Thunderbolts of the Gods

Electromagnetism is way more powerful than gravity....at short range. Over the long haul, gravity reigns.

No, EM is a waaay more powerful force than gravity, and obeys the same inverse square law as gravity. The effects of a nearby super nova on our planet are not going to be in any way connected with the gravity of the situation, but the EM radiation. Can you understand why?

In the long haul, gravity from distant bodies does not influence us in any meaningful way, unlike the EM radiation, which is a real issue. EM from distant bodies is influencing us at every moment. Because of our protective atmosphere, and magnetosphere, we don't suffer much from the extremely powerful EM radiation that bathes every bit of the planet, all the time. This doesn't mean it isn't there.

To make this obvious, on a space flight to the moon, or to mars, anywhere really outside the protection of our planet, nobody is worried about the effect of gravity, either from the sun or distant stars, but we know that the EM radiation is a serious issue. The EM from the sun, as well as Cosmic Rays, from very distant bodies, is a real and ever present danger. Even just being on the ISS greatly increases the exposure to radiation, and also the risk of cataracts.

The gravity from distant bodies isn't even considered, for all practical purposes, it doesn't matter. Nobody worries about the Sun's gravitational energy in orbit. The EM is another matter.

Over the long haul, gravity reigns.

I have no idea what that means. There is no contest between fundamental forces. To try and make this clear, simply reverse the claim, (which is also going to seem dumb).


Over the long haul, EM reigns. Which is why Maxwell's equations, rather than Newton's Laws, explain why the sun radiates energy.

See? What does that even mean?

Even at extreme close range, where gravity is very powerful, EM doesn't seem to care. Sunspots don't act the way they do because of gravity, not do charged particles and EM radiating from the sun. Which is kind of cool, really. Gravity doesn't effect EM, and EM doesn't effect gravity. (Or so says current theory.)

(Yeah, I know, but the bending of EM near gravity sources is considered a warping of space time, gravity doesn't slow or really "bend" EM radiation, it just seems like it, because of the warped spacetime)

I think the reason otherwise intelligent people consider the force of gravity more "powerful" than the electromagnetic force, is because somehow they forget what EM is, what the electromagnetic field is, what it means.

What we call "light" is actually a propagating oscillatory disturbance in the electromagnetic field, or in other words, an electromagnetic wave. Electromagnetic radiation, that force that some think gravity trumps, is everything from radio waves to visible light to gamma rays. Even atoms and molecules are dominated by the EM force.

Of course the whole idea that gravity trumps or EM trumps is a bit absurd. But interesting. Practically all the phenomena we encounter in daily life is due to the electromagnetic force, except for gravity.

And the two don't effect each other much at all. Now that I think about it, that is rather strange really. The two most important, ever present forces that effect everything, don't effect each other. How can that be?
 
Over at BAUT this group has been there for a while trying to push the E;ectric Universe or Plasma Universe stuff. They in general do not what they talking about. One said the suns core was made of solid iron and took three months for him finally realize he did not know why the iron has not melted with the surface temperature being higher then the boiling point of iron.
 
If you're gonna put your hand into the cookie-jar, put it in up to the elbow!
Oh, **** yeah. Why screw around?

If you're going to argue reductio ad absurdam, cut straight to the most absurd. Velinovsky is much neglected these days, but well worth dusting off and waving at people.
Hey, I see people dusting off Edgar Cayce and waving him around every so often. Velikovsky ain't so bad compared to that crud. Bad enough, though.

You know, I think there's certain styles in woo. They keep coming back around again, you with me? Like how they say, wait long enough, and all those old dresses and wide-lapel suits and stuff are back "in" again. Wait ten years, here's Blavatsky again! Oh, look, there's Nostradamus! It's like, the conservation of woo, or something.

The cool dudes are the ones that claim they used to hang with him, back in the day.
'Course they did. Have another bong hit, dude. Then freak out on this wild stuff about how the planets all got rearranged and all those scientist dudes, they're hidin' it because the Saturnians told them to. See, they're gonna all emigrate to the Moon on sekrit rockets which is what they're REALLY hidin' down all them holes in Montana an' Dakota an' ****.
 
