Partly why I asked about your formal training, in science.

YMMV (your mileage may vary), but I think the conventions around provenance, image credits, acknowledgments, etc, etc, etc in the scientific community in general (and the astronomy etc one in particular) are both well known and well-respected.

If Thornhill et al. are serious about their claims to be scientists*, surely a minimal requirement is to adhere to these conventions?

Of course, anyone can make a mistake, and while sloppiness may not be good for one's scientific career, it certainly isn't necessarily fatal to it.

However, the usual response to having someone point out that you goofed is embarrassment, an apology, and corrective action; contrast this with the response of the "EU community" ... pln2bz, iantresman, and mgmirkin - all unquestionably leading figures in this community - were made aware of the possible shortcomings in the T&T document in February this year (see above).

Has the document been withdrawn? No.

Has the document been edited? No.

Have T&T (individually or together) issued a statement about this? No.

And so on.

Having found this one case of apparent intellectual/academic fraud, I've been reading "papers" by Thornhill much more closely. It has been quite difficult to actually get hold of them; unlike most astronomy (indeed, physics) papers, nothing appears in arXiv. However, I now have some, and I must say they are real eye-openers.

Falsified data or something? I'm not sure yet ... but stay tuned ...

* and I'm sure you'd agree there is no lack of material (marketing fluff?) making such claims, at quite high volumes.

Probably? One group says currents make magnetic fields that cause spiral galaxy motion. I don't know how rigorous the math is, it might be quite awful. Another group says invisible magic dust is responsible. This dark matter has mass but doesn't emit or absorb light, exerts gravitational force but doesn't crash into things, it also cannot be created in a laboratory and it can't be directly observed. It has the strange but perhaps convienient quality of being more than 90% of the actual mass of the universe, and exactly zero percent of the mass of anything close by. Where does that 'probably' come from? At least the EU etc. idea supposes a cause that we know actually exists. And until there is some direct proof for this dark matter stuff then one guess is as good as another. There are no probablies. Rigorous mathematical work is just expressing the guess in the language of a mathematical equation.

Say what? Empiricism always works. It's the only thing that actually works. Any math that seems to work was made with hearty helping of empiricism. Math that has yet to be checked against real life (dark matter, dark energy, black holes, neutron stars, cosmological redshift, inlfation etc.) is just math. It's just a guess. The fact that lots of prominent people all make the same guess means nothing. People should not go around assigning arbitrary probabilities to their guesses. Saying one theory is more probable because the mathematical experssion of it is more eloquent and bueatiful or it is more popular is like saying one debater is right on a political issue because his oration was vivid and musical while the other's was boring and cacophonic.

I think you will find that a lot people on this board believe that mathematical truth == reality. Sadly!

?
If you are going to be snotty about it, try one side thinks magic invisible currents that no one can see make spiral arms and the other side thinks density waves in visible matter cause spiral arms.

You need to stop trying to learn physics and astrophysics off of woo woo sites. We dont know squat about DM other than it is dark, and it causes things to act heavier than they look. For all you know, you are sitting on dark matter right now. If you were to actually do some physics, you would also know that, assuming an even distribution, there is about 10^14 kg of dark matter in a sphere the width of Earth's orbit. Considering that that is 10^25 m^3, a density of 10^-11 kg/m^3 would be a bit hard to see.

Physics isnt done by 'well I think' it is done by 'well I can prove' That fact that you dont like the fact that we cant see most of the mass of the universe does not make bad plasma physics right.
Really? Empiricism always works? Where is an electron in a hydrogen atom. Exactly. What is spin?

The fact that you dont know enough to know how or why some things are the way they are does not make them wrong. The examples you give above are a classic example of someone who is doing physics by "I dont like that". The fact that you think that the current theories are 'prominent people making the same guess' really shows just how amazingly little you actually know. Current theory is derived from first principles and then matched to observation. It does and must work both ways. As a matter of fact, ALL of the examples you give for 'math that has yet to be checked against real life' are objects that were OBSERVED FIRST then an explanation was sought.

You should really try to learn what physics is before you redesign the universe.

who?

More support for my 1st Law of ATM.

Maths is bunk, ATMers can't or won't do the Maths so it must be ignored. 'Just So' and 'Looks Like' stories are all that is needed.

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

Indeed they have ... dozens of times (a quick search in this section of BAUT will turn up many examples ...)

