Electric Universe: has there ever been a scientific research program?

Reality Check · Feb 22, 2018

SelfSim;12192368The recent CQ ATM thread '[URL="https://forum.cosmoquest.org/showthread.php?167525-Is-the-universe-static" said:
Is the Universe Static?[/URL]' and Crawford's accompanying paper, at least demonstrated his willingness to put pen-to-paper, and perform analysis on what he thought was raw SN data. That he showed no particular affiliations with the EU nonsense, also raised the credibility of his arguments, thereby warranting more attention than EU ramblings, (IMO).

To be more exact Crawford's paper did analyze raw SN data but in such a way that he got the results that he wanted!
The A problem with the analysis of type Ia supernovae paper is an attempt to debunk the several papers that show that the widths of type 1a supernova light curves are time dilated as predicted in an expanding universe. These papers use standard techniques to take the raw data and calibrate the light curves. Crawford takes a template from the SALT2 model

SALT (for Spectral Adaptive Lightcurve Template) is a package for Type Ia Supernovae light curve fitting

That file is available at salt2_template_0.dat Average spectral sequence.

Crawford's fatal error was to take raw SN data and fit it to that template, thus removing any possible trends! He plots width against redshift, gets a random looking scatter and declares the universe to be static. What he really has done is just show that the raw SN light curves vary from the template light curve.

David F. Crawford seems to have retired in 2003 and has spent his time writing about a static universe explained with his personal cosmology. No known association with EU, just yet another invalid tired light theory. ETA: An idea about cosmological redshift from "gravitational interactions" seems to stem from at least 1993.

SelfSim · Feb 23, 2018

Reality Check said:
To be more exact Crawford's paper did analyze raw SN data but in such a way that he got the results that he wanted!
....
Crawford's fatal error was to take raw SN data and fit it to that template, thus removing any possible trends! He plots width against redshift, gets a random looking scatter and declares the universe to be static. What he really has done is just show that the raw SN light curves vary from the template light curve.

Ok .. I think you may have been somewhat ahead of JT in the analysis of Crawford's paper, (and I didn't make it as far as either of you), so I'm happy to stand corrected.

Either way, the point is that at least Crawford made the effort to use the data (even though his analysis technique was flawed). This distinguishes him from the EU mindset .. and also in terms of the 'mirror' thread I was actively involved in at CFs, where you-know-who was just waiting poised to swoop on any morsels of road-kill, (from Crawford's thread), he could use to support his own nonsense agendas .. (which included incredible misconceptions about Olber's paradox (Static, Infinite Universes)). Evidently that nonsense agenda favours a non-banged, static, finite (yet somehow 'eternal') universe which starts out as some kind of 'fog' substance! :jaw-dropp

(I kid you not .. :boggled:

)

Reality Check said:
ETA: An idea about cosmological redshift from "gravitational interactions" seems to stem from at least 1993.

Yep .. he's certainly cranked out a few papers leading up to the SN one ..

JeanTate · Feb 23, 2018

I did not finish this post yesterday...

JeanTate said:
Personally, I’m a by surprised that BK has kept the comments up for so long.

EU nonsense has been thoroughly shown to be, well, inconsistent, not science etc, and a rather large number of EU acolytes more interested in trivial arguments than in discussing science. So continuing to allow comments permits these ideas to be endlessly repeated, without anyone becoming any wiser.

These days it’s such a fringe activity perhaps it’s best to just ignore it.

I just dropped in to EU central ... same old, same old.

Same old, same old as in (varying degrees of): “looks like a duck” analyses, abhorrence of anything to do with mathematics beyond simple arithmetic, “mainstream is RONG! Therefore EU must be RITE!!!”, willingness to embrace “alternative” physics irrespective of how inconsistent it is with core EU ideas, reliance on YT vids and pop-sci articles as primary sources, and long-dead scientists having their work stolen and grotesquely misrepresented (e.g. Birkeland).

You no longer see any EU stuff being promoted here; even Sol88’s EC thread isn’t about EC ideas any more. Ditto on moderated sites seriously interested in discussing astronomy etc (e.g. CQ, PF, Starship Asterisk); plenty of nonsense on unmoderated sites of course. So EU ideas have suffered greatly ... they are simply ignored as irrelevant to anyone or anything.

jonesdave116 · Feb 23, 2018

So EU ideas have suffered greatly ... they are simply ignored as irrelevant to anyone or anything.

'Twas ever thus, and 'twill always be thus. The first time I visited that place was in the early days of the Rosetta mission. If you go back in that thread until late 2014, you'll see a lot of users in there that are no longer there. I suspect that mission was a killer for quite a few. Then, of course, there were the GW detections. Particularly the last one, where we can actually observe the progenitor. Then we had Thornhill's gravity lunacy.
If it wasn't for MM, that place might as well shut down. Only the hardcore cranks left, for the most part. There is only MM defending Scott and Thornhill's solar models, which he doesn't even believe! Nobody else can be bothered.

JeanTate · Feb 23, 2018

jonesdave116 said:
'Twas ever thus, and 'twill always be thus. The first time I visited that place was in the early days of the Rosetta mission. If you go back in that thread until late 2014, you'll see a lot of users in there that are no longer there. I suspect that mission was a killer for quite a few. Then, of course, there were the GW detections. Particularly the last one, where we can actually observe the progenitor. Then we had Thornhill's gravity lunacy.
If it wasn't for MM, that place might as well shut down. Only the hardcore cranks left, for the most part. There is only MM defending Scott and Thornhill's solar models, which he doesn't even believe! Nobody else can be bothered.

Ah yes, so much irony!

Certainly a lot of new stuff was learned from Rosetta, but as tusenfem never tires of saying, a huge treasure trove of comet data existed long before Rosetta arrived, but no EU acolyte ever availed themselves of it. Opportunity to avoid a lot of red faces, squandered.

