How did crackpot Electric Universe papers get published in a peer-reviewed journal?

[Almo]

Shouldn't the question be, "How did the crackpot EU thread finally drop off the front page?"



On topic, the idea of pay-to-publish really is a bad one. I'm surprised anyone pays attention to them, but I guess the crackpots have realized they need a new strategy, and the people running them are happy to take their money.

 

[Reality Check]

[I should add (as I can't edit my post) the only reason I brought up Peratt + Plasma Cosmology here is because his book 'physics of the plasma universe' is one of the few references in the opening paper, so is obviously considered by him one of the seminal publications in this area, even if its merging with eu theories is unfortunate due to EU theories previous record of sloppy work]

The first thing you should note is that the editorial and this entire special issue is not about Plasma Cosmology. Plasma Cosmology is Alfvén's invalidated cosmological theory.

The special issue is about the crank plasma cosmology (note the small p and c) that cannot even be defined (remember your attempt to define it, Zeuzzz?) except as a collection of often mutually exclusive theories with the common thread that standard cosmology is assumed to be wrong.

The editor only cites Peratt's 'physics of the plasma universe' as a book on plasma physics in the universe, not as a book on plasma cosmology.

 

[fuelair]

Curious.

That webpage is dated 2010, and the list is entitled (my bold) Proposed Scientific Advisory Board Members.

Also on this list is Herman J. Mosquera Cuesta. That makes three (of four, George Ellis is the odd man out) members of the Editorial team (i.e. not counting the OAJ Editorial Advisory Board) on this list.

(not much effort on proof-reading the list either, "Professor Marco Morelli of the Fondazione Prato Ricerche" is listed twice!).

Possibly the Professor paid extra to be listed twice.

 

[Zeuzzz]

For those who can't be bothered to look at the papers themselves, here's a scratch-the-surface sample of what's scientifically wrong with the editorial by Dunning-Davies and with the four single-author articles by Smith, Scott, Ransom, and Thornhill.

Starting with the editorial by Jeremy Dunning-Davies:

• After citing The Electric Universe by Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott, and The Electric Sky by Donald Scott, he avers that these "ideas are supported by much computer modelling".

• 
  
  
  The computer modelling facade is due to Peratts use of supercomputers in the early 90's to model a new type of galaxy formation. We have not seen the coding, so no-one can really comment on this further.
  
  

  [*]He promotes the looks-like-a-bunny approach to astronomy: "However, at least visually, some of the phenomena observed in the laboratory are very like what is observed by some of the most powerful of telescopes....Examples such as these prove nothing but should awaken people to the possibility of alternative explanations for astronomical phenomena."

  
  
  See bolded, is that really promoting it?!
  
  

  [*]He complains about routine use of "powerful mathematics".

  
  
  Yes he does, well done. Crothers, unlike Thornhill, can actually do maths however. And Crothers provides a very specific context for this misuse of powerful mathematics in place of rigorous experimental physics.
  
  

  To
  that point in time, his experimental and observational
  achievements had tended to be overshadowed by the purely
  theoretical predictions and explanations of the geophysicist,
  Sydney Chapman. Once again, powerful mathematics seems
  to have held sway over the more expected techniques of
  physics – experimentation and observation, with
  mathematics a mere tool to be used when necessary. This is
  not to decry Chapman’s work but to emphasise the
  overwhelming importance of the physics when investigating
  natural phenomena.

  
  

  [*]He speculates that electromagnetic forces may be responsible for the anomalies that have driven the search for dark matter.

  
  
  Yes, he does. And he's wrong.
  

  [*]He says astrophysics should treat gravity as "secondary" because "the electric force is so much more powerful."

  
  
  Do you know how many sig fig EM forces are stronger than gravity? 36 sig fig is not a small amount!
  
  Put very simply: What usually wins, a magnet picking up a metal object or the entire weight of the earth pulling down on it?
  
  Now imagine a magnet the size of the earth and a brick the size of a magnet. You get my point.
  
