Er ... here's what you wrote:
A standard astrophysics textbook contains all the relevant physics, including classical electromagnetism and QED (or references to them); for the Earth's magnetic field you'd be better off reading a geophysics textbook ... would you like some references?

I think it's really weird that I actually get to just plain repeat myself, but anyway, as I stated earlier...

So yeah, I know, how about making observations inconsistent with the theory? What is one I could make?

Boring. Besides, you guys will just throw in another parameter like dark matter or the cosmological constant. That's another trap like your Socratic games.

I get it. I don't know if you all do.

Because it's really, really cool?

How should the funds for scientific research be allocated among different branches of science and different projects and programmes? That's a topic for a different thread, I think, and maybe a different part of BAUT (or even a different forum?).

We haven't failed. The basic self-exciting mechanism is used to produce the electricity you're using now, just (mostly) not with a fluid generator (MHD generators do exist and are in use, though). Lab experiments have verified that fluid flows can produce magnetic fields. They are not very similar to the Earth's own core, but that's just because it's a little difficult to produce a planet-sized sphere of convecting conductive liquid in the lab. Various approximations have proven the effect, though, and MHD simulations of real planet cores produce magnetic fields.

http://focus.aps.org/story/v19/st3
http://complex.umd.edu/dynamo/3m.html

Ozzy, in regard to:

What sets the big bang theory apart from the swiss cheese theory? I mean, say we didn't have space ships and couldn't travel to the moon, would I have any way of knowing if the swiss cheese theory was wrong?

Everyone but rcglinsk BAUT Survivor!

rcglinsk Sorry, but your posts/attitude drove me looooopy. Had to do something!

I to take exception to this ' un-disprovable'

It is now obvious that you will not be exceptive of any ideas that run contrary to your own preconceived ignorance. As has been well said by the many astute and well informed contributers here. Just as your 'no proof no deal' .. Then so to do you fall into the trap of 'with no proof there can be no answer.'

What is the answer to this. That from my point of view is simple. We know not why the great expansion of this universe begun. That is a question we may never answer. The fun is in the learning. Just as we learn there is more to learn. What is it you are looking for?

If it is as you say ' A method of testing what we know' Then that answer you have. That work has been well done and ongoing still. I trust the published conclusions of the scientific community.
It could be...Un-disprovable or just disprovable and unprovable or even prov-en or is that proof not enough... I give up. Now whats the alternate ?

OK, you got me there. *wipes egg off face*

When I was in eleventh grade my physics teacher told me people had experimented with self-sustaining dynamos for decades and that they don't work because they violate the second law of thermodynamics. I've learned about thermodynamics since then and can see clearly how it relates to the idea. I've learned about the self sustaining dynamo theory, how it works in clouds and cores, but never seen any evidence that it's true. No matter what experiment people run the process can't be recreated. Is that geophysics textbook going to tell me any different?

I can't tell you how happy that reply makes me. It's the only answer I can't argue against. It is really cool. I like that large hadron collider even if we'll never be lucky enough to find the one time traveling higgs boson that gives everything it's mass. (I've always thought that joke was funny, that the higgs boson is like Feynman's one time-traveling electron, never get any laughs though...)

Awe, don't burn me at the stake just for being a heretic. If I'm causing that much of a stink just say shut up and I will.

Hey, I like heretics!

I thought we'd moved on from the OP, but apparently not ...

rcglinsk, that's not a testable hypothesis.

Let's take something a little bit more specific, the CMB.

Let's assume you could write a good hypothesis concerning the CMB and an LCDM model.

One test of this hypothesis might be the CMB's polarisation, and the apparatus you'd build would be a fancy detector, that you'd place in a stable orbit far from the Earth.

Another might be the constancy of the CMB, and the apparatus you'd build would be exact replicas of WMAP, that you'd launch every decade for the next ten millennia.

A third might be the excitations of certain atomic or molecular states caused by absorption of a CMB at a higher temperature than today's ~2.7K, and the apparatus you'd build would be a very good spectrograph attached to an 8m class telescope at a good location.

A fourth might be consistency of estimates of the Hubble constant, derived from the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, in rich clusters spanning a large range of redshifts, and the apparatus you'd build would be a microwave interferometer.

And so on.

Lots of predictions, lots of tests, lots and lots of opportunities to show inconsistency ...

PS: the first is underway, and the third and fourth have already been done (with limited samples, much more extensive testing is planned); sadly, neither you nor I will live to see results from the second.

I'll chime in on this, to relieve Nereid from the duty of having to keep explaining to you all by herself how science works-- it's a daunting task! Let me just tell you that you keep stumbling over a fundamental misconception about what science is for. I don't blame you for this misconception, it is reinforced constantly by sloppy science writing, but the fact is that it gets a quite unwieldy for every science publication to keep having to repeat what I am about to tell you.

