Lambda-CDM theory - Woo or not?

[ben m]

FYI, the "sphere of charge has no effect on anything inside" is much more than a staple of sophomore-level physics midterms. It's also the subject of a number of lovely desktop-sized lab experiments, all of them up to full Mozpirical standards. For example,

http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v26/i12/p721_1

(ETA: which is a more sensitive version of a 1773 experiment by Henry Cavendish.)

 

[Perpetual Student]

It would appear that some "outside of the observable universe" force pulling on the universe to accelerate the cosmological expansion can be ruled out mathematically, by the simple geometry of the situation.
Consequently, it must be something within the observable universe that we can't see and can't feel or test in a laboratory because of the scale involved. Hey, I have an idea; let's call it "dark energy" and try to figure out what it is!

 

[Michael Mozina]

It would appear that some "outside of the observable universe" force pulling on the universe to accelerate the cosmological expansion can be ruled out mathematically, by the simple geometry of the situation.

It appears you never read any of Birkeland's terella experiments. How do you figure he got *BOTH* positive and negative particles to fly off his sphere and hit the walls?

I really wonder about you guys sometimes. You rule out empirical physics and simply ignore the empirical experiments that blow away your beliefs. You can't "rule out" something that empirically works in the lab.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birkeland-terrella.jpg

 

[W.D.Clinger]

The bold part above is quite clear intuitively, and I believe the mathematics required to demonstrate it would be very straightforward.

Ziggurat has already cited the current Wikipedia article on the Shell theorem^WP, which contains a derivation based on Gauss's law for gravity^WP, ∇∙g=-4πGρ.

I can't say for EM off the top of my head, but if there were a perfect sphere of matter, no matter how thick, gravity is completely neutral for any location within the sphere. Zero.

For the electric field, Gauss's law is ∇∙E=4πρ. Apart from a multiplicative constant -G, that's just like Gauss's law for gravity, so you can take exactly the same proof, substitute E for g, and remove the factor of -G from every equation in which it appears.

One of the many ironies here is that it's been less than a week since Michael Mozina accused us of loving "pseudoscience" because he, Michael, had placed his faith in some ludicrous pseudo-mathematical dogma he had invented about magnetic reconnection being somehow forbidden by Gauss's law for the magnetic field, ∇∙B=0. Now, when a similar form of Gauss's law is actually relevant, and that relevance is backed up by hundreds of years of laboratory experiments, Michael refuses to see the connection.

Just as I was about to post this, I see he has once again stuck his fingers in his ears and kicked off another of his Gish gallops.

It would appear that some "outside of the observable universe" force pulling on the universe to accelerate the cosmological expansion can be ruled out mathematically, by the simple geometry of the situation.
Consequently, it must be something within the observable universe that we can't see and can't feel or test in a laboratory because of the scale involved. Hey, I have an idea; let's call it "dark energy" and try to figure out what it is!

Sounds like a plan, but we might have to proceed without Michael.

 

[temporalillusion]

It appears you never read any of Birkeland's terella experiments. How do you figure he got *BOTH* positive and negative particles to fly off his sphere and hit the walls?

That doesn't look like a hollow sphere to me.

You have a positively charged spherical shell in zero gravity.

Take a negatively charged particle and put it inside the spherical shell.

What will happen?

 

[GeeMack]

It would appear that some "outside of the observable universe" force pulling on the universe to accelerate the cosmological expansion can be ruled out mathematically, by the simple geometry of the situation.
Consequently, it must be something within the observable universe that we can't see and can't feel or test in a laboratory because of the scale involved. Hey, I have an idea; let's call it "dark energy" and try to figure out what it is!

Michael believes the Universe is enclosed in a glass box connected to a vacuum system to pump out the air, at least according to his god Birkeland's model. Ain't that right, Michael? Birkeland made a model of the Universe in his lab, so that must be how it works.

 

[Reality Check]

It would appear that some "outside of the observable universe" force pulling on the universe to accelerate the cosmological expansion can be ruled out mathematically, by the simple geometry of the situation.

Michael Mozina's fantasies about this are definitely ruled out due to his ignorance of the physics involved.
People seem think that his idea is a sphere of matter or charge. That would be dumb even from MM since Gauss's law (gravitational or EM) states that the force is zero inside such a sphere. Michael Mozina's "charges" fantasy is even worse since matter in the universe is neutral (quasi-neutral for plasma) so charges billions of light years away would have not enough effect. But I am sure that MM can provide the math showing that he is right .

The scientific theories about inhomogeneous gravitational forces exerted from outside the observable universe are merely improbable, not ruled out.
Michael Mozina is being his usual illogical self in supporting void theories given the parallels between them and dark energy.
Void theories:

• Take GR. Apply it to an inhomogeneous universe.
  This duplicates the observations for some parameter sets but not all. The fine tuning needed makes the theories improbable.