Thornhill’s, um, gravity idea is a nice segue to “EU/PC theory”. Many have pointed out, BK among them, that there is no such thing. It’s a shorthand often invoked, but no EU acolyte bothers with trying to explain what it is, complete with reliable references. At its purest - i.e. what the leading “electrical theorists” wrote in published books - no one can take it seriously ... stars powered by giant currents, General Relativity is nonsense, and so on. And the argument gets really lame when Alfven, Arp, Peratt, and even Birkeland get roped in, with nonsensical claims about them buying fully into the EU of Scott and Thornhill. Does anyone, even MM, even try to pull together a consistent framework? One that is more than a “Just So” story?

JeanTate · Feb 23, 2018

To close the circle ...

Safire aside (that’s covered extensively above), there is no ongoing experimental or observational work on whatever EU theory is. Not even ~zero cost projects in the style of the Zooniverse’s Galaxy Zoo or Radio Galaxy Zoo.

What, then, do EU acolytes spend their time on? Certainly not writing new EU papers; by their own admission, very few have the ability to do such a thing.

Instead, it seems they spend their time, outside EU central, arguing with all the lyin’ liar mainstream folk, whether professional or amateur. And within EU central, a lot of whining about how unfair those lyin’ liar mainstream folks are, forever banning honest EU folk for constantly breaking the clearly published rules!

But no time at all on even thinking about how to test EU ideas. Proof positive that whatever the EU is, it certainly isn’t science.

JeanTate · Feb 25, 2018

I conducted an unofficial, not very scientific, experiment. After my initial post, a few days ago, I noticed that someone in EU central was not only reading this thread, but actually responding to parts of some of the posts here.

Yes, some of those responses are funny, some reflect what we wrote here remarkably well, but there’s a meta I find most interesting: no posts except by MM. Maybe there’ll be some later?

Anyway, a key take-away: exceedingly few acolytes who hang out at EU central care about critiques of the EU, posted here or elsewhere. And ~none have any interest in engaging in a science-based discussion of the EU; likewise none have any interest in testing the EU.

And unless you are concerned about the feelings of just one acolyte, there’s no reason to shed any tears over BK removing comments from his blog. Nor any reason to continue to even mention the EU, here in the ISF.

An ignominious end? Death by being totally ignored, due to complete irrelevance!

jonesdave116 · Feb 26, 2018

JeanTate said:
An ignominious end? Death by being totally ignored, due to complete irrelevance!

Can something that never really started actually end? Not sure about that

At the end of the day it comes down to two people who have a bizarre belief that Velikovsky was right. By definition, that disqualifies it from being remotely related to anything scientific.
Even the adoption of certain ideas from the likes of Alfven, Peratt, Juergens et al, can be traced back to the loon Velikovsky, and his "Cosmos without Gravitation" nonsense. Thornhill wants to force fit everything into a Velikovskian worldview, with Venus doing handbrake turns around the solar system a couple of weeks ago last Tuesday. Hence his risible attempts to describe gravity as an EM effect. It can't possibly be that the loon Velikovsky was wrong, and the laws of physics are correct - nope, V was right, therefore we need to rewrite everything we know about physics. The fact that his acolytes can't see through this is sad.
All of their electric sun ideas are laughably bad. Juergens was, I'm afraid, clueless. As is Scott, when it comes to astrophysics. Talbott has never studied science, and Thornhill has a bachelors degree. Whoopee.
They don't even manage to understand what their heroes, such as Alfven, were actually saying. They learn, by rote, passages from papers or speeches. They don't actually understand any of the science.
Magnetic reconnection is a prime example. They can't figure out that Alfven said that it could be possible under certain circumstances. Or that his mate, Falthammar, fully accepted it having been a PI on the Cluster mission, and seen the data with his own eyes.
They'll still believe in lunatic electric cratering, even though they have no viable mechanism.
They'll still believe that Io's volcanoes are some sort of electric woo, even though another hero, Peratt, would (and did) tell them that it is due to tidal heating.
They'll still believe that comets are rock, and all the stuff we see is due to some sort of unexplained electrical woo. Despite a complete lack of a valid hypothesis nor any evidence.
All because of Velikovsky's rubbish. Now, I'm sure that they have followers who will say that they don't take Velikovsky seriously. Well, here's some news guys; that is precisely what the EU is built upon. It wouldn't exist otherwise. The laws of physics, and an awful lot of well established science needs to be thrown out, just so that Wal and Dave can continue to peddle their unscientific idiocy to the faithful.
Very, very sad.

jonesdave116 · Feb 26, 2018

No EU solar theory predicts "no neutrinos", but for four years not a single EU/PC hater set lyin' Brian Koberlein strait (sic).

Talking about unscientific idiocy, the above is another quote from MM. It doesn't seem to have registered with him that it doesn't matter what Thornhill or Scott have said about neutrinos in their models. The models are crap, and scientifically impossible. And if the neutrinos were from heavy element fusion, as stated by Thornhill, then the detections would not match theory. The fact that they do match theory shows that the standard model is correct, and Thornhill et al are wrong. As usual.
Fusion at, or anywhere near the surface, would lead to an obvious gamma ray signal. Detections show that the standard model is correct in that the vast majority of the energy to power the Sun is from the first step in the p-p chain. And the detections match theory for the amount of fusion happening to power the Sun. Ergo, there is no need for idiotic, unscientific woo about electric power, because it isn't required. All the power comes from fusion, as has been demonstrated. None of it comes from electric woo. For which there is no viable model, nor evidence. Which is why nobody takes it seriously.

It might also be worth Thornhill, or one of the other wooists, doing a calculation for how much fusion they are going to get, based on the temperatures and pressures encountered in the photosphere. Hint: it is nowhere near hot and dense enough.

Reality Check · Feb 26, 2018

jonesdave116 said:
Talking about unscientific idiocy, the above is another quote from MM. ....

What has also never registered with MM is that A Beginner’s View of Our Electric Universe by Tom Findlay exists and that was the e-book that Brian Koberlein cited with the PDF link. This is an e-book reviewed by Wallace Thornhill, Dr Donald E Scott, etc. who know about the EU

!

Anyone who reads Testing the Electric Universe will understand that the article is based on that PDF which explicitly states that stars are not fusion powered at all
Page 79

We will be returning to the idea of nuclear fusion-powered stars later to delve into why this, in fact, is not the way the Sun works and to take a close look at how all stars actually do work, electrically of course.

