Continuation The Electric Comet Theory Boogaloo (Part 2)

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Captain_Swoop said:
Stop feeding him.
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Oh it's not about him anymore. No chance of convincing someone who is that far gone. Like Ferd said, if he's playing up to the lurkers, then maybe some of them aren't quite as dense as he is, and might actually get it through their heads that they have been deceived by these woo peddlers.
After all, they've built their rubbish on years of essentially calling real, well qualified scientists, incompetent or worse.
Maybe some people don't think that they deserve it back in spades; I'm not one of them :)
 
jonesdave116 said:
What, you think he's ready to mount a coup against T & T, to become the grand poobah of the scientifically illiterate woo believers over at Dunderdolts?
Hadn't thought of it that way!
The only other explanation I can come up with, is that he enjoys public humiliation, and has become addicted to it.
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My thought was that the peanut gallery over there would love to watch someone poke the bear, especially when the bear reacts :).

To some science, in the paper you posted "The 2.5-12/~m Spectrum of Comet Halley from the IKS-VEGA Experiment" I wondered what the effect of the vacuum environment is on the spectral features. Are we essentially looking at what we would see in a gas phase spectrum here on earth? My experience is limited to solid and liquid phase mid-IR. ETA in transmission mode only.

Your posts are very much appreciated, just don't let anyone rent space in your head, amigo. :thumbsup:

Cheers,

ferd
 
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ferd burfle said:
My thought was that the peanut gallery over there would love to watch someone poke the bear, especially when the bear reacts :).

To some science, in the paper you posted "The 2.5-12/~m Spectrum of Comet Halley from the IKS-VEGA Experiment" I wondered what the effect of the vacuum environment is on the spectral features. Are we essentially looking at what we would see in a gas phase spectrum here on earth? My experience is limited to solid and liquid phase mid-IR. ETA in transmission mode only.

Your posts are very much appreciated, just don't let anyone rent space in your head, amigo. :thumbsup:

Cheers,

ferd
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Regarding the spectral features, yes, just what you'd see in a gas here on Earth. As per:



(I love that gif!)

For a while, cometary ground observations couldn't detect these modes, due to extinction in the atmosphere by telluric H2O. So the first unambiguous detection was from the Kuiper Airborne Observatory (1985, Halley), which got high enough above most of the water to be able to see it. In the mid 90s a method of detection from ground based telescopes was developed using IR 'hot bands', which don't suffer from extinction in the atmosphere. Since 2001, there has been ODIN, a satellite which detects H2O in the sub-mm wavelengths, at ~557 GHz.
Prior to all this, they had to rely on measurements of OH, usually from the 18cm line (from memory), given that it's a breakdown product of water.
That is where Thornhill, despite many decades of allegedly researching comets, came a cropper. His research obviously wasn't very good! Probably due to these things not being in press releases, where he seems to do most of his 'research.'

As for Sol; yes, he can get me (and others) quite exercised with his inane reposting of stuff that has already been answered. However, once I've (yet again) answered his nonsense, I'll usually calm down and often add a bit extra about his spiritual leaders' propensity to obfuscate, lie, omit and generally display scientific incompetence. That part is purely for the peanut gallery. One reason for that is that it ought to show Sol that every time he thinks he's entertaining his lurkers, they are also going to get a free lesson on the con artists whose nonsense they follow. You'd think he would have learned by now! If it turns one person away, or prevents just one from buying into this woo, then it'll be a worthwhile exercise!
In fact, if you look at the Rosetta thread on Thunderdolts, it pretty much looks like nobody is buying into it any more, and many of the posters who were active at the start are no longer on the site, let alone the thread. Not that I'm taking credit for that; it just shows that they are not all incapable of looking at the evidence and seeing that their model has failed. Horribly. :)
 
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jonesdave116 said:
Regarding the spectral features, yes, just what you'd see in a gas here on Earth. As per:

[qimg]http://thumbnails117.imagebam.com/53073/bac360530721890.jpg[/qimg]

(I love that gif!)