Dark energy theories

• Take GR. Apply it to an homogeneous universe with a constant or scalar field (cosmological constant or quintessence).

 

[Reality Check]

Citation for *BOTH* positive and negative particles from Birkelands brass spheres

It appears you never read any of Birkeland's terella experiments. How do you figure he got *BOTH* positive and negative particles to fly off his sphere and hit the walls?
...snipped usual rant about his delusion that we ignore empirica data...

First asked 10 September 2010
Michael Mozina
Where does Birkeland state that he detects *BOTH* positive and negative particles emtited from his brass spheres and hitting the glass walls of his apparatus?

I read references to soot but that is neutral carbon. I would expect electrons because he induced electric discharge and I can see only electrons mentioned in his book.
Birkeland originally (1908) thought that the solar wind was electrons and it was a few years (1913?) before he changed to electrons and positive ions. But I have not seen any empirical experiments that he did to check this. This means that by MM-logic, the Birkeland solar wind is a "mythical sky deity" .

Now where have I seen this obsession with Birkeland's experiments, the delusion that Birkeland worked on cosmology and ignorance of what Birkeland actually stated before? Oh yes

And now he is going on about his delusions about Birkland's work.

This is totally irrelevant to the Lambda-CDM model and this thread.

However it is appropriate to list MM's lies and misinterpretations about Birkeland's book from this post (Micheal Mozina's iron crust has been totally debunked! ) in the Iron Sun thread:


An honest person would just say "I was wrong - Birkeland did not write that" in answer to most of these.

1. Where is the the solar wind and the appropriate math in Birkeland's book?
2. Please cite where in his book Birkeland identified fission as the "original current source"
3. Please cite where in his book Birkeland identified a discharge process between the Sun's surface and the heliosphere (about 10 billion kilometers from the Sun).
4. Is Saturn the Sun?
5. Question about "streams of electrons" for Micheal Mozina
6. Citation for Birkeland's prediction for the speed of the solar wind
   First asked 28 December 2009
7. Where is the solar model that predicts the SDO images in Birkeland's book? (really a follow on to questions dating from July 2009)
8. Are galaxies electrical discharges from magnetized iron spheres (Birkelands "nebulae model")?
9. Where in Birkeland's book does he state that the Sun is a metal globe?
10. Why is the iron crust iron and not Birkeland's brass?

 

[Tubbythin]

So if I charge the material in the center of that shell negatively and charge the inside that shell positively, nothing will happen?

I'm calling Poe. I fail to believe that anybody genuine can scour the internet for five years telling everyone that all the astronomers and cosmologists of the world are completely wrong because they don't understand electromagnetism can not understand Gauss' law at its most trivial.

 

[nvidiot]

I would be inclined to believe that but I've seen too many idiots in my short life who believe and espouse things they know aren't true.

Michael, the key point in all of this is that you have no evidence, not even the basics of a hypothesis let alone a theory, that would show the current cosmological models are radically and fundamentally wrong as you suggest.

If you are so sure that LCDM is wrong, find the evidence, do the hard yards in doing the observations and working out the mathematics that back it up, and present a paper to a cosmology journal. If the current theories are only so much wishful thinking and you have an alternative and testable theory as to why the universe is observed to not only expand, but accelerate in said expansion, then you'll not only win the Nobel for physics but go down as one of the intellectual giants of the age.

If you just hang around on various skeptic forums and call everyone idiots you just confirm what most of us already think: that you're willfully ignorant of just about every aspect of cosmology learnt over the last century and more.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

I'm calling Poe. I fail to believe that anybody genuine can scour the internet for five years telling everyone that all the astronomers and cosmologists of the world are completely wrong because they don't understand electromagnetism can not understand Gauss' law at its most trivial.

Intellectually not that much different from the Casimir effect and the definition of pressure.

However, considering the centrality of electromagnetism to MM's claims, I agree that this is truly amazing, more eye-popping and jaw-dropping and shocking than anything we've seen before.

 

[Mister Earl]

Poe's law. I'd have to agree. I still think this is some kind of bizarre roleplay.

 

[temporalillusion]

Unless you see the math I don't think it's necessarily intuitive what the gravitational/EM effects inside a hollow sphere will be, so I don't think it's roleplay, it's just someone going with their gut reaction to things, which is pretty much describes this and other threads.

 

[Michael Mozina]

Unless you see the math I don't think it's necessarily intuitive what the gravitational/EM effects inside a hollow sphere will be, so I don't think it's roleplay, it's just someone going with their gut reaction to things, which is pretty much describes this and other threads.