The purpose of scientific theory, like the Big Bang, is not to tell us what "really exists", what "really happened", or what is "the real reason" things behave they way they do. That would be way, way too difficult, and frankly, we have no way to test such claims. So your continual criticism of the Big Bang based on the fact that it cannot tell us what "really happened" is not actually a criticism of that theory at all-- it is a fundamental misunderstanding about what scientific theory is capable of.

What a scientific theory is capable of, and what the Big Bang theory is a wonderful example of, is organizing, unifying, and predicting observations. In effect, a scientific theory is nothing but a kind of shorthand that can be used in place of a vast body of experimental data, most of which is entirely hypothetical because we simply haven't bothered to observe everything we possibly can (take the Hubble deep field, for example, and ask-- how many other deep fields are there that Hubble did not look at?). To the extent that the observations that haven't been done yet also conform to the theory, we say the theory is predictive (an aspect that is only testable in hindsight, when we actually do the observations), and to the extent that the theory unifies and makes sense of existing data, we say it is explanatory.

But either way, at no time does the theory ever cut loose from the body of existing and potential future data, and become what "really is". It just doesn't. I'm sorry that things you have read somehow led you to believe otherwise, but there simply is no valid criticism of the Big Bang that sounds like "but how do you know it is really right?" Thus to answer your question above, what separates the BBT from the "swiss cheese theory" of the Moon has nothing to do with which is "right or wrong", it has to do with which one unifies, organizes, and simplifies our understanding of a wide body of existing data and points to intelligent choices for new observations, and which one does none of those things. Do you see now?

Scientific writing does not make this clear at every opportunity, but it is just an implicit aspect of the entire process that bears repeating every now and again.

So... Thats it then. Little room for argument and debate.
To quote Ken G...

"But either way, at no time does the theory ever cut loose from the body of existing and potential future data, and become what "really is". It just doesn't. I'm sorry that things you have read somehow led you to believe otherwise, but there simply is no valid criticism of the Big Bang that sounds like "but how do you know it really happened?" end Quote... and thank you Ken.

The currant weight of scientific opinion would support the Theory as it stands... but our eyes are still open, and should always be. If you have information we have not would you please share it -'rcglinsk'- thank you.

Because the phenomenon cannot be simply scaled down to laboratory size.

But some people are working on it.

EDIT to add: D'oh! See cjameshuff's post.

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"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

"...because the logic of the lines traced from reality is as poor of aesthetic value as it is strict in consistency. " - Paolo Bozzi (Naive Physics - free translation)

Of course thermodynamics relates to a physical system. But I don't see why a self-sustaining dynamo would violate the second law. After all, it is not a system in equilibrium.


Links have been provided in this thread.


No, the experiments tell a different story.
Maybe you shouldn't jump to a conclusion only because a class of experiments is technically difficult to perform.

__________________
papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

"...because the logic of the lines traced from reality is as poor of aesthetic value as it is strict in consistency. " - Paolo Bozzi (Naive Physics - free translation)

The "self sustaining" vs "second law" comment had me thinking it was an implied "perpetual motion" counterpoint to the mainstream view.

So (while it may not be quite relevant) I'd ask if anyone thinks the Earths magnetic field, and the way it is generated, will last "forever"?

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The field should last as long as the Earth's core is hot enough.

__________________
papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

"...because the logic of the lines traced from reality is as poor of aesthetic value as it is strict in consistency. " - Paolo Bozzi (Naive Physics - free translation)

The word 'forever' should not be used. It implies things will never change. That is not true.
Change is a certainty. Your opening comment is also misguided as it too suggests cause or perpose... That is not prov-en or known.This universe may be one of millions or a mistake... The facts are unclear. It is here, we are here. We know not why. Informed speculation is not proof, but it is scientific.

I think there might be confusion between "self sustaining" (a perpetual motion machine) and "self exciting" (using its magnetic field to convert mechanical power into electrical power to produce its magnetic field).

The former is not claimed. Earth's core converts mechanical energy in the form of convection currents into electrical currents and a magnetic field. When the core freezes solid, the convection will stop and the dynamo will end. Joule heating likely returns some of the energy to the inner core as heat, but that would still only prolong the lifetime of the dynamo, it would not sustain it indefinitely.

The latter is not in doubt, self exciting dynamos are used in large generators because permanent magnets have limited strength, and under the conditions that exist in the generators, very limited lifetime. Self excitation also been demonstrated in conductive fluid flows. They do not violate any laws of thermodynamics, the excitation current consumes some small percentage of the total mechanical power driving the system. Without that mechanical power, the field will quickly die away, but with it, a small initial field will be amplified up to a saturation point. In large generators, a battery or small generator (itself using permanent magnets or battery-driven field coils) is used to provide the initial magnetic field. In a star or planetary core, there's friction, thermal and electrochemical effects that are all capable of separating charges and creating the needed starting field.

