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Originally Posted by tusenfem
Whoah, Neiried, you bad - Girl!
I have once discussed that "poster" too, but not in the amount of detail that you went into! Thanks!
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I must say it was quite an eye-opening experience ... given its purported provenance (a poster at an ICOPS), I was rather shocked to find a complete absence of any references, and so many missing image credits (not to say mis-representations of same).
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There is one thing I noticed, but it may be that is has to be in the new thread on EC, but here it goes. As stated above about the charging of the comet:
My bolding here.
First of all, as said often here on the board, the solar wind is a plasma and does not like strong radial electric fields. Naturally, Talbott may want to use Juergens' model for the sun, which has been rather easily debunked by myself in another thread on the ES. But in all, there is no large electric field radially outward of the sun, or at least not at the values that Talbott might want to have for "charging" (however he wants to do that).
But the comet "moving at furious speed", basically the speed of a comet (AFAIK) is say 50 km/s at the Earth's orbit. Naturally, this is a significant value (one would not want such a comet to hit the Earth), however, it is negligible with respect to the solar wind speed, which is hundreds of km/s. Indeed, up until the heliopause the solar wind velocity is 400 km/s.
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(emphasis added)
Here's one thing (among many) that surprised me (as I hope I showed, above): almost nothing in the PDF is falsifiable, even in principle!
For example, if you read the relevant parts of the PDF carefully, even the apparently absolute (but unquantified) "
The Sun's radial electric field is weak but constant with distance in interplanetary space" is modified elsewhere, so the PDF doesn't, as a whole, say anything at all about what sort of electric field is to be found in interplanetary space (note, for example, "
The Sun's" - plenty of leeway to add radial, or other, fields of any planet, asteroid, comet, ....!).
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So, how does Talbott want to charge the comet, I have no idea.
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You've highlighted one aspect of what motivated me to write about Thornhill, in the series of posts above ... as someone who (supposedly) has a degree in physics, it's astonishing that he put his name to a document with many things that he should have been able to at least put good bounds on, with a hour (or a day, or a week) of effort. Yet he's supposed to have been researching 'the electric comet' for
30 years!