  

  [*]He repeats the canard about "the strength of a magnetic field produced by an electric current is inversely proportional to the distance from the current but the gravitational force between stars is inversely proportional to the square of the distance." (Both fields, gravity and electromagnetic, obey the same inverse-square law. He's comparing the force produced by an infinitely long generator of the field to the force produced by a point source.)

  
  
  You seem to be confused between the inverse square law for magnetism and electrostatics (which is indeed 1/r²) where as Amperes law (or its equivalent Biot Savart force law) does indeed obey a 1/r relationship when the filaments in question are an infinite line of charge, which for most intents and purposes they can be considered as. Analogous to two wires obeying amperes law, but scaled up over ten orders of magnitude, which is done by virtue of maxwells equations being translationally invarient. Numerous observations from the nanoscale to the stellar and galactic scale have been shown to hold time and time again with extreme precision.
  
  Again, this is all dealt with in Peratts book physics of the plasma universe that has been accepted by previous posters here as a book about plasma physics, and this is clearly outlined in, as reality check has just kindly pointed out previously:
  
  

  Right - the editorial references Peratt - Physics of the Plasma Universe. This is a book on plasma physics.

  
  If you go to the third chapter this topic is dealt with at length, validating in fact what crothers says as true from page 93 onwards.
  If you can not access the book there will be a fair few plasma physicists that will have referenced that chapter for the basis of their work. I can link you to them if you want, I remember reading them before.
  
  http://www.plasma-universe.com/index.php/Physics_of_the_Plasma_Universe_(Book)
  3. Biot–Savart Law in Cosmic Plasma, page 93
  
  This is usually where Ziggurat chimes in about amperes law being only a short range force, a claim which he has never even defined theoretically let alone mathematically despite repeated requests; let alone provided experimental evidence for. So I can only presume this "short range force" is a "short range force" because thats how he assumed it works due to it usually being learnt about on small scales.
  
  

  [*]He then says "this well-known difference between the two forces" (which doesn't even exist) "could lie at the heart of the problem of the galactic rotation curves".

  
  
  It does exist, Im afraid, as explained above.
  
  I am also afraid that it does not do anything to explain galactic rotation curves. That Crothers has indeed gotten wrong,
  
  

  [*]Smith writes "It is a fact that major "theories" of popular cosmology and its Standard Model have not been tested because they cannot be" (with emphasis as in the original). In reality, the standard model makes many testable predictions, including the cosmic background radiation and its character, the correlation between red-shift and distance, the existence of black holes, gravitational lensing, all the standard tests of general relativity, and many other tests that others here are more qualified than I to list.

  
  I do find that statement a bit bizzarre.
  
  Haven't got time to read smiths paper so will comment on the rest another time.
  
  

  In the second paragraph of his section III, Scott constructs a caricature of magnetic reconnection and then attacks that strawman. As I proved in the "Electric Sun" thread, magnetic reconnection is a simple consequence of Maxwell's equations. Scott discredits himself whenever he pretends otherwise.

  
  Scott has actually backed up his reasoning with rather sound mathematical deductions, as explained in depth here:
  
  Real Properties of Electromagnetic Fields and Plasma in the Cosmos
  www.electric-cosmos.org/IEEE-TransPlasmaSci-Scott-Aug2007.pdf
  by DE Scott - 2007 - Cited by 6 - Related articles
  IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PLASMA SCIENCE, VOL. 35, NO. 4, AUGUST 2007
  
  If you are going to try to discredit him based on a few sentences you will never understand why he is saying what he is saying. You should address the chapters in that paper (primarily IV) where he has clearly outlined the reason for his views in the literature for all to see and critique. If you can find such critiques, please feel free to link me to them.
  
  Despite his rather confrontational rhetoric, which still seems to blind a lot of peoples views on his papers here, he makes a good case. I have found other researchers work before that have arrived at the same conclusions, if you want I can find the thread and dig up the links to their abstracts too, I'm not even sure Scott is aware they have arrived at the same conclusions as him yet.

