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

[jonesdave116]

A mathematical critique on Scott's continuing blunders in his 'Birkeland Currents and Dark Matter' paper, is made here.

Basically amounts to a mathematically errored derivation of his equations (3) and (4) from Lundquist's solution, by his using Maxwell’s 4th equation with a constant electric field,
∂E/∂t=0^*. This then contradicts j=0 as being a physical solution in a magnetic force free field.

^* (Maxwell’s 4th equation with a constant electric field is: ∇X B = μj, where μ is the magnetic permeability).

Ahhh, good old sjastro! I enjoyed his/ her posts on the Rosetta blog, when a few of us were addressing a steadily decreasing cadre of EUists. They eventually decreased to zero (or possibly one) by the end. Whether this was due to our superb exposition of the flaws in the nonsense they believed, or more due to the continued appearance of water vapour and ice, combined with a total lack of electric woo, is open to question.

 

[jonesdave116]

One might imagine this as being only a temporary measure(?) The mainstream debunks contained in the blog comments served as highly useful reference material, after all.
(Bring 'em back if possible, Brian! .. )

Regarding Brian Koberlein's blog - the comments are back! I did see something a few weeks ago on G+ or Twitter sating he was upgrading the website, so that may have been what was going on.

https://briankoberlein.com/2018/01/27/just-so-story/#comments

 

[Belz...]

Who the hell would waste money on researching drivel?

https://creationresearch.org/

 

[SelfSim]

...^* (Maxwell’s 4th equation with a constant electric field is: ∇X B = μj, where μ is the magnetic permeability).

Oops! .. My above statement was incorrect and is in fact, also where Scott made his fundamental error.

Maxwell’s 4th equation is: ∇XB = μj+∂E/∂t.

In Scott’s first Magnetic Fields of Birkeland Current paper he assumed ∂E/∂t=0, and then concluded ∇XB=αB= μj.
This then sets the condition j=0 ⇒ B=0.

In a force free field however, B≠0 if j=0, so when he makes the substitution B=(μ/α)j, it leads to the contradictions in equations (3) and (4) of his planned-for-publication of Birkeland Currents and Dark Matter paper.

 

[SelfSim]

Ahhh, good old sjastro! I enjoyed his/ her posts on the Rosetta blog, when a few of us were addressing a steadily decreasing cadre of EUists.

I've found that whenever sjastro makes a post, its always worthwhile taking time out and paying added attention. (Unfortunately, he's not a member here ..).

They eventually decreased to zero (or possibly one) by the end. Whether this was due to our superb exposition of the flaws in the nonsense they believed, or more due to the continued appearance of water vapour and ice, combined with a total lack of electric woo, is open to question.

An interesting open question there.

Either way, I'm glad to see Koberlein bringing back all that good work done, as it serves as a repository for future reference.

 

[SelfSim]

Regarding Brian Koberlein's blog - the comments are back! I did see something a few weeks ago on G+ or Twitter sating he was upgrading the website, so that may have been what was going on.

Cool!
So much for the idea that Brian might have been running away from delusional 'EU threats'!

 

[tusenfem]

For those interested in force free fields, here is the "original" citation from 1988
L.F. Burlaga: Magnetic Clouds and Force-Free Fields With Constant Alpha, who also quotes:

A simple solution for a cylindrically symmetric force-free field with constant alpha was found by Lundquist [1950], and many subsequent studies have shown that constant alpha force-free fields are very special and important configurations.
[/url]

I could not find the original 1950 paper by Lundquist, but I did find On the stability of magneto-hydrostatic fields from 1951, which could be another version of the paper in "Arch. Fys." (a journal that I cannot find at the moment).

Another comment, which is in principle also made by others, is that often in the EU clan the magnetic field is supposed to be generated by currents (nothing wrong with that), but they also want the currents to be parallel to the magnetic field (as in a force free situation). But for the latter there has to be another source for the large scale magnetic field.

 

[SelfSim]

Thanks for those references tusenfem. Looked everywhere I could for the original 1950 Lundquist paper (but couldn't find it).

Scott appears to be trying to do just as you mention and redefine 'Birkeland Current' as being force free on its own without any mention of external magnetic fields (of greater magnitude than the intrinsic one).

The 'Birkeland Currents and Dark Matter' paper looks to be set for publication in the very next issue of the so-called 'Progress in Physics' (crank) journal although, I don't think its been formally published just yet, because the issue hasn't been released. They should drop it because of all the glaring errors!

