Here is a summary of the sub-thread on the claim that the Rosetta mission has the potential (!) to falsify the ECM.

Post#112 (VanderL): "It [the ECM] can be verified/falsified by the Rosetta mission, it can be understood qualitatively as described in the electric comet pdf."

Nereid, post#116:post#123 (VanderL):tusenfem's questions on this VanderL post includes these: "So, how about coming up with a model? [...] How do you get the charge of the comet? How do you get the necessary discharges?".

VanderL's response (excerpt): "To answer these questions you need to get measurements, either from experiments designed to mimic the processes, or in situ. I am convinced that all theoretical models must bow to the experimental data."

The last sentence drew quite a few responses!

Nereid: "Thanks for the answer. However, it does not - it seems to me - to answer the questions asked. In a later post I shall clarify the questions, show that the above does not answer them, and request that you answer the direct, pertinent questions, on the ATM ideas, as presented."

The "later post" is #138, and contains ~7 questions.

Post #139 re-states several questions not yet answered: "The questions on the source ECM document(s), the role of hypothesis formation and testing, model building and testing, and criteria for assessing internal consistency and consistency with Rosetta results have not yet been answered."

Note: there are many other posts that relate to the initial VanderL 'ECM can be verified/falsified by the Rosetta mission' claim; I have included only those which seem to me to relate directly to the link between any ECM that is publicly available and how Rosetta may test that ECM, as presented.

Q1: would it be helpful, VanderL, if I re-stated the unanswered questions (per the above chain and explicit focus), one per post?

I have to apologise, because I won't be able to respond in detail this week. I will be able to respond at a later date, so I think it is wise to either reopen the thread when I have my response ready (is that an option?), as I don't think starting a new thread is very helpful.

And to answer Nereid's last question, yes it would be helpful to re-state unanswered questions, but I think that would have to wait until my response too.

Cheers.

__________________
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

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.

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

Having established that the Thornhill & Talbott PDF never had the least pretension to being a peer-reviewed paper, let’s now address Nereid’s main criticisms. I won’t attempt to be exhaustive, because I don’t have the time, but just a few examples will show how the sort of criticism being made is both disingenuous and invalid.

Much of it is mere quibbling over words. For example:
What’s the deal? a quick Googlesearch reveals that the two terms are used interchangeably.

Nereid’s criticism of T&T’s use of quote marks is particularly revealing of the confusion she is disingenuously making between two completely different sets of conventions.
Nereid’s definition of the way quote marks are used is valid for academic research (and a definition would be given) but it’s totally irrelevant here, since the document is designed for another purpose, as we’ve seen. T&T are following a completely different and extremely commonplace convention, derived from the practice of vulgarizing a complex theory for people who may not be conversant with some of the more technical terms involved. The fact of putting these terms in quote marks "the first time the terms [...] are used" (as Nereid herself states, without, however, seeming to understand the convention) simply signals their technical nature. Since the document was also designed for publication on the Internet, the use of quote marks enables the reader to quickly do a Googlesearch for additional explanations, if required.

Let’s do the test.
becomes:

« The primary distinction between comet and asteroid surfaces is that electrical arcing and [the] invisible elves of the comet nucleus will leave little or no dust or debris on the surface during the active phase, even if a shallow layer of dust may be attracted back to the nucleus electrostatically as the comet becomes dormant in its retreat to more remote regions. »


Similarly, let’s replace:
by :

« The observed jets of comets are electric arc discharges to the nucleus, producing Naom Chomsky’s colorless green dreams sleep[ing] furiously (NCCGDSF) of the surface. The excavated material is accelerated into space along the jets’ observed filamentary arcs. »

Nereid states that in both cases the two alternative statements “have just the same meaning”. I beg to differ. I would even go as far as taking a diametrically opposed view to Nereid’s. Far from the terms in quote marks being “empty” of meaning, they are actually required in the context, as being the only possible alternatives. Let’s take the second example again and this time turn it into a cloze text by omitting the incriminating terms:

« The observed jets of comets are electric arc discharges to the nucleus, producing “_______ ________ _________” of the surface. The excavated material is accelerated into space along the jets’ observed filamentary arcs. »

Anyone familiar with the basic concepts of electrical engineering will have no difficulty making the logical link between « electric arc discharges » and « The excavated material » so as to conclude that the phenomenon being described must indeed be “electrical discharge machining (EDM) ».

Such arguments are neither founded, nor do they have anything to do with “science” (as I understand Nereid to use the term). They are merely examples of fallacious arguments which pertain to the fields of semantics and pragmatics, themselves branches of the wider linguistic field of semiotics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics. They do nothing to invalidate the T&T PDF.

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

One further “argument” of Nereid’s leaves one speechless for its sheer brazen cheek:

and

Talk of the pot calling the kettle black! It’s as if Pol Pot had accused Mother Teresa of genocide. Let it never be forgotten that mainstream theory has never seen anything wrong with inventing such conveniently unfalsifiable notions as inflation, black holes, neutron stars, dark matter or dark energy, to name but five, simply in an attempt to keep the Big Bang theory from falling completely apart. Not only can none of these things ever be observed, but in addition they are all in flagrant violation of the most fundamental principles of physics.