Actually, no, I'm going with what I know works in empirical experimentation and I'm simply ignoring your oversimplifications entirely. Nobody said it had to be a "perfect sphere", or that the inside surface had to be homogeneously charged. All of these things are your attempt to ignore the obvious. Birkeland already used a "charge separation" model to "simulate" the effect I've described. His terella was a cathode, and the sides of the box were the anode. The "current flow" between them is what moves the particles on a continuous basis and provides "particle acceleration' on a continuous basis.

What you're doing is "playing with strawman math", oversimplifying the entire process (one charged particle vs. a cathode), and ignoring empirical lab experiments entirely! You do this all the time. You folks *LOVE* to create oversimplified mathematical models to shoot down strawmen of your own creation. I prefer empirical physics over math. Your mathematical theories are always grossly oversimplified. They ignore empirical experimentation and they even ignore what is known to "work" in nature in favor of what Alfven called "pseudoscience". I suggest you all take a deep breath, reread Birkeland's work in the lab, and notice that his solar wind particles are being constantly accelerated. When you understand how and why, then you'll have some clue what I'm talking about. Until then, you're simply not listening, nor are you accepting something that is already *lab demonstrated*.

 

[Mister Earl]

What was Birkeland trying to figure out when he did that cathode experiment?

 

[edd]

I'll ask my earlier question again, rephrased. Photons don't change speed but they can change velocity and momentum. This happens in standard cosmology - they get redshifted continually - not in a one-off Doppler shift. They are subject to the same cosmological forces as matter.
Even if I did accept an electromagnetic rather than gravitational means of accelerating things in the universe - how does it do it to photons?

 

[Michael Mozina]

What was Birkeland trying to figure out when he did that cathode experiment?

Originally he was trying to figure out what caused the aurora. He bombarded a 'terella' (metallic sphere, with an electromagnet inside) with rays from a cathode and was able to simulate aurora around the poles of the sphere. He then wondered where such rays might come from and figured it was probably the sun that released them. He then conducted a series of experiments where he turned the surface of his sphere into a cathode and the outside box was the anode. Using this configuration, he was able to simulate many of the features we observe in solar atmospheric activity, including continuously accelerated solar wind.

 

[sol invictus]

You cannot accelerate net neutral objects electromagnetically. Galaxies are net neutral. Therefore they are not being accelerated by electromagnetic forces.

You can accelerate net neutral objects with gravitational forces. However, Newtonian gravity is purely attractive. That makes it impossible to gravitationally accelerate objects spherically symmetrically outwards from an origin (you can accelerate them inwards by putting a mass at the origin, but there are no repulsive masses).

To oversimplify slightly, observations show that matter is accelerating spherically symmetrically out from the earth. That is incompatible with Newtonian gravity (see above). Fortunately it is not incompatible with general relativity, because in GR the pressure contributes as a gravitational source, and pressure can be negative.

Therefore one can explain this outward acceleration if there is a uniform density filling all space with a net negative value of energy plus 3 times pressure. Such a density is called "dark energy".

 

[Mister Earl]

Originally he was trying to figure out what caused the aurora. He bombarded a 'terella' (metallic sphere, with an electromagnet inside) with rays from a cathode and was able to simulate aurora around the poles of the sphere. He then wondered where such rays might come from and figured it was probably the sun that released them. He then conducted a series of experiments where he turned the surface of his sphere into a cathode and the outside box was the anode. Using this configuration, he was able to simulate many of the features we observe in solar atmospheric activity, including continuously accelerated solar wind.

Do you think that was an accurate model for the sun?

 

[ben m]

What was Birkeland trying to figure out when he did that cathode experiment?

He was trying to simulate the Earth's aurora. In terms of the geometry, he basically got it right---the Earth's B field is a dipole, like his terella's B field, which (under the right range of conditions) means that, both in the terella and in real life, trapped plasmas can only get to the sphere in the circumpolar regions, not at the equator. Good for him. If he'd been thinking in the right direction, he also could have predicted the trapping of the Van Allen belts, but I'm not aware that he did.

Like all old experiments, he did a lot of things that we now know to be wrong, irrelevant, or misdirected. His sphere was electrically charged (via a high-voltage power supply), and that's why there was a plasma in his chamber to begin with. (The Earth is not so charged and has no such power supply; its trapped particles come from the solar wind and from wisps of upper atmosphere ionized in situ.)

The terrella was never intended to have anything to do with the solar wind, magnetic reconnection, and/or cosmology. (And so what if it had been so intended? That doesn't mean it was an accurate model.) At some point IIRC we asked Mozina to cite Birkeland's work on solar winds, and all he could find was a NY Times article where a journalist recounts a speech.