But that is totally beside the point! I know negative ions can exist, I have personally shown that Cl^- exist in the pickup cloud of Europa. There are various kinds of processes that can create negative ions hydroxyl, mostly by photodissociation of water. (I would have to look up the nature paper by Chaizy et al. for details)

But can you show me that by EDM (electrical discharge machining) of the minerals of the nucleus of the comet can produce negatively charged hydroxyl? Has it been shown, is it e.g. mentioned in that one paper on using a plasma gun to get water on Mars (or something of the like, you probably have the link to that paper somewhere).

From the reference Chaizy et al. we find that near the Earth, the lifetime of negative hydroxyl is 0.9 seconds against photodetachment.

Then on page 394 they say:

So, they have mechanisms that create negative ions, but basically it all seems to come from cometogenic water released by the nucleus, so your idea that "I guess the reference in my previous post should give us an indication if the proposed water production from rocky material through discharging and recombination with solar protons is viable mechanism" does not really hold up that well.

But they did not have the cross-section for the necessary reactions. I am sure that one could find some of the cross-sections now, as the paper is 17 years old, and new research has been done, but I don't feel like searching, I have a paper of my own to finish.

__________________
************************************************** *************************
Optimism does not change the laws of physics. (T'Pol)
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. (Dao De Jing 27)
************************************************** *************************
Martin ( http://www.geocities.com/DrMartinV )

Thanks for the offer.

Consistent with my oft-repeated comments about the need for science to be public, let's wait until such papers become available.

To repeat, here is the actual prediction (please refer to post #69 for full details):(emphasis added).

Let's take the 3 (or 300) first.

"may well include more than one peak" -> 2 (or 299) pre-impact flashes are consistent with the prediction, as it was actually made.

To turn this around, if there were, say, four "flashes"* in all, then an EU proponent would be able to claim the observations are consistent with the prediction.

Ditto if there were, say, five "flashes"; and so on.

What about no 'pre-impact flashes'?

The actual 'prediction' is not at all absolute (e.g. "there will be one pre-impact flash"); rather, it is conditional.

First, pre-impact flashes are one class of "[e]lectrical interaction[] with Deep Impact" ... and all such interactions "may be slight". An obvious corollary is that had there been no observed pre-impact flash, then, in the logic of the actual prediction, the electrical interactions must have been "slight", and so no observed pre-flash impact would be consistent with the prediction.

Second, the electrical interactions "would likely be similar to those of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 prior to striking Jupiter's atmosphere". As electrical interactions of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 prior to striking Jupiter's atmosphere were not referenced^, if no pre-flash impact had been observed, all kinds of post-diction 'explanations' become possible (and easy); for example (these are made-up) "here's what was actually observed re SL9 and Jupiter {details}; note that the electrical interactions are very slight, so, clearly no pre-impact flash could have observed"; "on further analysis {no references, no details, given}, the DI electrical interactions and the SL9-Jupiter ones are not similar, so, clearly no pre-impact flash could have been predicted".

It is important to identify the root cause of this incredible predictive power (capable of producing "the DI observations are consistent with the EU prediction", no matter what was observed).

It comes from the secret nature of the how the predictions were made - no independent, objective testing of the validity of the predictions themselves is possible (they are like sacred writings in this sense).

It also comes from their non-quantitative nature.
Now that I have reproduced the actual prediction (concerning 'pre-impact flashes'), have I clarified my question?

The observation of pre-impact flashes can be taken, logically, as a validation of the existence of "[electrical interactions] of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 prior to striking Jupiter's atmosphere". Further, the data on that (those) pre-impact flash(es) could be used to refine predictions (actually post-dictions) for SL9-Jupiter. And so on. Yet no commentary on these (obvious) implications has been made (as far as I know).

* The question of whether the observed light curve is consistent, or not, with "flashes" is a separate issue

^ Note that, as I mentioned earlier, no reference to any such interactions is given - not what they were expected to have been; how they could be independently, objectively checked; what was observed; and so on

The customary week has passed, and while Luxor has posted since the 5th, there is - as yet - no reply to these questions.

When may we expect a reply, Luxor?

What evidence suggested trhis?

__________________
'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

(source)(emphasis added)

Here's a tentative conclusion I have come to: at least with regard to the ECM, Electric Universe proponents are not engaged in a science-based dialogue.