 

[ben m]

Man, those four papers are monuments to ignorance.

Ransom's paper is delusional. Yes, hypervelocity impacts and spark-discharge welds both make round dimples in surfaces. Yes, we see round dimples on various scales on planetary surfaces. OMG WHAT COULD IT MEAN? It's like "Here are some photos of broken windshields. Here is an experiment where I strike a windshield with the claw of the SUPPOSEDLY EXTINCT GIANT SLOTH. Note the similarity! This motivates further searches for a relic giant sloth population in the parking lot at the Costco."

Thornhill's and Smith's papers are classic pseudoscience. They're simply statements of belief in every plasma-cosmology-like paper that's every been written. Here's someone who claims to explain galaxy formation! Here's someone who claims to explain the CMB! Here's another one! Here's a Geocities page claiming to explain the Kennedy assassination! All of which Thornhill reports as victories set in stone---never mind that the papers are gibberish. Never mind followups, refutations, and so on. If you published a paper in 1982 saying "Plasma cosmology predicts the top quark mass to be 10 GeV, which is correct", Thornhill would probably be citing it today.

Scott's paper is the usual anti-reconnection gibberish. "There is no known mechanism that can grab hold of two adjacent ‘lines of force’ in a magnetic field and push
them together. So how (why?) do they do this?" If there were no known mechanism, Scott, then why does plugging Newton's and Maxwell's equations into a computer show lines of force that move? There's always "no known mechanism" if you're deliberately ignorant of the mechanism.

 

[Zeuzzz]

Possibly the Professor paid extra to be listed twice.

Dont be ridiculous.

It's much more likely he read it through twice, so deserves to be mentioned twice in the list.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

After citing The Electric Universe by Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott, and The Electric Sky by Donald Scott, he avers that these "ideas are supported by much computer modelling".

The computer modelling facade is due to Peratts use of supercomputers in the early 90's to model a new type of galaxy formation. We have not seen the coding, so no-one can really comment on this further.

I'm fairly confident that Peratt's work is okay. In fact, I've skimmed Peratt's long review of that work myself.

(ETA: I'm talking about Peratt's work on numerical modelling of plasmas in general. So far as I know, Peratt hasn't simulated any plasma universe theory of galaxy formation. So far as I know, the plasma universe theory of galaxy formation does not exist in a form that's sufficiently well defined to be modelled numerically.)​

It was not okay for Dunning-Davies to suggest that Peratt's (or anyone else's) computer modelling supports the two books by Thornhill/Talbott and by Scott.

[*]He complains about routine use of "powerful mathematics".

Yes he does, well done. Crothers, unlike Thornhill, can actually do maths however. And Crothers provides a very specific context for this misuse of powerful mathematics in place of rigorous experimental physics.

I'm sorry, but Crothers got the math wrong. I could walk you through some of his errors, but Jason Sharples has already done that. Crothers responded to Sharples, but I could also walk you through the errors in Crothers's response.

Crothers gave a devastating proof of his mathematical incompetence in a back-and-forth with Sharples in written comments at the "Dealing with Creationism in Astronomy" blog site. During that exchange, Crothers defended the claim made in one of his papers that there exists a homeomorphism (which all of the discussants referred to as a one-to-one correspondence, but they meant homeomorphism) between Euclidean 3-space and an arbitrary 3-dimensional metric manifold.

No such homeomorphism exists. (ETA: Not in general, and Crothers was talking about the general case in his paper.) That's a variation of exercise 8 in part 1 of the exercises I formulated for Farsight, and it's a fact that undergraduate math majors should learn (even if they may not learn how to prove it). Crothers contradicted that well-known theorem in one of his papers, and continued to deny that fact even after his wrongness was pointed out to him. He couldn't even handle the one-dimensional case, which Sharples asked him to address.

Had Crothers been competent at math, he wouldn't have given us that demonstration of basic incompetence.