The Sun is mentioned as the source or powered by electric currents or with Birkleand currents (page 106). And then we get on page 169:

Our star, the Sun, does not operate through the action of a gravity-moderated nuclear explosion. It works instead as a concentrated ball of electrically excited plasma, where its visible glowing surface is maintained in arc mode by a drift of electrons flowing inward from the distant cathode region of our solar system, the heliopause, and by positive currents flowing into its poles from the interstellar circuit of which our star is a single component. The Sun is, in fact, an enormous fluorescent light that glows around a smaller, solid and much cooler anode core.

(my emphasis added)

Back on page 18 there is an implied ignorance of

If the Sun really does have a continuous nuclear explosion going on inside it, why then do we see only a small level of a particular ‘nuclear action tell-tale’ type of radiation being emitted where this should actually be at a very much higher level?

Vague but may be referring to solar neutrinos all of which have been detected.

Brian Koberlein pointed out that the neutrinos have been detected and that an "electrically excited plasma" produces a spectrum that is not observed.

ETA: That EU guide also has a section on Velikovsky as if he were a credible scientist rather than a dubious historian denying much of physics.

SelfSim · Feb 26, 2018

MM said:
jonesdave116 said:

.. As is Scott, when it comes to astrophysics.

Click to expand...

More lies. Let's see you find any error in his recent Birkeland current paper hotshot. Watch how fast you run and hide from that request.

And here we have yet another example of the gross dishonesty of Mozina (which is the real reason he gets banned everywhere .. and nothing to do with his claims that he is 'mainstream-persecuted' .. eg: by some perceived 'Spanish Inquisition' at CQ)..

Even though I raised the matter of Scott's misconceptions about Birkeland Currents in this thread, and linked to another thread I raised in 2014 at CFs about it, Mozina completely ignores this past history and then puts the matter directly back to jonesdave. Talk about deceitful!

Regardless of Mozina's lies, Scott has the basic physics of Birkeland Currents demonstrably dead-flat wrong in his paper. Scott plagiarised, without formal references to Lundquist's original solution in his first paper on the topic, and then allowed it to be widely dispersed across the public webspace domain. Scott's paper about Birkeland Currents is fundamentally flawed in mulitple ways, and then his paper on Olber's Paradox is blatantly outright incorrect for reasons described here. He also recently continued to propagate the same rubbish in this thread at acolyte HQ, (post is dated Feb 2, 2018).

In spite of JT's lead of suggesting that EU is completely irrelevant, and jonesdave stating it more succinctly, as always being a non-starter, (both ideas with which I completely concur), unfortunately, formal publications such as Scott's cannot be dismissed quite so easily as they require much deeper conceptual understanding .. specifically on the contexts of science's physical definitions. Scott seems determined to 're-wire' those contexts in a very under-handed manner, perhaps to give EU rantings some semblance of theoretical credibility .. and acolytes like Mozina are too deficient in their knowledge of Physics and Math to see though it.

'Debating' with the likes of Mozina is a complete waste of time .. but publishing, technically savvy authors such as Scott are culpable, (making Mozina's trivial criticisms of folks such as Koberlein also pale, by way of comparison, into utter insignificance).

jonesdave116 · Feb 26, 2018

@SelfSim,

Scott has the basic physics of Birkeland Currents demonstrably dead-flat wrong in his paper.

This wasn't the paper where he tries to equate the Butterfly Nebula with a z-pinch, is it? That in itself should be enough to show his incompetence. He could have checked the Doppler data!

JeanTate · Feb 27, 2018

SelfSim said:
<snip>

In spite of JT's lead of suggesting that EU is completely irrelevant, and jonesdave stating it more succinctly, as always being a non-starter, (both ideas with which I completely concur), unfortunately, formal publications such as Scott's cannot be dismissed quite so easily as they require much deeper conceptual understanding .. specifically on the contexts of science's physical definitions. Scott seems determined to 're-wire' those contexts in a very under-handed manner, perhaps to give EU rantings some semblance of theoretical credibility .. and acolytes like Mozina are too deficient in their knowledge of Physics and Math to see though it.

'Debating' with the likes of Mozina is a complete waste of time .. but publishing, technically savvy authors such as Scott are culpable, (making Mozina's trivial criticisms of folks such as Koberlein also pale, by way of comparison, into utter insignificance).

Thanks SS, that's a good point.

To spell it out a bit, if someone at EU central claims that there's no experimental evidence of neutrino oscillation (say), or that no one has replicated or extended Birkeland's terralla experiments, make a wry smile at the ignorance and finish drinking your morning coffee by doing a cross-word puzzle. However, if some claim like this is made in a relevant moderated forum, then respond robustly, even if very succinctly (e.g. re the first claim, https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1778).

MM was a member here, and was banned for violating the (clearly stated) membership agreement. There is no reason to repeat, or even paraphrase, what he posts in EU central.

SelfSim · Feb 27, 2018

jonesdave116 said:
... This wasn't the paper where he tries to equate the Butterfly Nebula with a z-pinch, is it? That in itself should be enough to show his incompetence. He could have checked the Doppler data!

Yes .. it is the same one... Although he produced two versions of the same paper. The first is widely circulated (and didn't accredit Lundquist with the vector calculus derived solution for a force-free field aligned current in space), and the second version was published in the shonky 'Progress in Physics' journal, in which he eventually confessed the origin of the solution as not being his own! In fact, all both papers did, was to completely screw up the context of the original Lundquist solution!

Whilst your highly valid point homes in on his utter malarkey about the M2-9 twin jet (butterfly) nebula, the theoretical errors tend to be far more concerning because they have wider-reaching impacts .. these being that:

- his claim that a force free field, (where the magnetic field and the direction of current density are parallel), is at its minimum, and therefore at its most stable energy state, is grossly nonsensical and;

- the inability of his model as stated, to produce synchrotron radiation, completely contradicts the observed basis underpinning the fundamental definition of a 'Birkeland Current' (BC). Are we now supposed to now go forward blindly accepting that BCs don't have to generate synchrotron radiation signatures and thus, there is not even any need to look for any? What sort of misleading, negligent garbage is this?

