The Electric Comet theory

[ben m]

I hope everyone will keep an eye on this question over the coming months, while also watching for well-focused glow discharge on the surface. Perhaps even visible and sustained electrical arcing where image resolution is sufficient.

Sorry, what? Electrical arcing (or "glow discharge") from what to what? Across parts of the comet, or from the comet into space?

If into space: "arcing" from an isolated object (i.e., one not plugged into a power supply) is a capacitor-discharge problem. If you start off with extra charge, a "current" means the charge is going away (that's what the arc is, it's a current, i.e. charge moving towards a lower voltage.) Given this fact (I call it a "fact" because it's familiar in the laboratory, familiar in space, AND strictly obeys the so-far-known laws of E&M):

a) what makes you say "sustained arcing"? "Sustained" for how long? Please show how you predicted "sustained" time, in light of the standard (again, standard means "repeatedly lab- and space-tested") law of charge conservation.

b) Please show your analysis of the electrical power associated with these discharges. How much power is being dissipated by the visible phenomenon you're predicting? (Please express as a product of voltage and current.) What is the original source for this power? Can you walk us through the *coupling* of this source-power and its conversion to discharge-power, attempting to convince us that energy is conserved and all relevant E&M laws are obeyed at each step?

c) If I am in a laboratory vacuum chamber and interested in knowing where there are voltages, currents, and/or charged particle streams, I would not "look for glow discharges". Instead, I would use standard lab current and field-measuring instruments. Rosetta has a large suite of such instruments, as did Giotto. Do you think the comet is in an charged-up state severe enough to produce "discharges", but somehow invisible to all magnetometers and plasma probes? Please describe this state, including the numbers that motivated you to ignore the plasma instruments AND the numbers that motivated you to claim to make this visible-light "discharge" prediction.

 

[Matthew Cline]

c) If I am in a laboratory vacuum chamber and interested in knowing where there are voltages, currents, and/or charged particle streams, I would not "look for glow discharges". Instead, I would use standard lab current and field-measuring instruments. Rosetta has a large suite of such instruments, as did Giotto. Do you think the comet is in an charged-up state severe enough to produce "discharges", but somehow invisible to all magnetometers and plasma probes?

*ahem*

<Electric-Comet-proponent>How you you know that those sort of equipment can actually sense those sort of things? They should have done laboratory experiments simulating Electric Comet conditions and stuck the measuring equipment in to make sure. We wouldn't have to deal with this sort of uncertainty if there had been Electric Comet/Sun people involved in the development of the Rosetta and Giotta projects.</Electric-Comet-proponent>

So, how did I do?

 

[David Talbott]

This discussion would get a lot more meaningful if someone would come on to this list and challenge any statement of fact in the Electric Comet documentary. There, factual findings combine with quotes from respected authorities in the comet sciences to make clear that a coherent comet theory no longer exists.

The dirty snowball model failed to predict comet behavior. As of today, a falsified model has found no replacement because its proponents could not break free from two fatally discredited assumptions: that comets accreted billions of years ago from icy "stardust," and that comet activity is due to warming by the Sun.

As explorations continued the situation just grew worse. A distinguished authority confessed, "It’s a mystery to me how comets work at all." This exemplary confession speaks for science at its best, on those occasions when fundamental ideas have lost their predictive ability. The author of the quote was Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington, principal investigator of the Stardust Mission.

But Reality Check's couldn't find the quote except on pages citing the Thunderbolts Project. So he decided that we must have made the quote up. How about actually looking beyond a superficial Internet search? The quote is from an article by Stuart Clark, September 9, 2005, published by the NewSientist.com news service.

To the best of my knowledge there are no misquotes in the documentary, and the facts presented stand. Same goes for the addendum, "The Water of Deep Impact." As I've stated more than once, any necessary correction will be appreciated and acted upon.

For the record, an earlier post of mine was apparently rejected because in it I renamed Reality Check. I'll keep that to myself for now, but I kind of liked it.

 

[David Talbott]

Sorry, what? Electrical arcing (or "glow discharge") from what to what? Across parts of the comet, or from the comet into space?

I do not know of any reason why either should be excluded if the comet is moving through plasma regions of different charge (a fundamental assumption of the electric comet hypothesis).

We have well qualified electrical engineers in our group. They understand the elementary question and don't need to be tutored on the instruments that would assist in detecting glow discharge or arcing. As to what things might look like visually we have possible examples in the plumes of Jupiter's moon Io and Saturn's moon Enceladus. On the other hand, it's a bit humorous to see you asking me to predict specific energies, along with temporal and spatial parameters. The time for discussing that would be when something has actually been MEASURED, sufficiently to understand the scale of forces acting on the surface, right?