[*]He says astrophysics should treat gravity as "secondary" because "the electric force is so much more powerful."

Do you know how many sig fig EM forces are stronger than gravity? 36 sig fig is not a small amount!

As I said, that comparison is not relevant to astrophysics, where the charge balance is nearly perfect.

[*]He repeats the canard about "the strength of a magnetic field produced by an electric current is inversely proportional to the distance from the current but the gravitational force between stars is inversely proportional to the square of the distance." (Both fields, gravity and electromagnetic, obey the same inverse-square law. He's comparing the force produced by an infinitely long generator of the field to the force produced by a point source.)

You seem to be confused between the inverse square law for magnetism and electrostatics (which is indeed 1/r²) where as Amperes law (or its equivalent Biot Savart force law) does indeed obey a 1/r relationship when the filaments in question are an infinite line of charge, which for most intents and purposes they can be considered as.

I am not confused about this. I stated the situation correctly.

An infinitely long line of matter would generate a 1/r force just as an infinitely long line of current density produces a 1/r magnetic field. A small, compact source of matter generates an inverse-square field, as does a small, compact source of current density.

[*]He then says "this well-known difference between the two forces" (which doesn't even exist) "could lie at the heart of the problem of the galactic rotation curves".

It does exist, Im afraid, as explained above.

As explained above, you're wrong. I've done the math. You should try it sometime.

In the second paragraph of his section III, Scott constructs a caricature of magnetic reconnection and then attacks that strawman. As I proved in the "Electric Sun" thread, magnetic reconnection is a simple consequence of Maxwell's equations. Scott discredits himself whenever he pretends otherwise.

If you are going to try to discredit him based on a few sentences you will never understand why he is saying what he is saying.

Scott denies magnetic reconnection in many of his articles and at his web site. The magnetic reconnection that Scott denies is a simple consequence of Maxwell's equations. I've done the math.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

I'd like to point out some other oddities in the editorial board.

Let's look at the board of directors of a company called "Steriwave":
Jeremy Dunning-Davies, Francesco Fucilla, Waldyr Rodriguez, Franco Selleri ...

Let's look at the board of staff of a company called "Yellow Energy PLC":
Waldyr Rodriguez, Francesco Fucilla, Franco Selleri, Christian Corda ...

Let's look at the editorial board of Ruggero Santilli's personal crackpot journal "Hadronic Mechanics":
Ruggero Santilli, Christian Corda (editor in chief), Jeremy Dunning-Davies ...

Let's look at the board of directors of the crackpot-award-giving "Telesio Galilei Academy of Sciences":

Waldyr Rodriguez, Franco Selleri, Jeremy Dunning-Davies. In the membership list we see Christian Corda, Wallace Thornhill. Let's keep reading: there's Reginald Cahill, Florentin Smarandache, and (for crying out loud) Wladimir Guglinski.

Well, it seems just about anyone can become a member!

More interesting, perhaps, is that one of the OAJ's Special Issue (the PC one) authors is an "Honorary Member" - Dave Smith.

Who has WON the Telesio Galilei awards? Why, look! It's Jeremy Dunning-Davies, Wallace Thornhill, Stephen Crothers, Wladimir Guglinski, Franco Selleri, Florentin Smarandache. (Keep reading: Myron Evans!!)

True, but the 2011 gold medal winners include Nicola Cabibbo and Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza.

So there seem somewhat conflicted.

Draw your own conclusions. My conclusion is that the Santilli-ites and the plasma cosmologists have built a "walled garden". They found institutes to give one another awards, they take over journals and give one another special issues, and every so often their fake-prestige is enough to get a government grant or two. Bentham got roped in.

Another interesting fact: Christian Corda wrote "A clarification on the debate on "the original Schwarzschild solution"", which rips Crothers' nonsense to shreds (take note, Zeuzzzzz). This appears immediately above a Crothers document, in the TGA's Publications and Discussions section.