But the point is why have any label - be it "EU", "PC", or whatever - if it is either empty or so thoroughly soaked in pseudoscience and anti-science?

If you - or anyone - could come up with a concise description of some subset of this, that is based on sound physics and is not riddled with (largely unacknowledged) inconsistencies, it might help.

However, unless and until there is such a starting point, it is surely a perfectly reasonable stance to take that using "EU" or "PC" (etc) will hinder communication ... and certainly stand in the way of presenting a solid case for a new ATM idea!

BTW, you might like to read the special BAUT rule on this ATM section ... re-hashing "EU" or "PC" ideas that have already been covered will likely get this thread closed very smartly indeed.
Why not take some time to read various threads here then?

IIRC, almost no "EU" or "PC" ATM idea presented here has even got to the stage of being sufficiently concrete that internal inconsistencies could be found, and the ones that did get that far (like Peratt's crazy idea about spiral galaxy rotation curves) got beat up pretty badly.

I think you'll find it's more the other way ... is there any part of EU/PC/etc that does NOT contradict GR? or SR? or QED? or ...?
Indeed ... 'parody' is about the nicest thing one could say about such 'criticism'; 'mind-blowing ignorance', 'cynical deception', and so on may be closer to the mark ...

I'm not sure if you've ever tried this or not; if not, you should, sometime ...

Ask an ardent EU/PC/whatever proponent what they'd do if they were granted a million seconds of HST or XMM-Newton or Spitzer or VLT or Keck or INTEGRAL or ... observation time, using any combo of any facilities (instruments, data pipelines, bespoke software, ...)? Or any combo of a million seconds on any combo? What key EU/PC/whatever hypotheses would they test? How would the analyse the data so gathered? And so on.

There is just such a thread here in BAUT (admittedly a light-hearted one) ...

(to be continued)

I suppose that works. I will say that dark current is a real thing, even though you can't see it the current is there, that's reproducable in a laboratory.

Ok, so if there's going to be about 10^14kg of dark matter in a sphere the size of the Earth, and dark matter makes up around 22% of the universe's energy density and normal matter makes up about 4%, then, assuming even distribution, we'd expect to find 1.82E13 kg of regular matter in an area the size of the Earth. Considering that is 10^25 m^3, a density of 1.82E-12 kg/m^3 would be a bit hard to sit on comfortably like this here chair under my bum.

The fact that you lack the experimental technology to actually evaluate any of these theories does not mittigate the burden of proof. Try that shoe on the other foot. A successful curve fit is not evidence for the notions the fit is based on.


That's not what empiricism means to me. Take QM. The hydrogen atom can be solved with first principles. The energy level of the electrons in every other atom are described as an infinite series of hydrogen's orbitals with emperically derrived paramaters to balance the influence of each hydrogen orbital on the overall orbital for an electron in a different atom. There is nothing mathematical about the electron orbitals of a helium or platinum atom. It's 100% emperical. We don't know where in the helium atom the electron is supposed to be, or what it even really means for an electron to be in the atom, but we can predict its behavior because we have a database of emperical evidence. That sort of empericism is never, ever wrong. The perturbations of mercury and the orbitals of the hydrogen atom are about the only situations I can think of that have ever seen a purely mathematical approach make successful predictions. The second is only due to the fluke of the coulomb force being spherically uniform in the special and strange case of one proton and one electron. If the hydrogen atom's coulomb force were not actually spherically uniform, if that was just a rough approximation, then the first principles analysis would not give the right answers. So you might have a first principles analysis of a plasma with the frozen-in field line assumption. But since that condition of infinite conductivity never actually exists, you're always getting slightly wrong answers.

But you do understand that the lack of real experimental proof of the existence of dark matter and dark energy means you don't know for sure that stuff is real right? Dark matter is a paramater in a curve fit that fills in the discrepency between observations and a basic Keppler's law model (and perhaps other discrepencies I'm not familiar with). That is all it is. It does not matter how well any plot of dark matter density and location smooths the discrepencies, a paramaterized curve fit is not evidence for anything.

You mean that they started with first principles to get a skeleton model, then they used observations from telescopes to calculate paramaters that smoothed out the discrepencies between the skeleton model's predictions and the observations. That is NOT an experiment. That is not a process by which scientific evidence is created. That is the process by which a hypothesis is created. If you want to test the dark matter hypothesis, you'll need to get some dark matter and start setting up controlled experiments. I know gettting dark matter is not technologically feasible, but that does not alter the burden of proof or what is scientific evidence.

