Thunderbolts of the Gods

So, BeAChooser---oops! I mean iantresman

Notice how when they can't come up with any peer reviewed papers to support their claims ... or written statements in ANY mainstream media by astrophysicists directly challenging Peratt's work ... they start to resort to this type of tactic. It's telling. I guess that sol also thinks iantresman is Karl Rove, since I'm supposedly that person too. :D

But since they raised the possibility ... how do we know that sol invictus isn't Ziggurat? I think it's pretty obvious that iantresman has brought a lot of new material and sources that I had not to this discussion. What has sol invictus brought to the discussion that is any different than what Ziggurat has produced. Nothing. He's just parroting the same unsourced claims that Ziggurat made. Now I ask you, who is more likely an alter ego? :D
 
And you did it all without bothering to actually read and understand Peratt's (and Alfven's) model. ;)

If the calculations I did are correct, why does it matter whether or not I understand the rest of the model? And if they aren't correct, why don't you point out why they're not correct? Or are you not even able to evaluate whether or not my calculations are correct? And if you're not able to evaluate that, where do you get off telling me what I do or don't understand?

How did he manage to get his paper approved in the first place, by fellow scientists and engineers, if his work could that easily be proven wrong? Did the peer review process simply break down?

Hell if I know. Wouldn't be the first time, won't be the last. But plenty of papers get published on what are essentially toy models with little direct connection to the physical world - it's a way of developing tools which might be useful elsewhere. Maybe they published it because they thought it might lead somewhere eventually, only it hasn't. Don't know, don't really care.

If that happened, why didn't the publishing journal offer an apology to its readers when the failure of their peer reviewers to catch the obvious was noticed?

Because that's not the way journals operate. They retract papers in the case of misconduct or fraud, but if the paper is merely wrong (even pathetically so), they don't appologize. That's not their role in the process, and that's not how they operate.

Or are you just so much smarter than all of them and the first to actually find this flaw? :D

No, BAC. The only person I have confidence I'm far smarter than is you. Go on, prove me wrong: show me what's wrong with my calculation. Hell, Sol even gave you an opening. So let's see if you can actually do a calculation without screwing something up. Again.
 
Hey BAC and/or iantresman, can you point out exactly where in Peratt's paper he mentions the existence of stars, in order to compute forces on them? It looks to me like these are papers entirely about strongly-coupled plasmas, and he quite literally assumes, with no calculations, that the stars get swept along with whatever the plasma is doing.

Surely you can point us to a line, or paragraph, in Peratt's papers which tell us: "In these simulations, stars of mass M are assumed to have charge Q and magnetic moment U ... "? Or even "The simulations assume a plasma with components X, Y, Z ..." ? No?

No one is saying that Peratt's simulations are meaningless, BAC. I'm sure that Peratt's paper makes some set of assumptions, and that he makes some computationally-sound inferences from those assumptions. Unfortunately the assumptions do not agree with the real world. (You have been invited to argue that they do, but Peratt's paper makes no such argument---please do not pretend that merely mentioning "this paper passed IEEE peer review" will somehow substitute for such an argument.)
 
how do we know that sol invictus isn't Ziggurat?

Because he pointed out something I overlooked. And I'm far too arrogant a prick to ever do that to myself. Duh.

I'm perfectly willing to believe iantresman is not a sock puppet for BAC. Doesn't matter anyways, he's got no more clue.
 
By the way, here's a peer-reviewed paper published in a major astrophysical journal debunking these claims. It took my 30 seconds to find. Ouch.

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/383229

In an isolated system, it is well
known that the magnetic field contribution to the virial
theorem, applied to a large enough volume, is positive or
zero, but never negative, reflecting the net expansive ten-
dency of magnetic fields (e.g., Shafranov 1966). Jokipii
& Levy (1993) used this argument to conclude that in the
presence of magnetic fields, galaxies would need even more
dark matter than in the unmagnetized case.
(my bold)

To quote BAC: ROTFL.

You can also find a list of seven or eight other papers demonstrating the wrongness of these ideas there.

Zig, if you're wondering - the calculations these guys are doing are for the effects of magnetic fields on galactic plasma, not on stars.
 
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Oh, I see. So the reason Tauri are more determined than Aquarii has to do with the color of the stars in the night sky in the month they were born, rather than their gravitational effects?
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I said nothing about Tauri and Aquarii , nor the color of stars, nor when people were born. I did say that some people are affected by what they see in the night sky.

Let me be clear: the idea that galactic magnetic fields can explain rotation curves is much more far-fetched than astrology. Same goes for the sun being powered electrically.
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I agree, I don't think galactic magnetic fields can explain rotation curves, but I don't know anyone who has.