Could Rosetta finally confirm that the comet is discharging electrically? The electric comet hypothesis says yes, and that's quite sufficient for now. The standard model has predicted nothing of the sort, and that's quite sufficient for now too.

 

[LSSBB]

Hi,
Why do Apollo objects not show comas?

Why do only 6 objects in the asteroid belt show comas, when other asteroid belt objects go through exactly the same regions of space?

David Talbott, why don't you answer this question? Is it too challenging?

 

[Ziggurat]

David Talbott, why don't you answer this question? Is it too challenging?

The answer is obvious.

They're plastic.

 

[Ziggurat]

We have well qualified electrical engineers in our group.

Like Juergens?

I keep hearing about these electrical engineers, yet they never seem to do any actual engineering. I've gone through the calculations for electric sun model, and it just doesn't work. And nobody seems to be trying to make it work.

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

This discussion would get a lot more meaningful if someone would come on to this list and challenge any statement of fact in the Electric Comet documentary. There, factual findings combine with quotes from respected authorities in the comet sciences to make clear that a coherent comet theory no longer exists.

The dirty snowball model failed to predict comet behavior. As of today, a falsified model has found no replacement because its proponents could not break free from two fatally discredited assumptions: that comets accreted billions of years ago from icy "stardust," and that comet activity is due to warming by the Sun.

As explorations continued the situation just grew worse. A distinguished authority confessed, "It’s a mystery to me how comets work at all." This exemplary confession speaks for science at its best, on those occasions when fundamental ideas have lost their predictive ability. The author of the quote was Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington, principal investigator of the Stardust Mission.

But Reality Check's couldn't find the quote except on pages citing the Thunderbolts Project. So he decided that we must have made the quote up. How about actually looking beyond a superficial Internet search? The quote is from an article by Stuart Clark, September 9, 2005, published by the NewSientist.com news service.

To the best of my knowledge there are no misquotes in the documentary, and the facts presented stand. Same goes for the addendum, "The Water of Deep Impact." As I've stated more than once, any necessary correction will be appreciated and acted upon.

For the record, an earlier post of mine was apparently rejected because in it I renamed Reality Check. I'll keep that to myself for now, but I kind of liked it.

I have made several, but they are consitently ignored.

1. Explain in detail why the currents/fields/whatevers that cause the electric comet effect selectively work on comets and not on the literally thousands of metal objects we have moving trough the solar system.
2. What are the calculations showing that an object moving trough the intersolar vacuum can build up enough charge fast enough to have discharges that to the human eye seem to be continuous (taking question 1 into account)
3. Electricity needs to arc between two objects. What is the object a comet interacts with when it shows it tail and how much voltage is needed to arc between the object. (It cannot logically be the sun itself as then the effects would become less as the comet approaches the sun)

Each of these questions can be answered using what we know about electricity at the moment and lab equipment costing at most a few thousand dollars. So why hasn't that been done?

I'll add a fourth one as Haig keeps bringing up the electric sun model.
Why havent the EU proponents made a working propostion to recreate the powersource of the sun in small? After all, nuclear fusion was predicted using boring math decades before we actually managed to recreate it, where is the EU theory that would be better? If nothing else it would solve the worlds energy problems, so I'd say solving that problem would be at the forefront of EU research.

 

[Haig]

The first four points are known, the Peratt reference is given, but we know that Peratt's ideas are not valid, at least not the ones about gravitational collapse and galaxy formation.

Anyway, this does not take away anything from my comment that the magnetic fields along which these field aligned currents are flowing cannot be generated by these same currents. That fact stands, no matter how many references you are going to make to Birkeland currents.

Really, Velikovsky?

Taking your last quip first ..

It should be obvious that no one can claim a monopoly on the electric comet theory. But it is only appropriate that innovative pioneers (in this case, Velikovsky and Juergens) receive due credit for having opened the doors to revolutionary possibilities

If you talk of History and Comets (as you did) then of course Velikovsky has to be there

Especially if it's big electric comets and they don't come much bigger

He, after all, predicted that Jupiter would be a source of radio noise, that Venus would have a high surface temperature, that the sun and bodies of the solar system would have large electrical charges and several other such predictions. Velikovsky argued that electromagnetic effects play an important role in celestial mechanics at a time when the dogma of the time denied any role for electromagnetic effects.

Modern space exploration has confirmed ALL of this vindicating his stand.

Most detractors judge and condemn him on what others says he said instead of actually reading what he did say, as most of you will I expect.

Try this PDF ...

EARTH IN UPHEAVAL Emmanuel Velikovsky

More HERE

Of course Electric Comets need electric currents - Birkland currents ...

