Plasma Cosmology - Woo or not

[DeiRenDopa]

Stop the presses; to first order, I was incorrect about the interpretation of this particular Eot-Wash work. Their main, ultrasensitive result may not be sensitive to the particular weird force posited by PC, which would act through the center of mass of their pendulum, but only to actual modified gravities which act on the pendulum arms directly.

Could you say a bit more about this please?

In particular, to what extent does any null result from any of the Eot-Wash experiments require a quantitative specification of any "weird forces" (whether PC-based or not)? IOW, if the non-gravitational force being tested is not specified in a sufficiently clear form, can any test (Eot-Wash or other) be used to rule it out, ever?

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Perhaps I'm missing something. These tests are measuring possible minute EM forces. Is it not true that that the forces required for the kind of cosmological effects promulgated by the believers in EU/PC must much greater?

This is hard to answer ...

Let's take the example of the explanation of the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, per the Peratt (et al.) paper(s).

In at least one such paper, the extent to which gravitation has been included in the simulation is unclear ... and as the source code is not available, there is no independent, objective way to find out (AFAIK). It follows, therefore, that the tests that have been suggested - in my posts and others' - are inconclusive. But there's a much more important conclusion: the inability to independently, and objectively, verify (or falsify) this result makes the proposal, by definition, non-science!

In at least one other paper, it is the formation of spiral structure that is proposed, not its on-going maintenance - the matter that is modelled is an ISM that behaves as a plasma. In this model, there is no coupling between the stars which form from the ISM and the ISM, nor between the stars and the galactic magnetic fields ... so it is irrelevant what forces are acting on the ionised gas. Of course, these models can be ruled out because the observed rotation curves of spiral galaxies can be traced by stars as well as ionised gas, and they are the same (and it doesn't matter how old the stars are either). While this does not, per se, rule out the proposed mechanism - during the formation of spiral galaxies - it does limit its explanatory power.

Now that's arguably PC, no matter how vehement EU proponents are in asserting that PC and EU are the same.

When it comes to EU, as Tom Bridgman pointed out (in another thread here), there are no quantitative proposals for the dominant forces at work, wrt the motions of bodies such as planets, stars, gas, etc. Ergo, whatever EU proposals there are, in this respect, they cannot be tested.

 

[Perpetual Student]

It is conclusive! Sol88 does not understand the nature of scientific evidence and he is unwilling to or incapable of making the effort to change that fact. This little Mercury episode is very telling. "Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck walks like a duck," whatever.... is his notion of proof. He does not have even the slightest clue as to what is meant by quantitative proof. He does not understand how physics has been done since Newton and how pathetically poor his attempt at proving his case has been.
Sadly, even if some features of some planets could be attributed to electrical effects, there still exists a vast chasm to demonstrating any cosmological effects of EM forces. But he simply does not get that! It's sad.
There are so many interesting and knowledgeable people on these threads to learn from and gain further understanding of the universe at all levels. Soll88 obviously has a serious interest in cosmology but is totally missing the boat. It's very sad indeed!

 

[The Man]

And so did mission member Louise Prockter of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, US. LINK

The troughs appear to be stretch marks called extensional faults - troughs formed as a result of part of the surface expanding.

Well the appearance of such stretch marks or extensional faults certainly seems consistent with the geology of the region, known as the Caloris Basin. It hardly seems unlikely to find such geological features at almost the center of the largest impact basin on mercury.


A relevant paper
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2008/pdf/1421.pdf

Drtailed pictures of the rim
http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/captions/mercury/merccal.htm

An overview of the basin (the spider pattern or ‘Pantheon Fossea’ is almost at the center of the blue circle)
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/images/strom/hi_res/Strom01.jpg


Oh and in case you are wondering it is also consistent with some mathematical models of that geology. Don’t happen to have anything like that for your explanation, like say an observationally consistent model?

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/M..._Formation_Linked_To_Asteroid_Impact_999.html

And if you prefer wikipedia.