Thank you. Excellent addition.

It's not anything like that! Did you miss the part about observations? When you're working with observations, you can't just be making any old assumptions. "Best fit" means the theory lines up well with the observations, i.e., the observations support the theory.

So, if you want to speak of how cosmologists attempt to model our cosmos in accordance with the totality of the physical observations thereof, you should remove from your sentence the words assuming, true, proven, and false, and instead say:

The so-called Big Bang Theory is a complex, hierarchical model, or set of models, all based on corresponding to what we see, observe, and measure. The sophistication of today's observations places sometimes severe constraints on how a number of these models must be described.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

I wonder what happened to rcglinsk?

Was this some kind of a "drive-by" question? Or part of a larger investigation perhaps?

I actually know the answer to that question.

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smile, and the Universe smiles with you

...and...

Yes, these are the answers I would have given, and what I expected.

(

Sorry if it was unclear, but my post #77 was (kind of rhetorically) expecting these responses; in opposition to post #68 by rcglinsk.

I may be the only one, but I read post #68 as a claim (by rcglinsk) that the current view of the generation of the Earths magnetic field was like a "perpetual motion machine" (i.e his/her comment on the violation of themodynamics laws...). The obvious (to my odd mind) rebuttal to that is simply that it isn't expected by anyone to last "forever" - the process will "wind down".

)

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Hi Nereid,

Someone linked a poll asking to ban me. I figured I should lay off the posting for a while. I don't want to be disrespectful. You are awesome though. I'll get back into things soon.

I'm answering posts out of order... I have no real excuse...

Anyway, my curiosity relates to the idea that a dynamo process can start without a seed. I also doubt the theories about feedback at high magnetic Reynold's numbers. I don't think either of those phenomena have been demonstrated in laboratories. I also think those two ideas are the difference between an ordinary dynamo and a "self-sustaining dynamo."

We know from observation that there is a high amp electric current flowing between the Earth and the Sun. I would be a fool to insist molten Iron in the core of the Earth would not respond to a seed magnetic field in the same was as molten metal in a laboratory. Could the current between the Earth and the Sun give rise to the seed field that induces the magnetic field from the molten metal of the Earth's core? If that were true, we would not need theories about feedback amplification. The seed is never taken away.

The "so called big bang theory" is not nearly so complex as you describe. It has three basic axioms:

1. The universe is finite in volume
2. That volume is increasing
3. The universe is finite in time, it has an "age"

While that "age" may be the most recent bang after a crunch, it makes little difference.

Suppose I had an odd religion. Some profit came a thousand years ago, wrote a book of poetry and laid down a couple tenants:

1. The universe is infinite in time - there is no beginning nor an end
2. The universe is infinite in space - go off in a straight line and you will never find an edge nor get back to where you started.

Suppose a child went to school, raised to believe in the religion as I described, and was told by a teacher that "science" knows their religion is wrong. Wouldn't that violate that child's right to religious freedom?

I submit that the only standard to judge the difference between science and religion is saying that science can be falsified by experimentation, while religion is different. To quote the wise words of my sister, "mystery is a prerequisite to faith." Religion cannot be falsified.

I do not think that any of the axioms I laid out, 1-3 for the big bang, and 1-2 for my fake religion, can be falsified. I think it's a violation of a child's religious freedom to be told that "science" knows the universe is expanding after a big bang.

A dynamo field without a seed? Feedback at high magnetic Reynold's numbers? Maybe you shouldn't jump to conclusions only because a class of experiments is difficult to perform.

1. Red Meat is awesome.
2. So, what do ya got?

I have come up with an excuse for my order. I scrolled up from the bottom of the page.

If all the "big bang theories" are not actually big bang theories, but really are children of it, "if there was a big bang and [theory] then..." I don't see why the idea of a big bang has any scientific merit.

So, you say that the CMB's polarization is a way to test the hypothesis. But can any particular polarization prove a big bang never happened? That's the key issue.

Your second example is strikingly similar to the answer an intelligent design advocate gave when asked "what experiment could I conduct to disprove the intelligent design hypothesis." The advocate said, basically, "Set a beaker with the 'building blocks of life' and some water on a shelf for fifty thousand years. When no life evolves, you'll have your proof." It did not fly as a reason to teach intelligent design in schools.

The third and fourth example you give depend on assuming the big bang theory is true at the outset. You assume things far away were experiencing a higher temperature CMB and that the Hubble constant has some physical meaning.

Also, as for inconsistency. If we assume the big bang is true, we can look back in time to what things were like 13 billion years ago. At that time the big bang theory predicts two values for ratios of isotopes of lithium seven. One by inflation theory. The other by the look backwards theory. Is that not an inconsistency?

I would be very interested in hearing your opinions on my separation of church and state argument.