Electric Universe: has there ever been a scientific research program?

[tusenfem]

I've been reading up on Birkeland and his experiments; fascinating stuff!

Birkeland was an amazing guy (if not so nice to his students now and then: I'm going home you clean up the Terrella ...).
The book Northern Lights by Lucy Yago is a great read.

 

[JeanTate]

I also think that they are scared shootless of actually trying to look at data.

<snip>

Believe it or not, at least one EU fan says he's prepared to try (no, I'm not going to provide a link; this is from a thread discussing gravitational waves):

They do not seem specialists in electromagnetism and quantum physics, which is more my area.

I have just downloaded some of the data. I hope it is unfiltered. Now I can find my solar flare, or a face.

Amazing!

An EU follower who is prepared to analyze LIGO data, in order to search for the footprints of a solar flare, yet seems uninterested in testing anything to do with the EU ...

 

[jonesdave116]

Believe it or not, at least one EU fan says he's prepared to try (no, I'm not going to provide a link; this is from a thread discussing gravitational waves):




Amazing!

An EU follower who is prepared to analyze LIGO data, in order to search for the footprints of a solar flare, yet seems uninterested in testing anything to do with the EU ...

No point in analysing it JT, Metryq has already figured it out:

The late Tom Van Flandern estimated the speed of gravity at 20 billion times that of light—effectively infinite at the scale of the Solar system. Eddington argued that if gravity were no faster than light, the planets would speed up in their orbits. Also, celestial mechanics (e.g. navigating space probes) assumes an instantaneous speed for gravity.

Experiments during eclipses show aberration between the Sun's light and its gravity. We see the Sun where it was about 500 seconds ago, while gravity points to the Sun's current location.

Ergo, the LIGO signal was not a gravity wave.

Genius

 

[ben m]

An EU follower who is prepared to analyze LIGO data, in order to search for the footprints of a solar flare, yet seems uninterested in testing anything to do with the EU ...

The actual LIGO scientists spend a lot of time on two issues:

a) Making sure they don't miss signals like the one they're looking for
b) Making sure they don't latch onto noise patterns and mislabel them as signals, and understanding exactly how often this can happen in each category of search.

Their effort on (a) is how they found the bloops now known as GW150914. Their effort on (b) is why anyone cares.

I wonder how much time an EUer will spend on part (b)?

 

[JeanTate]

In another thread related to this, there's a post on a Motherboard article, by Sarah Scoles, "The People Who Believe Electricity Rules the Universe". She interviewed a number of EU fans, and what she reports is relevant to several posts in this thread.

I think you vastly overestimate the degree to which EU fans are actually interested in scientific truth and inquiry. What they're really after is just a smug feeling that they know more than the mainstream, and have the inside scoop on reality.

Several of Scoles' interviews are consistent with this.

The only experimentation ever done by the Electric Universe swindlers (Talbott and Thornhill) is to test the ease at which they can fleece money from gullible cult members -- this test is conducted each year and promoted as an "EU Conference".

Their next test is scheduled for June 17, 2016 in Phoenix, Arizona.
The flimflam price is $350 per deluded fool.

<snip>

Scoles provides some hard data:

One hundred seventy-five people donate $1,905 per month to the Thunderbolts Project Patreon campaign for video production. On its YouTube page, six feature-length documentaries have anywhere between 300,000 and a million views. The group holds annual conferences. This year’s is at the Sheraton in Mesa, Arizona.

There's nothing in her article - that I could find - on how much $$ is dedicated to testing EU ideas. Which, as I have said several times, I find exceedingly odd, considering the constant, um, refrains about "the EU" being science-based.

Perhaps most directly relevant to this thread is this (actually two snippets):

EU makes few predictions. It doesn’t have a unified framework, or mathematical laws underpinning it. The underlying physics doesn’t go far beyond, “It’s electric.” Data doesn’t support or disprove specific hypotheses. And where are all these electrical arcs in space? And what could their power source possibly be?

It’s hard to point out the holes in EU hole by hole because, well, there are a lot. (Here are some others’ attempts to poke holes.) Proponents also cherry-pick individual phenomena to explain: individual entries on how stars shine, how craters form, why galaxies have their shapes, and what causes planets and craters. They don’t give a whole-universe overview detailed enough to unify those phenomena and also apply to phenomena they haven’t yet described.

[...]