Oh please. Wikipedia? Why should I trust those nutjobs? :D

I know about Velikovsky, I thought maybe there was also a Velinovsky.
 
No, EM is a waaay more powerful force than gravity, and obeys the same inverse square law as gravity. The effects of a nearby super nova on our planet are not going to be in any way connected with the gravity of the situation, but the EM radiation. Can you understand why?

In the long haul, gravity from distant bodies does not influence us in any meaningful way, unlike the EM radiation, which is a real issue. EM from distant bodies is influencing us at every moment. Because of our protective atmosphere, and magnetosphere, we don't suffer much from the extremely powerful EM radiation that bathes every bit of the planet, all the time. This doesn't mean it isn't there.

To make this obvious, on a space flight to the moon, or to mars, anywhere really outside the protection of our planet, nobody is worried about the effect of gravity, either from the sun or distant stars, but we know that the EM radiation is a serious issue. The EM from the sun, as well as Cosmic Rays, from very distant bodies, is a real and ever present danger. Even just being on the ISS greatly increases the exposure to radiation, and also the risk of cataracts.

The gravity from distant bodies isn't even considered, for all practical purposes, it doesn't matter. Nobody worries about the Sun's gravitational energy in orbit. The EM is another matter.



I have no idea what that means. There is no contest between fundamental forces. To try and make this clear, simply reverse the claim, (which is also going to seem dumb).




See? What does that even mean?

Even at extreme close range, where gravity is very powerful, EM doesn't seem to care. Sunspots don't act the way they do because of gravity, not do charged particles and EM radiating from the sun. Which is kind of cool, really. Gravity doesn't effect EM, and EM doesn't effect gravity. (Or so says current theory.)

(Yeah, I know, but the bending of EM near gravity sources is considered a warping of space time, gravity doesn't slow or really "bend" EM radiation, it just seems like it, because of the warped spacetime)

I think the reason otherwise intelligent people consider the force of gravity more "powerful" than the electromagnetic force, is because somehow they forget what EM is, what the electromagnetic field is, what it means.

What we call "light" is actually a propagating oscillatory disturbance in the electromagnetic field, or in other words, an electromagnetic wave. Electromagnetic radiation, that force that some think gravity trumps, is everything from radio waves to visible light to gamma rays. Even atoms and molecules are dominated by the EM force.

Of course the whole idea that gravity trumps or EM trumps is a bit absurd. But interesting. Practically all the phenomena we encounter in daily life is due to the electromagnetic force, except for gravity.

And the two don't effect each other much at all. Now that I think about it, that is rather strange really. The two most important, ever present forces that effect everything, don't effect each other. How can that be?


Oops. When I said gravity was stronger over long distances, I was thinking "nuclear forces" and saying "electromagnetic". Mea culpa.
 
Gravity does have an effect at very long ranges, but it is in cosmology and the dark matter theory that the effect of the EM forces matter to the plasma cosmologists.

Observation:

Galaxies that are farther away appear to be redshifted to a greater extent. In that their spectrums are shifted to the IR (visible light) end of the spectrum. The greater the distance the greater the redshift.

This led Hubble to theorise that the universe is expanding. And plasma cosmology can not explain this effect.


Observation two:

There is a certain amount of visible matter in galaxies, when stars in galaxies are observed they appear to be rotating faster around the galactic cores faster than can be accounted for by the visible matter.

Hypothesis: there is a source of gravity that is not accounted for by the visible matter. IE dark matter: a source of gravitational atraction not yet detected.

Hypothesis: the EM forces of a galaxy are sufficient to create this rotational speed.
(I have not seen this explained well yet, just a lot of handwaving.)

Observation three:

Halton Arp looked at galaxies that appear to have been disrupted in some way, usually through collision. There is the Arp catalog of such interesting objects and they are some of the best Hubble views as well. Halton also began lloking at quasi stellar objects and he felt that there appeared to be an association between quasi stellar objects and disrupted galaxies.

However the biggest thing he noticed was that the redshift of the quasi stellar objects was much higher that the associated disrupted galaxies. He concluded that the redshift of the quasistellar onbjects was anamalous and that the redshift value was not consistent withe the redshift of the associated galaxies.