For a while, cometary ground observations couldn't detect these modes, due to extinction in the atmosphere by telluric H2O. So the first unambiguous detection was from the Kuiper Airborne Observatory (1985, Halley), which got high enough above most of the water to be able to see it. In the mid 90s a method of detection from ground based telescopes was developed using IR 'hot bands', which don't suffer from extinction in the atmosphere. Since 2001, there has been ODIN, a satellite which detects H2O in the sub-mm wavelengths, at ~557 GHz.
Prior to all this, they had to rely on measurements of OH, usually from the 18cm line (from memory), given that it's a breakdown product of water.
That is where Thornhill, despite many decades of allegedly researching comets, came a cropper. His research obviously wasn't very good! Probably due to these things not being in press releases, where he seems to do most of his 'research.'

As for Sol; yes, he can get me (and others) quite exercised with his inane reposting of stuff that has already been answered. However, once I've (yet again) answered his nonsense, I'll usually calm down and often add a bit extra about his spiritual leaders' propensity to obfuscate, lie, omit and generally display scientific incompetence. That part is purely for the peanut gallery. One reason for that is that it ought to show Sol that every time he thinks he's entertaining his lurkers, they are also going to get a free lesson on the con artists whose nonsense they follow. You'd think he would have learned by now! If it turns one person away, or prevents just one from buying into this woo, then it'll be a worthwhile exercise!
In fact, if you look at the Rosetta thread on Thunderdolts, it pretty much looks like nobody is buying into it any more, and many of the posters who were active at the start are no longer on the site, let alone the thread. Not that I'm taking credit for that; it just shows that they are not all incapable of looking at the evidence and seeing that their model has failed. Horribly. :)
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Thanks very much and good point about potential fence sitters among the lurkers.
 
ferd burfle said:
Thanks very much and good point about potential fence sitters among the lurkers.
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No worries. Download that gif, it rocks (well, rotates and vibrates)

I was a regular contributor on the Rosetta blog and, after heading off the initial influx of EU loons ('it's not H2O, it's OH' etc), we were only left with a few hardcore loons. There were some people on there whose knowledge well outstripped mine. Harvey, who was/ is a professor with a shed load of letters after his name, sjastro, Gerald, and numerous others. All of the nonsense the nutjobs were coming out with was straight out of the EU play book. Not even worth responding to, due to its idiocy.
However, Harvey (Prof. Harvey Rutt) did say that the only reason he responded to their lunacy was due to the fact that there may well be people following the blog who were not so scientifically clued up as others, and he only did it on their behalf, lest they get caught in the same sort of mythology woo trap that Sol finds himself in.
So, one can either ignore the ***gers, and hope they go away, or respond to their woo with actual science and links to it. I've decided on the latter option. For the time being.
 
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I'll finish with this, for the moment:

http://www.holoscience.com/wp/comet-wild-2/?article=ayxpdjcb

And how does the electric universe model fit this picture?............In addition to removing dust, the gargantuan electric forces of an interplanetary thunderbolt are able to loft entire mountains into space from the surface of a planet. Comets and asteroids can be formed this way.
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:dl:

Seriously, I didn't make that up! Time for breath, and then;

:dl:

Deary me. People actually believe this?
 
OK. So thought I'd finished, but we have, from lala land (Dunderdolts; I'm not linking it):

Jonesdave116 *flat out lied* when he claims that Thornill suggested that no comets contain any water/ice. That too is nothing but a strawman and nothing but a flat out *lie*. His error could conceivably be based on *ignorance* of Thornhill's beliefs of course, but let's just wait and see if Jonesnave116 admits that Thornhill never predicted that no water exists on any comets, or he gives us a real quote where Thornill claims that no comets contain any water.
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No, Michael, it is based on everything he has ever said about comets. Get it? How many times do I have to quote the fraud, before you actually get it? Huh? He has probably covered his a** somewhere, but the loon NEVER REPORTED the ice ejected from Tempel 1. UNDERSTAND? Despite prattling on about a non-existent pre-impact flash. He covered the EPOXI mission to Hartley 2; did he report the sodding shed loads of ice floating around that comet? Did he hell. What is that to you, MM? Lying, is what it is to me. Wanting to carry on his book sales. A completely fraudulent person, is what that is to me, old boy. A fraud. Prove me wrong.
 
OK, just for the lurkers:

http://www.holoscience.com/wp/deep-impact-2/

This website carried the only prediction of the unexpected initial flash before impact:
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Bloody well didn't happen. End of story! Outright lie. Nobody saw it except that loon.

