Venom? I called a bunch of crackpots, "crackpots", what's venomous about that? I see no reason to suffer fools gracefully, and I don't (even on those rare occasions where I am one myself). I also see no reason to assume that the words "open minded" and "gullible" should be considered synonymous. It is of no consequence that someone holds a different opinion than mine, and I am a champion of original thinking. But opinion is not the issue here.

It is a matter of fact, and not opinion, that the electric universe cosmology has already been proven false, to the extent that anything is proven in the empirical sciences, where the standard of "proof" is somewhat different than it is in formal mathematics. It is a matter of fact, and not opinion, that the electric cosmos cosmology strongly violates chapter & verse of well known, fundamental principles of physics. Is it not passing strange that somebody with a bachelors degree in physics, and somebody with a PhD in electrical engineering, should support a hypothesis that grossly violates even freshman level physics? Is this really an example of valuable, original thinking?

Science is not so much a matter of what you know, as it is a matter of how you know it. While there is no single, mythical, "scientific method", there is a "scientific attitude", which is at it's heart, an honest investigation of the natural universe, as unfettered as possible by preconception. People cannot function with no preconceptions at all, but they can do a good job with a minimal set. All science is based on this one fundamental principle of honesty, which is why scientists are ruthless in their response to those found falsifying data, or plagerizing other peoples work.

There is no honesty in the electric cosmos, it is dominated by preconception. You can see this clearly in the way they practice "science by exegesis", using literary techniques, and criticizing phrases & passages. But when they try to follow the form of "science", suggesting "scientific" explanations, like the simple circuit model for a solar flare, they can't even make their own model physically consistent with their own explanantion! When do you finally decide that enough is enough? How many gross, simple factual errors do you think are OK, before you are willing to call something "stupid"? I actually have a pretty decent level of tolerance for error based on ignorance, but errors based on a fundamental dishonesty are intolerable when peddled as "science". At its core, the electric cosmos is based on dishonesty, not science, and you cannot ever tolerate that.

I was far kinder to the electric cosmos folks than they rightly deserve, but then I am the forgiving type. Now, if you want to see somebody who is really loaded for bear on this topic, you should check out the writings, speakings, post cards, phone calls, and other late night musings of Leroy Ellenberger, former confidant to Velikovsky himself, and now an evangelical anti-Velikovskian (Velikovsky Still Colliding, An Antidote to Velikovskian Delusions). His opinion of Thornhill cannot be printed in any public medium, and I dare say Thornhill feels the same way.

__________________
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. -- Bertrand Russell

I'm glad you consider yourself a champion of original thinking rarely being a fool, but sometimes it is exactly proposing something "foolish" that leads to new insights.
That still doesn't mean that you need to use those words in this forum, as I said you showed where the holes are and if you're right the model is based on a belief. If you want to say those things in the strongest words possible, be my guest, but you should just provide a link and keep the accusations towards Thornhill and others (for even considering an Electric model) out of this forum and voice them on your website. And what is considered well known and fundamental today, can change into something not so fundamental tomorrow, if (and only if) enough evidence becomes available.
Electricity in space does exist, so the premise for the model is not too farfetched. And most people are not familiar with plasma, while it is the dominant state of matter. So I see this model as a way to learn things about plasma that I wouldn't otherwise have known, and the the pros and cons of this model shows me where there is truly something worth to learn (for instance about the solar wind, heliosphere and magnetospheres). And that's all, there are worse things in the world than turning the ideas that stars are powered from within inside out and proposing those ideas. The people proposing it should provide evidence, otherwise it doesn't hold. Simple as that.
Cheers.

umm, i hate to interrupt, but are we not getting off topic, I am wondering if more about the solar wind could be explained to me Dr. Thompson, one major aspect is the interaction of solar wind say in a binary system - what happens? do we get a solar tornado? (what a frightening thought :blink

__________________
Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

Ah, I love a lively debate! :P

I have to throw my 2 cents' worth in... Isn't it true that this "electric cosmos" model claims that stars are like electrical generators - not nuclear reactors? I find this an incredible claim. It goes against ALL of physics, not just cosmology. I can't see how anybody could claim this, when after all atoms have been split & nuclear explosions unleashed right here on Earth!!!