The paper, (and Scott's subsequent dog and pony shows), have appeared everywhere, (and unopposed from what I can see), across the web, since. (Eg: presentation slides, YouTubes etc). Scott needs to hang his head in shame, and also own up to the responsibility of the net result of his blatant, unprofessional, errored-in-Physics blunders!

But wait .. there's more .. he then goes on pushing more of this crap out .. this time, in the form of his brain-dead 'Olber's Paradox' blundering fiasco paper!

I tell ya matey, this dude is nothing but bad news .. and he keeps on doing it, virtually unopposed!

jonesdave116 · Feb 27, 2018

I don't know if SS has seen the latest offering from Don Scott. I had a visit to his site to get the paper mentioned above, and saw that he has a 2018 paper on "Birkeland Currents and Dark Matter", http://www.ptep-online.com/2018/PP-53-01.PDF. This is to appear in the April edition of the crank journal Progress in Physics.
What I can make of it so far, is that he's basically trying to resurrect Peratt's failed model, and not doing a very good job of it. This relies on the observed filamentary structure of space, and the streamers of gas connecting galaxies. Looking at references [32] & [33] in Scott's paper shows that, despite Scott's claims, these appear to be talking about cold, neutral flows, detected in Lyman alpha. Ref [35] does see ionised gas, but that is as the gas approaches the QSO.
Ref [32] is paywalled, but I have the paper. Scott hasn't, as he referenced a pop-sci article about it on phys.org! Amazed the peer reviewers let that go! (not really

).

The ironic thing here is that ref [33] is to a paper where the authors use various model parameters to try to simulate the filamentary structure we see. All of their models use dark matter to achieve the results! The very thing that Scott is trying to replace, is necessary to observe the filaments. Irony, much?

ref [32] is;
A giant protogalactic disk linked to the cosmic web
Martin, C. D. et al.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14616 (paywalled)

ref [33] is;
The Network Behind the Cosmic Web
Coutinho, B. C. et al.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.03236.pdf

SelfSim · Feb 27, 2018

jonesdave116 said:
I don't know if SS has seen the latest offering from Don Scott ...

Groan ... No I hadn't ... and see what I mean .. this dude didn't even get the basics of Birkeland Currents sorted .. so what does he do? He continues blundering along with more rubbish and non-sense!

I haven't had a chance to look more closely at this paper, but the following words in section '12 Results and Comments' give insight to the real basis of his analysis:

Scott said:
... Since the beginning of space research, most astrophysicists have asserted that electric fields, and currents, are not important in space phenomena [13]. Because of this rejection of electrical science and experimental plasma engineering, all efforts to explain why the outer stars in galaxies revolve around their galactic centers with velocities that, according to Newtonian dynamics, are too high have failed. This fruitless search has lasted for decades [14].

And then, this unsupported outburst:

Scott said:
An observation that is ’anomalous’ is one that is inconsistent with accepted hypotheses. In real science this requires the replacement of the falsified hypothesis, not an eighty-five year hunt for invisible entities that will preserve it. The work being presented here demonstrates that the root cause of the now vast collection of observed ’anomalous’ galactic stellar rotation profiles is the electrical nature of the Birkeland Currents on which those galaxies have been or are being formed.

.. and that's coming from someone who completely confused himself in his un peer-reviewed inaugural 'Magnetic Fields of Birkeland Currents' publication (referred to in my previous post). :boggled:

JeanTate · Feb 27, 2018

jonesdave116 said:
I don't know if SS has seen the latest offering from Don Scott. I had a visit to his site to get the paper mentioned above, and saw that he has a 2018 paper on "Birkeland Currents and Dark Matter", http://www.ptep-online.com/2018/PP-53-01.PDF. This is to appear in the April edition of the crank journal Progress in Physics.
What I can make of it so far, is that he's basically trying to resurrect Peratt's failed model, and not doing a very good job of it. This relies on the observed filamentary structure of space, and the streamers of gas connecting galaxies. Looking at references [32] & [33] in Scott's paper shows that, despite Scott's claims, these appear to be talking about cold, neutral flows, detected in Lyman alpha. Ref [35] does see ionised gas, but that is as the gas approaches the QSO.
Ref [32] is paywalled, but I have the paper. Scott hasn't, as he referenced a pop-sci article about it on phys.org! Amazed the peer reviewers let that go! (not really ).

The ironic thing here is that ref [33] is to a paper where the authors use various model parameters to try to simulate the filamentary structure we see. All of their models use dark matter to achieve the results! The very thing that Scott is trying to replace, is necessary to observe the filaments. Irony, much?

ref [32] is;
A giant protogalactic disk linked to the cosmic web
Martin, C. D. et al.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14616 (paywalled)

ref [33] is;
The Network Behind the Cosmic Web
Coutinho, B. C. et al.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.03236.pdf

How does this make Scott any different from the thousands of other fringe/crackpot authors, who publish in obscure or totally dodgy journals (e.g. PIP), viXra, on their own websites, or even occasionally in arXiv?

There are, historically, many a thread on ideas by such authors, here, in CQ, even in PF; for example, there’s a long-running thread here in ISF on Mills and his “hydrino”. And we even had Lerner start a thread here, on his own BB never happened ideas.

Addressing all this fringe/crackpot stuff would take far more time than one person has, so prioritization is essential. That’s one reason why I like to focus on tests ... so in this case, did Scott propose some concrete, feasible tests of his musings? Has he posted to a relevant, moderated forum? If not, why does he deserve any of us taking time away from our own research?

SelfSim · Feb 27, 2018

After perusing this latest paper by Scott, it looks as though its a 'lets see if we can make the data fit the model' exercise. Thus far, I've attempted to follow two of his reference links, and both have turned out to be 'dud' links.
The first came from this section:

Scott said:
6 Estimating the velocity profile of a FAC
It has been suggested [8] that galaxies form on and along cosmic Birkeland currents.

Reference [8] failed, so I chased up the proper link here. Almost needless to say, there is nothing about galaxies forming 'on and along Birkeland currents' in it.