With these successful predictions, what might we expect from Deep Impact 2?
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Well, not a shed load of bloody ice floating around the comet eh, Wal? Which is why you didn't bother making another entry on that particular mission. Fraud.

Like me to go on MM? About how H+ can travel at ~400 km/s and combine with extremely rare O- to create OH? How scientifically illiterate do you need to be to believe that? And how well trained and qualified scientists are going to mistake this for H2O? When the solar wind isn't even reaching the nucleus, as he must have known? Lies, Michael. The guy is a fraud. Read my previous posts. Just because you are allowed to post there does not mean you have to leave your brain at the front door, eh?
 
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So, hopefully everyone (i.e. lurkers) is sorted now. Thornhill is a pathological liar. Yes?

https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2015/08/30/predictions-for-comet-science-after-rosetta/
“The cathode jets strip and ionize atoms of oxygen from minerals on the comet and accelerate the negative ions away in a fine jet. The oxygen ions then combine with the protons in the solar wind to form the hydroxyl radical, OH, which was mistakenly assumed to be evidence of an ultraviolet breakdown product of water molecules from the comet. Oxygen and hydrogen have both been found in the comet’s coma, by the Rosetta ultraviolet spectrometer.
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And crap at predictions?
 
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This post is as good as any as an introduction ...
ferd burfle said:
Think for a minute, jd116. Who is Sol trying to influence with such buffoonery as equivocating an electron with a lightning bolt and an inorganic granule with an asteroid? Obviously not the scientically literate, right? Why is it he never tries to mount any kind of serious argument, never makes a declarative statement? We are not his intended audience, we're just the means to an end.
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jd116, and RC and tusenfem, have done a terrific job of showing just how hopeless "the EU" is, in terms of providing consistent, objective, independently verifiable explanations of relevant data on comets (etc). Whether such explanations come directly from what Sol88 posts, or what the "electrical theorists" Talbott and Thornhill have published.

They have also been wonderful in educating readers - whether lurkers or not - on various aspects of plasma physics, space science, etc.

However, I think there's one aspect which has not really gotten the prominence it deserves, namely that whatever "the EU" is, it is not science.

Yes, it's incredibly easy to find things T&T (and Sol88, and Scott, and MM, and ...) have said (in documents openly available on the internet) which may be characterized as "lies", "fraud", and so on. But doing so misses a key point, I think. A great many of these, I submit, are "alternative facts", and acceptable as such in the worldview of a great many EU fans. To see this, take a step back for a moment, and look at "the EU" more broadly.

Brian Koberlein said:
The rest of your comments seem to focus on the fact that I’m either not representing EU fairly, or I simply don’t get it. I’ve actually dealt with a lot of EU supporters, and the biggest problem is that you never know which position on the spectrum they’re going to take:

Plasma astrophysics is a legitimate science! (I completely agree.)
Mainstream cosmologists have problems their models can’t answer (True)
Plasma physics could explain dark matter/dark energy/no big bang (Interesting, but I’m not convinced)
The Sun is powered by interstellar electric fields (No)
The Valles Marineris on Mars was carved electrically! (Hoo boy…)
EU means the Universe is 6,000 years old (facepalm)
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(source)

It takes just a few minutes of careful reading - e.g. of the posts in the Thunderdolts Forum - to appreciate that all these positions are acceptable to EU fans (though the last one is, perhaps, not acceptable to the (self-appointed) "electrical theorists"). In terms of underlying physics, the viewpoints acceptable to EU fans are equally extraordinary and diverse (if you have a few idle moments, I think you can compile a list of ten real eye-openers in less than half an hour).

Yet this is not seen as a weakness of "the EU", by EU fans, but a great strength. :jaw-dropp

In fact, just about the only thing which such fans do seem to agree on is that calling the EU "pseudoscience" is indeed an instant permaban offense. And thus that who do so - loudly, publicly - fully deserve all the trolling a handful of EU ardents unleash on them.

How easy is it to show that "the EU" has a great many features in common with a religious cult? That there are very few differences between "the EU" and a religious cult? I submit that it's extremely easy to do so.