Hypothesis: Quasars associated with Arp galaxies are anamalous in that the distance implied by the redshift is not appropriate.

Hypothesis: sampling effects led Arp to belive that the galaxies were associated with quasars, when it is a matter of visual alignment not a matter of association.

Some, maybe Arp concluded that the redshift of galaxies is not associated with distance. therefore the big bang theory is a false one. Plasma cosmology is alleged to be a competitor.
 
If they are marketing it under "hypothetical science", which things like multiverses also encompass, it's different. It's the very least interesting when an educated affair.
 
Electromagnetism is not stronger than gravity. It really makes very little sense to compare the strength of any forces unless you also specify the quantities and distances involved. How would you compare them? The force from one gram of matter compared to one Coulomb of matter might be stronger, but those are completely arbitrary units. Why not choose one megagram of matter and one electron?

Sure, if you take two electrons, the EM force is stronger than the gravitational force, but so what? That only says that it is stronger in that particular case, not that one fundamental force is bigger than the other. It's like saying what's longer, a piece of string or a plank of wood? The answer depends entirely on how long the string is and how long the wood is.
 
Hey, I see people dusting off Edgar Cayce and waving him around every so often. Velikovsky ain't so bad compared to that crud. Bad enough, though.

At least Velikovsky (:o) claimed to be purely scientific, as I recall. It was all double-speak and the begging of many questions, but quite ground-breaking in its way. Truthers are, I think, direct descendents.

You know, I think there's certain styles in woo. They keep coming back around again, you with me? Like how they say, wait long enough, and all those old dresses and wide-lapel suits and stuff are back "in" again. Wait ten years, here's Blavatsky again! Oh, look, there's Nostradamus! It's like, the conservation of woo, or something.

As long as a yellowing paperback survives for some adolescent to stumble, across, the woo lives.
 
That quote, as well as a bunch of others, is not linked or attributed to anyone. Who said it? And where?

The BAUT threads are interesting, but every one of them is locked. What kind of forum is that?

The threads got locked mostly because there was a new rule brought about by Fraser and Phil to limit of thrity days of posting to a certain thread, then they got locked down. The reason is mostly is because some threads went on forever without the OP answering any questions about their thoeries, they say mostly as a place to get help on their theories and expose to a slightly larger audience. Also some them created sock puppets, and abused the Q&A section of the BAUT forum.
 
Damn. I just found all the "official" threads about any and all mentions of any alt theories there. Turns out almost all threads are locked in the ATM (against the mainstream) section. And it is against the rules to even start a new discussion. If the JREF was that tight assed the CT forum here would be pretty much dead. And boring as well.
 
Beachooser finaly quit and stopped posting.

Hi David. Unfortunately, I had other, more pressing things to do at the time and had basically said what I wanted to say on the topic. Plus I knew that I'd probably not open any of the minds that were posting if I hadn't already in that long thread (http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=99727). But since there seems to be a new crop of perhaps interested JREFers, I'll now post something I've been working on as time permits in anticipation of renewed interest. It's a review and summary of some of the material I presented on that thread, as well as some additional material that demonstrate (I think) how it is the alternative/plasma/electric community rather than the mainstream/Big Bang/gravity-only community that has been most successful in predicting and explaining astronomical observations over time.

I shall break the discussion into somewhat separate topics. Hopefully it will answer some of the questions you posted near the end of the last thread and make it easier for the others to grapple with the issues at hand.

Let's start with the issue of redshift because of it's important role in Big Bang cosmology.

Part 1 - Problems With Big Bang's Interpretation Of Redshift Compared To Observations