Pantheon Fossae is a region in the center of Caloris Basin on Mercury containing numerous radial graben (troughs) that appear to be extensional faults, with a 40 km crater located near the center of the pattern. The exact cause of this pattern of troughs is not currently known.[1] The feature was nicknamed "the Spider" before receiving its official name.[2]
The name is taken from the Pantheon in Rome, an ancient temple with a classic domed roof. The dome of the Pantheon has a series of sunken panels that radiate from a central circular opening at the top of the dome, and Mercury’s Pantheon Fossae is reminiscent of this pattern. Consequently, the crater near the center of Pantheon Fossae is now named Apollodorus, who is credited by some as being the architect of the Pantheon. MESSENGER scientists are debating whether Apollodorus played a role in the formation of Pantheon Fossae or whether the crater is simply from a later impact that occurred close to the center of the radial pattern.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_Fossae

 

[Dancing David]

Wrong Mr parrot please re read post 2240

Quack quack!

Again you don't understand the common use of words.

You haves hown pictures but not explained your model.

Such as :
What created the electrical discharge to create the crater.

 

[Ziggurat]

But it's just so much fun, watching them blindly follow and regurgitate the standard party line!

Oh, the irony.

Even when faced with insurmountable challenges to their theory, case in hand is the few post's above, the parrots will keep parroting!

Yes, that is rather exactly what you're doing. You're the parrot: you've picked up a few ideas from various PC websites and you just repeat them. You are incapable of evaluating those ideas in any meaningful fashion. You can't do a single calculation to actually compare relative forces for gravity and electromagnetism. You can't even evaluate calculations that are done for you which demonstrate that the claims you are making are simply false. All you can do is look at pictures. In most cases, those pictures don't actually indicate anything about your claims. In some cases (as with the electron orbitals) they directly contradict your claims.

You are, in short, pig-ignorant. Now, I don't generally hold ignorance against people: not everyone has an equal opportunity to learn, and not everyone spends their time learning about the same things. But when you manage to convince yourself that the people who do know what they are talking about and have spent considerable time and effort acquiring the knowledge they have are somehow far more ignorant than you, when you've done nothing except look at a few pictures online, well, that I do mind. That's not just ignorance, that's plain stupidity. And willful stupidity at that.

 

[Tim Thompson]

Pantheon Fossae

Ok, one single phenomena it is!! I pick Mercuries spider crater! ... I propose this is an electrical discharge scar. A planetary sized lightning strike!! ...

Well the appearance of such stretch marks or extensional faults certainly seems consistent with the geology of the region, known as the Caloris Basin. ...

I see The Man has beat me to the main point, but I would like to expand a bit by presenting a paper not on his list ... Could Pantheon Fossae be the Result of the Apollodorus Crater-forming Impact within the Caloris Basin, Mercury?; Freed, et al., 2009; 40th Lunar and Planetary Conference, 2000 (follow the PDF link, it's freely accessible). In this short paper the authors detail the argument that the Apollodorus impact event caused the Pantheon Fossae features. As the paper puts it: "Specifically, we explore whether the Apollodorus crater-forming impact modified the state of stress within the central Caloris basin floor in a manner that led to the formation of many, if not all, of the graben of Pantheon Fossae." Of course there is no claim that this is definitely the cause of the Pantheon Fossae features, and the authors are quite explicit about the possibility that they are wrong ("The fact that no other similar sized impacts induced such a complex implies either that no significant extensional pre-stress was present at the time of those impacts, or our scenario linking Apollodorus to Pantheon Fossae is not correct."). However, the geological & geophysical evidence & arguments are presented, and the entire scenario makes physical sense, and is consistent with known geology & geophysics.

So compare this hypothesis to the competing electrical discharge hypothesis championed by Sol88. Which seems more likely? Which makes more physical sense? I submit that the electrical discharge hypothesis is much inferior, makes less physical sense, and suffers from far more serious problems than does the alternative, more mainstream geological explanation offered by Freed, et al.

The pictures shown by Sol88 are not consistent with the graben pattern seen in pantheon Fossae. In both of his pictures, the electrical discharge pattern spreads out along the surface, and forms a "dendritic pattern" with many branches spreading out from the large radial channels. But look at the pictures of Pantheon Fossae and you see little no branching. Instead you see only strong radial features, and they are fairly straight, rather than following the twisty courses seen in the electrical discharge pictures. The pattern is not consistent with the electrical discharge pictures, but is consistent with the well known geology of grabens. This lends confidence to the geological explanation, and takes confidence away from the electrical discharge hypothesis.

