Sorry, I haven't had time to contribute anything over the past couple of weeks but before the thread is closed, I'd like to come back on Nereid's apparently impeccably academic dissection, analysis and consignment to the trash-bin of the Thornhill and Talbott "Poster presentation" PDF "The Electric Comet". Allow me to say that it's more than a little disingenuous.

The crux of the matter is that this critique of the PDF functions exactly as if Nereid believed it were actually a paper being submitted to a scientific journal for the usual peer-review process, with herself being the chief reviewer. This is confirmed by Papageno's post #91:
The whole thing needs to be put back into perspective, with the PDF in question being resituated in its proper context.

The point you are (I suspect, deliberately) missing is that the PDF is not designed to be just "any other scientific paper" seeking to be published in a journal. It is, along with the hundreds of articles published on the Thunderbolts website, on Wallace Thornhill's website "The Electric Universe", on Anthony Perrat's website Plasma Universe and on Donald Scott's website "Electric Cosmos" a contribution to the attempt being made by scientists whose training and research are founded in the field and tradition of electrical engineering to make the general public aware that there are alternative cosmological theories to the Big Bang, with the major contenders being PC/EU theories. We all know that mainstream BB theory is presented in all conventional media as being the definitive and unanimously accepted theory of the cosmos and that it manages to grab something close to 100% of public research-funding in the area. The claim is repeatedly made in the press, on radio and on television that "all the current research tends to confirm the theory". We don't, however, hear much in these same media about the fact that recent and current observations are posing enormous, not to say insurmountable problems for this same theory. This is what the Thornhill & Talbott PDF and the whole corpus of articles published on the websites linked above are aiming to publicise, for the general public. Clearly nothing can be done to change public policy on research funding as long as the general public the world over is being held in ignorance of the problems being encountered by BB theory and the existence of alternative theories which ARE consistent with the "puzzling/surprising/amazing/challenging" (choose your “flavour”) observations which are pouring in at a steadily increasing rate.

In case it's not clear, let it be stated that most of Thornhill's, Talbott's, Perrat's and Scott's work as published on their websites is, for the reasons I've just given, explicitly designed for the general public. It is an attempt at vulgarization of the complex theory concerning manifestations of electricity at all scales in the universe which is developed elsewhere either in peer-reviewed articles or in books (which, by definition, have been accepted for publication after a specific reviewing process). To take a couple of examples regarding peer-reviewed articles :

- The title page of Donald Scott's website explicitly states: "Electric-Cosmos.org announces the arrival of a new book that provides understandable answers to your questions about the cosmos". But at the same time, one of the links provided, "IEEE article" is a peer-reviewed article (not, of course, reviewed by your peers though), full of maths, diagrams and external references, written in impeccable academic fashion. Scott is choosing to vulgarize the theory on his website and in his books, while also publishing "scientific papers" you people should love.

- The same goes for Anthony Peratt and his website and published papers which I already provided links to here .

Thornhill and Talbott may not have published any peer-reviewed papers in mainstream astronomy journals but they also have their references, in particular their book "Thunderbolts of the Gods" and their free online video of the same name.

To come back to the alleged demolition of the "Electric Comet" PDF, it should now be clear that Nereid was disingenuously applying a set of conventions derived from one particular explanatory tradition (peer-reviewed papers) to another completely different tradition (vulgarizetion of complex scientific theory). Such an intellectual approach is quite simply invalid. A comparison might be found in the field of legislation. The laws of the land (any democratic land) are invariably couched in rather obscure, because necessarily technical, legal language. Fortunately, for all important legislation, there are newspaper artcles and talk-shows on radio and television to explain the actual implications of it for the man in the street. And when someone is accused of infringing the new law, his lawyer will hopefully also explain to him what the problem is in language he can understand. No-one would dream of criticizing the journalists or lawyers concerned for not respecting the linguistic or "orthographic" conventions of the law as it appears on the statute book. Yet this is precisely the sort of thing Nereid is purporting to do with the T&T PDF. She is applying to one particular area a set of rules and conventions which were designed to regulate an entirely different area. It’s as if you were allowed to use a soccer ball to knock down the pins in a ten-pin bowling alley.

You and your peers obviously do not need this sort of vulgarization, just as a lawyer would not need to read an explanatory newsaper article or consult a lawyer if he were accused of infringing some new legislation. And you're perfectly entitled to despise it as being much too far below your own exalted level of expository power or even to get as "angry" as you like about it. But those are minor, circumstantial considerations which in themselves can do nothing to cast doubt on the validity of the observations and interpretations the PDF is putting forward.

To do that, you actually have to demonstrate that what is being said, however deliberately "vulgar" the terms being used are, is actually false.

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Where is the truth? Who sees the old hag and who the young beauty?