The lack of anything quantitative in discussions on the ECM has been evident for a long time, and at least as far as this thread is concerned, not much has changed in this regard.

However, there are other, more essential, parts of what in the doing of science that are missing - or even actively denied - in discussions on the ECM (as far as this thread is representative).

First, there's the public/private (or secret) nature of the core concepts - authors are often not identified; the reasoning, logic, methods used to arrive at the bald conclusions published (nearly always on websites, which can be edited at a whim, with no trace left of previous editions), and so on is rarely revealed; the specific work of the giants whose shoulders "EU theorists" presumably stand on is rarely identified; reviews are never (apparently) done (or if they are, they are done entirely in secret); and so on.

One corollary of this is to make what is published resemble sacred (religious) texts - immune from objective review, incapable of being independently checked, vague and ambiguous*, ... and almost always beyond falsification^.

Another is that using material from standard textbooks, or published in relevant peer-reviewed journals, to rebut (or question) presentations of the ECM, is quite ineffective ... if only because the mutual agreement on the meanings of key terms that is necessary for meaningful dialogue is, at best, coincidental (the writings of the high priests of EU are not to be even compared with the works of professional space scientists, much less discussed in the same sentences).

Second, there's the default false dichotomy: if {mainstream explanation} can be shown to be inconsistent with the data, then {EU-based explanation} must be right. Of course, this is not always explicitly stated (though it is, surprisingly often), and it can take many forms (see ATKINS' posts on "only", for example).

One corollary of this default is the huge focus on what can be spun as inconsistencies between observation and (mainstream) models, and the often fierce resistance shown to questions about the nature of the ECM (as well as the tendency for such questions to be answered in terms of perceived failings of consensus models rather than attributes of the ECM).

Third, there's the cult of personalities, or hero worship. There are many examples of this; the funniest (if they weren't so sad) are the ones where Alfvén (say, or Birkeland) is quoted in response to a question or challenge ... but the quote is quite inappropriate to the context! It may be that this is also behind the almost complete silence that followed my posts on what seems like intellectual fraud by Thornhill and Talbott.

There's more, but I think that will do for now.

Suggestion to readers: try this for yourself ... find a piece of the ECM that seems, at first glance, to be meaty, and see how well you can trace the provenance, history, etc of the content. Make a note of where you have to assume that you understand it, based on your own understanding of key terms, if only because you have no other way to check whether that understanding is correct. Then imagine how you might go about independently checking that meaty piece of the ECM, whether by a literature search, or by reconstructing the logic, or formulating hypothetical tests, or ... Now go back to the source and read it again. My guess is that, most likely, your only meaningful option is to ask Thornhill and Talbott what they really meant when they wrote {insert text here} ...

I suspect it's the same for most parts of 'EU theory', with Scott replacing Thornhill and Talbott (for the 'Electric Sun', for example). However, as iantresman has often pointed out, for most parts of 'Plasma Universe' or 'Plasma Cosmology', it's a different story (and one reason why EU proponents try very hard to blur the distinction).

* If only because where the conclusions published came from is rarely stated, key terms are almost never defined, etc
^ See the so-called 'pre-impact flash prediction', for example, above

There are some publicly available papers from Thornhill et al., but none directly address the EC model.

Cheers.

Wowie, now I am beginning to quote myself!!
While watching dancing stars (yeah, how profane!) I have been googling and found the following paper by J. B. Greenwood, A. Chutjian, and S. J. Smith with the title Measurements of Absolute, Single Charge-Exchange Cross Sections of H+, He+ and He++ with H2O and CO2 with the link to the pdf here.

The abstract reads:

A quick look at the paper shows in Fig. 3 that the cross section (depending on energy) varies between 0.5 and 1.5 × 10^-15 which is larger than was thought required at a comet. So, it seems that the processes by Chaizy et al. can well happen.

I thought already that more information would be available after a 1991 paper.

__________________
************************************************** *************************
Optimism does not change the laws of physics. (T'Pol)
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. (Dao De Jing 27)
************************************************** *************************
Martin ( http://www.geocities.com/DrMartinV )

I want to know what you mean by Electric Universe proponents, the people here trying to argue that the ECM is viable, or the people writing the books, articles and webpages?

