Lambda-CDM theory - Woo or not?

[Michael Mozina]

Oh. So Birkeland was just guessing

You're no scientist or you would know that he wasn't just "guessing". You misrepresent truth any time and every time. You're consistent at least, I'll give you that much.

 

[GeeMack]

You're no scientist or you would know that he wasn't just "guessing". You misrepresent truth any time and every time. You're consistent at least, I'll give you that much.

So okay, Birkeland figured out that dark matter thing?

 

[Michael Mozina]

It doesn't operate at 600 MV. If it did, solar wind ions and electrons would have a minimum energy of 600 MeV.

You're going to have to let me ponder that point and think about how it applies to coronal loops. I'm not sure how it would apply to solar wind per se, but cause they can attach themselves to "currents' of various types. I'll have to think about that a bit. Birkeland did see to predict a "sputtering" sort of effect where some momentum was passed on to positively charged ions. He talked about finding fragments of his sphere on the sides of the vacuum chamber. That's also why he predicted both positively and negatively charged particles would come from the sun. Something has to heat the corona.

(If it matters 600MV would arise from a 700,000,000 C charge. Nothing at all in terms of force on the Sun)

Because Birkeland's numbers were based on actual experimentation, I would tend to use his numbers rather than Peratt's. I'd be inclined then to agree with you that the direct effect on the sun would not necessarily be significant, but it would not be zero.

Gibberish. You're still imagining a force on a wispy cloud, and somehow that force drags the Sun along.

It's more like the analogy I used about the rubber sheet with particles in embedded in the sheet. The whole sheet is being accelerated, and it has the most mass. The particles embedded in the sheet are simply carried along with the rest of the "flow" of the mass of the universe. It's an "electric", and "not so wispy" sort of flow, anymore than an electrical discharge is 'wispy'.

Imagination isn't good enough.

Why not? It worked for Guth. He simply "imagined up" an entirely new, and now extinct force of nature! Come on Ben, cut me so slack.

If some gentle force makes the Earth's atmosphere move horizontally, that doesn't "magically" drag sailboats along with it. The sailboat is coupled to the atmosphere via ordinary, known forces.

That's the whole point Ben. The cosmic wind blows against the galactic sails and the galaxies 'move'. It's not magic, it's physics!

If that coupling is weak, the sailboat sits there (no net acceleration) and the wind just moves past it.

A galaxy's overall EM field isn't necessarily "small', particularly the EM field around a "black hole". I like your analogy, but you need a bigger boat IMO. The galaxies are the "boats' and the cosmic rays and cosmic EM fields are the wind. The Earth's atmosphere is tucked neatly away inside the magnetosphere so we don't feel much in terms of EM influences from those million mile per hour solar winds. Their net effect is "almost' negligible compared to gravity, but that solar wind does "push" ever so slightly against the Earth.

Let's talk about those black holes, "jets" and such might act as sails and how they might interact and couple with the intergalactic winds.

 

[ben m]

Yeah, Birkeland's calculations were within the context of his hypothesis. "If my premises are true, then it must also be true that (calculate calculate calculate) there are 700 corpuscles per cubic furlong ... "

In the days when people thought the Sun was powered by radium decay, they calculated how much radium. When people thought that Andromeda was a nearby molecular cloud, they calculated how dense it was. When people thought there was a 17 keV heavy neutrino, they calculated many of its properties. And so on.

I don't care what details Birkeland needed to attach to his data-free, pre-space-age, pre-particle-physics speculation about what lay above his aurorae.

 

[ben m]

It's more like the analogy I used about the rubber sheet with particles in embedded in the sheet. The whole sheet is being accelerated, and it has the most mass. The particles embedded in the sheet are simply carried along with the rest of the "flow" of the mass of the universe.

In a rubber sheet, the "particles" carried along are physically attached to the sheet. They accelerate because the sheet exerts a force on them---an ordinary elastic-mechanical force. The particles obey F=ma, just like everything else. If the particles are not attached to the sheet, such that F=0, then a=0 as well.

Notice that I included elastic forces in my list. Is there an elastic substance attached to the Sun that can exert 10^19 Newton of force on it?

That's the whole point Ben. The cosmic wind blows against the galactic sails and the galaxies 'move'. It's not magic, it's physics!

OK, Michael, I identified the force exerted on the sail by this "wind". A 8m/s wind exerts a 10 pascal pressure gradient on a sailboat, and that's the force that moves it. Answer the question already: what is the actual force that's felt by the Sun, and how does your "wind" actually exert that force?

I would like to remind you that a minute ago you thought that winds dragged stuff along by "gravity". That was utter baloney, gravity doesn't do that. But it was a start: at least you recognized that things accelerate due to actual forces, they don't just feel a vague urge to follow local velocity vector fields. Are you going to try again or not?

