Re a description, concise or otherwise, of 'plasma cosmology' (PC).
iantresman, who has posted in this section of this forum as recently as a month or two ago, is an open proponent of PC. He has said, many times, that the term is not at all precise, being used by different people (and sometimes the same people, at different times*) to cover a wide range of ideas, approaches, theories, etc.
I think it may be useful to distinguish two different levels on which proponents of PC operate:
1) specific, concrete models, theories, etc on the origin, evolution, composition, structure, and the main physical mechanisms (or processes) that give (and/or gave) rise to what we observe today.
2) the nature of scientific discovery, of legitimate methods and approaches; the characteristics of acceptable reasoning, logic, etc; the role of physics and astronomy in addressing questions about the nature of the observable universe.
Particularly confusing to an attempt to understand PC is the tendency of many proponents to be quite indiscriminate about what models etc to include (examining PC at level 1, above): you can easily find stuff straight from standard (space science) textbooks for example on the solar wind, on the Jovian magnetosphere, on jets; just as easily you can find stuff from the remotest regions of woo-land, for example on the Columbia Shuttle being downed by a mega-lightning bolt from space, on stone carvings being faithful representations of giant historical atmospheric plasma phenomena which, scaled up, were also responsible for the creation of Venus ('birthed' from Jupiter) - it's all 'plasma cosmology' to some proponents.
PC proponents (most of them anyway) don't seem to have a problem with the extraordinary internal inconsistencies that accepting (say) textbook models of the Io plasma torus as well as Peratt's model for galaxy rotation curves as well as lightning bolts being the cause of lunar craters as well as the Sun being powered by giant, galaxy-wide currents ... entail. Why? I think it's because most such proponent are also working within a framework that differs significantly from that of contemporary physics (and geology and astronomy and ...); level 2 in other words. Some consciously and explicitly acknowledge this; most vehemently deny it. I think the origins of this split with modern science can be traced to Alfvén's own work on cosmology, and this may be an interesting discussion to have. Of course, Alfvén was far too good a scientist to have ever presented much of the PC material that Zeuzzz (to take just one example) is perfectly happy to spam JREF forum threads with, and if we could transport a younger Alfvén through time to today and give him a week or so to read the last decade or two's landmark papers on cosmology, who knows how different his views would be?
Just two aspects of PC, at level 2:
- there's a strong tendency to employ the logic of false dichotomy: {this set of observations} can't be explained using ΛCDM models, THEREFORE plasma cosmology MUST be right!!!
- effects (mechanisms, processes) not yet demonstrated in labs here on Earth do not exist, so, for example, black holes and neutron stars cannot. That this approach is deployed in a highly selective way (for example, most PC proponents embrace Arp with open arms, despite the fact that no Arpian 'intrinsic redshift' has ever been demonstrated in a lab) is also a feature of the woo part of PC.
* and, in the case of Zeuzzz, per the record of his posts here, even at the same time!
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