Like creationist who argue that anything found in the cosmos less than billions of years old is automatically evidence for their Young-Earth creationism, EU supporters think any mention of electric fields in mainstream astronomy is automatically evidence for their claims that are long-discarded as useless by scientists and engineers who do real space flight.
Actually, I've found some references going back to the 1700s.
At times when actual data is scarce, hypotheses abound.
When electromagnetism was the new and exciting force in science, it is certainly reasonable to explore ideas of what it might help explain.
But real science is more than just an 'idea'. A successful theory lets you relate quantities in places where you can measure to different quantities and/or different places and times. The theory that succeeds is the theory that can do that. Electric Comets were a reasonable idea, even hypothesis, at one time, but they have long since failed. The EU claim that the tiny X-ray fluxes we see, predicted in the 1970s by mainstream astronomers, are evidence that comets are a discharge phenomena is like arguing the existence of mountains is proof that the Earth is not round. The X-rays, like the mountains, are just tiny deviations from the main model.
I've got loads of papers exploring cosmic electrical phenomena prior to the publication of Worlds in Collision in 1950, so your statement is demonstrably false. The big jump in the study of electrical phenomena in space was the advent of space flight even with the early high-altitude sub-orbital launches like Aerobee and Viking, also building up in the 1950s, where we could finally do actual measurements of particles and fields in space.
Really? You spout big numbers but don't present them in relevant context, so you clearly don't understand what they really mean.
How much of a voltage difference is needed to accelerate a proton or electron from zero to 1,000,000 miles per hour? This is a question that a competent high-school physics student can answer, yet I've not received an answer from any EU 'theorist'. 1e6 miles/hour is about 4e5 meters/second, so:
0.5 *m*v^2 = qV
0.5* (1.67e-27 kg)* (400e3 m/s)^2 = (1.6e-19 coulombs)* volts
comes out to about 840 volts for protons - about the magnitude found in the mainstream models. It's even lower for electrons. But it doesn't even need to be that large as collisional dynamics are important closer to the photosphere to give an initial push.
Rather inconsistent with EU claims, isn't it.
Even worse for EU is if the solar wind were driven by an external electric field, the flow would be much more uniform as acceleration by the field would dominate the flow. In the measured solar wind, the speed is roughly constant after the initial acceleration closer to the Sun, what you'd expect from a hydrodynamic flow as the density and pressure drops due to expansion, like from a popped balloon.
1) Where is the EU method of computing the electric and magnetic fields and particle fluxes in any of these galactic birkeland currents?
2) Where are the numbers that we can compare to actual spacecraft measurement?
3) What is the amount of microwave emission we would detect for such currents? Both the one driving the Sun and those driving other stars? How does this compare to current instrument sensitivity in the detection bands of instruments like PLANCK or even ground-based radio telescopes?
The standard models do pretty good at this, and at best they have voltage differences across the heliosphere of 1000 volts or so, but much of this voltage difference is induced by the plasma flow. These results are consistent with spacecraft measurements, not the millions/billions of volts claimed by EU.
Mainstream space weather models like Enlil are running all the time, such as those presented at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, so we know when to take precautions to protect astronauts and satellites. Gee, they even show irregularities in the flow.
Most of these models were developed and initially tested on desktop class computers readily available today. So where is the EU equivalent? What's their excuse? Or are they still waiting for others to do their work for them and they'll just hang around to claim credit for any mentions of electric fields?
As I stated, EU supporters always complain, but never present a usable analysis themselves. They just make excuses and continue to insist that others must do EU's work for them. That's just a cover to hide the fact that they really don't know what they're talking about.
H. Benioff. The Present Status of the Electrical Theory of Comet Forms. Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 36:200–203, August 1924.
Benioff gets a value for solar charge over 100x larger than that estimated by other methods, which reveals a consistency problem.
N. T. Bobrovnikoff. The Present State of the Theory of Comets. Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 40:164–190, June 1928. doi: 10.1086/123823.
"As for the rival explanations of the physical properties of comets only the electrostatical theory will .be mentioned here. It was developed largely by Zöllner in his book Uber die Natur der Cometen, 1872, and persisted until quite recent time. It is dearly unsatisfactory as it leads to an impossible electrostatic charge of the Sun and also in view of the presence of the non-polar molecules, like CN, in abundance in the cometary heads."
So you still want to push electric comets?
4) What's the electric charge on the comet and the Sun?
5) How does the presence of the electrostatic force between the comet and Sun affect the comet's motion?
6) Want to complain that this doesn't include effects of the Sun's magnetic field? Then compute them, otherwise you're just making excuses.
Yet without including any of these 'electric sun' features, the Rosetta team managed to navigate their spacecraft for 10 years to a precision rendezvous.
7) If the mainstream model is so wrong, how did they manage that when they didn't include all the charges and electric fields in this environment advocated by EU?
So far, we've had no demonstration from Electric Universe supporters are even competent enough to compute the trajectory based on their model, much less build the spacecraft.
I've got a code that can be used for computing model runs like described in questions 4-6 above. I could run some of the EU-type models with it, placing charges and magnetic fields consistent with what EU 'theorists' describe, but when the results don't match their claims, EU supporters will cry 'strawman'! and hope that no one will call them on it.
Perhaps I should post a run just to see how well that prediction holds up...
I'm waiting for some predictions which can be used to do real stuff from EU advocates, not the useless fairy tale we keep receiving from them.