I also want to mention again the reason this thread was started; the findings of the composition of comet dust strongly suggests comets and asteroids are very similar. Meaning that the the notion of sublimating ices as the mechanism of comet activity is highly suspect. The Electric Comet model is (as far as I know) the only model that suggests this is the case, and if other models exist please let's hear about them. We know the model isn't quantitative (yet), but that doesn't mean it can't be tested in principle. In fact it is highly likely that the Rosetta mission has the potential to verify or falsify the EC model. I don't see how this is unscientific. The model needs extraordinary evidence, and it can be expected, although 2014 is a long wait. In the meantime, I'm still trying to find the information necessary to show that EDM is a viable option. And since these threads only run for a month, I'm trying to do it as quickly as possible.

Also, in this thread a number of relevant references were mentioned, which is also the scientific approach, even if you deny their importance (see below).


Thanks for acknowledging the efforts.

Now you are overgeneralising, you should read all the material first, there is much to say on EU than the Electric Comet pdf.

Nonsense, you take the absence of a few references to an absurd level. And if trying to build caution into the predictions is making them ambiguous, that's a pity, but on the other hand make too strong a prediction (even if verified) is still only a qualitative process without the specifics needed to make the model quantitative.


I don't remember me being silent, merely pressed for time (as ever).

Again I offer the peer-reviewed references for those who would like to read them.

Cheers.

Sorry Neried for my late reply...but what was the question again?

Backing up what VanderL stated, we still need to do a lot of research into the mechanisms that could be responsible for the observed phenomena wrt comets.

for instance todays UT story on the Genisis mission quoted

"Of particular interest will be the measurement of the primordial form of oxygen as it is emitted from the Sun in the solar wind. If we can measure the quantities of oxygen isotopes in the solar wind, we will have a starting point from which other oxygen isotopes are formed from. The Earth, Moon and meteorites have vastly differing quantities of oxygen-16, oxygen-17 and "oxygen-18. Why this is the case is a mystery to scientists. Using the Genesis data as a foundation to this work will help us understand how the oxygen isotopes evolved so differently in different parts of the solar system."


So its still a mystery, do we fully understand the solar wind?

Because we are only just getting a handle on, IMHO, the same process (only far more energetic) that happens on the surface of a comet as happens form the very poles of mother Earth.

eg http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/head...t09dec97_3.htm
(just some snipitts)

"Since the late 1950s and '60s, scientists have believed that the Earth's magnetic field has captured a lot of the solar wind - charged particles flowing out from the sun - and formed an immense, comet-like cloud of electrified gas that surrounds our planet. An accidental discovery in the 1980s and new data collected since 1996 indicate that this magnetosphere may well be filled by a fountain of energized gas (right) blowing from the north and south poles."

Comet like?? There is something in that analogy!

"but the studies are making us take a new look at 40-year-old assumptions about how the Earth interacts with the space environment."

40 yr old assumptions? so that would mean assumption based on space being electrically neutral, remember we only found out in the '58!

goes on

"Apparently, the particles that slammed into the ionosphere to paint the aurora borealis also energized enough atoms to head spaceward. (The same is true of the south pole where DE-1 made similar observations.) The acceleration mechanism is not fully understood, though. Giles said that very low frequency (VLF) radio waves, emitted in the magnetosphere, may contribute energy."

So there must be a mechanism...what is it?

further

"It turns out that all spacecraft develop an electrical charge. For high altitude satellites, exposure to sunlight and the passage through plasmas give a satellite a charge of about 5 to 10 eV. A small cloud of ions, a plasma sheath, builds around the spacecraft and repels anything with lower energy.

"We needed a device to neutralize that plasma sheath," Chappell said. "Unless you can do that, you won't ever see those particles."'

So we still cant get the full picture because of the very properties of plasma!

bit more

""The really incredible thing," Chappell said, "is that if you do a very careful model of the magnetic field and electric field, and then put in 10 eV particles, they go into the plasma sheet, and are energized at least a thousandfold.""

A thousandfold!!! where's the energy for that? Could it maybe have something to do with electricity?

lastly

"the solar wind still plays an important role, Chappell said. It generates the electric field which energizes the tail, and even compresses it so it squirts materials back towards Earth to cause substorms that disrupt satellite communications, interfere with terrestrial power lines, and push the auroras towards lower latitudes."