Kristian Birkeland: The first space scientist

The existence of field-aligned currents was controversial and disputed vigorously among scientists for more than 50 years. During The Birkeland
Symposium in 1967 it was unanimously proposed that field-aligned currents in space should be called ‘‘Birkeland currents’’, which was accepted by the International Union for Geomagnetism and Aeronomy. Today, plasma physicists strongly believe that many significant cosmic phenomena result from streams of Birkeland currents.

The Electric Sun/Earth Connection Confirmed

"It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds." -- Kristian Birkeland

The Electric Comet Encke and it's brightness versus the number of sunspots (Original chart) suggests an electrical connection between comets and our variable Sun.
Source: M. J. Bosler, "Sur les variations d'éclat de la comète d'Encke et la période des taches solaires" FULL TEXT (1909) Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences, 1909 (T. 148). Chart: page 1740. PEER REVIEWED

Then there is the work of Anthony L. Peratt that you also refer too.

Peratt's plasma figures as a proto-alphabet?

when all those plasma catastrophies began. People weren't having this idyllic worldview (that they have had in the paleolithic age - with all those colourful animal paintings) anymore at that time. They began to abstract from reality, which was pretty much filled with horror (and probably death and suffering). So some sort of psychic sublimation occurred, and later those symbols began to be used as an alphabet, as signs of some super-reality (abstract thinking, logic, mathematics etc.) or something.

The Squatter Man (Squatting Man) Petroglyphs | evidence of the Electric Universe
"The discovery that objects from the Neolithic or Early Bronze Age carry patterns associated with high-current Z-pinches provides a possible insight into the origin and meaning of these ancient symbols produced by man. This paper directly compares the graphIcal and radiation data from high-current Z-pinches to these patterns. The paper focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on petroglyphs. It is found that a great many archaic petroglyphs can be classified according to plasma stability and instability data. As the same morphological types are found worldwide, the comparisons suggest the occurrence of an intense aurora, as might be produced if the solar wind had increased between one and two orders of magnitude, millennia ago"

The Origin of Petroglyphs—Recordings of a Catastrophic
Aurora in Human Prehistory? PDF

Petroglyphs are images created on rock by means of carving or ‘pecking’ the outer surface to expose the surface underneath. They are found on all continents except Antarctica. The purpose of this paper is an attempt to explain how in man’s prehistory recordings of high-energy-density phenomena (some not experimentally recorded until the last few years) could have been carved on rock in an accurate, systematic, and apparently temporally accurate fashion. Based on the compilation and analysis of the order of 50,000 digitally recorded petroglyphs, we have identified several dozen general categories of instabilities whose morphology is that of a highly nonlinear pinched plasma column generally associated with multi-mega-ampere Z-pinch experiments

.

The above historic works complement and support each other when considering Electric Comets. Anyone care to do the maths that these obvious electrical connections / plasma connections could only be by CHANCE !!!

 

[ben m]

We have well qualified electrical engineers in our group. They understand the elementary question and don't need to be tutored on the instruments that would assist in detecting glow discharge or arcing.

Easy to say, isn't it? Anyone can say they "understand the elementary questions". I didn't ask for your say-so, I asked for the calculation of how it works. Did the Giotto plasma instrumentation detect magnetic pulses and/or electrically-accelerated particle beams from either of its target comets? What conclusions have they drawn about EC from that data?

As to what things might look like visually we have possible examples in the plumes of Jupiter's moon Io and Saturn's moon Enceladus.

I didn't ask "what things might look like visually", did I?

On the other hand, it's a bit humorous to see you asking me to predict specific energies, along with temporal and spatial parameters. The time for discussing that would be when something has actually been MEASURED, sufficiently to understand the scale of forces acting on the surface, right?

Why is that funny? You have been predicting that "focused glow discharge" will occur---a complex phenomenon requiring certain gas pressures (not yet measured), certain emitter geometries and surface properties (not measured) AND certain electric fields (also not measured). I'm asking what E&M fields you put in when you are constructing the model. The model you've been talking about for two decades.

Go ahead and give a conditional answer. "If a comet WERE to carry voltage X on surface of shape Y it would suffer a Z amp-second spark."

 

[ben m]

The above historic works complement and support each other when considering Electric Comets. Anyone care to do the maths that these obvious electrical connections / plasma connections could only be by CHANCE !!!

I don't know why I even build physics experiments when I could be getting the answers from squiggles on bronze-age pottery.

 

[Haig]

I don't know why I even build physics experiments when I could be getting the answers from squiggles on bronze-age pottery.