And that, I think, is why calling the EU pseudoscience (or anti-science) arouses such a vehement response in so many EU fans ... the truth hurts, deeply. It is also why there is such apparent persistence by EU fans, to promote the cult in fora such as the ISF, in the comments sections of physics-blogs, and the Rosetta blog. And also why responding rationally - with chapter and verse of the relevant bits of science and objective analyses of data - has little effect on these fans.

So, yes please, by all means jd116, RC, and tusenfem keep up the good work of pointing out the inconsistencies etc in what Sol88 posts, and in educating ISF readers and lurkers.

May I suggest adding some words about "the EU" being anti-science? Concentrating more on its resemblance to a religious cult (and less on "lies", "fraud", etc)?
 
JeanTate said:
<snipped for space>

And that, I think, is why calling the EU pseudoscience (or anti-science) arouses such a vehement response in so many EU fans ... the truth hurts, deeply. It is also why there is such apparent persistence by EU fans, to promote the cult in fora such as the ISF, in the comments sections of physics-blogs, and the Rosetta blog. And also why responding rationally - with chapter and verse of the relevant bits of science and objective analyses of data - has little effect on these fans.

So, yes please, by all means jd116, RC, and tusenfem keep up the good work of pointing out the inconsistencies etc in what Sol88 posts, and in educating ISF readers and lurkers.

May I suggest adding some words about "the EU" being anti-science? Concentrating more on its resemblance to a religious cult (and less on "lies", "fraud", etc)?
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I would agree that it bears far more resemblance to a religion/ cult than it does to science. The problem with EUers, in common with e.g, IDers, is that they try to pass off their beliefs as being scientific. One would struggle to find anything vaguely scientific in what they write.
However, I think this belief system resembles religion due to the fact that Wal & Dave are unashamedly pro-Velikovskian. Pretty much every piece of nonsense they come out with will, if you scratch away at it, reveal itself to be Velikovskian in nature. Such as the need for comets to be rocks, blasted off planets during a recent game of interplanetary billiards.
If one is basing the whole of ones worldview on Velikovsky, then it is, by definition, absolutely nothing whatever to do with science. It simply has to be a belief system, involving faith, and a suspension of one's higher thinking skills.
Even with the scientists that they do invoke, such as Birkeland and Alfvén, the regard in which they are held borders on a cultish hero worship. Very few of them actually seem to have much of a clue about what Alfvén, in particular, wrote. They just trot out the usual whines of his about the dreaded 'mainstream.'
So, indeed, whatever it is, it isn't science.
 
Okay, for the extremely hard of thinking lurkers;

What does the idiot Thornhill's model involve? Well, it involves Velikovskian woo, doesn't it? The comet has to be rock, yes? Is there any evidence that they are rock? No, would be the answer to that. The idiot wants to change the whole theory of gravity (with a BSc) so that his comets can become rock, despite umpteen observations that they bloody well aren't. Yes? Not going too fast for you, am I?
So what does the scientifically illiterate idiot do when the results come back that don't happen to match his non-scientific nonsense? Ignore them. i.e. Lie. End of story, the bloke is a fraud.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050704predictions.htm

For the survival of the standard model, nothing is more crucial than finding an abundance of ices on or below the surface of the nucleus of Tempel 1. It is not sufficient to find water merely in the comet’s coma. Negative oxygen ions from cathodic etching of rock minerals in the nucleus will combine with protons from the solar wind to form water in the coma and tail. Spectra of comets already reveal the presence of negative oxygen ions. Moreover, the ions exhibit forbidden lines characteristic of a strong electric field. There is no conventional explanation for these observations.
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So, where do we start with this? Let's take the first sentence:

For the survival of the standard model, nothing is more crucial than finding an abundance of ices on or below the surface of the nucleus of Tempel 1.
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And they did. Not just at Tempel 1, but at Hartley 2. And Thornhill decided not to mention it to his flock, either on Thunderdolts or hollowscience. Very strange, given that, by his own words, it is 'crucial' to the standard model. And this is what I mean about lying by omission. It is simply so that he can keep spewing out his neo-Velikovskian rubbish to his deluded followers.

Let's have a look at the second bit:

It is not sufficient to find water merely in the comet’s coma. Negative oxygen ions from cathodic etching of rock minerals in the nucleus will combine with protons from the solar wind to form water in the coma and tail.
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Which is a complete pile of scientific fail. As mentioned several times, H+ from the solar wind is not going to plough into extremely hard to find O-(see below), and form OH! Apart from the scientific implausibility of this process, a quick run through of the numbers involved would have shown him that this gets you nowhere near enough OH (or H2O, or whatever he's trying to do here) to account for the amount of H2O outgassed by comets.