Their Missions and Goals page contains this:

Disclaimer

The Telesio - Galilei Academy of Science has no connectivity to Prof. Santilli Institute for Basic Research whatsoever. The Telesio - Galilei Academy of Science operates independently to any other institutes.

I had not heard of Santilli before; one of the documents in the TGA's Publications and Discussions is a "paper" by him ... to say it's bizarre is to give that word a whole new dimension of meaning ...

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Shouldn't the question be, "How did the crackpot EU thread finally drop off the front page?"

Yeah, sorry.

On topic, the idea of pay-to-publish really is a bad one. I'm surprised anyone pays attention to them, but I guess the crackpots have realized they need a new strategy, and the people running them are happy to take their money.

I think there's more to it than that, taking a wider look*.

Do OA-type journals fulfill a genuine need, among astronomers?

Is there a place of OA-type journals, one that arXiv doesn't provide?

Does an editorial association with an OAJ-type journal damage one's academic reputation? Should it?

* in this particular case, the responsible editors at OAJ were asleep at the wheel, for putting J D-D on the advisory board, for allowing him to be editor of that special issue, for not doing any QA on something published in their name, for ...

 

[ben m]

The main things people on this page have brought up are nothing to do with the papers in question, there's nothing about EM forces being responsible for the motion of large mass bodies in any of these papers.

Quite the contrary. In the crackpot Bentham issue we're discussing, we have both Smith's paper:

Computer models based on verified plasma science,
show that two interacting Birkeland current filaments can
reproduce the fine detail and motion of spiral galaxies ...

Plasma cosmology thus suggests that the continuous flow
of Birkeland currents not only creates and holds galaxies
together but also drives them like a homopolar motor ...

And from Thornhill's:

The scandalous truth is that there is a model of spiral galaxy formation (Fig. 2) that has long been demonstrated by
laboratory experiment and ‘particle in cell’ (PIC) simulations
on a supercomputer. But instead of using stars, gas and dust
as the particles subject to Newton’s laws, the particles are
charged and respond to Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism. This seems like an obvious approach when we know
that more than 99.99 percent of the visible universe is in the
form of plasma. Most cosmic plasma is a gas influenced by
the presence of free electrons, charged atoms and dust.
Plasma responds to electromagnetic forces that exceed the
strength of gravity to the extent that gravity can usually be
ignored over interstellar distances. This simple fact alone
suggests why gravitational models of galaxies fail.

 

[Zeuzzz]

^ I didn't read either of those papers fully (they seemed the least competent of the lot from a cursory glance). Seems that old dogmas die harder than I thought.

 

[Zeuzzz]

What I find confusing is that Scott assosciates with people that still have views such as the above. He should know as an electrical engineer and professor, simply from the shape of every planets magnetic field, that EM forces have nothing to do with galactic rotation curves.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

What I find confusing is that Scott assosciates with people that still have views such as the above. He should know as an electrical engineer and professor, simply from the shape of every planets magnetic field, that EM forces have nothing to do with galactic rotation curves.

Scott retired in 1998. His professional reputation as an EE is unlikely to be much affected by his hobby advocacy of electric universe cosmology. His dismissals of mainstream cosmology will eventually be forgotten, unless he's lucky enough to be right about something, in which case he'll become a cult hero. He's risking little in return for an extremely unlikely jackpot. In the meantime, he sells some books.

 

[ben m]

What I find confusing is that Scott assosciates with people that still have views such as the above. He should know as an electrical engineer and professor, simply from the shape of every planets magnetic field, that EM forces have nothing to do with galactic rotation curves.

Well, that's practically the definition of a physics crackpot---to quote Posner, he is "inexplicably obsessed by an obviously unsound idea".

And: you thought that Thornhill's and Smith's papers were the worst of that EU/PC collection? Surely Ransom's "round things are round" photo album, with its wacky suggestion that asteroids and planets can get struck by invisible space lightning, is worse.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Shouldn't the question be, "How did the crackpot EU thread finally drop off the front page?"