The crux of his argument apparently relies on using the
'Observed (measured) velocity profile of a typical galaxy. NGC 1620. [9]' (his words used here). Reference [9], (of course), also turns out to be blind although I guess we might be able to give him the benefit of the doubt on this(?) (Well, at least for the time being, maybe).

Overall, given that just about all of the references we've, (JD, myself), checked thus far, either don't support his statements in the paper, or are blind links, I'd say this paper amounts to prime test material for testing out the quality of the so-called 'peer-reviewers' in the crank journal he intends to publish it in.

Also even if NGC 1620's rotation velocity profile data happens to fit into the Lunquist solution, (no error bars considered by him either in this exercise), his errored seminal arguments about the physics of force-free fields, (in his original paper), totally undermine the rationale in this paper.

I'd say this paper is not any more worthy of further consideration than any other crank paper. It is certainly lacking in quality, (thus far).

Reality Check · Feb 27, 2018

jonesdave116 said:
I had a visit to his site to get the paper mentioned above, and saw that he has a 2018 paper on "Birkeland Currents and Dark Matter", http://www.ptep-online.com/2018/PP-53-01.PDF. ...

That "paper" is basically a fantasy extending his already invalid Birkeland current analysis.
The main result could be an ignorant fantasy that stars and gas in a galaxy do not orbit under gravity at all (his figure 6). Instead they are driven only by Birkeland currents. But this is more a really bad case of circular reasoning and deep ignorance. He uses the observed velocity profile of NGC 1620 to derive a charge density that is ignorantly used to derive a velocity profile!

The deep ignorance (or denial) is of basic astronomy. Galaxy rotation curves are measured using visible stars and gas. Stars are not plasma clouds in Birkeland currents

!

Scott hides this astronomy by a broken link to a figure supposedly within the paper: Ionized gas and stellar kinematics of seventeen nearby spiral galaxies

Ionized gas and stellar kinematics have been measured along the major axes of seventeen nearby spiral galaxies of intermediate to late morphological type. We discuss the properties of each sample galaxy, distinguishing between those characterized by regular or peculiar kinematics. In most of the observed galaxies, ionized gas rotates more rapidly than stars and has a lower velocity dispersion, as is to be expected if the gas is confined in the disc and supported by rotation while the stars are mostly supported by dynamical pressure. In a few objects, gas and stars show almost the same rotational velocity and low velocity dispersion, suggesting that their motion is dominated by rotation.

but the paper has a NGC 1620 figure (Fig 2) that is not his figure (the paper has a plot of ionized gas rotation curves from 3 papers).

ETA: Scott ignores that some galaxies have gas that rotate in the opposite direction to their stars

This allowed us to address the frequency of counter-rotation in spiral galaxies. It turns out that less than 12% and less than 8% (at the 95% confidence level) of the sample galaxies host a counter-rotating gaseous and stellar disc, respectively

How do Birkeland current make gas rotate one way and stars rotate the other way?

The persistent EU lie of most astrophysicists asserting that "electric fields, and current, are not important in space phenomena" (links to himself!) pops up.
Astrophysicists assert that electric fields and currents (like Birkeland currents!) are important for the appropriate space phenomena. A solar wind interacting with a planetary magnetic field (and atmosphere?) is the appropriate place to consider Birkeland currents to be important. Birkeland currents are unimportant at larger scales, especially galactic scales, because there is no evidence of "winds", definitely no planetary magnetic fields and a weak galactic magnetic field.

ETA: A Marklund convection lie.
Marklund convection is unrelated to Birkeland currents. Hannes Alfvén showed that plasma filaments will drive elements with the lowest ionization potential closer to the filament axis. Scott has figure 5 plotting ionization voltage of elements in a "target" form with hydrogen (and O and N) at 13 eV - actually 13.59844 eV - on the outside. He then cites an observation of counter-rotating NGC 4550 having a outer rim with a collection of hydrogen-rich stars.
The lie is omitting helium that has an ionization energy of 24.5 eV and should be the outermost ring from his figure. Also fluorine (17.4), argon (15.7), krypton (13.99) and nitrogen at 14.53414 eV could be in separate outer rings. His suggestion will have helium rich stars at the outer rim.

jonesdave116 · Feb 28, 2018

SelfSim said:
Reference [8] failed, so I chased up the proper link here. Almost needless to say, there is nothing about galaxies forming 'on and along Birkeland currents' in it.

Just for completeness, here is the paper (free access!) that reports the findings:

Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): fine filaments of galaxies detected within voids
Alpaslan, M. et al.
https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/440/1/L106/1393805

tusenfem · Feb 28, 2018

ow ow ow
the stupid in the scott paper, starting at the introduction (nasa calls it birkeland currents, no flux ropes!) and culmination in the section 2 title "force-free plasmas are field aligned" which physically makes no sense at all. And really, after 65 years Scott was the one to explain bessel funnctions to the world? section 2 is just bonkers, how can something like that get through review? (i guess it was not reviewed)

well it is bad, especially calculating the charge density from dividing current density by velocity, not taking into account that electrons and ions move n opposite directions. charge density should probably be quasi nuetral, but an electric engineer only thinks of moving electrons in a wire ...

enough for today

Mikemcc · Feb 28, 2018

Who the hell would waste money on researching drivel? It's bad enough the time that I've taken to type this!

jonesdave116 · Feb 28, 2018

tusenfem said:
well it is bad, especially calculating the charge density from dividing current density by velocity, not taking into account that ***electrons and ions move n opposite directions***. charge density should probably be quasi nuetral, but an electric engineer only thinks of moving electrons in a wire ...

enough for today

This got me thinking of something else - Scott has an article on his website, entitled "A Note on the Acceleration of the Solar Wind." (http://electric-cosmos.org/SolarWind.pdf)

Plasma stuff really isn't my thing; I learn as much of it as I need to to understand, at a basic level, some of the papers I read. However, perusing the above paper brought me to the conclusion that Scott was suggesting that an electric field was responsible for the solar wind acceleration. In my limited understanding, wouldn't that accelerate ions and electrons in opposite directions? If so, how can it be a possible mechanism?
Maybe I'm missing something that others can edumacate me on.