By contrast, the ECM is entirely falsifiable, both “in principle” and in reality, by observation. Several of the key Deep Impact predictions (double flash at impact, sharp surface relief, dearth of surface ice, release of “more energy than expected”) received conclusive support from the images acquired by the impactor and by ground-based telescopes. The whole “qualitative” debate is just a smoke screen attempting to mask inconvenient observational facts. We’ve had this debate before and neither side is likely to budge from its positions for the moment. Fortunately, Rosetta is bound for Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. I fully agree with VanderL in believing that conclusive data could well be provided by this mission, data which mainstreamers will find it increasingly hard to mask or explain away. We have another six years to wait but I am confident that the ECM will either be confirmed or be falsified by the images and measurements Rosetta will acquire. The model is 100% falsifiable.

The same applies to the mainstream model. ESA’s Rosetta website is on record as already describing what they are confident is going to happen, according to the mainstream “dirty snowball” model:

(my bolding)

Are mainstreamers prepared to accept this account as containing predictions which might be falsified by the data acquired by Rosetta? Apparently, there are all the necessary instruments on board both the orbiter and the lander.

Orbiter:
Lander:
The two models are so radically different that the data obtained should be able to settle the debate conclusively one way or the other. Are mainstreamers prepared to accept that?

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

Proven repeatedly yes. You are the one with the problems accepting fault.

Just so that I don't misunderstand ...

Starting with the assumption¹ that the ATM section is one of the parts of BAUT that is avowedly science-based, to what extent does it follow that almost nothing by Scott, Talbott, and Thornhill (and much of that by Peratt) merits more than a cursory glance ... unless it can be backed up by material that is, explicitly, science-based?

I want to be quite clear on this, if only because it could help greatly when it comes to questioning and challenging any material by these three (plus one) authors that any proponent of any ATM idea wishes to put on the table in future.

(to be continued)

¹ which, of course, can be questioned or challenged ... but please, not in this thread

Hmm ... let's refresh our memories, shall we, on what Nereid actually wrote ... (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Start with the last (post #73):So, pace ATKINS, it is T&T themselves who claimed the document should follow "one particular explanatory tradition".

Further, it would seem that a strong case could be made that ATKINS intended this 21-page PDF to be considered in "one particular explanatory tradition (peer-reviewed papers)" rather than "another completely different tradition (vulgarizetion of complex scientific theory)":The other Nereid posts¹ treat the 21-page PDF as if it is what T&T claim it to be.

Turning to the rest of ATKINS' post:Hmm ... let's refresh our memories of what the BAUT rules re this ATM section are ...As I read it, ATKINS' interpretation is almost exactly the wrong way around: those who choose to start threads in this ATM section must answer questions on, and address challenges to, the ATM ideas they present (as presented).

Of course, none of this kind of thing is new, and certainly not new to ATKINS or Nereid, as a read of old ATM threads on EU ideas will quickly show.

Similarly, it is not new that with regard to an "Electric Comet Model" there is no such thing in existence, within "one particular explanatory tradition (peer-reviewed papers)" (the one which surely must count as the gold standard for any forum which is avowedly science-based!) ... despite a person² who claims to be a physicist having worked on just such a thing for 30 years.

Finally, there's even an explicit statement of policy (dated August 2006!) on just the kind of thing ATKINS is apparently seeking to promote: Read this first, re posting "Electric Universe" ideas here

¹ Except, perhaps, #71 and #72, on 'rules of evidence'
² and who is the co-author of a document which purports to adhere to just those conventions

To repeat, we can test ATKINS' hypothesis by quoting from the Thornhill and Talbott document directly:So, a direct, pertinent question to ATKINS: does a poster presentation to an international conference on Plasma Sciences, in 2006, constitute "academic research"? Would it be "valid for academic research (and a definition would be given)" for quoted terms to be defined? for sources to be referenced? images to be credited? to expect consistency in the use of "electric" and "electrical", when at least one word is used as part of a definition?

Another direct, pertinent question: if not intended as a poster presentation for a 21st century ICOPS, what was the T&T PDF intended for? In your answer, please explain how such a different intention can be squared with what's written on the bottom right of the first page.

Here I agree somewhat with ATKINS ... if one assumes that the 21-page PDF does not follow the kinds of conventions widely used in posters at international scientific conferences (in the 21st century), Nereid's objections are rather silly.

However, as we have seen, Nereid's comments on the 21-page PDF were tightly scoped, and predicated upon the document being what it purports to be.

In particular:
a) the physical mechanisms (nine of them) were examined, as presented
b) the context of those mechanisms (as presented) was examined; specifically, how they were tied to work of others (be they physicists or electrical engineers, or natural philosophers).

In that context, the mechanisms are essentially meaningless.