 

[SelfSim]

Coming clean:

Maxwell’s 4th equation is:
∇XB = μj+∂E/∂t

Should read:
∇XB=μj + με∂E/∂t

(Eye/finger co-ordination issues here .. Doesn't impact the logical contradictions introduced by Scott's flawed algebra substitutions though).

 

[JeanTate]

(my highlite)

And GLIMPSE and IRAS and AKARI and GB6 and FIRST and NVSS and HI4PI and SUMMS and WENS and TGSS and VLSSr and GLEAM and ...

Why bother to give stuff that's so obviously crackpot nonsense (now, and has been for quite some time) any airtime here? If an EU acolyte wishes to join ISF and start (or continue) a thread on this sort of topic, by all means let them do so; otherwise ...

All these surveys, with the possible exception of GLIMPSE, are open/public; anyone can obtain essentially all the data from them, for free (though some files are huge).

Some have been available for decades.

And there are plenty of others.

Yet, in all this time, and despite the obvious direct relevance to so many core EU ideas, it seems that no EU acolyte has ever availed themselves of any of this data, much less attempted independent analyses (to show, for example, consistency with Peratt's 1986 papers on galaxy formation etc).

(yeah, yeah, tusenfem has been making a similar point about spacecraft data on comets, for years)

Pointless, now, to ask why? Why the apparent, profound lack of interest?

Whatever. I'm done. If anyone notices that an EU acolyte (or team thereof) has, in fact, shown signs of getting serious about a scientific research program involving any of these, or similar, datasets, please let me know.

 

[JeanTate]

Evidence against concordance cosmology is an old-ish thread (started over two years' ago) which was revived a few days' ago on the occasion of the publication of a recent paper by the OP in MNRAS (a leading, peer-reviewed, astronomy journal).

This thread is not the place to discuss Lerner's MNRAS (his first, I think) - the existing thread is more than adequate for that - rather, to point to a concrete example of something which EU acolytes might consider as a model.

To be clear: Lerner's paper should cause EU acolytes much wailing and gnashing of teeth - it commits many core heresies (e.g. a ~linear relationship between redshift and distance) - so they cannot rationally use it as support for their religion. However, they might consider studying what he did, and think of ways to do something similar for an idea that is actually part of the EU.

What did Lerner do?

Studied the literature (well, at least some of it), extracted data from public astronomical databases, developed his own analysis tools, turned the handle, wrote up his results, and submitted them to MNRAS.

 

[jonesdave116]

Just wanted to update this thread regarding recent developments at Christian Forums (from which MM is serving another ban!).

Upthread, SelfSim made this post.

I did a bit more digging on that reference. Now, to recap, Scott references an article at Asronomy.com, in his 'paper' here;

Birkeland Currents and Dark Matter
Scott, D. E.
http://www.ptep-online.com/2018/PP-53-01.PDF

The reference in question is [8]. It refers to this article;

Astronomers find faint strings of galaxies inside empty space
http://www.astronomy.com/news/2014/03/astronomers-find-faint-strings-of-galaxies-inside-empty-space

Scott says;

It has been suggested [8] that galaxies form on and along cosmic Birkeland currents.

SelfSim has already noted that there are no mentions of Birkeland currents in that article.
I located the paper that the article refers to;

Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): fine filaments of galaxies detected within voids
Alpaslan, M. et al.
https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/440/1/L106/1393805 (free access)

Obviously there is no mention of any sort of currents within the paper, either.

I was thinking about this earlier, and wondered why Scott would have referenced an article when the paper was free access? The only reason I can see is that had Scott referenced the paper, as he should have done, then the authors of that paper may very well have become aware of his 'paper' and the false claims therein. So, he sneakily only referenced the article, so that Alpaslan et al would not become aware of his lie, due to it only being in a crank, predatory journal that they would never notice.

Yet again, this sort of behaviour points to the very root of the fundamental dishonesty of EU and its proponents.

 

[MRC_Hans]

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)?

If I understand correctly, EU is based on the idea that electrical charges do at least some of the work of gravity in the universe. As electrostatic attraction/repulsion is way stronger than gravity, this is in fact an interesting proposal. However, if this were the case, we would see orbital mechanics reflecting both attraction and repulsion (opposite charges attract, like charges repulse), and this would be proportional to charge and not necessarily mass. However, what we DO observe is universal attraction, entirely guided by mass.

Hans

 

[JeanTate]

If I understand correctly, EU is based on the idea that electrical charges do at least some of the work of gravity in the universe. As electrostatic attraction/repulsion is way stronger than gravity, this is in fact an interesting proposal. However, if this were the case, we would see orbital mechanics reflecting both attraction and repulsion (opposite charges attract, like charges repulse), and this would be proportional to charge and not necessarily mass. However, what we DO observe is universal attraction, entirely guided by mass.

