DeiRenDopa said:
I have a general question concerning any flavour of Plasma Cosmology.
Or rather, concerning any living proponent of any such flavour.
Has there been any suggested tests of PC? If so, some details please.
Some background: in all the hundreds of posts on PC, in this thread and several others; in all the papers cited in those posts I did not read a single, specific, concrete test of PC! As in, "if only astronomers would point the HST at {insert RA and Dec here}, using {insert instrument here}, they would observe {insert expectation here}, which would test the following hypothesis {insert details here}, derived from PC as follows {insert more details here}."
Generalise the HST to any of the thousands of astronomical facilities, covering wavebands from TeV gammas to ~100 MHz radio; generalise a single observation to any observational program; etc.
And not just astronomy; generalise to any space mission (e.g. what commands to send to Cassini, or MESSENGER), or any Earth-based physics facility (e.g. what signals to look for when the LHC gets up and running).
And not just current facilities; generalise to any feasible research program.
But perhaps I missed something; perhaps Thornhill or Scott have published detailed programs, and there are a half-dozen papers by Peratt and Lerner on just how they'd test PC if only they were granted telescope time, and ...
So, does any reader know of any such material/proposals?
And is any other reader curious as to why there is such a dearth of interest, by PC proponents, in actually testing their pet ideas?
Well the usual counter argument, I infer from what I have read on these threads, is the lack of funding or resources to get that ‘testing’ done. As I have said before, for funding, just write a book called “Big Bang Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About” and have Kevin Trudeau do an infomercial, but just don’t let him do the accounting. As most of us know, some who have actually been involved in testing ideas (even our own), some ideas can be tested with minimal expenditure, effort and with existing data, but of course you need an idea to be tested. As you note DRD, most PC/EU claims are such generalizations and we have seen a consistent problem on these threads just trying to pin down what constitutes EU/PC that testing is superfluous until you have something to test. So it remains up to the PC/EU proponents to come up with falsifiable tests. Until then it is not science but just woo and of course a falsifiable test puts one’s idea at risk of being falsified. So I see no mystery as to why such testing is avoided.
This is pretty close to the tentative conclusion I'd come to; namely, that yet one more reason why PC is scientific woo is that none of its contemporary proponents show any interest in having their ideas tested, whether by astronomical observation or laboratory experiment.
There are many aspects to this.
For example, from the hundreds and hundreds of posts here, by PC proponents, it's pretty obvious none of them have more than the vaguest idea of what observational astronomy actually is, as in what telescopes actually are, what the instruments attached to them actually do, how one goes about deciding what to point at, what the data from the instrument is, how it needs to be processed, etc, etc, etc, etc ... and I suspect much the same staggering ignorance prevails wrt
in situ space probes, experiments in labs, etc (among contemporary PC heros, Peratt is an obvious except wrt this last).
Then there's how one goes about devising a test, from formulating a hypothesis to obtaining data to analysing it to dealing with confounding factors and statistics to ...
Take part of Thornhill's so-called prediction re the Deep Impact experiment; it illustrates well just how wide and deep the gulf is between, in this case, EU proponents and standard science:
Thornhill said:
X-rays will accompany discharges to the projectile, which will not match X-ray production through the mechanics of impact. The intensity curve will be that of a lightning bolt (sudden onset, exponential decline) and may well include more than one peak
"
X-rays will accompany discharges to the projectile" -> the detection of a single x-ray photon thus confirms the prediction
"
which will not match X-ray production through the mechanics of impact" -> and what is the expected "
X-ray production through the mechanics of impact"? and how was this determined? Thornhill does not say, so no one can independently check his work; in particular, no one is able to say whether the method he used to determine what was expected is valid (or not)
"
The intensity curve" -> what is this? no definition, so it's impossible to independently verify
"
will be that of a lightning bolt (sudden onset, exponential decline)" -> no reference given, so no way to independently check; for example, AFAIK lightning bolts do NOT, typically, have an "intensity curve" that has "a sudden onset and exponential decline", but the so-called prediction is impervious to such an objection
"
and may well include more than one peak" -> if there were one peak, EU proponents could claim it was spot on; if there were two peaks, EU proponents could claim it was spot on; if there were 42 peaks, EU proponents could claim it was spot on ... only if there were no peaks could the prediction have been said to have failed.
It would seem that Sol88 is among the EU adherents who proudly markets this non-science, rather than hanging his head in deep embarrassment and shame.
PC and EU proponents also put Birkeland on a pedestal. Aside from the intellectual dishonesty of radically re-writing history (for example, Birkeland did not study plasmas, and certainly never used the term "plasma cosmology"), the conspicuous absence of an active, science-based testing program among these folk shows they have failed, dismally, to learn from the core part of Birkeland's work (it is also richly ironic; one can only wonder how severely he'd've ripped Thornhill's so-called predictions to shreds, for example).
flick a switch and bingo, plasma!!! 