So field research on Petroglyphs (rock art carved into rocks) noticing the similarity between high energy plasma discharges and the images recorded in rock art and cave drawings by nations all over the world has no significance for you in Electric Comet hypothisis????

These high energy plasma discharges images are NOWHERE to be seen by humans in our sky's today. So how could the Ancients from ALL over the world have been INSPIRED by them?

Our solar system has not always been so stable and that's why Electric Comets, even small ones, bringing electrical unstable conditions are so instructive.

 

[Matthew Cline]

On the other hand, it's a bit humorous to see you asking me to predict specific energies, along with temporal and spatial parameters. The time for discussing that would be when something has actually been MEASURED, sufficiently to understand the scale of forces acting on the surface, right?

But surely you can derive some upper and lower bounds from your hypothesis? Something like "the voltage must be at least X across a distance of no more than Y"?

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

So field research on Petroglyphs (rock art carved into rocks) noticing the similarity between high energy plasma discharges and the images recorded in rock art and cave drawings by nations all over the world has no significance for you in Electric Comet hypothisis????

These high energy plasma discharges images are NOWHERE to be seen by humans in our sky's today. So how could the Ancients from ALL over the world have been INSPIRED by them?

Our solar system has not always been so stable and that's why Electric Comets, even small ones, bringing electrical unstable conditions are so instructive.

Yes, because simple geometric symbols can ONLY be explained that way. That is why doodles made by bored people anywhere should be examined to decypher the hidden psycic messages that can then explain the whole universe.
Why bother with experiments, math and all that nonsense.

 

[JeanTate]

Good morning, David Talbott.

This discussion would get a lot more meaningful if someone would come on to this list and challenge any statement of fact in the Electric Comet documentary.

Just so that I'm clear on this, is this the only thing you are willing to respond to? For example, Haig is - in your view - wasting his time with all the other links, documents, etc (except where they are directly cited in "the Electric Comet documentary")?

True, you have not said you would respond to only such a list; however, you seem to have not responded to anything that anyone has posted - challenges, questions, comments, ... nothing.

There, factual findings combine with quotes from respected authorities in the comet sciences to make clear that a coherent comet theory no longer exists.

The dirty snowball model failed to predict comet behavior. As of today, a falsified model has found no replacement because its proponents could not break free from two fatally discredited assumptions: that comets accreted billions of years ago from icy "stardust," and that comet activity is due to warming by the Sun.

As explorations continued the situation just grew worse. A distinguished authority confessed, "It’s a mystery to me how comets work at all." This exemplary confession speaks for science at its best, on those occasions when fundamental ideas have lost their predictive ability. The author of the quote was Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington, principal investigator of the Stardust Mission.

But Reality Check's couldn't find the quote except on pages citing the Thunderbolts Project. So he decided that we must have made the quote up. How about actually looking beyond a superficial Internet search? The quote is from an article by Stuart Clark, September 9, 2005, published by the NewSientist.com news service.

To the best of my knowledge there are no misquotes in the documentary, and the facts presented stand. Same goes for the addendum, "The Water of Deep Impact." As I've stated more than once, any necessary correction will be appreciated and acted upon.

<snip>

Nothing about the electric comet ideas, eh?

It seems that the focus of your work is to present material which you think* is inconsistent with what you think* is the "dirty snowball model" (and any extensions, modifications, etc), and not the electric comet ideas themselves. For example, you have yet to respond to Dancing David's question - repeated many times - about why many asteroids with essentially the same orbital eccentricities and perihelia as comets do not have comas and tails (that's my paraphrase).

*not you personally (though you may have been involved), but the authors of the Electric Comet documentary; whether or not the material you present is an accurate summary.

 

[JeanTate]

Good morning, ben m.

I don't know why I even build physics experiments when I could be getting the answers from squiggles on bronze-age pottery.

I think it's fair to say that Haig honestly believes that Maxwell's equations (say) could have been discovered many centuries ago if only the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Arabs, Indians, Mayans, ... had paid more attention to stone age rock art.

Further, it seems that both he and Sol88 see Rosetta (and all the comet missions before it) as relatively trivial, in terms of adding to humanity's understanding of comets; for them the big V is the world's greatest (astro)physicist of all time, almost to the point where his work is inerrant, sacred even.

 

[JeanTate]

Good morning, Ziggurat.

Like Juergens?

I keep hearing about these electrical engineers, yet they never seem to do any actual engineering. I've gone through the calculations for electric sun model, and it just doesn't work. And nobody seems to be trying to make it work.

To be fair, it seems that Don Scott may be one of these electrical engineers (I think I read, in one of the materials Haig posted a link to, that he taught this subject until he retired). There's also a "Ranson" (I think), who has a PhD in plasma physics (not electrical engineering, but maybe David Talbott was being brief).

