Lambda-CDM theory - Woo or not?

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In terms of the sun acting as a cathode in space, yes.

I see a couple of issues with that, though. How did he decide the voltage? Was the sphere in a vacuum? How did he correct for the differences in size and materials? Wouldn't the box, being cubical or rectangular, change the results? Did he try to keep the experment true to nature, or did he change things to test a specific mechanic?
 
I see a couple of issues with that, though. How did he decide the voltage? Was the sphere in a vacuum? How did he correct for the differences in size and materials? Wouldn't the box, being cubical or rectangular, change the results? Did he try to keep the experment true to nature, or did he change things to test a specific mechanic?

If you want the long version, and you have bandwidth to burn, you'll find a complete compilation of his work here:

http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/birkeland.pdf

Careful, I think it's 90 megs or so.

In terms of where he came up with voltages and such, essentially he took what he learned from his empirical experiments and "scaled it up". He did correct for size. The magnetic field inside the terella had more overall impact on the energy flow patterns than the outline of the box, or the size of the sphere in relationship to the box. The box shape wasn't one a 'variable' he could easily modify, but he worked with a series of glass jars before building his boxes.

IMO Birkeland was *WAY* ahead of where the solar physics community is today at least in terms of explaining solar atmospheric activities. He had limited knowledge of the elements to work with, but for his time, he was highly educated, and very well funded. He made a financial killing on his patents and poured a lot that money back into his research.
 
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?

http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.3536

I would assume the redshift is probably related to a time dilation process caused by the acceleration over time. I've seen other "tired light' approaches, but they all suffer from a number of "issues" that tend to be rather problematic in terms of creating a "smooth" effect.

http://arxiv.org/find/astro-ph/1/au:+Brynjolfsson_A/0/1/0/all/0/1
 
I was under the impression that experiment was Birkland attempting to model the aurora borealis.

Well, he modeled aurora, solar wind, coronal loops, polar jets, planetary rings and a host of other things too. He had years to work with his experiments and he performed many of them. He originally began by studying the aurora, but he specifically compares his experiments with a cathode sphere with the sun and solar activity. Once he realized that bombarding a sphere with a cathode created the aurora, he naturally moved on to experimenting with a cathode sphere. He specifically mentions that he believes that this configuration of his experiments have important solar implications. He's right IMO.

birkelandyohkohmini.jpg


A lot of features we see in modern satellite images are described and *predicted* by Birkeland over 100 years ago, including coronal loops and constantly accelerated solar wind of *BOTH* positive and negative particles. Those were really "out there" predictions at the time, but many of this theories have since been verified by satellites in space. To the left are "loops" Birkeland created in the atmosphere of his terrela and to the right is an image of coronal loop activity from the Yohkoh satellite (x-ray).
 
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Actually, no, I'm going with what I know works in empirical experimentation

No you aren't. The experiments you refer to don't resemble what's going on with cosmology, and they definitely don't violate the shell theorem.

Nobody said it had to be a "perfect sphere", or that the inside surface had to be homogeneously charged.

Indeed. That "nobody" includes me: I didn't say that.

But here's the thing, Michael. Pay attention, because this gets a little technical. One can treat a single acceleration as the linear combination of two different accelerations. So for example, a ball swinging on a string can be treated as accelerating due to gravity and accelerating due to the tension in the string. Now, the observed cosmic acceleration is mostly spherically symmetric. Does it matter that it might not be perfectly spherically symmetric? Not for our current discussion. Why? Because we can treat the acceleration as a sum of a component that IS spherically symmetric plus a component which is not. And the component which IS spherically symmetric is by far the larger of the two. And the source for this component must be spherically symmetric. I don't care if you want to claim (with no evidence) that the perturbations are due to something outside the visible universe: the primary component still cannot be.

Oh, and this whole analyzing accelerations as sums due to different sources? Yeah, that's easy to experimentally verify, in a lab, on earth.

Birkeland already used a "charge separation" model to "simulate" the effect I've described.

No he didn't. Nothing he did resembles the observed cosmological acceleration.

His terella was a cathode, and the sides of the box were the anode.

And it's the central cathode, NOT the surrounding anode, which drove the current. Where's your central anode for the entire cosmos, Michael? What's the charge on it, and why is it accelerating everything in the same outward direction, rather than ripping different charges in different directions?

The "current flow" between them is what moves the particles on a continuous basis

The current flow is what causes current flow. Yup, you're right on that one.

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!

Not so. First of all, the distinction doesn't matter here, as the shell theorem demonstrates. And that's not strawman math, that's a fact of physics, which has been experimentally verified and which Birkeland's experiments don't contradict. Second, again, where the hell is your proposed central charge for the entire cosmos?