Every person I interviewed for this story was thoughtful, curious, and skeptical. They spend their free time learning. They don’t want to accept; they want to investigate. [...] But when a scientist says, “Just trust me,” it’s the job of any other scientist (or science writer) to say, “I don’t,” and to go digging for more, like the Thunderbolts do.

You have it in a nutshell: if EU acolytes are "thoughtful, curious, and skeptical", if they "spend their free time learning", if they "go digging for more", why is there ~zero evidence of any of them being thoughtful and skeptical about "the EU" itself? Why do none of them seem even the slightest bit interested in testing EU ideas?

Over in Thunderdolts, there's a thread devoted to following this one, and commenting on it (no, I'm not going to provide a link). This thread is almost a month old, and the ISF Wallace Thornhill: The Long Path to Understanding Gravity | EU2015 one, which also has a 'mirror' in Thunderdolts, almost six. As far as I can tell, there's nothing in either 'mirror thread', nor in the mirror to the ISF LIGO gravitational wave announcement one that provides even a hint of concrete evidence for the proposition that EU fans are interested in testing "the EU".

 

[JeanTate]

The actual LIGO scientists spend a lot of time on two issues:

a) Making sure they don't miss signals like the one they're looking for
b) Making sure they don't latch onto noise patterns and mislabel them as signals, and understanding exactly how often this can happen in each category of search.

Their effort on (a) is how they found the bloops now known as GW150914. Their effort on (b) is why anyone cares.

I wonder how much time an EUer will spend on part (b)?

Well, we now know that one EUer will spend zero time of part (b). In Thunderdolts, a vocal member is all but certain that the GW150914 signal is "electric" in nature (duh!), a chirp in the magnetosphere which was 'seen' by both observatories.

The math-based, quantitative work he did to demonstrate this? Well, as David Talbott said (in a different context), quantitative work is "a ruse", so no, he did no such thing.

Birkeland, Alfven, et al. are turning in their graves.

 

[jonesdave116]

<snip>

Birkeland, Alfven, et al. are turning in their graves.

Yes, this always makes me laugh. When did these people sign up to EU? Would Birkeland, if he were still alive, and privy to what we now know, still be pontificating on an electric Sun? I very much doubt it.
Would Alfvén be attending EU conferences, and sending messages of support to Thornhill and Talbott? My guess is that he wouldn't be seen dead anywhere near them.
In it's current guise, i.e. T & T, Scott et al, it has done precisely the square root of sod all. Nobody in the world of real science takes them the least bit seriously, and they have no influence on current thinking.
If any of them see themselves as being a budding Birkeland or Alfvén, then their best bet is to totally dissociate themselves from the loons. If, by some miracle, one of them came up with some sort of valid hypothesis for something, chances are it would be overlooked due to the company they keep.

 

[jonesdave116]

Oh deary me; just when I thought they couldn't get any funnier, comes this from their "Which aspects of EU resonate most with you?" thread: "The EU can explain the ancient attenuation of gravity and standard theories cannot. A large dinosaur would be crushed by his own weight in our present gravity."
Had to stop reading at that point for obvious reasons.

 

[JeanTate]

Yes, this always makes me laugh. When did these people sign up to EU? Would Birkeland, if he were still alive, and privy to what we now know, still be pontificating on an electric Sun? I very much doubt it.
Would Alfvén be attending EU conferences, and sending messages of support to Thornhill and Talbott? My guess is that he wouldn't be seen dead anywhere near them.
In it's current guise, i.e. T & T, Scott et al, it has done precisely the square root of sod all. Nobody in the world of real science takes them the least bit seriously, and they have no influence on current thinking.
If any of them see themselves as being a budding Birkeland or Alfvén, then their best bet is to totally dissociate themselves from the loons. If, by some miracle, one of them came up with some sort of valid hypothesis for something, chances are it would be overlooked due to the company they keep.

One aspect that's relevant to this thread: every one of the 'founders' of 'the EU/PC', and the oft claimed 'current members of the EU/PC community' (such as Lerner and Peratt), were/are dead keen on empirical tests, experiments, etc to test their hypotheses, yet, with perhaps one exception (SAFIRE), there's zero evidence that any of the current EU leaders, or high profile posters in the TD forum, have the slightest interest in even thinking about tests!

