Wouldn't be anything to do with selling books and DVD's would it?
Yes, that's certainly part of it.
However, compare "
In the case of the electric comet, the way to avoid a cart running pell mell ahead of the horse is do what is presently being done: gather systematic observations of comet behavior and open the door of scientific imagination to a possibility too long ignored. Where is the problem in that approach? Is the comet discharging electrically?" (a general question), and "
electric discharge as the essential contributor to the comet's increasing activity" (a sorta implication), with "
Perhaps even a definitive conclusion: 67P is just a rock!"
Why is "
67P is just a rock" tied (apparently inextricably) with "
Is the comet discharging electrically?"? Surely the existence of electrical discharges associated with 67P is independent of 67P (or any comet) being just a rock? Yet clearly, for David Talbott, it's not.
Electrical discharges are pretty well understood, as many of Haig's sources point out, and as David Talbott himself has said. So it's fairly straight-forward to see, from the data returned from many comet missions (not just Rosetta) that there are no electrical discharges of the EDM kind ("
visible electrical erosion of the surface in the fashion of electrical etching of surface materials and electric discharge machining (edm)"), and no "
focused glow discharge enigmatically moving across the surface". Further, the electrical nature of 67P and its environment is becoming much clearer, as tusenfem has patiently pointed out many times.
So there's already an abundance of facts and data strongly inconsistent with the ech. That part of David Talbott's hope has already been fulfilled ... but the results are manifestly not what he was expecting/predicting/hoping.
Likewise, the "just a rock" part is also strongly inconsistent with the facts and data. Yet apparently David Talbott is continuing to hold firm in his insistence that the ech has not yet been falsified (see posts in the Rosetta blog which are apparently by him).
Why?
I think Tom Bridgman put his finger on the core reason, a long time ago: the ech is a critical part of the EU, and the EU is essentially the same as creationism, at an intellectual level. There's a core belief (something to do with catastrophic events in the solar system a few thousand or so years ago) and surrounding layers of semi-core beliefs (something to do with "electricity" being the core mechanism behind the believed catastrophic events). These are, to use a great many EU proponents' word, dogma; they are inerrant truths which cannot be questioned, challenged, or falsified.
In short, the EU is a religion, and a fundamentalist one at that. Many believers are both fervent and fanatical. And as is almost inevitable, they are not promoting
pseudo-science, but take a virulent
anti-science stance when it comes to defending their core beliefs.
This is why presenting facts and data to do with plasmas, the electrical nature of comets, etc has essentially zero effect ... while the words look like ones found in scientific papers and textbooks (e.g. "plasma", "discharge") they have dramatically different meanings: in the EU, "electric" means "magic".
That completes my analysis. However, there's a loose end: SAFIRE (I'll get to that later).
And if you cannot find any such DIRECT EVIDENCE, then what is the basis for your claim? Specifically, how is such a claim different from trolling?
