materials because you consistently assume that the arguments are less powerful than they actually are. You do not see the big picture of what is being argued and why it is logical. You don't see the actual argument because you're unable to read what it says without disagreeing with it. The irony is that you'd do a far better job of arguing the case if you actually read the materials. But the thing is, I think you can't possibly stand to read them. And if you read them, you might "accidentally" see the logic to it, and your objections to it would give way to more nuanced feeling towards it. It's only by keeping yourself ignorant of the meat of the arguments that you can maintain your intense opposition to it. You're basically no different than the regular person in this regard. And in my own mind, it makes you less qualified to do what you do. The public expects people like yourself to maintain a level of objectivity. When they finally come to understand how you guys have been conducting yourselves, they are not going to like it one bit. You guys don't appreciate the rate of change that can happen within science. You've become very comfortable with the situation that is going on right now for no other reason than because it has been going on for quite a while. But the telescopes are getting better. The gravy train is almost over for you guys. I recommend milking it for all it's worth while you still can.
You just don't get it, and you will not until you see it happening with your own eyes. Until that very moment, you will fight like a rabid animal.
Are you just now figuring out right now that I don't read your messages?
You appear to not realize that you are interjecting into my own conversations. Normally, that would be considered to be rude, but you come from BAUT, where it's normal to be rude to people that you disagree with.
Yes, that's the one. If you look carefully at the image, you can see that there is still a slight connective filament between them in the infrared. That suggests that the red dwarf has yet to achieve an electromagnetically stable orbit -- which probably means that the expulsion did not occur all that long ago. I'm not asserting certainty here; this is my own personal speculation based upon what I already know. But I think that I am right here.
It is possible that the connection between these two bodies pulses in a rhythmic EM fashion. You guys erroneously assume that this pulsing is the result of a rotating lighthouse type of effect in spite of the rapid rates that have been observed with the pulses. Instead, pulsars are just bodies in space that are trying to achieve electromagnetic stability, and for whatever reason, an electromagnetic resonance erupts. Plasmas in space can become highly electrical. It shouldn't surprise you though really. We've observed the Sun and Earth connect with huge magnetic ropes by now. Your true problem is your willingness to just explain it away as a secondary force, and your refusal to consider that bodies in space can and do acquire and trade electrical charges -- oftentimes violently. You're seeing it right here, although you will surely deny it since it does not appear in your textbooks.
I'm not interested in hearing the garbage that you've been taught, btw. I'm educating you on what the EU says here. If you want to change the nature of the conversation to interpreting observations through the context of EU, I'd be glad to oblige you on that. The EU does a pretty good job of explaining nearly all of our modern observations in a conceptual fashion (certainly far better than you realize) without resorting to dark matters or forces. But I will *never* respond to your constant barrage of condescension, and I will expect a sincere apology from all of you jackasses when the day comes when you guys observe firsthand a planetary expulsion or stellar fissioning (I am a technical writer btw, and I will be writing about all of this down the road). To be honest, I'll be laughing because you guys are really destroying your own careers. You're letting this small group of scientists hoard some of the greatest discoveries ever made just because you can't man-up (or woman-up in your case, eh?) to the fact that you may be wrong. Humans are defined by our fallibility. There's nothing about mathematics that changes that. It's our psychology that's screwed up and that screws up our theories.
The telescopes are getting there. We don't have much longer to wait. I'm betting on 2 or 3 years, which is why this is so exciting. If I were you, I'd start putting away some savings. There will come a day when you are not so proud of the APOD in APODNereid, and you will suddenly find that you're famous -- but not in the way that you imagined. I don't have much sympathy for you though by now. You've been so horribly rude to me and others over time that you actually don't even deserve the footnote that you will get in the history of science. You've really wasted a lot of our time trying to get the word out, and you've generated a lot of excuses for people here on Slashdot to continue to believe in your fairy tale gravity-centric universe. Slashdot, the company, has to go along with what their user base wants to hear about. But, it's people like you that convince the user base to ignore alternative cosmologies. You really have no idea how much of a negative impact you have upon science's forward momentum. You think that your education and position somehow insulates you from the possibility of being wrong. But you truly do deceive yourself, Nereid. Your story will be that of a Greek Tragedy because I'm quite sure that this stuff is going to completely unravel right before our eyes. The paradigm change is going to result from a sequence of images, and it will be very dramatic when it occurs. Such is the nature of a catastrophic universe; it typically appears quiescent and stable, and then one day, somebody will be pointing a telescope in the right direction at the right time, and the images will not be explainable within the conventional paradigms.
more reliable? Not quite. You'd like it if it were true though, huh? We merely admit human testimony into the set of data that we're willing to consider. We do it far more carefully than you imagine, and it *never* supercedes direct observation.