 

[Reality Check]

Ya, and they've been euphemistically referring to them as "magnetic slinkies" in space.

Ya, and you are still displaying your ignorance.
No astronomer calls filament 'magnetic slinkies': they call them filaments.
The term 'magnetic Slinky' has been used to describe the observation of spiralling magnetic fields - Magnetic ‘Slinky’ confirms space theory

I'm really curious to see how that new paper plays out. You folks have consistently underestimated the mass in those high energy filaments because you've ignored the "current" flow for so long.

More ignorance:
Amelia Fraser-McKelvie found evidence of filaments between galaxy clusters.
She found the evidence. There was no evidence before.

And the really ignorant part: Nothing to do with a delusion of "current" flow.

"we people" (i.e. scientists in general) can calculate the amount of baryonic matter in the universe from the WMAP data. This is bout 4% of the mass & anbery inthe universe.

This result increases the ~2% of visible matter that we have detected. It may be ~2.001% now. It may be ~3% now. The WMAG data says that it cannot be greater than ~4%.

 

[GeeMack]

"we people" (i.e. scientists in general) can calculate the amount of baryonic matter in the universe from the WMAP data. This is bout 4% of the mass & anbery inthe universe.

This result increases the ~2% of visible matter that we have detected. It may be ~2.001% now. It may be ~3% now. The WMAG data says that it cannot be greater than ~4%.

Really? It may be 3 or 4 percent? Actually...

You folks have consistently under overestimated the mass in those high energy filaments because you've ignored the "current" flow Birkeland for so long.

Don't forget, in Chapter 6 of The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition, Birkeland calculated the mass of the visible matter in the Universe to be just one hundredth of one percent...

We see from the above that it is not impossible that future investigations will show that without coming into conflict with experience in any way here mentioned, we may reckon that there are more than ten thousand times greater masses gathered as flying corpuscles in "empty" space than the masses of the stars and nebulae.

All those corpuscles of dark matter make up the other 99.99%.

 

[Aitch]

All those corpuscles of dark matter make up the other 99.99%.

I do wish they'd find another word to use.

You just know that it's going to inspire some lurking woo-ster to come up with a theory of the universe based on the work of William Harvey^WP.

 

[ben m]

You folks have consistently underestimated the mass in those high energy filaments because you've ignored the "current" flow for so long.

This is a paper about how everyone has long expected 50% of the baryons to be in hot filaments, because that's what the LCDM predicted. This prediction motivated people to search for the filaments. They did the search, which turns out to be quite difficult, and they found exactly what LCDM had predicted.

How'd you manage to read that as "you folks underestimated ..."? Do you have a special pair of glasses, like in "They Live", that translates all science journalism into LCDM BROKEN, EU/PC WINS AGAIN?

 

[sol invictus]

[MM translation]

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
LCDM BROKEN, EU/PC WINS AGAIN?

[/MM translation]

 

[Tim Thompson]

Stellar mass and Birkeland's flying corpuscles

FYI, he finished up all his calculations including electrons on page 721 with the following statement:

We see from the above that it is not impossible that future investigations will show that without coming into conflict with experience in any way here mentioned, we may reckon that there are more than ten thousand times greater masses gathered in flying corpuscles in "empty" space than the masses in the stars and nebulae.

Oh. So Birkeland was just guessing. And what exactly, in objective and quantitative terms, are corpuscles? Looks like Birkeland had a hunch scientists might find that dark matter stuff.

You're no scientist or you would know that he wasn't just "guessing".

Lets repeat the Birkeland quote with different hilite:

We see from the above that it is not impossible that future investigations will show that without coming into conflict with experience in any way here mentioned, we may reckon that there are more than ten thousand times greater masses gathered in flying corpuscles in "empty" space than the masses in the stars and nebulae.

Oh, of course Birkeland was guessing! Even Birkeland knew he was guessing. That's why he said, in the very passage you quoted, "it is not impossible" that future scientists would discover all those flying corpuscles out-mass the stars (and nebulae!) by a factor of 10,000. Birkeland knew that he had no direct knowledge of the interplanetary or interstellar flying corpuscles. All he had was indirect knowledge derived from his interpretations of his own laboratory experiments, plus his own interpretation of auroral phenomena.

Well, today we have direct knowledge of the interplanetary corpuscles. We measure them directly with spacecraft immersed in those corpuscles. We know that the number density of the solar wind, in the vicinity of Earth's orbit, is on average about 7 protons & electrons per cubic centimeter. If we assume that density on average throughout a sphere 100 astronomical units (AU) in radius, I get a total mass of about 1.642x10¹⁷ grams. That is about 0.0032% of the total mass of the atmosphere of planet Earth. Not exactly a dynamical monster in the presence of the entire solar system, which is dominated by the 1.989x10³³ gram mass of the Sun.