Furthermore, Sol88 "scales up" the phenomenon in size without justification. Despite claims to the contrary, it is not true that you can "scale up" any plasma process without question. One need only look at the Pantheon Fossae pictures to see that the linear features are quite deep, which presents no problem if they are grabens. However, this poses great problems for the electrical discharge hypothesis, because it is now required of the electrical discharge that it carve deep features into basaltic rocks. There is no experimental or observational evidence to support such an extreme claim, and a lot of evidence to oppose it. For one thing, we see that the channel features interpreted as graben are consistently the same width all along the channel. If they were carved by electrical discharge, they should be thick at the base, and grow thinner, as the electric current loses energy due to the work done digging the channel, and due to energy lost to the dendritic branches (both of which features we do see in the Sol88 pictures, and do not see in the Pantheon Fossae pictures). This is aside from the extraordinary difficulty in explaining where the very considerable amount of energy required to did even one channel in basalt would come from, let alone that required to dig the entire system.

So here are my conclusions:

Why the electrical hypothesis of Sol88 should be rejected
1) The pictorial evidence that Sol88 presents is not self consistent, as the branching pattern and channel shapes seen in the pictures are significantly inconsistent with those seen in Pantheon Fossae.
2) The lack of channel thinning in the Pantheon Fossae picture implies that the carving current does not lose energy as it does work, which is not physically reasonable.
3) There is no known mechanism whereby any electric current, under any circumstances, could carve a deep channel in basaltic rock. So this must be assumed a-priori.
4) Even if we ignore (3), there is no physically reasonable explanation for the source of the enormous energy required in an electrical discharge to mechanically carve the channels.

Why the geological explanation should not be rejected
1) The Apollodorus crater is entirely consistent with impact crater shapes, both from physical models, and from laboratory experiments modeling impact features. There is no reason to reject this as an impact feature.
2) The assumption of pre-existing extensional stress in Caloris Basin is consistent with the observed presence of circumferential graben in the outer Caloris Basin, and is consistent with extensional stress in terrestrial basins.
3) The shape and pattern of channels in Caloris Basin is consistent with the geological interpretation that they are grabens.
4) There is no fundamental energy problem; the impact and pre-existing extensional stress provide all of the energy necessary to explain the work done in creating the grabens.

Last word: I do not claim that the explanation in Freed, et al. is correct, only that it is scientifically preferable, and significantly so, than the electrical alternative offered by Sol88. The Freed, et al., explanation is not without problems of its own, most notably the fact that the radial graben pattern from an impact crater is quite rare. There are alternative geological explanations on the table which do not depend on the impact, as referenced by Freed, et al.

 

[Tim Thompson]

Review Time

Actually, Z did provide a concise description of Plasma Cosmology. He had been asked, repeatedly, to do so, from the very start of this thread, and, in post #684 he did so: ...

Ah, so long ago in post time. I was unaware of this. I will have to review the earlier posts to see what, if anything, there is to say further on the matter.

 

[Reality Check]

Richard Cranium is you! RC

Your inability to read is showing. Neither my real name or forum name is Richard Cranium.

 

[Reality Check]

RC wrote

Perfect!! next please!

You mean the next picture of a strange thing unrelated to cosmology that you cannot understand?

I have an interesting picture of a zit somewhere. Shall we discuss that ?

 

[Reality Check]

My numbers are in the same place yours are, wrt impactors, comet water/gas and volcanic lava flows.

I do not have any numbers. But you should look up the papers on impactors, comet water/gas and volcanic lava flows if you want to see some.

 

[Reality Check]

Still avoiding questions Sol88:

Hypothesis 1: The Spider crater and rays were created in one event (a lightning strike).
Falsifiable Prediction 1: The Spider crater and rays are the same age.

Hypothesis 2: The Spider crater and rays were created in two events.
Falsifiable Prediction 2: The Spider crater and rays are different ages.

Data: The density of craters on the Spider crater and the terrain containing the rays (and even in the rays themselves) is different. Standard astronomy tells us that the crater is a different age from the rays.

For the second time Sol88: Which falsifiable prediction is supported by the data?