Take Zig's estimate - the magnetic fields would need to be stronger by 20 orders of magnitude to significantly affect the motion of stars. Suppose starlight was stronger by that same factor. That's equivalent to putting the stars closer to us by a factor of 10^10 - which would make the nearest ones as bright as if they were a few thousand miles from the earth. A star passing that close would have quite an effect on everyone's personality....
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Indeed, Zig's model does not appear to work.
 
If the calculations I did are correct, why does it matter whether or not I understand the rest of the model?

Because perhaps you don't understand the model and physics nearly as well as you think you do. Afterall, none of the peer reviewers caught what you and sol claim is an obvious flaw ... even to someone with high school physics. Were they just dumb? And IF the peer review process broke down in such an dramatic fashion where Peratt's work was concerned and on such an important subject, don't you think we should try to understand why it did? Instead of just ignoring that it did?

And if they aren't correct, why don't you point out why they're not correct?

I don't claim to be an expert on this subject. I've published nothing in a peer reviewed journal on this subject. Have you? Peratt did. In several different journals, in fact. He presented the material at conferences, too, where other scientists and engineers could directly ask him questions. Was no one in the audience as smart as you and sol? Did it take almost 30 years for someone with your intellect to appear on earth?

But plenty of papers get published on what are essentially toy models

But in those other cases, there is always someone pointing out in print where those models are flawed. We don't see that happening in this case. And I don't think its at all fair to describe Peratt's model (which you admit you haven't bothered to fully understand) a toy model. Afterall, it's a model that took months of supercomputer time to produce results.

with little direct connection to the physical world

That's a truly ironic statement coming from someone who:

- believes in matter of a dark kind that is unlike any we currently know and which shows its presence only in a ghostly manner

- someone who believes in dark energy, which is even more ghostly and ill defined than dark matter

- someone who believes that black holes (which also have never been directly observed) are ubiquitous in space and uses them to explain a multitude of observations that otherwise can't be explained

- someone who believes in stars made of neutrons and quarks

- someone who believes astrophysics is justified in creating utterly new physics like reconnection (which many in the fields of electrical engineering and plasma physics have now completely rejected as bogus) to explain the observations they can't otherwise explain ... while ignoring physics like Birkeland currents, double layers, exploding double layers and z-pinches that are well understood and quite obviously present in space ... and which might easily explain some of those observations.

- someone who believes redshift ALWAYS equates to distance despite a still growing mountain of evidence to the contrary ... peer reviewed evidence that again the mainstream community simply ignores rather than trying to directly challenge in peer reviewed rebuttals.

- someone who believes in that mysterious event called *inflation* and uses it to explain away a host of observation problems ... even though the cause of that event is still unknown 30 years after the idea was introduced.

I don't think Peratt is the one out of touch with the physical world, Ziggurat. :D

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If that happened, why didn't the publishing journal offer an apology to its readers when the failure of their peer reviewers to catch the obvious was noticed?

Because that's not the way journals operate. They retract papers in the case of misconduct or fraud, but if the paper is merely wrong (even pathetically so), they don't appologize.

So they sort of cover up their mistakes. Is that the way these science journals function? We learn something new all the time, don't we folks. :)

But even if a journal doesn't apologize for an obviously poor peer review, it will publish letters from its readers that point out the obvious flaw in the work. Right? So in the case of Peratt's work, can you link us to any letters that pointed out this flaw you've discovered? Or did that flaw just go undiscovered by the readers too ... until *you* came along? :D

The only person I have confidence I'm far smarter than is you.

But I'm not putting my smarts up against yours. I'm putting Peratt's (and that Nobel Prize winner ... Alfven's). Both of whom actually have published in peer reviewed journals. :D
 
Zig's estimate is a basic calculation from electricity and magnetism. If you have a high-school level knowledge of physics you can do it yourself. He took an estimate for the net charge of the sun and asked how strong a magnetic field you'd need to get a force comparable to the gravitational forces acting on the star. There are no assumptions in there - none at all. And there are no significantly adjustable numbers either. The estimate for the charge might be off a little, but it cannot be off by much (again, for totally obvious reasons).
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The assumption is that this applies to Peratt's model. It doesn't. To criticize someone else's model, you find an issue with it, not another model.
 
My calculations are based upon three things: the observed motion of our sun, the maximum charge our sun can have (in other words, this is an upper bound for the produced acceleration since the actual charge could be less), and the field proposed by Peratt. There is no other model dependence, everything else is dictated by Maxwell's equations, and nobody is challenging those. It doesn't matter if I'm not using Peratt's model: I'm using his numbers and showing they can't produce the necessary accelerations to explain galactic rotation curves when applied to an actual star, as opposed to some homogenous plasma which he might be simulating. Whether or not his model is self-consistent is quite beside the point as far as I'm concerned: it doesn't match reality, and is therefore little more than a curiosity.
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In which case we'll agree to disagree. I don't think your model is applicable to Peratt's.
 
Because perhaps you don't understand the model and physics nearly as well as you think you do.