Much the same is true of 'mathematics': the papers by B, A, L, and P are often chockablock with equations and numbers, some pretty hairy ... yet no EU acolyte seems willing to do even the simplest of high school-based calculations, much less detailed simulations. Although Scoles didn't explore this, I suspect a key reason why many EU supporters avoid the dreaded 'M' is because they are incapable of doing even simple BOTE calculations. And despite their curiosity and desire to keep learning, they have zero interest in, or intent to change that.

One consequence of this self-crippling mindset is the need for the moaning/special pleading/bleating you so often come across: 'all the money is going to mainstream research! If only a tiny part of it were dedicated to research into the EU!' Sometimes I want to scream, "guys, pencils and paper cost you ~nothing! The computers you write your excuses on have FREE software you can do quite detailed modeling, calculations, and simulations on/with! Get off your lazy ***** and start doing some real research!!"

 

[JeanTate]

At the same time I wonder if there are EU believers/enthusiasts who have at least sat down, picked up pen and paper, and formed the idea that they'd make a testable prediction. And maybe something like this happens:

OK, here goes, this Wikipedia page seems to have the equations I need. Gimme ten minutes and I'll know the radio-brightness of the Sun-powering Birkeland current. <math math math> Wait, no, I must have something wrong <erase erase erase>. Huh. <rereads wikipedia article on solar radio emissions>. That's way way way too bright, how did I drop a factor of 10^20? <scribble scribble>

"What does that mean? Does it mean the external power source isn't there ... <closes eyes, mumbles brief prayer to Velikovsky> naaaaah. This radio calculation must just be more complicated than I expected, somehow. <tears up paper, closes computer>

Over in Thunderdolts there's indirect evidence that something like this has probably happened (no, I'm not going to provide links, or mention any particular EU acolyte(s)).

Here's what I mean: the observation that the redshifts of galaxies correlate well with distance is one of the key pieces of evidence in support of an expanding universe, per application of GR to the universe as a whole. "the EU" rejects this, and some EU fans have proposed an alternative, "plasma redshift". And some have gone further and proposed "pulse broadening" as an alternative explanation for the "time dilation" seen in the light curves of SNIa. A supposed plus for these are (claimed) "in the lab" experiments which show both.

However, chatter on this seems to have decreased lately. Perhaps the reason is that at least some of the more thoughtful EU proponents have done something like what ben m describes ... and come to the realization that these "plasma redshift" and "pulse broadening" explanations cannot possibly work, for the observed universe (e.g. the density of the IPM, much less the inter-cluster medium, is so much ridiculously lower than any reported experimental test, and even if the effects are extrapolated to estimated ICM densities, they would be vanishingly small).

Leaving the only EU fans who still talk about this as those who clearly cannot do any BOTE calculations anyway.

 

[IGMisBestM]

'Arp woz rite!', about discordant redshifts, is a common EU belief. To me, an obvious thing to do would be to point Hubble at some of his most famous examples, to get better resolution data, spectra, etc. Yet almost no EU fan seems ever to have thought this would be a good idea! Another: a sky survey like SDSS, but of the southern sky.

To be fair people have been asking for that since 2dFgrs ended much too quickly. I don't quite think even a scientific titan like Thornhill could convince the AAO TAC (particularly now that they have HERMES), we will all just have to wait for 4MOST.

But seriously the thing that irks me is despite 10 years of endless 'Arp wins again' comments in every article even mentioning Quasars I have never seen a single one even try to use SDSS. SDSS started releasing spectroscopy way back then. The only discordant redshift papers using SDSS is one that beautifully disproves Arp's idea that QSOs are more common near galaxies and another one which was withdrawn. The database was written practically for children, it's not difficult to use.

"But the establishment would never give us telescope time" is not an excuse if you've never even bothered to look at one of the many data archives. These people don't need a new survey, they need to actually look at the ones which exist.

I find it deeply disturbing that an "astronomical revolution" are not actually interested in doing any astronomy. It would be funny if there weren't so many people falling for it.

 

[Reality Check]

The only discordant redshift papers using SDSS is one that beautifully disproves Arp's idea that QSOs are more common near galaxies

Sounds like:
Tang, S. M.; Zhang, S. N. (2005). "Critical Examinations of QSO Redshift Periodicities and Associations with Galaxies in Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data". Astrophysical Journal 633 (1): 41. arXiv:astro-ph/0506366. Bibcode:2005ApJ...633...41T. doi:10.1086/432754.
This is the paper that was the nail in the coffin of redshift quantization.