Mercury has a magnetic field and so there is no charge separation from the solar wind (as on the Moon and other bodies) to provide a source for the ligtning

For the second time Sol88: Where did your lightning strike come from?

 

[sol invictus]

Sol Invictus,

you are not holding up your end of the bargin!

How do YOU think that the spider crater formed?

pony up dude!

You should re-read my challenge, since you don't appear to understand it... but I've learned that your lack of understanding is too basic to be remedied by re-reading anything.

Two comments:

First, the challenge cuts two ways, and I am not going to respond until you agree to your half.

Second, your proposal fails the conditions I set out on multiple counts - it is not quantitative, it is not specific (you haven't specified it in anything other than the vaguest terms - look at these pretty pictures which look very little like that crater!!!! OMG!!!!!!), and it doesn't disagree with the mainstream explanation - because there isn't one. That last point might be irrelevant here, but the first two certainly aren't.

The ball's in your court, sol88. Try not to trip on it.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

It is conclusive! Sol88 does not understand the nature of scientific evidence and he is unwilling to or incapable of making the effort to change that fact. This little Mercury episode is very telling. "Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck walks like a duck," whatever.... is his notion of proof. He does not have even the slightest clue as to what is meant by quantitative proof. He does not understand how physics has been done since Newton and how pathetically poor his attempt at proving his case has been.
Sadly, even if some features of some planets could be attributed to electrical effects, there still exists a vast chasm to demonstrating any cosmological effects of EM forces. But he simply does not get that! It's sad.
There are so many interesting and knowledgeable people on these threads to learn from and gain further understanding of the universe at all levels. Soll88 obviously has a serious interest in cosmology but is totally missing the boat. It's very sad indeed!

Thanks for the comments.

I should have made it crystal clear earlier ... Sol88 has demonstrated both an inability and an unwillingness to engage in a discussion based on logic.

As logic is among the fundamental bases of science, that inability and unwillingness automatically makes anything and everything he writes - beyond that which is necessary to demonstrate the inability and unwillingness - beyond the scope of this part of the JREF Forum ("Science, Mathematics, Medicine, and Technology") ... including anything to do with "EU" ideas (except, perhaps, to suggest that EU ideas are non-science by virtue of their manifest failures of logic).

Anaconda's last post seems to say that he too is out of place in this section of the JREF Forum (except, perhaps, if he wished to discuss the extent to which contemporary science is meaningful without its quantitative component).

However, BAC, robinson, Zeuzzz, and brantc (at least) may still be prepared to, and be, engaged in a logic-based discussion (though robinson seems to have got himself banned, not for anything he wrote in this thread though, it seems).

 

[The Man]

I see The Man has beat me to the main point, but I would like to expand a bit by presenting a paper not on his list ... http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009LPI....40.1362F

Hey I finally beat someone to the punch. Thanks Tim, I always prefer being expanded upon to being expanded within. I’ll have to give that paper a look later as it seems more of the type of paper I was looking for.

The pictures shown by Sol88 are not consistent with the graben pattern seen in pantheon Fossae. In both of his pictures, the electrical discharge pattern spreads out along the surface, and forms a "dendritic pattern" with many branches spreading out from the large radial channels. But look at the pictures of Pantheon Fossae and you see little no branching. Instead you see only strong radial features, and they are fairly straight, rather than following the twisty courses seen in the electrical discharge pictures. The pattern is not consistent with the electrical discharge pictures, but is consistent with the well known geology of grabens. This lends confidence to the geological explanation, and takes confidence away from the electrical discharge hypothesis.

Well this one you did beat me to (by my own fault). Having worked for years in a high voltage lab where I regularly produced such electrical discharges and pictures like the ones Sol88 presented, I’m quite familiar with the patterns those discharges make. The differences between electrical discharge patterns and the Pantheon Fossae were imediatly apparent to me for the very reasons you note, but I decided not to address that issue at that time for sake of brevity.

 

[Tim Thompson]

Electric Currents - So What?

Synchrotron radiation has been widely detected in deep-space. It is a product of electrons spiralling in a magnetic current, an electron flow, if you will, ordered movement of electrons, also known as electric current. This is the most solid piece of scientific evidence that electric currents exist in space.

