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Thunderbolts of the Gods

We certainly need two or three more threads where dark matter VS electricity can be discussed. :D

As for lurkers, they all died of boredom weeks ago.
 
See that is part of the conflation of issues, plasma cosmology has been conflated with the electric sun, much to the valid POV of plasma cosmology.

Now Alven did believe in some sort of steady state universe which has other issues.
 
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Dancing David said:
Now Alven did believe in some sort of steady state universe which has other issues.
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Please, Hannes Alfvén is a Nobel Prize winner, a famous scientist, and deserves the respect of spelling his name correctly. If one can't be bothered to at least spell a name correctly, why would anything else from a person be considered? :wackywink:
 
Dancing David said:
Now Alven did believe in some sort of steady state universe which has other issues.
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I think Alfvén was more open minded than this. A couple of years before he died, he was writing that "we should try to adopt the “Big Bang” cosmology to the plasma universe model in two different ways." (ref), I think implying that he did not reject the Big Bang out of hand, although he may have preferred alternative cosmologies.

Writing in 1988, Anthony L. Peratt noted that "Alfvén and his colleagues have proposed an alternative cosmology to both the Steady State and the Big Bang cosmologies", but also, "To Alfvén, the Big Bang is a myth — a myth devised to explain creation. "I was there when Abbe Georges Lemaître first proposed this theory," he recalls. Lemaître was, at the time, both a member of the Catholic hierarchy and an accomplished scientist. He said in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas Aquinas' theological dictum of creatio ex nihilo — creation out of nothing." (ref) (Full text, PDF)

Ironically, it appears that it is the Big Bang has its origins in Creationism, but I digress.
 
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The "Big Bang" was coined by Hoyle on the BBC radio program, The Nature of Things while criticizing the theory that everything started off from a single point.

He thought it smacked of creationism, and used the term "the big bang" as criticism of the idea. Very funny it has become the term used by the true believers.
 
robinson said:
Very funny it has become the term used by the true believers.
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When you are as clueless about physics as you have shown yourself to be, it's not exactly wise to use such terms to describe people who know so much more than you about the topic
 
Ziggurat said:
When you are as clueless about physics as you have shown yourself to be, it's not exactly wise to use such terms to describe people who know so much more than you about the topic
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I don't think robinson was, attributing the term to Hoyle (a steady state man), applying it to criticism of the idea.
 
iantresman said:
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I don't think robinson was, attributing the term to Hoyle (a steady state man), applying it to criticism of the idea.
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Hoyle was using the term "true believer"? That's not what robinson's post says. Looks like he's using the term himself. If he wants to attribute the term to someone else, he should indicate so, but he didn't. So we're left with the only logical conclusion in the absence of such attribution: robinson is using the term himself.

Edit: perhaps you thought I was talking about the term "big bang". That would explain your reference to Hoyle, but such an objection on my part wouldn't make sense, since it's the term accepted by both proponents and opponents.
 
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iantresman said:
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Ironically, it appears that it is the Big Bang has its origins in Creationism, but I digress.
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robinson said:
Very funny it has become the term used by the true believers.
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What total nonsense.

The big bang has is origins in overwhelming observational evidence together with a very successful theory of gravity.

If general relativity is correct there was a big bang (or there will be a big crunch). General relativity does not have stable steady-state cosmological solutions. This is quite easy to understand - it follows essentially from the fact that gravity is attractive. (As everyone knows one can find steady state solution by adding a positive cosmological constant to a closed matter dominated one, but that solution is unstable and hence physically uninteresting.) We have very good evidence that GR is correct from many different observations.

On the observational side, we have observed hundreds of billions of stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, supernovae, quasars, and other astrophysical objects. Guess what? They obey a Hubble law. That means everything in the universe is moving away from us, and the farther it is, the faster it's moving. Try running that movie backwards in time in your head for a while (and don't forget that gravity is attractive). Ouch!

To not believe in the big bang requires denying that GR is correct, denying that the evidence for GR is valid, and denying the obvious observational facts you see when you look at the sky (which have been known for 80 years). Basically you just have to deny everything. Now THAT's faith.
 
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The true-believer syndrome merits study by science. What is it that compels a person, past all reason, to believe the unbelievable. How can an otherwise sane individual become so enamored of a fantasy, an imposture, that even after it's exposed in the bright light of day he still clings to it--indeed, clings to it all the harder?
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--M. Lamar Keene
 
robinson said:
The same reason people cling to dark matter and dark energy.
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Dark matter and dark energy haven't been disproven. Electric sun models have been. And you have not once shown any significant understanding of any of the subject matter in debate here. So why do you feel qualified to judge people who have demonstrated far greater understanding than you have?
 
robinson said:
The same reason people cling to dark matter and dark energy.