I see that MM has discovered this thread, and - from what others quote of his posts - is up to his usual tricks. If he actually posted anything that is directly relevant to the topic of this thread, would you (or any other reader who does not have MM on Ignore) please quote it? Thanks.

A thought just occurred to me: since OAJ seems happy to publish at least some (crackpot EU) papers with zero peer review, maybe MM could further destroy its reputation by asking Jeremy Dunning-Davies to publish a paper that he (MM) writes? One on why the Sun has a solid iron surface perhaps (or is it rigid iron-compound/amalgam?), or how neon keeps that surface from melting/subliming? Better yet, how solar flares are electrical discharges, like terrestrial lightning, taking place through a dusty plasma (per Bruce)!

Oh, wait; that won't work ... Jeremy Dunning-Davies, acting as editor, wouldn't publish any such stuff without (TGA Gold Medal winner) Thornhill or Talbott or Scott's express permission, would he? He can't afford to call into question his position at TGA, can he?

 

[ben m]

A thought just occurred to me: since OAJ seems happy to publish at least some (crackpot EU) papers with zero peer review,

Oh, I doubt it. I'm sure that special-issue-editor Jeremy Dunning-Davies chose the reviewers personally. I'm sure that Scott's, Ransom's, Thornhill's, and Smith's papers were "peer reviewed", and recommended for publication, by some combination of Scott, Ransom, Thornhill, Smith, Dunning-Davies, Peratt, etc..

ETA: Don't forget Ruggero Santilli, founder of TGA, who also seems to have a friendly audience here.

The root problem is Bentham. I doubt they care in the slightest. They "launched" this "journal" for the cost of (a) adding a line to their MySQL database and (b) sending out an email bomb or two. The email bomb got them their "editors", and that provides (at exactly zero admin overhead) a "journal" that has racked up twenty or thirty full payments of page-charges already. Ka-ching! What do they care if the content is miserable, the impact-factor zero, and the entire business is a laughingstock? They've got a business model (i.e., zero marginal cost per journal) that works despite that, and that doesn't give them any professional journal-improvement-and-monitoring staff.

 

[Michael Mozina]

So if this is such a laughing stock of a publication, demonstrate it and get Clinger's nonsense published in the same publication. Then I'll know for sure it's worthy of your attacks.

 

[phunk]

So if this is such a laughing stock of a publication, demonstrate it and get Clinger's nonsense published in the same publication. Then I'll know for sure it's worthy of your attacks.

Maybe because that journal charges the author to publish? Why do you think it's free for the reader?

ETA: $800 if I remember correctly.

 

[tusenfem]

Let's keep the mozina discussion in the mozina thread. Let's not let this develop in yet another endless pointless thread where MM tries to defend his misconceptions about electrodynamics and plasma physics. This is about Bentham, and I just got an email from them this morning to publish in their open journal on atmospheric science. I have too little knowledge of atmospheric sciences to judge whether this also has crackpot issues in their publication list.

Another comment is on paying for your paper.
All respectable journals that I publish my papers in (Annales Geophysicae, Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research Letters, ...) you have to pay page charges for your paper to be published. At AG it is about 50 euro per page (but with my last paper 21 pages, that still adds up) and at JGR and GRL the page charges are even higher (although you can get the charges waived now and then), so just the fact that you need to pay for your paper is not a decisive criterion on whether the journal is bogus or not.

 

[phunk]

Another comment is on paying for your paper.
All respectable journals that I publish my papers in (Annales Geophysicae, Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research Letters, ...) you have to pay page charges for your paper to be published. At AG it is about 50 euro per page (but with my last paper 21 pages, that still adds up) and at JGR and GRL the page charges are even higher (although you can get the charges waived now and then), so just the fact that you need to pay for your paper is not a decisive criterion on whether the journal is bogus or not.

That wasn't the point I was making, I was just commenting on why someone might not want to publish nonsense just to prove the journal is trash. I generally don't like paying the people who I believe are doing things wrong.