Other than those two, I don't recall reading anything in any of Haig's links about other (still living) electrical engineers who have worked on electric comet ideas.

But perhaps Haig or David Talbott could clarify?

Otherwise how are these people - however many of them there are - different from ghosts? We have only David's word that they exist.

 

[David Talbott]

To Lukraak_Sisser: most of the questions you've asked above would not be asked if you'd followed this discussion. Everyone's time is limited, and that includes my own. But your fourth question makes a key point pretty well.

I'll add a fourth one as Haig keeps bringing up the electric sun model.
Why havent the EU proponents made a working propostion to recreate the powersource of the sun in small? After all, nuclear fusion was predicted using boring math decades before we actually managed to recreate it, where is the EU theory that would be better? If nothing else it would solve the worlds energy problems, so I'd say solving that problem would be at the forefront of EU research.

Your acknowledgment above is probably more significant than you realize. HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of dollars have been spent globally in recent decades trying to recreate, in a laboratory environment, the imagined thermonuclear furnace at the core of the Sun. The great attractor was the hope of ending the world's energy problems. But it does not appear that any experiment has succeeded in producing more energy than it required to get nuclear fusion. (Keep in mind that I'm making this statement based on information available three years ago; the paper I presented at the NPA mtg in 2011 has not been updated.)

What has not been explored with any seriousness is the possibility of significant electrical contributions to the Sun's activity from the heliosphere itself and beyond. To see why this is so important, one need only consider the results of the IBEX probe exploring the heliospheric boundary. Then ask what is acting to organize the astonishing ribbon of ENAs enclosing the boundary. The boundary environment cannot be electrically neutral.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/326/5955/964.figures-only
[See Related Resources cited as well]

As a footnote, I've been assured of a fascinating fact by one who would know. All of the theoretical predictions relating to neutral kinetics at the boundary—the very predictions from which the IBEX project emerged—were proven wrong. All, that is, except a prediction concerning electrical transactions across the boundary and into interstellar space.

Out of the Electric Universe movement, a laboratory project has emerged. It involves highly capable engineers and PhD's across a variety of specialties, including laboratory plasma science. It has led directly to the first experimental phases in a new conceptual approach to the Sun and to star formation. The project was initially funded with a million dollars (an interesting contrast to the BILLIONS already spent asking the wrong questions). The first test phase in the design of experiments has surprised every member of the team.

But yes, much more experimental work lies ahead of us. For example, the chamber used in the aforementioned experimental work will almost certainly provide an ideal environment for testing the electric comet. I'd love to say more, but I'd be betraying trust to do so.

 

[JeanTate]

Something in this post by David Talbott bothered me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Now I think I know what seemed not quite right, and am asking tusenfem (in particular) and Ziggurat, ben m, ... to please comment.

<snip>

But since you appear to love mathematics, even in the absence of concrete measurements, why don't you calculate for us how, in the absence of an electric field, charged particles of the solar wind can be continually accelerated out past the planets? Do you envision these charged particles as little rocket ships, or what?

One value of working with electrical engineers as we do is the fact that they know how to accelerate charge particles.

David did not cite any sources, so let me start with this question: what are some of the papers which report that "charged particles of the solar wind can be [are] continually accelerated out past the planets"?

I'm pretty sure Haig, David Talbott, and perhaps even Sol88 could quote from various PRs and pop-sci/mass media material to support this; however, I doubt that any could cite actual papers.

Assume this is true - that charged particles of the solar wind have been observed to be continually accelerated out past the planets - how could this be evidence for an approximately radially symmetric electric field, centered approximately on the Sun, from ~the outer edge of the corona to ~the inner edge of the heliosphere ('radial electric field' for short)?

As far as I know, the solar wind is charge neutral (over distances larger than ~a few Debye lengths); to a first approximation, it consists of equal numbers of electrons and protons (ignoring any neutral species, such as hydrogen atoms). If there were a radial electric field, the protons and electrons would be going in opposite directions, wouldn't they? And yet in situ observations of the solar wind are consistent with them going in the same direction, right?

If so, what can David Talbott be referring to when he writes "the fact that they [the electrical engineers he works with] know how to accelerate charge particles"? If not, what am I missing?

 

[rwguinn]

.... On the other hand, it's a bit humorous to see you asking me to predict specific energies, along with temporal and spatial parameters. The time for discussing that would be when something has actually been MEASURED, sufficiently to understand the scale of forces acting on the surface, right?
....

Could there possibly be a reason that the "something" you speak so passionately of has not been MEASURED?

Take your time.