How long is a comets tail compared to it's radius?

from another link

http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/head...t08dec98_1.htm


snip

"In the early 1980s, scientists at NASA/Marshall, using an instrument aboard the Dynamics Explorer-1 (DE-1) satellite, discovered that the upper ionosphere is heated by electrical currents to form a "polar plasma fountain" of oxygen and hydrogen ions."

snip

"The energy connects into the rocks in the ground and into electrical power grids, long-distance phone lines, petroleum pipelines, and other manmade objects"

maybe even non conductive silicate rock, similar to an asteroid or maybe even a comet?

from the agu abstract (bottom of page)

"On the 30th anniversary of the first quantitative descriptions of the light ion polar wind and after 30 years of observing terrestrial ionospheric outflows it is fitting that our understanding of these flows and their consequences in planetary magnetospheres should be assessed. That the solar wind wake of magnetized planets indeed imposes a vacuum boundary condition on their polar ionospheres, leading to a supersonic plasma enhancement of Jeans' atmospheric escape, and that solar wind energy is dissipated as heat in the auroral ionosphere, locally increasing the escaping mass flux of plasma (and inevitably, fast neutral atoms, though these have not been observed to date) are known"

Mmmm... interesting

So why not comets?

The EU/PC interpretation of comet phenomena may indeed be wrong, but the mainstream "standard" model is a little like the Titanic, full of holes and taking on water...fast.

So where does that leave us? seems just from the PR's I linked too(I'm sure Neried, tusenfem and others, you could find the relevant peer reviewed papers if you so desire) but I doubt you'll find one that spells out in math for you the whole EC model, but good luck and let me know how you get on.

BTW you may want to check their papers for any inconsistencies, but my hunch is the most prolly right, we just need to put it all together.

"One corollary of this is to make what is published resemble sacred (religious) texts - immune from objective review, incapable of being independently checked, vague and ambiguous*, ... and almost always beyond falsification"

Rich Neried, very rich, shall we mention BH,DM,DE water hidden under the surface so on and so forth....

First of all that page is 11 years old and in the mean time us-space-physicists have not sat idly on our respective asses. There is a lot of science going on with new missions etc. One of the next conferences specifically dealing with the Earth's tail and processes therein is the International Conference on Substorms 9 near Graz, Austria.

We first have to think about the fact that this a public outreach page, which we cannot use for real scientific discussions. But yeah, the magnetotail of the Earth looks a bit like a cometary tail, apart from the fact that the magnetic field of the tail comes from INSIDE the Earth (the dipole) which is pulled along by the solar wind. And indeed there is upflow in the polar region. For example, there is "black aurora" (basically this means that there is no aurora) where return currents flow. These currents are broad in size and less energetic than the currents that create the luminous aurora.

The assumption, I think, that the magnetosphere is filled with solar wind particles, that enter through the poles and the tail. However, it is quite clear that e.g. the oxygen content in the tail is from the atmosphere.

I have no idea what you are pointing at with the "electrically neutral" of space. If you mean here that total sum of charge (i.e. of ions and electrons) is zero, than you are correct and this is indeed the case. If you mean that the particles themselves should be neutral than you are mistaken. And "we only found out in the '58!"??? care to finish that statement?

Maybe you should read more recent literature and not complain about the mechanism not being fully understood from a point in time that the discovery has been made public? A simple search on ADS (polar fountain in the title) showed this , only two papers but is seems that Lev Zelenyi already talked about them in 1985! And a quick search on "polar fountain ion" in "abstract text" shows 32 refereed papers here . Read the papers and you might get an idea about the mechanisms that are at work.

Space craft charging is a problem, because it will impede the low energy plasma to reach the instruments on the spacecraft. However, these days we have a device called "ASPOC" (develped by the Space Research Insitute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, which takes care of the charge. Seems like you are still in the stone age Luxor.

Well, if you put a charged particle in an electric field, would you not expect it to be accelerated? I guess this has to do with energizing the particles coming from the atmosphere being accelerated into the magnetosphere. Well, we KNOW that there are electric fields along the magnetic fields, for example double layers, which can easily accelerate these particle. I have no idea what your complaint is here.