SelfSim · Feb 28, 2018

tusenfem said:
... culmination in the section 2 title "force-free plasmas are field aligned" which physically makes no sense at all.
...
And really, after 65 years Scott was the one to explain bessel funnctions to the world? section 2 is just bonkers, how can something like that get through review? (i guess it was not reviewed)

I think his Section 2 is a restatement of his nonsensical arguments in his original 'Birkeland Currents: A Force-Free Field-Aligned Model' paper. I guess seeing as none of his so-called peer-reviewers at the crank 'Progress in Physics' journal, corrected his theoretical misconceptions made in that paper, he continues compounding and propagating them in this one.

His whole counter-rotating cross sectional structure based on the original Lundquist solution, (ie: the Bessel function effects), would surely have to be completely unstable in space without an enormous external magnetic confinement field(?) In fact, I think this was even stated before Scott got his paws on Lundquist's solution (and proceeded to completely screw it up).

Using the apparent counter-rotation derived from Lundquist's model, to explain RC's previous question about why stars and gases might rotate in different directions, (which would at least be a consistent explanation in Scott's deluded paradigm), fails to explain why the gases and the stars wouldn't just fly apart. Scott's online (YT) presentations, following the first paper, even show him stating that 'the net field between different rotating layers, either promotes or inhibits charge flow between the concentric cylinders .. and also cause dissimilar (ionised) element separation across the cross-section' (as RC also compares with the evidence to the contrary).

tusenfem said:
.. well it is bad, especially calculating the charge density from dividing current density by velocity, not taking into account that electrons and ions move n opposite directions. charge density should probably be quasi nuetral, but an electric engineer only thinks of moving electrons in a wire ...

Thanks for that .. (it had me going for while) .. and the issue you mention above, goes straight to the heart of the theoretical flaw in this present paper.

These kinds of flaws really do need to be addressed, otherwise readers will simply defer to what the author says and assume it was correct and forever-after argue from that viewpoint. (Just highlighting here my point about how flawed, uncorrected theoretical points live forever on the web).

JeanTate · Mar 1, 2018

Answering my own questions ...

JeanTate said:
<snip>

Addressing all this fringe/crackpot stuff would take far more time than one person has, so prioritization is essential. That’s one reason why I like to focus on tests ... so in this case, did Scott propose some concrete, feasible tests of his musings?

Apparently yes (see below)

Has he posted to a relevant, moderated forum?

Apparently not.

If not, why does he deserve any of us taking time away from our own research?

He doesn't ... why are you guys even bothering with this?

RealityCheck said:
The deep ignorance (or denial) is of basic astronomy. Galaxy rotation curves are measured using visible stars and gas. Stars are not plasma clouds in Birkeland currents !

Scott hides this astronomy by a broken link to a figure supposedly within the paper: Ionized gas and stellar kinematics of seventeen nearby spiral galaxies

Ionized gas and stellar kinematics have been measured along the major axes of seventeen nearby spiral galaxies of intermediate to late morphological type. We discuss the properties of each sample galaxy, distinguishing between those characterized by regular or peculiar kinematics. In most of the observed galaxies, ionized gas rotates more rapidly than stars and has a lower velocity dispersion, as is to be expected if the gas is confined in the disc and supported by rotation while the stars are mostly supported by dynamical pressure. In a few objects, gas and stars show almost the same rotational velocity and low velocity dispersion, suggesting that their motion is dominated by rotation.

Click to expand...

So, Scott himself has proposed a concrete, feasible test of his musings, the difference in the rotation curves of disk-dominated galaxies, as measured by the "ionized gas" (what? has Scott fallen out with the EU crowd? Doesn't he mean "plasma"?) and by stars.

The charge/mass ratio of ions - H⁺, O²⁺, etc - compared with that of stars is ginormous; my envelope doesn't have a back big enough to contain all the zeros (but it's at least 20 orders of magnitude; could someone please independently verify this?), so the effects of any electric/magnetic fields on each class of object will be equally ginormously different.

Yet rotation curves of disk-dominated galaxies - whether as early as S0⁰ or as late as Sd - are, in general, the same for the ionized gas (of which there is very little in early-type systems), the neutral gas (as determined by radio astronomers, mostly neutral H, but also CO, etc), and for the stars.

So, into the pile of "failed" papers Scott's goes.

Incidentally, this ~lack of difference between rotation curves derived from ionized gas, neutral gas, and stars is one reason why Peratt's 1986 papers (and the relevant chapter in his book) fail. I guess a distinction is that Peratt didn't really try to hide this problem (merely didn't highlight it), whereas Scott ...

jonesdave116 · Mar 1, 2018

Hi JT,
As chance would have it, I was looking back through some old posts on this sort of thing. I did a search on "Peratt" to see if Tim Thompson had addressed his galaxy model, as this is obviously relevant to Scott's MKII version. And indeed he had:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4562982&highlight=peratt#post4562982

Just a snippet from the post, and relevant to yours:

But the method fails to deal with the motion of stars, and that is significant. See, for instance, Tsiklauri, 2008, whose method is similar to that of Snell & Peratt. He too handles only the gas, and concludes in his abstract that "The model is applicable to gas and plasma dynamics, while flat rotational curves for stars would need some other explanation, as stars would be more affected by gravity than electromagnetic forces such as the Ampere force."

And, as noted, as there can be no significant charge on a star, one wonders how Scott intends to get round it? I doubt that he's thought it through that far.

Reality Check · Mar 1, 2018

Scoot is totally wasting everyone's time with a "Peratt Mark II" model because the original version is obviously flawed. See the thread Anthony Peratt's Plasma Model of Galaxy Formation.
The main errors are what any astronomy student knows.

Spiral galaxies are not spirals with nothing in between the arms (his results).
We see spirals because the arms are bright star-forming regions. The in between region are 10-20% less dense than the arms.
Double-lobed radio galaxies are actually large elliptical galaxies with jets interacting with plasma producing the radio lobes.
Possibly not known in 1986.

