Redshifts, etc
Tidying up a loose end ...
One of the many inconsistencies that makes PC, as presented in this thread by Z, woo is redshift.
Actually, it's a set of related inconsistencies.
Start with observation: for galaxies (and other objects) beyond the Local Group (the MW, M31, M33, the Magellanic Clouds, etc), distance and redshift are closely related - the greater the redshift, the greater the distance. This was first noticed by Hubble*, nearly a century ago now, and the distance-redshift relationship is today called the Hubble relationship. There's some scatter about the trend line, and a quantitative measure of that scatter correlates well with the objects membership of groups and clusters (the richer the cluster, the greater the scatter). To the extent that they have been measured, redshifts in different wavebands are the same (for the same object) - a galaxy's redshift measured in the x-ray waveband is the same as it is in the UV, or IR, or microwave, or radio waveband. Further, the atomic (or molecular) transitions that give rise to the lines used to measure redshift are many, from highly ionised iron, to moderately ionised oxygen, to neutral CO and H; hence the physical environments in which the excited species exist span an amazing range of temperature, density, and so on. Those are the observational results.
As Plasma Cosmology (PC) is universal in its scope (at least according to Z, per his posts in this thread), a good, consistent (PC) explanation of these observations should be available.
Surprisingly, there is no such explanation.
Instead (per Z anyway) there is a mishmash of creative ideas, speculations, and nonsense, with no apparent attempt by any PC proponent to produce anything definitive.
Curiously, most of these PC explanations involve mechanisms or processes that have never been seen in any lab here on Earth, a fact which would, no doubt, cause Alfvén to turn in his grave (a more egregious violation of his actualistic approach would be hard to imagine!); the ones that have been observed in labs pretty obviously do not apply to galaxies or objects whose redshifts have been measured in widely separated wavebands (say, radio and visual).
Even more curious, perhaps, is how uncritically PC proponents (including Z) embrace the published papers of Arp, Bell, et al ... curious because (among other things) there's even less in the way of potential (plasma) mechanisms for Arpian 'intrinsic redshift' than there is for that of the Hubble relationship**, and because if there really were such 'intrinsic redshifts' most of the works of most PCers (such as Peratt and Lerner) would have to be extensively edited, if not completely re-written.
In a way, the uncritical acceptance of Arpian 'intrinsic redshifts' for quasars is a rather nice summary of PC as a whole: not only are there no papers by any of the founders of PC on the existence of such an effect (recall that PC proponents are very big on 'predictions'), not only are there no plasma-based mechanisms for such an effect, but PC proponents are quite unconcerned about lensed quasars, which provide about as clear an observation-based case as you could ask for that quasars are at distances consistent with their (Hubble relationship) redshifts (
example)!
Saying this another way: uncritical acceptance of inconsistencies, of many kinds and at many levels (and the extreme reluctance to even acknowledge that any inconsistencies exist), shows that whatever PC is, it is not a science or based on science.
Can we get on to new questions now? Like whether PC is more akin to religion or to conspiracy theories?
*
actually it was almost certainly noticed by someone else earlier, but Hubble gets the credit (for being the first to publish a paper on it?)
**
with one exception: AFAIK it is possible (and maybe even easy) to construct models for some subsets of the line spectra of unresolved quasars using standard physics; however such models are inconsistent with more general observations of quasars