But of course, Birkeland is referring to "stars and nebulae", so he must clearly mean to speak about the environment far beyond the Sun and solar system. But Birkeland did not even have indirect data of any kind on that environment. All he could possibly do is extrapolate based on his determinations of the solar system environment. But of course he was already just guessing about that, so his ideas about the interstellar environment can only be an extrapolation from a guess. And since "extrapolation" is as often as not a pretty good synonym for "guess", what Birkeland is actually doing is making a guess based on a guess, which is pretty much "guessing" in my book.

But today we have strong indirect knowledge of the content of the interstellar medium in galaxies, based on extensive multiwavelength astronomy campaigns (radio, infrared, ultraviolet and X-ray astronomy being the chief contributors).

I'm still struggling to get you and Sol to acknowledge that the mass contained in stars is merely 'chump change" compared to the mass that is contained in the plasma filaments between the stars.

Then you are in real trouble. The mass of the filaments in a spiral galaxy amounts to about 10% of the galaxy's baryonic mass, the rest being stars. And of course, in elliptical galaxies there are generally no such filaments at all.

I posted that while off on a trip to the Riverside Telescope Makers Conference, and away from my library. Now that I have returned, allow me to elaborate.

"The visible mass of galaxies is primarily in the form of stars. Gas, even in the case of the so-called late-type spirals that have the largest gas content, does not contribute more than a few percent of the total mass. However, because the various forms of matter have different spatial distributions, it should be kept in mind that, in some locations, the gas content can be significant. For example, in the outer disks of spiral galaxies the gas-to-star surface density ratio can easily exceed 15%. In the case of elliptical galaxies, traditionally described as gas-free systems, there are examples, such as NGC 4636, in which almost 10¹¹ solar masses (i.e., ~10% of the estimated stellar mass) is in the form of hot, X-ray emitting gas; this hot corona occupies a volume larger than that of the luminous content."
Dynamics of Galaxies by Giuseppe Bertin, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
​

Clearly, even on galactic scales, the idea that the mass contained in stars is "chump change" is quite wrong. Only when we reach the scale of galaxy clusters, do we see the intracluster hot gas take the leading role, out-massing stars by about 9 to 1. Whether or not this constitutes "chump change" is surely subjective. However, it does make the point that even at galactic scales, stellar mass dominates. And even in galaxy clusters, the intracluster medium is extremely tenuous, with a number density of about 1/1000cm³ (10^-3/cm³), and occupies a volume far greater than the volume occupied by galactic stars (there are also quite a lot of intracluster stars, not associated with or bound to any specific galaxy in the cluster). But we also know that this hot gas that out-masses the stars by 9 to 1 is still about a factor of 10 too little to maintain the cluster in gravitational equilibrium, hence the need for dark matter to supply the additional "missing mass". See, for instance, Loewenstein, 2004; Dynamics of Galaxies by Giuseppe Bertin, Cambridge University Press, 2000; Galaxies in the Universe: an Introduction by Linda Sparke and John Gallagher, Cambridge University Press 2007 (2nd edition).

Modern, direct & indirect observational evidence is explicit and clear in completely rejecting Birkeland's notion that the "flying corpuscles" (which we now identify more explicitly as electrons, protons, and various neutral & ionized atomic and molecular gases) out-mass the stars & nebulae by a factor as large as 10,000. In reality, averaged only over distance scales that span galaxy clusters (~2 Mpc or ~6,500,000 light years), then the "flying corpuscles" can fairly be estimated to out-mass the stars by about a factor of 9 or 10. However, averaged over smaller spatial scales, importantly including one or a few galaxies, then the mass contained in stars is significantly greater than the mass of the "flying corpuscles" in the same volume.

That's the whole point Ben. The cosmic wind blows against the galactic sails and the galaxies 'move'. It's not magic, it's physics!

No, it most certainly is not physics. It is not even very good magic. It's just plain impossible and there is no way around it. Guth's idea of inflation is a far better idea, makes far more sense, and has the added advantage of not postulating phenomena that are so easily shown to be simply physically impossible.

 

[ben m]

In a rubber sheet, the "particles" carried along are physically attached to the sheet. They accelerate because the sheet exerts a force on them---an ordinary elastic-mechanical force. The particles obey F=ma, just like everything else. If the particles are not attached to the sheet, such that F=0, then a=0 as well.

Notice that I included elastic forces in my list. Is there an elastic substance attached to the Sun that can exert 10^19 Newton of force on it?

OK, Michael, I identified the force exerted on the sail by this "wind". A 8m/s wind exerts a 10 pascal pressure gradient on a sailboat, and that's the force that moves it. Answer the question already: what is the actual force that's felt by the Sun, and how does your "wind" actually exert that force?