Vesto Slipher started measuring the Doppler shift of galaxies about 1910, although at the time he didn't know that's what they were. He, like others in his era, called them nebula. Almost all of the objects showed a redshift ... that is, the frequency of the visible light coming from the object was shifted towards lower frequencies ... towards the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. For understandable reasons, this was suggestive that the objects were collectively moving away from us. That is where matters stood until 1922 when Alexander Friedmann derived equations from Einstein's theory of General Relativity that indeed suggested the universe should either be expanding or collapsing. Shortly after, in 1924, Hubble measured the distance to the nearest spiral "nebula" and showed that they weren't nebula at all, but other galaxies filled with stars just like the Milky Way. In 1927, Georges Lemaître independently derived Friedmann's equations and for the first time, it was concluded in a paper that the recession of the objects was due to the expansion "of the universe". His model included a redshift/distance relationship similar to that which in 1929 Hubble and Humason obtained by fitting a line through the observational data that had been collected so far. This redshift relationship (with considerable modification to the Hubble constant) would eventually be used by Big Bang cosmologists to interpret the distance to all objects in the universe based solely on their redshift. However, it wasn't until 1931 that Lemaître actually published a paper suggesting that the universe began as a simple "primeval atom" or "cosmic egg". Therefore, one might consider 1931 as the real birthdate of the *Big Bang* theory, in which case, Big Bang theorists did not "predict" the expansion as some proponents claim. But in any case, the story doesn't end there ...

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Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Lisa Simpson
 
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"Watch this film and in an hour know more than most NASA scientists about the fundamental force that forms and sustains the universe."

A whole hour to learn cosmology?

I don't see why it takes so long. It only took me fifteen minutes to learn brain surgery, so how much harder can astrophysics be?
 
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Part 2. Problems With Using Black Holes To Explain Quasars And Jets From Quasars

Say I still haven't convinced you at this point that there is a problem with claiming quasars are distant objects based on redshift or blackholes. Is there any other reason to doubt those claims? Absolutely ...

One of the best reasons are the jets that are sometimes seen coming from quasars. 3C273 is no exception. Recent images of the quasar show 10 regularly spaced knots that form a immense jet. The first knot supposedly produces as much energy as most Seyfert galaxies. Because of their immense distance, the jets from some quasars must be largest contiguous structures in the universe. http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020216/fob5.asp states that quasar PKS 1127-145 produces an X ray-emitting jet that projects at least 1 million light-years into space. According to the article, "The jet's great length makes it unlikely that the quasar could provide the energy for the X rays". So astrophysicists are forced to postulate still another magic gnome ... a "novel" (in their own words) interaction between the charged particles in the jet and photons in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The theory is that "when photons in the CMB collide with electrons in the jet, the electrons get a boost in energy and emit X rays." Now I don't know about you, but to me it looks like they are now stacking magic gnomes on top of magic gnomes on top of magic gnomes in order to explain the observations ... just to keep black holes, their model of quasars and Big Bang alive.

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Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Lisa Simpson
 
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Rational scientists would by now conclude that dark matter does not exist ... especially when after 30 years all attempts to identify what constitutes dark matter have utterly failed. But Big Bang theorists have obstinately ignored the above work and refused to abandon the notion of dark matter because they've too much invested in their dark matter gnome. Too many careers are at stake. Too many reputations. Too many expensive projects.
Oh, you're one of those.

This should be good for a laugh.
 
Part 3 - Problems With Big Bang's Explanation Of Pulsars And Supernova. Plasma Cosmology's Solution

Now let's consider some other astronomical objects that produce jets starting with pulsars?

To explain the jets from what astronomers call neutron/pulsar stars, Big Bang astrophysicists again call on the God of Magic Gnomes. Not only do they invent yet another form of matter that has never been observed here on earth (I ask you, folks, according to our current understanding, are groups of neutrons by themselves stable?), they again have to also use the bogus magnetic field *theories* to explain the jets that come from them. And of course each new observation raises new questions about their theory and necessitates the addition of still more magic gnomes. Here is an example of what I mean:

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Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Lisa Simpson
 
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Part 4 - The Electric Sun Alternative As An Explanation Of Supernova And Other Stellar Phenomena

Another possible (and very interesting) explanation for supernova comes from a group of plasma cosmologists and electrical engineers who are claiming the standard fusion model of stars is just plain wrong ... that fusion is not what powers the sun. Their reason for claiming this is that the standard model astrophysicists are unable to logically explain the observed phenomena on and above the sun without resorting to nonsense like "magnetic reconnection". In fact, without such bogus physics, an interior fusion source for the energy emitted by the sun seems to directly contradict the observations. So what's the alternative?

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Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Lisa Simpson
 
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