There is the use of simulation code for massless particles when real plasma has mass. The software is designed for very short term simulations where gravity can be neglected, e.g. microsecond in labs here on Earth. Peratt applies it to the billions of years of the lifetime of galaxies. A later Meierovich and Peratt paper derived an energy balance equation that showed gravity has 7 orders of magnitude more impact than electromagnetism for plasma.
Peratt's galactic plasma filaments should be easily detected.
Peratt's galactic plasma filaments should not be stable (implying galaxies "switching off" at random intervals).

A minor point: No one, including Peratt, has run his computer simulation again on more powerful computers or using better plasma simulation software in over 30 years. That includes using simulation software that includes both gravity and plasma interactions.

SelfSim · Mar 1, 2018

JeanTate said:
JT said:

If not, why does he deserve any of us taking time away from our own research?

Click to expand...

He doesn't ... why are you guys even bothering with this?

Personally speaking .. because whenever any of science's operational definitions are compromised by masses of 'professional-looking', published papers, containing badly flawed Physics, ('Birkeland Current' in this instance), I chose to speak out loudly about it.

Look, (for eg), at the controversy that happens when 'Planet' and/or (now), 'Dwarf Planet' enters the public arena!

SelfSim · Mar 1, 2018

RE: Scott's 'Section 2: Force-free plasmas are field-aligned' in the Birkeland Currents and Dark Matter and Sections 3 & 4 in the paper:

SelfSim said:
... His whole counter-rotating cross sectional structure based on the original Lundquist solution, (ie: the Bessel function effects), would surely have to be completely unstable in space without an enormous external magnetic confinement field(?) In fact, I think this was even stated before Scott got his paws on Lundquist's solution (and proceeded to completely screw it up).

It gets even worse where Scott presents all this in a widely available YouTube/presentation (made at some recent annual EU love-in).

He (more or less) says that his enveloping 'Birkeland Current' enveloping magnetic field spirals in one direction, and then comes back in the opposite direction. He likens this field topology to how ancient soldiers used to wrap their legs up with strapping by winding it down the leg and then back up again (see fasces).

If this analogy is the case, then each successive wrapping magnetic "layer" will exert a repulsive magnetic force on each adjacent layer, as the direction of the magnetic field changes for each layer. It's like running a current through two parallel straight wires. If the currents run in the same direction, then the magnetic field in each wire is in the same direction and the force between the fields is an attractive force, otherwise with the fields being in different directions, (as he argues), the force is in fact, repulsive. All this comes about because of the Bessel function at the heart of his model.

Scott's scenario turns out as being the distinct opposite of magnetic containment, and is unstable as the plasma, gas, (or whatever) associated with the alternating magnetic fields, described by the Bessel function, would be pulled apart.

The deeper one goes into the Scott's Birkeland Current model, the more nonsensical it becomes.
Its just badly errored Physics and should be known as being nothing more than that.

jonesdave116 · Mar 1, 2018

In a rather vomit inducing effort to crawl up Scott's nether regions, over at woo central, somebody posted this:

JonesDave seems to erroneously assume that stars have no relative charge with respect to their environment, which is directly at odds with Scott's anode solar model and Birkeland's cathode solar model as well.

Here's some news; there is ZERO evidence for Scott's or Birkeland's model. And a tonne against. So, we need failed models to explain a crap paper, for which there is also no evidence, and makes some basic mistakes, from an EE whose knowledge of plasma physics, particularly as it pertains to astrophysics, is limited at best. Somebody at the aforementioned woo central needs to work out how these non-existent Birkeland currents (invisible in COBE, WMAP & Planck), manage to make stars and gas and dust all travel about the galactic centre at pretty much the same speed? What is the charge on a star? What would that imply for the solar wind? The solar wind, for the hard of remembering, is that collection of ions and electrons which flee the Sun in the SAME direction at the SAME speed. So, is the Sun positively charged? What does this imply for the electrons in the solar wind? If it's accelerated by an electric field, as per Scott, then in which direction do the ions go? In comparison, which way do the electrons go?
Pure idiocy. I'm afraid that nobody associated with that mythology cult has the faintest idea about some pretty basic science. Which is why, after decades of spouting this rubbish, they have achieved the square root of sod all.

Ziggurat · Mar 1, 2018

jonesdave116 said:
What is the charge on a star?

One of the ironies of this whole thing is that standard astrophysics has in fact directly addressed this question. See for example:
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2001/24/aah2649.pdf

The sun has a positive charge of about 77 Coulombs. That's not nothing, but it's not near enough to drive what the EU folks need it to.

And to further hilight the irony, this very paper has been mentioned multiple times in this very forum, for example in this post:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6673481&postcount=947

jonesdave116 · Mar 1, 2018

Ziggurat said:
One of the ironies of this whole thing is that standard astrophysics has in fact directly addressed this question. See for example:
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2001/24/aah2649.pdf

The sun has a positive charge of about 77 Coulombs. That's not nothing, but it's not near enough to drive what the EU folks need it to.

And to further hilight the irony, this very paper has been mentioned multiple times in this very forum, for example in this post:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6673481&postcount=947

Ahhhh, nice find. So, gravity between two stars is 10³⁶ times greater than electrostatic forces! Must remember that number.

And an excellent post by Tim, as usual. Filed that away with various others.

JeanTate · Mar 1, 2018

jonesdave116 said:
Ahhhh, nice find. So, gravity between two stars is 10³⁶ times greater than electrostatic forces! Must remember that number.

[puts EU acolyte hat on]
No, no, no!!!

You gravity-worshipping mainstreamers have it all wrong!!!!!!!!!

The electromagnetic force is 39 times stronger than the gravitational one!

And as ~~scripture~~ Alfven tells us, Chapman's pithball model of stars is impossibly wrong! The force between two stars is something you can determine only by applying non-linear plasma equations!

And they are misleading anyway; look at images of the Sun taken by Thornhill&Talbott ... they clearly show a Birkeland current connecting it to the Earth (NASA misunderstands this as "flux ropes") and to the ten nearest stars!

Once again, you are being misled by mathemagic nonsense; LOOK AT THE PICTURES!!!!

Oh, and magnetic reconnection cannot explain anything, because it doesn't exist!!!

[takes EU acolyte hat off]

JeanTate · Mar 2, 2018

Reality Check said:
<snip>

Double-lobed radio galaxies are actually large elliptical galaxies with jets interacting with plasma producing the radio lobes.
Possibly not known in 1986.