I would like to remind you that a minute ago you thought that winds dragged stuff along by "gravity". That was utter baloney, gravity doesn't do that. But it was a start: at least you recognized that things accelerate due to actual forces, they don't just feel a vague urge to follow local velocity vector fields. Are you going to try again or not?

(Bump!)

This thread faded away with Michael ignoring the key argument against plasma cosmology. The whole point of EU/PC is "non-gravitational forces are important", but when I ask you to name a nongravitational force, you went all quiet. Any further thoughts? I don't see what you gain by ignoring this.

(Unless your plan for future pro-PC anti-LCDM threads is "ignore everything that's ever been said about PC or LCDM; start over from 'PC is unjustly ignored' and 'LCDM is not mozpirical'.") ...

 

[Michael Mozina]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20597-largest-cosmic-structures-too-big-for-theories.html

The result hints at some profound new physical phenomenon, perhaps involving dark energy – the mysterious entity that is accelerating the expansion of space. Dark energy is usually assumed to be uniform across the cosmos. If instead it can pool in some areas, then its repulsive force could push away nearby matter, creating these giant patterns.

Oh please! Only in Lambda-religion theory would they have the emotional need to keep "dark energy", call it a "repulsive" force, and then claim it "pools" in some areas. This has the be the most ad hoc metaphysical Frankenstein of all time.

 

[Michael Mozina]

The problem is that your "religion" has never properly "predicted" anything. It's been 100 percent "postdicted" to fit observation using the most ridiculous ad hoc metaphysics of all time! I guess since you never have to produce any of this stuff in a lab, it's perfectly acceptable to bend and shape it's properties like "Gumby". You folks really should rename this metaphysical kludge the "Lambda-Gumby" religion.

 

[GeeMack]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20597-largest-cosmic-structures-too-big-for-theories.html

Oh please! Only in Lambda-religion theory would they have the emotional need to keep "dark energy", call it a "repulsive" force, and then claim it "pools" in some areas. This has the be the most ad hoc metaphysical Frankenstein of all time.

The problem is that your "religion" has never properly "predicted" anything. It's been 100 percent "postdicted" to fit observation using the most ridiculous ad hoc metaphysics of all time! I guess since you never have to produce any of this stuff in a lab, it's perfectly acceptable to bend and shape it's properties like "Gumby". You folks really should rename this metaphysical kludge the "Lambda-Gumby" religion.

The ridiculous caricaturization of legitimate science as some sort of religion only lends further support to the notion that crackpot "science" simply cannot be supported objectively and quantitatively.

 

[Michael Mozina]

The ridiculous caricaturization of legitimate science as some sort of religion only lends further support to the notion that crackpot "science" simply cannot be supported objectively and quantitatively.

It turns out that your metaphysical kludge failed yet *ANOTHER* quantification "test". More importantly we have proof beyond all doubt that your religion can never be falsified.

There is no way to "falsify" a metaphysical religion because one can always "tweak" one of the invisible ad hoc constructs in a way that "fixes" everything. Since you can't let it die a natural falsification death, down the metaphysical rabbit hole we go.......

"Hey look, the invisible repulsive bunnies are "pooling" now!"

 

[ben m]

The problem is that your "religion" has never properly "predicted" anything. It's been 100 percent "postdicted" to fit observation using the most ridiculous ad hoc metaphysics of all time! I guess since you never have to produce any of this stuff in a lab, it's perfectly acceptable to bend and shape it's properties like "Gumby". You folks really should rename this metaphysical kludge the "Lambda-Gumby" religion.

Too bad EU/PC was ruled out conclusively, before even getting as far as postdicting anything.

 

[ben m]

And, Michael, you didn't even read the abstract of the actual journal article, did you? It's interesting and informative, unlike your interpretation of it. The article itself is in PhysRevLett, which I'm guessing you don't have a subscription to.

Unsurprising, I guess. Compared to the thin Birkeland-gives-speech NYT blurb that you find sufficient to justify EU/PC/FeSun, this New Scientist pop-science-journalism article is a veritable Encyclopedia Britannica of cosmology.

 

[Michael Mozina]

Too bad EU/PC was ruled out conclusively, before even getting as far as postdicting anything.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028174.900-universes-highest-electric-current-found.html

Ya, right Ben.

 

[ben m]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028174.900-universes-highest-electric-current-found.html

Ya, right Ben.

Look at the bottom of the screen, Michael. You probably see something like "Page 110 of 110". That means that we've had 110 pages of discussion of EU/PC ideas. The upshot of that discussion was:

(a) Magnetic fields, currents, and even electric fields are often present in space and well-known to mainstream astronomers.
(b) they do not exert any large forces on stars or galaxies.

For example, was the absence of large EM forces on stars mentioned on the page you're looking at right now? Scroll up and you'll see it.