You guys ignore virtually the whole lot of human writings and stories for thousands of years! And why? In part, because it doesn't make sense within your paradigm. When traditional astronomers see things that they don't understand in mythology, rather than question their own assumptions, they assume that the writings are garbage. That's a far stronger case for hubris. An honest, objective group of people would try and listen a little bit harder. At this point though, there is no longer *any* evidence of historical value that can induce you to question your own mathematics because you've worked yourself into such a frenzy over ridiculing the field of comparative mythology that you're no longer being rational about it. It doesn't even make sense that people would just write down garbage for thousands of years. You guys have over-reacted to a concern about accuracy in mythology by over-emphasizing mathematics. You could control that, so you decided it was a better way to try to understand the universe. It makes sense, but what you underestimated was the power of human psychology to penetrate the process of peer review. Your math eventually *became* both your mythology and scripture when you persisted in your astrophysical assumptions as you observed evidence that they were being violated. You guys made the mistake of listening to some of the loudest voices in the room (like Sagan and Lyell). When people like Tesla and Velikovsky came by and proposed ideas that were far ahead of their time, the group's natural response was to squash or ignore them out of fear. Your favored set of theories over time became less physical and more metaphysical until now things like dark energy and dark matter are required to keep the thing moving forward. When the spiral arms of galaxies were observed to rotate unusually, everybody should have taken a very deep breath and reconsidered the fundamental force of the universe. It was never done. You should not be surprised when you eventually realize that the younger kids are not interested in the horribly stitched-together beast that you're offering them. It's just not an effective tool for understanding our surroundings anymore. Astrophysics is a complete and utter mess! We don't even get clear and concise explanations for what gravity and mass are!
The ancient people are your relatives in a sense. And you are essentially shitting on their graves, to be honest. It's the ultimate form of not listening to your parents! In a sense, it's all juvenile behavior.
I really wish you'd drop this Anon format for writing. I want to observe your reaction the day that astrophysicists observe in extreme detail a planet being born from a star, or a star fissioning into two stars. That day will mark a new humble beginning for you. You won't be able to deny it any longer. Ei
"If occasionally, historical evidence does not square with formulated laws, it should be remembered that a law is but a deduction from experience and experiment, and therefore laws must conform with historical facts, not facts with laws." -- Immanuel Velikovsky
It is absolutely ASTOUNDING that you look past the fact that the conventional theories don't understand 95% of the universe! Time and time again, I have to help you guys perform a reality check. Understanding just 5% of something in any discipline other than astrophysics typically means that you do not understand it at all! You guys think that you have created this theory that is above reproach -- even by people who work within plasma laboratories. What you've actually done is confused the masses and induced them to become apathetic about space!
FROM WHERE DOES YOUR CONFIDENCE ARISE???
Grad students are flocking to the www.thunderbolts.info site and Thunderbolts.info is doubling the BAUT Forum's traffic in unique vistors as of December. The January 2008 issue of Astronomy Magazine has a feature on whether or not Jupiter is powered by a Z-pinch. You're not paying attention to what's happening. Why are *grad* students flocking to the Thunderbolts site?
The apparent problem is that you appear to not realize that laboratory plasma physicists are the ones arguing for the Electric Universe concepts against the mathematicians who play with beautiful equations all day long. Kristian Birkeland was the world's first laboratory astrophysicist. It was Hannes Alfven -- a man who was intimately familiar with the laboratory -- who argued against mathematical constructs like "frozen-in place magnetic fields", the supposed perfect conductivity of plasmas and magnetic reconnection. Somewhere along the way, it seems, you were convinced that black is white. We're saying the same thing; you're just talking about the wrong people. When Einstein admitted that not even he could understand physics anymore, that should have been your cue that physics was taken over by mathematicians. You somehow missed it.
And of course that's very true. But once again, I fear that you think that you are talking about the Electric Universe. EU is highly testable. We could build an impulse current laboratory where we can replicate Tesla's findings. Birkeland built a Terrella to understand the aurora (and when Alfven built a replica for Sydney Chapman, he refused to even look at the thing, btw). We can fire plasma guns at physical objects and model comets and electrical cratering. We can study the scalability of plasmas, and people have done so. What they've found is that we do not need to postulate that the universe is filled with 95% invisible matters. They can generate spiral galaxies with the proper rotation curves using nothing more than the characteristics of laboratory plasmas. The galactic rotation curves in simulations *only* become confused once you propose that the electromagnetic forces of plasmas to be secondary, rather than the driving, organizing force.