 

[fuelair]

It used to be, some years' ago, that Electric Universe (EU) proponents were many, and highly vocal. Look at the number of EU-related threads in the archives of ISF, for example.

These days, those proponents have retreated to Eejet-Tube vids, and unmoderated fora; even their fave forum today has little traffic.

One thing has always baffled me about the EU, and its fanatics: an apparent, complete, lack of any research proposals.

For example, all over the internet you'll find people asking EU fans things like "if you had total control over all the world's leading astronomical facilities - telescopes etc - where would you point them?" or "given unlimited funds, what experiments, here on Earth, would you conduct?" Yet, aside from SAFIRE and perhaps Lerner's Focus Fusion, there are no answers!

At least, none that I could find.

Which I find baffling.

I mean, isn't there even one EU adherent who is curious enough to think about doing an experiment, or making an observation, to test EU ideas? It seems to me that it'd take just one such to vastly improve the EU's standing (assuming the results of such experiments or observations were consistent with "EU theory", whatever that is).

Hence this thread: do any of you, dear readers, know of any published research projects/programs/experiments/observations, proposed by EU supporters (other than SAFIRE and Lerner's Focus Fusion)?

I could be wrong, but I am unaware of any actual scientists with a real physics background and access to real laboratories with real advanced physics capabilities working on the EU silliness.. So, I would have to say "NO!" on that

 

[fuelair]

I do believe I have asked this possibly rhetorical question before but, "How do you explain the lack of evidence of the Stark_effect^WP in the presence of the monstrously huge electric fields that rule the Solar System? Galaxy? Universe?"

Might I safely assume that if you get any response at all it is "What the hell is the Stark effect? Does it have something to do with Tony or his father?"

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Might I safely assume that if you get any response at all it is "What the hell is the Stark effect? Does it have something to do with Tony or his father?"

Nope. Possibly with naked Quarks however.

 

[fuelair]

Nope. Possibly with naked Quarks however.

From the EU people I mean...........

 

[JeanTate]

To be fair people have been asking for that since 2dFgrs ended much too quickly. I don't quite think even a scientific titan like Thornhill could convince the AAO TAC (particularly now that they have HERMES), we will all just have to wait for 4MOST.

But seriously the thing that irks me is despite 10 years of endless 'Arp wins again' comments in every article even mentioning Quasars I have never seen a single one even try to use SDSS. SDSS started releasing spectroscopy way back then. The only discordant redshift papers using SDSS is one that beautifully disproves Arp's idea that QSOs are more common near galaxies and another one which was withdrawn. The database was written practically for children, it's not difficult to use.

"But the establishment would never give us telescope time" is not an excuse if you've never even bothered to look at one of the many data archives. These people don't need a new survey, they need to actually look at the ones which exist.

I find it deeply disturbing that an "astronomical revolution" are not actually interested in doing any astronomy. It would be funny if there weren't so many people falling for it.

You are right, of course, and I should have highlighted this better.

In fact, much earlier in this thread, tusenfem made a similar point. And he has made just this point, many times, re freely available data on comets (in a different thread).

As I frequently use SDSS data myself, I continue to be astonished that no EU zealot has even bothered to look at it, much less test EU hypotheses with it (so it seems).

 

[JeanTate]

One aspect that's relevant to this thread: every one of the 'founders' of 'the EU/PC', and the oft claimed 'current members of the EU/PC community' (such as Lerner and Peratt), were/are dead keen on empirical tests, experiments, etc to test their hypotheses, yet, with perhaps one exception (SAFIRE), there's zero evidence that any of the current EU leaders, or high profile posters in the TD forum, have the slightest interest in even thinking about tests!

Much the same is true of 'mathematics': the papers by B, A, L, and P are often chockablock with equations and numbers, some pretty hairy ... yet no EU acolyte seems willing to do even the simplest of high school-based calculations, much less detailed simulations. Although Scoles didn't explore this, I suspect a key reason why many EU supporters avoid the dreaded 'M' is because they are incapable of doing even simple BOTE calculations. And despite their curiosity and desire to keep learning, they have zero interest in, or intent to change that.