:D
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I, for one, wasn't aware the 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' had been 'disproven'.

May I enquire as to what, for you robinson, constitutes a (the?) disproof of dark matter and dark energy?

Further, assuming there is, for you, at least one such disproof, what are the reasons why any other reader of this JREF thread should accept such a disproof?
 
My last 'little more than vanilla text' post (I hope!) ...

The Man, Ziggurat, Terry, Wolverine, MattusMaximus, and iantresman: would you mind answering the questions I asked in post #353 of this thread (sorry I can't provide links to it)?

Here they are, with preamble, again:
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Assuming that we - collectively - are studying the Sun (not any other topic related to Thunderblots of the Gods, or the Electric universe, or ...), I would like to ask those who've actively contributed to this thread the following simple questions:

How would you describe the scope of the science (only physics?) you (we) could, or should or would, use?

What would you say are the objectives of such science (physics), for the purposes of our study?

What are the criteria for deciding what sorts of things are legitimate evidence (or data) for our study?

What methods of analysis - including what logic - do you consider legitimate for our study?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Thanks to robinson and Dancing David and sol invictus for your inputs.

Thanks too to Zeuzzz for your comments; I expect to be able to comment on them (and ask some questions!) in my next post, which (hopefully) will include links etc ...
 
robinson said:
The same reason people cling to dark matter and dark energy.
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While I doubt this is what you meant, it is true that scientists often develop an emotional attachment to their theories that go well past what is merited by data or logic. That's actually not such a bad thing, because every once in a while one of them turns out to have been right, or at least discovers something interesting in their quest to save their idea. But that's rare.

So if you want to judge the merit of a scientific idea, don't look at the old fossils that still cling to it - look and see where the younger generation is trending, what Ph.D. students choose to work on, what most young researchers think is interesting. They're the ones with their lives and careers at stake - if they choose a bad idea, they won't eat.
 
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Praise be to Alfvén, Bahcall, and Lakatos!

Zeuzzz said:
Very true. A lot of what has been posted here is mainly EU material, mixed with plasma cosmology and astrophysics. It is important to distinguish between the two.

This does a good job of pointing out some of the differences;

The Electric Universe is a variant of Plasma Cosmology, and it is necessary to differentiate between the two. While they share more similarities than differences, it should be noted that EU ideas tend to go a step further than the generally more conservative approach of Plasma Cosmology.

While both viewpoints permit many ideas previously excluded by Big Bang Cosmology, The Electric Universe looks at the bigger picture, and promotes more radical ideas about the role of electricity in the universe, from ancient mythology to the mind-body connection.

Both PC and EU proponents acknowledge the fact that space is NOT electrically neutral, a fact largely denied in conventional astronomy.
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Plasma cosmology/astrophysics material has been published in many astronomical journals for over the past century, and most EU ideas can be traced back to work in plasma cosmology. EU just goes that step further, actually declaring that current science is wrong and they are right, whereas plasma cosmology is much more compatible with mainstream scientific views, that is why journals have published plenty plasma cosmology material but not so much EU. That and EU theory is a lot more recent a theory than Plasma cosmology.


For example the whole concept of Electric stars derives from the experimental work of Kristian Birkeland, and the work of Hannes Alfven who believed that there were certain electrical solar circuits, called a heliospheric current circuit. Although you will not see anything in the literature about stars being fuelled externally, [...]

(rest of post omitted)
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This post is (partly) a test of whether I can now post links (etc) without running afoul of the JREF 'newbie' filter ...

Zeuzzz, Google tells me that the material you quoted comes from Plasma cosmology .net (undated, no author), from JREF (many instances in this thread), and from PhysicsForums (a post, #9, by PlasmaSphere, dated 30 December, 2007), though the last involves some re-writing ("[...] i feel that a distinction needs to be made between the two. While they share more similarities than differences, it should be noted that E.U. ideas tend to go a step further than the generally more cautious approach of Plasma Cosmology. While both viewpoints permit many ideas previously excluded by Big Bang Cosmology, The Electric Universe looks at the bigger picture, and promotes more radical ideas about the role of electricity in the universe.

Plasma cosmology is more conservative in its approach and thus has recieved more approvement from various science journals over the years, partly due to the fact that they include areas of cosmology that the more unorthodox E.U. proponents have since disregarded.").

Do you mind if I ask which one of these was your source?

[ETA: Yippie! It seems the shackles have fallen from me! :D :eye-poppi :jaw-dropp]
 
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