<snip>

(highlite added)

I think you'll find that, in relevant university courses, Matthews+ (1964) is usually cited as the landmark paper in this regard.

The first spiral galaxy definitively shown to be the host of a double radio lobe is reported in Ledlow+ (1998).

It would be quite a challenge to definitively state in which paper the first lenticular was shown to be a radio double lobe host, if only because a robust demarcation between an S0^-, say, and an E⁺ galaxy is close to impossible without a high resolution set of images or IFU spectra (not to mention the fact that the Hubble type of S0 galaxies varies with the wavelength/filter they are observed in!); the "double radio lobe" part is easy; the nature of the host is not (in these cases).

SelfSim · Mar 2, 2018

JeanTate said:
[puts EU acolyte hat on]
No, no, no!!!
...
Once again, you are being misled by mathemagic nonsense; LOOK AT THE PICTURES!!!!
...
[takes EU acolyte hat off]

Another classic comes from the stand-up comedian himself, MM. He constantly demands to know where Scott's math is wrong in the Birkeland/Dark Matter paper .. Never mind if it isn't Scott's math in the first place .. its Lundquist's .. so why would that be wrong?

Also, when its pointed out that Scott's infinite integral limit for calculating the total Lumens received from a static infinite universe is incorrect, (and should be finite), suddenly the response becomes 'Who cares {if Scott's math is wrong ...}?' :boggled:

Then of course there is his own blunder of mistaking 0.5 as being equivalent in value to 1! :jaw-dropp

jonesdave116 · Mar 2, 2018

And another beauty from the court jester of dunderbolts!

If his math is right then there's no mathematical need for dark matter to explain galaxy rotation patterns. It's damn clear that his math *is* right,...

Never mind that there is zero evidence for these Birkeland currents that Peratt said we should see (and don't), but absolutely no mechanism for how these non-existent currents would make stars rotate faster than if DM wasn't accounted for! And Scott totally fails to offer one.
It's the same nonsense as the Thornhill/ Scott neutrinos - their models are rubbish, and don't work, and the neutrino energy spectra just doesn't match, among numerous other problems. Who cares what they predicted? It was unevidenced, impossible rubbish, that has never been written up. A complete irrelevance that is rightly ignored.
I don't think these people realise quite what an irrelevance to real science they actually are!

And another one:

You don't even have a valid explanation as to why those filaments form to start with, whereas Scott does. Current naturally generates filamentary features in plasma.

Dear me. Apart from the fact that there is zero evidence for any current, these filaments are modelled in LCDM simulations! Scott referenced one of them in his travesty of a paper [33], and I referenced it upthread. There is another paper I've read from 1996 doing a similar thing:

How Filaments Are Woven Into The Cosmic Web
Bond, J. R. et al
https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9512141.pdf

So they know very well how these filaments form. More to the point, the DM filaments are detected through gravitational lensing, as per:

The weak-lensing masses of filaments between luminous red galaxies
Epps, S. D. & Hudson, M. J.
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/468/3/2605/3059154

and;

A filament of dark matter between two clusters of galaxies
Dietrich, J. P. et al.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.0809.pdf

So, not only are these filaments seen in DM simulations, but the DM forming them is observed through gravitational lensing. Which is a hell of a lot more impressive than Scott saying - "Look, filament. Must be a current!" And then proceeding to use this evidence-free nonsense to explain galaxy rotation curves. Which is impossible.

JeanTate · Mar 2, 2018

jonesdave116 said:
<snip>

Somebody at the aforementioned woo central needs to work out how these non-existent Birkeland currents (invisible in COBE, WMAP & Planck), manage to [...]

<snip>

(my highlite)

And GLIMPSE and IRAS and AKARI and GB6 and FIRST and NVSS and HI4PI and SUMMS and WENS and TGSS and VLSSr and GLEAM and ...

Why bother to give stuff that's so obviously crackpot nonsense (now, and has been for quite some time) any airtime here? If an EU acolyte wishes to join ISF and start (or continue) a thread on this sort of topic, by all means let them do so; otherwise ...

jonesdave116 · Mar 2, 2018

And right on cue........more dark matter! The stuff gets everywhere!

A large sample of shear selected clusters from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program S16A wide field mass maps
Miyazaki, S. et al.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.10290v1.pdf

Still no currents, though.

JeanTate · Mar 2, 2018

JeanTate said:
<snip>

The charge/mass ratio of ions - H⁺, O²⁺, etc - compared with that of stars is ginormous; my envelope doesn't have a back big enough to contain all the zeros (but it's at least 20 orders of magnitude; could someone please independently verify this?), so the effects of any electric/magnetic fields on each class of object will be equally ginormously different.

<snip>

Ziggurat said:
The sun has a positive charge of about 77 Coulombs.

According to NIST, the electron charge to mass quotient is -1.758 820 024 x 10¹¹ C kg^-1; let's call it -20000000000 as an approximation (-2x10¹¹ to people other than EU acolytes).

A singly ionized lead (Pb) atom has about the lowest charge-to-mass ratio of any non-molecule; the back of my envelope gives me ~+500000 (5x10⁵) C kg^-1.

Taking the mass of the Sun as 200000000000000000000000000000 (2x10³⁰) kg, I get its charge-to-mass ratio as ~+0.00000000000000000000000000004 (4x10^-29) C kg^-1.

Looks like I was waaaay off ... it's nowhere near 20 OOM, rather more like >34. Or as an EU acolyte might write it 1034, or perhaps 34 ...

SelfSim · Mar 6, 2018

A mathematical critique on Scott's continuing blunders in his 'Birkeland Currents and Dark Matter' paper, is made here.

Basically amounts to a mathematically errored derivation of his equations (3) and (4) from Lundquist's solution, by his using Maxwell’s 4th equation with a constant electric field,
∂E/∂t=0^*. This then contradicts j=0 as being a physical solution in a magnetic force free field.

^* (Maxwell’s 4th equation with a constant electric field is: ∇X B = μj, where μ is the magnetic permeability).

Electric Universe: has there ever been a scientific research program?

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