The problem isn't that Electric Universe isn't testable. It's that people like yourself haven't *read* the evidence that clearly points out what has been tested in it, and what future tests that have been proposed for it. I don't know if you're aware of this, but people tend to only read those things which they already agree with. We make a decision about what we want to believe, and then go from there. You are doing just that right here.
It's so funny to see you guys try to diminish and nuance the situation until it is utterly meaningless. People on Slashdot spend so much time trying to parse semantics that they are quite willing to give a pass on the meat of the conversation. I clearly realize that electricity plays a role within astrophysical theories. The issue, as you likely realize, is that we constantly see it argued that it plays a subservient role. Astrophysicists are constantly telling us, "Yeah, it's there, but it doesn't *DO* anything. At least, not what you say!" You know how many times I've heard that?
The real question is this: At what point in your astrophysical models does the universe start being a closed electrical system? And why? In the days of Chapman, it was argued that the Earth was electrically closed. Birkeland turned out to be right. It is still argued to this day that thunderstorms are a closed system near the ground. And yet, this flies in the face of the numerous recent photographs of upper-atmospheric lightning leading straight into space. Currently, as it stands, the belief is that we can have electrical connections between the Sun and the Earth ("magnetic ropes"). Why? Because they've been observed to exist! Well, how much thought have you put into it? Where does it stop? We see jets in space that are highly collimated over tens of thousands of light years. Isn't it possible that these are also Birkeland Currents? What is stopping it? Every time that you see a "black hole" shooting a jet at another galaxy, ask yourself: are they fighting, or are they cooperating? What looks like a violent blast to one person can quite reasonably be argued to be a connective filament between two galaxies to another person. Who can say that they are right when the issue is rarely even discussed? Do we believe things in astrophysics for no better reason than because they can no longer be denied? What keeps our solar system quasi-neutral? There is after all a pervasive magnetic field that sweeps through the whole thing, right? Within the Electric Universe, a galaxy can be generally approximated as a homopolar motor, where current travels down the arms across the disc based upon the movement of charges through the axis. And the axes of galaxies furthermore connect up to create a vast electrical network. Who's to say that they are wrong? The observations can certainly be interpreted that way, and nobody has any right to ridicule them for stating it!
It's called creative problem solving. And before we always default to just what we've been taught in school, we'd be wise to exercise it more often when we consider the big questions in science. There are powerful arguments to be made that the entire universe is electrically connected, and that there are no closed systems anywhere. For God's sake, we see terraced craters all over the friggin place, and terraced craters can be formed with rotating Birkeland Currents. And even more than that, we also see craters that have little "c" copyright signs in them (one was imaged on Mercury just this past week), suggesting that the same force was only able to perform a half rotation before it was cut off. That certainly makes more sense than a "c"-shaped lava tube inside of a crater. All of the clues are right before us to assemble a competing cosmology to the conventional theories. Why is it not done? Whatever the reason, it's certainly not because it *cannot* be done. The Plasma Universe point of view is incredibly effective at describing planetary features within our local solar system. Whether or not people here realize it matters little.
It's actually non-controversial enough that we can just look it up in wikipedia. There are multiple references to the unsolved acceleration problem there ...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind
There is more discussion here, with an attempt to explain it
http://www.obspm.fr/actual/nouvelle/jun05/solarw.en.shtml
I pulled my data from "The Electric Sky", and they reference Peter Gallagher's conference on the subject, "Seminar on Observations and Modeling of the Corona and Solar Wind - Big Bear Solar Observatory". They appear to have published a slide from his presentation., which is where I got the numbers from.
What people on Slashdot need to realize is that Nereid refuses to actually read what the Electric Universe says from one of the books that have been written on it, and yet viciously maintains that it cannot possibly be true. Caveat Emptor!
You are quite correct, but I urge you to look closer at the linked-to material to get a better picture of the level of detail that in fact persists about Tesla. It is more than we have all been assuming for some time now. Tesla ran high-voltage impulse currents down thin wire filaments, and this induced electrical explosions that included pressure waves. This is pretty much a textbook explanation of the "pinch" effect. The greatest surprise is that the pressure waves had no problem moving through a copper Faraday cage. And this cannot be inconsequential or any minor matter.