And at least one JREF Forum member took you at your word, Anaconda, and focussed entirely on synchrotron radiation (with (electromagnetic) acceleration of charged particles promised), me. ...

I would like to add by interjecting a simple question of my own for Mr. Anaconda (or anyone else): Since when do the standard, mainstream models of astrophysics & cosmology deny the existence of electric currents in space?

 

[Zeuzzz]

Before I get back into the swing of this thread and reply to Sols 'challenge' in detail (need to be careful what I choose), I just read the paper often cited as the best evidence for dark matter, the one about the Bullet Cluster. The one that supposedly falsifies plasma cosmology, and is somehow statistically significant (along with like one or two other 'direct observations'). Its flipping hilarious!

A direct empirical proof of the existence of dark matter - astro-ph0608407 and 0608408 by Clowe et al. and Bradac et al.

We present new weak lensing observations of 1E0657-558 (z=0.296), a unique cluster merger, that enable a direct detection of dark matter, independent of assumptions regarding the nature of the gravitational force law. Due to the collision of two clusters, the dissipationless stellar component and the fluid-like X-ray emitting plasma are spatially segregated. By using both wide-field ground based images and HST/ACS images of the cluster cores, we create gravitational lensing maps which show that the gravitational potential does not trace the plasma distribution, the dominant baryonic mass component, but rather approximately traces the distribution of galaxies. An 8-sigma significance spatial offset of the center of the total mass from the center of the baryonic mass peaks cannot be explained with an alteration of the gravitational force law, and thus proves that the majority of the matter in the system is unseen.

"A direct empirical proof of the existence of dark matter"



...."A direct empirical proof of the existence of dark matter"



What a ridiculously unsupportable assertion! And what an amazingly inappropriate title.

 

[ben m]

What a ridiculously unsupportable assertion! And what an amazingly inappropriate title.

Let's see: a link to a paper, a funny picture, and no attention whatsoever to the science content. Is that you, Sol88?

 

[Reality Check]

Before I get back into the swing of this thread and reply to Sols 'challenge' in detail (need to be careful what I choose), I just read the paper often cited as the best evidence for dark matter, the one about the Bullet Cluster. The one that supposedly falsifies plasma cosmology, and is somehow statistically significant (along with like one or two other 'direct observations'). Its flipping hilarious!

A direct empirical proof of the existence of dark matter - astro-ph0608407 and 0608408 by Clowe et al. and Bradac et al.

What a ridiculously unsupportable assertion! And what an amazingly inappropriate title.

What is the assertion that is ridiculous and unsupportable?

Is it A: That gravitation lensing can determine the mass of a galactic cluster?
Is it B: That looking at the visible light in a galactic cluster can determine the mass of the visible matter in a galactic cluster?
Is it C: That subtracting B from A leaves a positive number that is the mass of the non-visible mass of the galactic cluster?

Or maybe you do not know what the "direct" part of the observation is?

FYI: Previous measurements of the dark matter in galactic clusters were exactly as above - subtract the gravitation mass of the cluster from the visible mass of the cluster to get the mass of the matter that cannot be seen. Typically this unseen mass is 10 times the visible mass.

But scientists wanted to measure the mass of the missing matter separately from the visible matter. That is why the two empirical observations of dark matter separate from the visible matter are direct observations of dark matter.

Thus we now have two direct empirical observations of dark matter in addition to the many other combined empirical observation of dark matter.

Is this so hard to understand Zeuzzz? (please, please do not let us think that you are as ignorant as Sol88 !)

 

[Sol88]

Let's see: a link to a paper, a funny picture, and no attention whatsoever to the science content. Is that you, Sol88?

Mmmm... science content??

The charging and discharging of the leyden jar not sciencey enough for ya!



Maybe you'd like to partake in a little experimental "science"? You know hands on, getting into it, scientific experiment, much like I show my 4 yr old daughter

I'd love nothing more to give you a mathematical description of an electric discharge but does one in fact exist?

But the leyden jar "scientific" experiment should get the point across with no need to resort to some differe_ntia_tal ve^Ctor integ^ral!!

Obviously there would be a number of very dynamic variables at play in an event such as this so I'm not sure what you maths is going to PROVE!!