Hans

Here’s the thing: as far as I know, concrete, specific new tests of EU ideas (in astronomy) do not exist. Not only no new tests, not even hints of possible tests.

I recently, in a fringe sub-Reddit, engaged in a discussion in which I recommended several, based on publicly available datasets. Zero interest.

So, I just do not understand this ... there’s a claim re science, but zero interest in actually DOING any science.

 

[MRC_Hans]

Here’s the thing: as far as I know, concrete, specific new tests of EU ideas (in astronomy) do not exist. Not only no new tests, not even hints of possible tests.

I recently, in a fringe sub-Reddit, engaged in a discussion in which I recommended several, based on publicly available datasets. Zero interest.

So, I just do not understand this ... there’s a claim re science, but zero interest in actually DOING any science.

However, there are plenty scientific observations that presume gravity and not electrical forces, and they seem to confirm gravity.

And to the highlighted: Isn't that more or less standard MO for fake science?

Hans

 

[Reality Check]

Birkeland Currents and Dark Matter
Scott, D. E.
http://www.ptep-online.com/2018/PP-53-01.PDF

Scott lying about the contents of a referenced paper looks new to me.

There is actual insanity in that paper. Birkeland currents occur in quite specific circumstances , e.g. the solar wind encountering the Earth's magnetic field where the only occurrence of Birkeland currents is known. A rational person would expect that same circumstances for hypothetical galactic Birkeland currents. The problem is that there is no evidence of a galactic "wind" and the galactic magnetic field is very different from the Earth's.

Most of the paper is what could be correct physics about Birkeland currents (previous papers by Scott make that doubtful). The insanity starts with a "Inserting a galaxy’s charge density profile" delusion when he has no mainstream observed or calculated charge density profile for a galaxy !
Scott has "Fig. 3: Charge density produced by the known jj(r)j from the FAC model and the jv(r)j of the observed galaxy from (8)." which suggests the stupidity of a charge density from his deluded FAC model being plugged back into the model.

A blatant "This eighty-five year quest for a dark matter explanation
of galactic stellar rotation profiles has produced only null results" lie. The many lines of observable evidence for dark matter includes its match to galactic stellar rotation curves. The universe is not constrained to have dark matter that we can detected directly!

A "Recently, scientific attention is becoming focused on discoveries of linkages among galaxies previously thought to be isolated from each other." lie. That the structure of the universe on large scales is filamentary has been known for decades. A cause of the filamentary structure is the presence of dark matter (simulate the large structure formation with no dark matter and we do not get a match to the observed structure).

Ends with a "Birkeland Currents on which those galaxies have been or are being formed" delusion.

ETA: Cherry picking old press releases as if he were ignorant about researching scientific literature or more likely purposely lying.
GIANT GALAXY STRING DEFIES MODELS OF HOW UNIVERSE EVOLVED January 7, 2004 - (date of web publication) which was 15 years ago.

The Distribution of Lya-Emitting Galaxies at z=2.3 by Povilas Palunas, Harry I. Teplitz, Paul J. Francis, Gerard M. Williger, Bruce E. Woodgate

We present the detection of 34 Ly-alpha emission-line galaxy candidates in a 80x80x60 co-moving Mpc region surrounding the known z=2.38 galaxy cluster J2143-4423. The space density of Ly-alpha emitters is comparable to that found by Steidel et al. when targeting a cluster at redshift 3.09, but is a factor of 5.8 +/- 2.5 greater than that found by field samples at similar redshifts. The distribution of these galaxy candidates contains several 5-10 Mpc scale voids. We compare our observations with mock catalogs derived from the VIRGO consortium Lambda-CDM n-body simulations. Fewer than 1% of the mock catalogues contain voids as large as we observe. Our observations thus tentatively suggest that the galaxy distribution at redshift 2.38 contains larger voids than predicted by current models. Three of the candidate galaxies and one previously discovered galaxy have the large luminosities and extended morphologies of "Ly-alpha blobs".

ETA2: The "if the mainstream is wrong, whether we imagine must be right" delusion. The mainstream at least has predictions for large scale structures that this observation in 2004 cast doubt on. The electric universe is crack-pottery partially because it has no such predictions.

 

[jonesdave116]

Following my post #172, I emailed Dr. Alpaslan. His reply is here;

https://www.christianforums.com/thr...-by-dark-matter.8108740/page-11#post-73929124