The other "argument" for this electric cosmos theory is the "case of the missing neutrinos". As far as I can ascertain, this WAS a problem for physicists years ago...but not anymore, as the neutrinos mutate on their way out of the Sun (supported by experiments from CERN, FermiLab etc).

Besides, I have to wonder, if neutrinos can travel unheeded through solid lead a lightyear thick...how could we possibly detect them???

Craters are formed, not by meteorites, but lightning strikes? Wow, that's a mighty one! Chalk that one up for originality! But how come we don't see lightning on the Moon?

I'm the first to advocate a good challenge to the Establishment...rough it up a bit...poke sticks at it...but I don't see the electric-universe model quite cutting the cake, I'm afraid!?

Because the craters on the Moon were not formed continuously, and not by ordinary lightning, according to the model. The Moon was captured by the Earth, and during that process the Moon and Earth interacted electrically and massive discharges occurred, facilitating the capture process.
And I should add that not all craters are from impacts, but some are.

And that the model isn't "cutting the cake" is the general feeling, although exploring some facets can really help us understand some strange findings. Like the cratering that is visible throughout the solar system and I'm still struggling to understand how the solar wind/heliosphere works and what powers the Van Allen belts and how some comets get their double (or even broken) tails to name a few things.
Cheers.

Fair call, VanderL! I love the mental image of 2 planetary bodies interacting with great big electric arcs...would look great in some scary sci-fi movie!

But...how come we don't see this electrical interaction between planets & moons anymore? Does it somehow equalize or neutralize away?

The fact that our Sun blows away its outer atmosphere regularly kinda scares me. We don't know everything there is to know about stars, I grant you that...and how our Sun compares to other G2 stars... It could be that our Sun is unstable! Maybe it's gonna blow? It certainly does seem to display some erratic behaviour.....

VanderL, you mentioned how "cratering throughout the solar system" is an anomaly. Could you please elaborate on that? I'm interested.

The fact that we don't see the really violent ones, is indeed because the discharges dissipate energy in effect neutralizing the electrical differences. And we do see electrical interactions between a planet and a moon: Jupiter and Io are strongly interacting, and the Electric model sees the "volcanoes" that are active on Io as an electrical arc (like an arc welder) producing exactly the type of features that can be found on many moons and planets, the biggest one is Valles Marinaris on Mars.
Cheers.

"Venom? I called a bunch of crackpots, "crackpots", what's venomous about that? I see no reason to suffer fools gracefully, and I don't (even on those rare occasions where I am one myself)."

We must make that the subject of a global advertising campaign, including local signs and, perhaps, a Christmas slogan - to encourage world tolerance, compassion, love and peace. Let's learn from it - if you don't agree, abuse 'em!

Now that was funny

Chook, very funny , but i'll buy a bundle. Can we keep this topic on topic, pleeeeeeeeease?

Okay VanderL I can see the point about Io and Jupiter and the very strong and detectable electrical relationship between the two. Also as the moon only seems to have significant craters on the earth side. However, should their not be an enormous interaction between other major moons and their host planets, such as Titan or even Europa.

Now will some one also answer my question from before:
the interaction of solar wind say in a binary system - what happens? do we get a solar tornado?

__________________
Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

You're right, other moons should be receiving their dose of Jupiter's fields. Here are some pictures of Io and Europa. I'm not sure these are updated, the article is a bit old
http://www.holoscience.com/news/jupiter.htm
There was an article about a binary that was interacting through their plasma's, I'll look for it. 'Meantime have fun with the Europa pictures, they are quite special.
Cheers.

Wrong, it was a planet interacting with it's star http://www.universetoday.com/forum/index.p...?showtopic=1701
There's also a story about stars circling inside each other's "envelopes", maybe there is some info there?
You know Damien, that's actually a very good question, not bad for an Aussie.
I'll keep looking.
Cheers

yes we aussies do come up with the good questions sometimes... I will think of a comeback later..anyways:

Would it be possible to ever harness the Io (Europa) - Jupiter torus for our own uses?