Now, you may disagree. I read a frightning article recently about people who most certainly do, and I link to it as often as I can because I think it's essential that anyone with a scientific education be alerted to what I consider a dangerous notion.

http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2008-May/002997.html



You should look the word observed up in a dictionary before you capitalize it. It doesn't mean inferred from an untested hypothesis.

Heh

If you read a random selection of ATM threads, I think you'll find that the bar is jaw-droppingly low.

The key thing is that you need to be prepared to defend every (ATM) aspect of every (ATM) idea you choose to post ... or at least answer all direct, pertinent questions on that ATM idea, in a timely manner ... that's what it says in the special ATM BAUT rule ...

You may also discover that word salads are nearly always a recipe for long threads ... and that when the threads are automatically closed after 30 days, the ATM idea proponent(s) still don't seem to have much of a clue what their idea actually is.

There are, of course, some notable exceptions ...

Closing a thread after 30 days is a great idea. That far along no good could come of it.

There might be an interesting job to be done, make an organized presentation of the debates had on these threads. Use sound editing to filter out all but the actual arguments. I suppose others have tried to do so by cutting and pasting old threads into new ones, but I bet there's a way to present the arguments more vividly, with fancy HTML etc. Don't mind me here, just thinking outloud. If you end up making money on the idea send me a thank you card or something.

Mainly ATM threads seem to say that the Mainstream has to be wrong so my ideas have to be right. Plus we don't need any Maths to explain it.

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

Electric current are not magic, but known physics. Dark matter is hypothetical. Electric current in plasmoids have been demonstrated in the laboratory to show similarities to galaxies (eg. ref), whereas hypothetical dark matter has never been observed anywhere, let alone in the laboratory.

I'm not saying that dark matter does not exist, but the existence of galactic electric currents is no less uncertain than dark matter.

R. S. "Bas" Pease (plasma fusion expert) writing with Svante Lindqvist, noted that Hannes Alfvén suggestion that electric current generate galactic magnetic fields "is now amply supported by observation" (Ref).

Again, this does not prove galactic electric currents, only that there are observations consistent with them (most obviously being magnetic fields).

__________________
Ian Tresman
plasma-universe.com

My American Legal History professor from last semester would always say "to be born British is to win first prize in the lottery of life."

That's not actually relevant, but since your location says Yorkshire and I like that quote, I figured why not.

To be born in Yorkshire is to win the Lottery of Life. To be simple born English could involve living in London or Liverpool. Not something that is desirable.

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

The best thing about American Legal History was my professor looked just like Ben Franklin. I mean more than the guy in the John Adams series.

http://www.law.uh.edu/faculty/main.asp?PID=33

One day I told him he was a pretty Ben Franklin looking guy and he laughed even harder than the rest of the class. Good times.

Which group would that be (as in, names)?

Do they have papers published in relevant, peer-reviewed journals on what they say (or what you say they say)?

If so, may we have some references please?
Which group would that be (as in, names)?

Do they have papers published in relevant, peer-reviewed journals on what they say (or what you say they say)?

If so, may we have some references please?
Well, presumably you have read the BAUT rules, especially the one for this ATM section, so ...

To what extent is this part of your post, that I am quoting, your own summary of what you understand the relevant part of contemporary astrophysics, astronomy, and cosmology to be? And what part is not?

Depending upon how you answer these questions, I may point you to BAUT's Q&A section (so you can get a better understanding), or I may ask you some more questions (in preparation for asking questions about ATM ideas you may choose to present), or both, or ...
It does?

What "EU etc. idea" would that be?

And to what extent would you say that idea is:
a) internally consistent?
b) consistent with well-established theories of physics for which the domains of applicability overlap?
c) above all, fully consistent with all relevant observational and experimental results?

In each case, I mean quantitatively.
In your (ATM?) view, what constitutes "direct proof", as in of "stuff"?

Here is a list of various "stuffs"; would you be so kind as to say for which, in your view, there is "some direct proof"?

[OIII]
tau neutrinos (not antineutrinos)
neutron stars
black holes
PeV photons
vacuum birefringence
10¹⁵ Gauss magnetic fields
objects with radii ~tens of km and masses of ~1 sol