One consequence of this self-crippling mindset is the need for the moaning/special pleading/bleating you so often come across: 'all the money is going to mainstream research! If only a tiny part of it were dedicated to research into the EU!' Sometimes I want to scream, "guys, pencils and paper cost you ~nothing! The computers you write your excuses on have FREE software you can do quite detailed modeling, calculations, and simulations on/with! Get off your lazy ***** and start doing some real research!!"

There's another, popular, refrain among EU zealots (I think I'll use this term almost exclusively from now on, it is just sooo apt): the abdication of the need to do any real work themselves, because others have already proven (certain, key) "EU" results, beyond any doubt.

Examples are too numerous to list, but two recent ones, from "EU central": results from IBEX prove that the Sun is powered by giant interstellar Birkeland currents, or that such currents exist but don't penetrate the heliosphere in an obvious way (yeah, EU zealots don't really 'do' consistency); and that cosmological redshifts are due to some sort of plasma-related process.

The latter one is especially ironic, given that, in a recent version of the claim, three different sources are given, none of them remotely related to "EU/PC"! Not to mention that two are (extremely) mutually incompatible (both are crackpot ideas, which even fairly straight-forward consistency checks show to be wildly incompatible with the very physics cited as the foundations!).

The third is far more interesting, if it were not so pathetic (I may add details later): it's an exercise in model-fitting, with a quite limited scope, and it produces an interesting, albeit limited, result.

Why is it "pathetic"? Partly because no EU zealot had, apparently, thought to do this research themselves (no, no big investment required, just the ability to read the relevant papers, extract data, and do some relatively straight-forward analyses), but mainly because the result seems to be so badly misunderstood.

 

[tusenfem]

There's another, popular, refrain among EU zealots (I think I'll use this term almost exclusively from now on, it is just sooo apt): the abdication of the need to do any real work themselves, because others have already proven (certain, key) "EU" results, beyond any doubt.

Examples are too numerous to list, but two recent ones, from "EU central": results from IBEX prove that the Sun is powered by giant interstellar Birkeland currents, or that such currents exist but don't penetrate the heliosphere in an obvious way (yeah, EU zealots don't really 'do' consistency); and that cosmological redshifts are due to some sort of plasma-related process.

The latter one is especially ironic, given that, in a recent version of the claim, three different sources are given, none of them remotely related to "EU/PC"! Not to mention that two are (extremely) mutually incompatible (both are crackpot ideas, which even fairly straight-forward consistency checks show to be wildly incompatible with the very physics cited as the foundations!).

The third is far more interesting, if it were not so pathetic (I may add details later): it's an exercise in model-fitting, with a quite limited scope, and it produces an interesting, albeit limited, result.

Why is it "pathetic"? Partly because no EU zealot had, apparently, thought to do this research themselves (no, no big investment required, just the ability to read the relevant papers, extract data, and do some relatively straight-forward analyses), but mainly because the result seems to be so badly misunderstood.

nono, you forget that the math to describe the COMPLEX NONLINEAR plasma interactions does not exist yet, all mainstream is doing is approximate and not exact, and thus furptile (unless it fits the EU profile of course)

 

[JeanTate]

nono, you forget that the math to describe the COMPLEX NONLINEAR plasma interactions does not exist yet, all mainstream is doing is approximate and not exact, and thus furptile (unless it fits the EU profile of course)

That's certainly true, and it applies in the three (actually four) examples of 'alternative' explanations of cosmological redshifts I indirectly referenced above.

For example, one EU zealot has been pushing Ari Brynjolfsson’s Plasma Redshift for several years, and even took part in a discussion on it, right here in ISF (see, for example, this post by ben m). In another, the alternative depends on there being a (classical) aether, with no apparent recognition that Earthly 'in the lab' experiments have ruled out this (e.g. MMX). And a third produces an easily checked prediction on the extent of 'blurring' of images of distant objects (almost any extra-galactic image from the Hubble is inconsistent with this plasma redshift mechanism).

But hey, consistency is clearly not important for "the EU"; all that matters is that someone, somewhere, has published a 'tired light' idea, preferably one which has the word 'plasma' in it ...

Just for fun, here's another of the wild nonsense some EU zealots have spouted (this one is by comingfrom, IIRC; I'm paraphrasing): NASA has proven that there are plasma currents in the Io torus, which is a prediction of "the EU". Therefore, "the EU" as a whole is proven, and that the observed orbits of the solar system's planets are due to electromagnetism, not gravity (no, I am not kidding).