Ah yes, I remember the planet cuasing the magnetic storms on the parent star story from Fraser, so we could say that that could be true for Jupiter and the Sun?

__________________
Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

Gee, VanderL is persistent, isn't he? Which is great, coz he raises perfectly valid issues. I wasn't aware of any Jupiter/Io interaction. Those are great photos in that link...but I must confess that the Io volcano looks like, well...a volcano!? And yes, the Near Side & Far Side of our Moon are quite contrasting with respect to surface features. Far Side is heavily pockmarked (so "they" tell us, heh :P )...Near Side has vast "seas" of ancient lava flow. But isn't that logical? The Earth, after all, would buffer much of the Near Side impacts...? And the Martian "Great Rift Valley", yes certainly it is MASSIVE & quite spectacular...but does it really need electricity to explain it? I thought it was caused by a glancing blow from some gigantic asteroid, or something? Maybe a natural geological formation, even, like the valleys and gorges here on Earth. The photos of Europa look stunning, certainly - but once again, the strange surface features are explained if we assume it is one big ice crust surrounding a liquid ocean beneath...much like sea ice here on Earth.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not debunking anything here. In fact, I would love it if someone could throw in some serious anomaly into this forum that blows all our minds! I think Venus's contra-rotation is a weird one, not easily explained...?? Also Uranus's 90-degree tilt...??

About DP's point of interacting solar winds between binary stars, eg Alpha Centauri A & B... That is very interesting, because I know the solar "wind" is actually more of a hyper-speed HURRICANE...So what if 2 solar winds come crashing into each other? Would it create some spectacular sky-show for Alpha Centaurians?? Would there be sufficient force there to trigger nuclear fusion?

I just looked at the APOD and there http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ you can see a picture of M2-9 a Butterfly Nebula, thought to be formed by a dying star. This one and the one you find by following the link to "bipolar appearance" are binaries (how many planetary nebulae are in fact binaries?). Suppose this is what the solar wind forms into when the interaction is strong enough to be visible. A glowing plasma following the magnetic fields of the stars. Just a thought.
Cheers.

I see what you mean VanderL! What a sight, so there certainly is more to the story than mere solar wind tornadoes:


wow

__________________
Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

Well, what volcano can move it's caldera for tens of miles in a few years?
Cheers.

Man oh man, I want to BELIEEEEEVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BUT....!!!!!!!

So a star spews itself inside out along polar axis etc...!???? And if they are 2 rapidly revolving binary stars (--17 DAYS?? WOW!! --) they form a SAWBLADE formation...

I just can't see anything anomalous...except the Great Cosmos Itself. It all makes sense according to conventional high-school physics. The real question you seem to be asking is WHY? - not "how?"... Sheet, I don't think even Paul Davies knows WHY?...!!!!! (But I'm sure he's got a few educated guesses!!!)...

You want my opinion? I'll give it to you:----

"Well, a trillion years ago......."

Ah stuff it, I can't be bothered putting it into words!!!!

Hey Fraser, what does "FLOOD CONTROL IS ENABLED ON THIS THREAD" mean???

(I tried to do a follow-up post, and that's what I got! Overload?? There's nobody on the active/inactive/guest/anonymous list!!!!!!!!!)

Anyhow...

VANDERL!!! (Vandal?)...ha ha... PLEASE direct me to the site that talks about Io's volcano's CALDEROS moving position!!! THANKS!!!!

I, too, had to read those sites posted by VanderL. The more I read, the more I laughed! I don't know much about the plasma end, but I can't believe that stars "birth" gas giants, which, in turn, spit out the rocky little planets. According to them, Saturn used to be the center of the solar system.

I also thought it a bit ludicrous that the electric universe people claim that DNA has nothing to do with how we look, electricity does though. Genetics is a pretty well understood in science.

Also, the ancients and their myths are moderately "true". Less than ten thousand years ago, man "saw" these lightning bolts between the planets. How else, did Zeus get his lightning bolt? Come On! I may have been born yesterday, but it wasn't last night!

If I came up with this theory, I would be laughed off this forum. Wacky would probably the nicest thing I would be called!