That's not an answer. If the model doesn't match reality, then its subtleties don't really matter.

I don't claim to be an expert on this subject.

That's an understatement. You're not even a novice. And as I suspected, you haven't even got the ability to evaluate the very simple calculations I made, nor are you capable of calculating the dipole attraction that sol referenced which I neglected.

So they sort of cover up their mistakes.

No, BAC. That was my whole point: it's not the journal's mistake, it's the author's. You really don't get the role of the journals.

But even if a journal doesn't apologize for an obviously poor peer review, it will publish letters from its readers that point out the obvious flaw in the work. Right?

If someone bothers to write such letters, yes.

But I'm not putting my smarts up against yours. I'm putting Peratt's (and that Nobel Prize winner ... Alfven's).

Argument from authority much?
The behavior of an essentially homogeneous plasma (which is what his model was calculating) need not describe what happens to compact matter like a star. And in this case it does not, and cannot, as my calculations demonstrated. And sol already linked to some articles which rather contradict Peratt's notions even for the case of homogeneous plasma. So there's really no use pretending that the issues have been ignored.
 
In which case we'll agree to disagree. I don't think your model is applicable to Peratt's.

But I'm not comparing my model against Peratt's model. I'm comparing Peratt's model to reality. It's quite possible that, within the confines of whatever approximations Peratt made to create his model, his results are entirely correct. But so what? The question of interest is how well the model conforms to reality. And it doesn't. That's what my calculations demonstrate. I've told you what I based those calculations on. Unless you can point to an error in something I did, there's no question of applicability involved.
 
No, BAC. That was my whole point: it's not the journal's mistake, it's the author's. You really don't get the role of the journals.

There was recently a case of a group of scientists who wrote a series of 20-30 published, peer-reviewed papers which were wholly or in part plagiarized. When this was discovered, several of the journals in question did absolutely nothing. One journal (an electronic only one) withdrew the papers with a note saying why, and (IIRC) one other journal issued a special notice. But several others simply did nothing at all.

Journals in general are not very good about these things. In this case the paper was published in a journal on plasma physics. I doubt very many people with expertise in astrophysics even read it at the time, and the quality of the peer review in such a case is even more questionable than ordinarily. And by the way, has anyone even bothered to check whether there were such letters to the editor?
 
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The reason there are "no articles demonstrating that the gravitational effects of the stars making up the constellations are too weak to affect anyone's personality." is because the effect is electromagnetic, specifically the visible spectrum, which has influenced lots of people to write mushy poetry, the Egyptians to base their religion on it, and others to become astronomers and philosophers. Not bad for a few specks of lights.
You believe in astrology?
 
By the way, here's a peer-reviewed paper published in a major astrophysical journal debunking these claims. ... snip ...

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/383229

Ah, you finally found one. And here is a rebuttal to that paper:

E. Battaner, E. Florido. (2007) "Are rotation curves in NGC 6946 and the Milky Way magnetically supported?", Astronomische Nachrichten 328:1, 92 (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/114033320/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 )

Abstract: The inner disk rotation of NGC 6946 and the Milky Way is dominated by gravity but magnetism is not negligible at radii where the rotation curve becomes flat, and indeed could become dominant at very large radii. ... snip ... Recent observations of magnetic fields in NGC 6946 and the Milky Way are in very good agreement with these predictions.

And here are some more recent sources all casting doubt:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0309823.pdf ( and here's an interesting thread discussing this work http://www.bautforum.com/questions-answers/34640-galaxy-rotation-curve-calculation.html )

http://www.marmet.org/cosmology/galaxyrotation/dynamics.pdf

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1475-7516/2005/05/003

http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2007/PP-11-03.PDF

And then there's the question of how big the magnetic fields really can get:

http://kino.as.arizona.edu/~disks/Abstracts.html "We conclude that the magnetic fields both in the disc and the halo of the Milky Way are quite turbulent with some indication of overlaying large scale structure."

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/307/5715/1610?rss=1 "The large bursts of recent star formation and supernova activity in the LMC argue against standard dynamo theory, adding to the growing evidence for rapid field amplification in galaxies."

I don't think we really know yet.
 
Argument from authority much?

Don't you love how when someone comes in with a different idea the mainstream supporters often say ... "come back when you've published it in a peer reviewed journal and have real scientists supporting it". And when you do, they suddenly couldn't care less if its peer reviewed or the work of nobel prize winners. :D

And sol already linked to some articles which rather contradict Peratt's notions even for the case of homogeneous plasma. So there's really no use pretending that the issues have been ignored.

Actually, he linked to one and that one was published in 2004 (how many years after Peratt's original work?). And are you sure it actually disputes Peratt's model ... given that you haven't read enough of Peratt's work apparently to even know what his model was? And, by the way, the 2004 paper was apparently rebutted in 2007 by those it challenged. So the verdict may be still out to anyone with an open mind. :)
 

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