Your mathematical theories are always grossly oversimplified.

And yet, they work.

They ignore empirical experimentation

The shell theorem doesn't.

and they even ignore what is known to "work" in nature

Again, the shell theorem doesn't.

in favor of what Alfven called "pseudoscience".

You think Alfven would consider the shell theorem "pseudoscience"? Yeah, um... no.

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.

By the central cathode. Not the surrounding anode. In agreement with the shell theorem.

When you understand how and why, then you'll have some clue what I'm talking about.

YOU don't understand how or why, and YOU don't have any clue about what you're talking about.
 
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.

And naturally you fail to comment on his papers on "are the particles send out by the sun positive or negative" where he comes to the conclusion that both kind of charges are coming from the sun. Somewhere here on the board I went through great pains of finding, reading and explaining these papers.

Please show us in great detail where he finds that when the terrella is negatively charged he gets positive charges emitted from the sphere. (paper or book and page number and which line please)
 
That's a good point. For Birkland's model to be halfway relevant, there'd have to be a central point to the universe with a massive charge. That could be a problem.
 
[qimg]http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/images/birkelandyohkohmini.jpg[/qimg]

A lot of features we see in modern satellite images are described and *predicted* by Birkeland over 100 years ago

A lot of features we see in exploding Death Stars are described and *predicted* by Birkeland over 100 years ago:



A lot of features we see in UFO photos are described and *predicted* by Birkeland over 100 years ago:



Science by pretty pictures is fun! Now I see why you do it!
 
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.

To determine if it had to be a perfect sphere or homogeneously charged or not, you would first have to understand the differences in what's expected between a perfect sphere and equal charge and other configurations.

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?

You have a box in zero gravity with the top and bottom plates positively charged.

Take a negatively charged particle and put it inside the box.

What will happen?

EDIT: Between those two, which one is closer to modeling what we observe?
 
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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*.


You're still lying about Birkeland. Hey, Michael, everyone here knows you're a liar, but was Birkeland a liar, too? :p
 
This discussion is a red herring---a Gish Gallop as WD Clinger said a page or two back.

Suppose, just for a second, that you can make MM agree to the statement "Gauss's Law shows that an external, uniform shell of charge exerts no EM force inside the shell; and an external non-uniform charge can only exert anisotropic forces." That'd be great, that'd feel like a step forward.

But seriously, what do you think is going to happen? Does this get you any closer to MM understanding---or admitting to not understanding---modern cosmology? No, of course not. Having admitted that the external shell doesn't work, he's going to say the following: "EVEN IF that's true about external charges, just look how your dogma religion ponies have prevented you from considering INTERNAL charges. And it's not just charge, it's CIRCUITS."

What follows will be an 80 page thread where Mozina repeats his dark-energy-dogma-religion-bunnies statements while occasionally citing internal charges or circuits as a better model. Maybe after 80 pages you can get him to actually say what model he has in mind. Let's imagine that you can convince him that THIS model is wrong (we've sort of done that already, that's why he went to the external shell business, right?). Good luck with that, it might take a few threads.

What follows will be an 100 page thread where Mozina repeats his dark-energy-dogma-religion-bunnies statements while mentioning external shells of charge as a better model. He'll have forgotten this thread entirely and will happily repeat any and all of it. Repeat ad nauseum.

Seriously, folks. If a crackpot were to say (say) "I reject Lambda-CDM because I think you have the Casimir Effect backwards" you could imagine educating him past that. But this is ridiculous. Mozina is rejecting Gauss's Law. Gauss's Law! The knight-errant champion of all things E&M-related against the dark forces for dark forces, is rejecting Gauss's Law.

It's worse than that---Mozina doesn't care about Gauss's Law. Remember how we got here. He tossed out a completely unexamined trial-balloon of a hypothesis ("a shell of charge pulling on the Universe from the outside"), not as a real hypothesis, but as a rhetorical cudgel---he wanted to have an X with which to say "... but you lambda-CDM-dogmatics ignored X". He's spent four pages denying Gauss's Law for the sake of that---a useless sub-scrap of thought that was momentarily convenient for him in an argument.

It's like a creationist troll in an evolution discussion---if there's some argument they can derail by denying that DNA is inherited, off they go. It's not that DNA-non-inheritance is actually part of Creationist theory, and there's no point convincing them that DNA is inherited. They won't add DNA-inheritance to a list of true facts to consider on the road to understanding evolution-vs-creationism. It's just trolling.

Do you think Mozina is going to write a paper on the novel and never-before-published "external shell of charge" hypothesis? Will "Gauss's Law is wrong" appear in a sidebar at TheSurfaceOfTheSunIsBrass Gadolinium Chloride Iron.com? No, of course not, he doesn't care.
 
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