__________________
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

Geez, the whole idea's too radical...EVEN FOR ME!!!! Saturn's the birthplace of the planets?? Well, I guess it's got the most moons (hasn't it? = the record seems to shift back'n'forth between Jupiter & Saturn pretty often!)...

Man, the whole notion of "matter into energy" (and vice versa) makes pefect sense to me. A massive old star supernovas itself apart...the rubble gravitates back towards the spinning source...Inside, nuclear fusion erupts...the outside rubble starts spinning around in gravity-locked orbit...forming a disk...energy condenses to matter...matter congregates into larger clumps...planetoids form, getting bigger, struck by meteorites continually...until the meteorites are used up & we see what we see today.

All the meteorites (ie shrapnel) is used up. That's precisely why we exist. Because an asteroid hasn't wiped us out yet! (But it will!).

I bet if someone did a serious scientific study of meteoric impacts on Earth (or Moon...or whatever...) they'd trace a downward curve on their graphs - ie impacts have got less & less over the millennia. There was more "rubble" in the past. Now it's mostly impacted into planets...

Maybe life itself (DNA) got manufactured within our parent Star (along with all the HEAVY METALS = uranium, titanium, vanadium, mercury, etc etc)...

Maybe life is metallic??

Thinking back to my last post, I'm wondering now how a rotating star that has exploded can congregate a "planetary disk" in an equatorial plane about itself?? Wouldn't it be more SPHERICAL???

There you go Faulkner, just take time to read through it and if there is any truth in all the claims there has to be evidence. If someone claims Saturn was the place Earth used to circle you'd need evidence to back it up. Mythology can be more than fairytales (as Schliemann's digs at Troy showed us) but it is a extremely difficult area and maybe even impossible to use. The stuff I find interesting and which gets clouded by the big claims is whether electrical phenomena are really shaping the solar system in any way. If it wasn't for these people who would have considered the cratering on planets and moons and the volcanoes on Io could be different than we imagine?
Io's wandering volcano is here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/753906.stm
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sola...mes_000519.html
Cheers.

Just to be off-topic for a moment...

Faulkner, "flooding" is when you enter one post onto the forum and then reply to the same topic within a specified timespan - I'm guessing, in this case, the timespan is set to 5 minutes. If you try and do this, the program running the forum won't allow the post because it's within the limit and therefore seen as flooding.

It's just there to stop people from making multiple posts (either innocently or maliciously) and thereby clogging up the forums when one post is adequate (and can be edited by the poster)

...as you were...

__________________
"The stars are my home"
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark, near the Tanhauser Gate... all those moments will be lost, in time... like tears in the rain..."

Thanks, Dipster!

VanderL - proost! for the links! - I checked them out, but actually it's not a case of a moving volcano, just a moving volcanic plume. Obviously some nearby vent has opened up...

Keep it coming, tho'. I love this stuff! "Anomalies in our solar system"...it's a great avenue for research & discussion!

Yes, but a vent opening 95 km further is not something that has been seen with any other volcano, and the places are connected and it's still moving. Anyway, these volcanoes are the strangest ever, let's watch what happens to them, and maybe find more examples.
Cheers.

Maybe it's indeed laughable, but it's the first model that I'm aware of that accounts for close-orbiting giant planets and explains why there are so many binary systems, and tells us why we can't find the dark matter.
The least these guys do is point to where the current models have their little problems, and make us aware that there is a lot more to know and explore.
Cheers.

There definitely looks like some bad science in the plasma theory but there's always the chance that there's a nugget of truth in there too. Then again, the more conventional cosmology worries me when the theory is based on 95% of the universe being invisible. Doesn't mean it's a bad theory though. Just waiting for something better to come along, or evidence that supports or disproves all this dark matter & energy.

Always keep a balance between skepticism and gullibility, and don't forget that if your mind is too open, your brains can fall out.

__________________
Spike
:)

This is only true for people with brains, so that's no problem.
Cheers.

Quote Spike:
"don't forget that if your mind is too open, your brains can fall out."

Quote VanderL:
"This is only true for people with brains, so that's no problem."

TOUCHE!

Cheers Louis