On to the next bit:

Spectra of comets already reveal the presence of negative oxygen ions.
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Yes they did, at Halley, from the breakdown of other molecules. And had a ratio to neutral densities of 10-6! So this is just another pile of fail.

And to the last sentence:

Moreover, the ions exhibit forbidden lines characteristic of a strong electric field. There is no conventional explanation for these observations.
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Well, Tom Bridgman had an explanation! Then again, he's a scientist, and Wal isn't - he's just playing at it:

Where did Thornhill get bizarre mis-understanding about forbidden lines?

Forbidden lines are created by metastable states in the atom, which have a lifetime much longer than the regular atomic states. Under normal circumstances, these states get de-excited by collisions with other atoms before they have a chance to radiate a photon. However, under extremely low pressures, the states will not be de-excited by collisions and will de-excite by emitting a photon at a frequency correspond to the 'forbidden line'. Electric fields may be in the environment, but they are not required to form forbidden lines.
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https://dealingwithcreationisminast.../11/electric-comets-failures-of-electric.html

So, yet more fail.

And all this from just one, short paragraph.

Thorhill's whole contribution to pseudoscience has been one long, sad story of epic failure. This is due to him believing in scientifically impossible woo of the sort promulgated by the loon Velikovsky. When you start from there, there is only one way to go. He should take a metaphorical Japanese sword, and do the decent thing. He won't though, because we all know that this scientifically illiterate nobody is now going to prove to us that gravity is an electrical force! Yeah, right. Give it up Wal, you're a Wally!
 
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jonesdave116 said:
Tell me again; where is your rock? Where were the 'discharges to the nucleus'? Why was the comet 'remarkably non-magnetic'? Where was this 'radial electric field'? Why didn't it charge up the comet, like Wal said it would? Why was water vapour pouring out of it when the solar wind was over 1500 km away? Where were your double layers (not that Wal mentioned them; that's your own fantasy)? Etc, etc.
R.I.P.
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Whoops, that was wrong. Wally did indeed mention them!

Most of the voltage difference between the comet and the solar plasma is taken up in a double layer of charge, called a plasma sheath, that surrounds the comet. When the electrical stress is great enough, the sheath glows and appears as the typical cometary coma and tail. Diffuse electrical discharges occur in the sheath and at the nucleus, radiating a variety of frequencies, including x-rays.
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Which is a strange thing to claim, in 2006, when 20 years earlier six spacecraft had flown to within various distances of Halley, and had found no such thing. Giotto even flew through the diamagnetic cavity, and to within ~600 km of the nucleus. Given that the imaginary double layers could not be within the cavity, this rules them out as having any possible contribution to the observed outgassing of H2O and other gases.
At least I now know why Sol has such an obsession with them. I just thought it was an Alfvén thing.
 
Again, this post is as good as any to introduce my comments

jonesdave116 said:
What are you talking about? Yet another quote from a press release, aimed at the layman? Picked up that trick from Thornhill have we? Try reading the science, just for a change:

[...]

BRIGHT ICE SPOTS ON THE NUCLEUS OF COMET 67PCHURYUMOVGERASIMENKO AS OBSERVED BY ROSETTA OSIRIS AND VIRTIS INSTRUMENTS
Barucci, M. A. et al
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016cosp...41E.152B

[...]

Not to mention (which Thornhill didn't!) the ejection of ice grains at Tempel 1 and Hartley 2.

So, I repeat; what are you on about?
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While it may take some time to find them, it's not all that hard to cite published papers whose contents are clearly and obviously inconsistent with the "Electric Comet" ideas as published by T&T, Sol, MM, etc. Despite the fact that such "Electric Universe"-based ideas are almost wholly devoid of quantification, numbers etc.

However, I think there's a fundamental flaw in all the commentary on Rosetta mission results1 from EU zealots, one that points directly at the anti-science nature of "the EU". A flaw which is rarely pointed out, and EU zealots rarely challenged on.

OSIRIS (Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System) produces (produced) images, which are calibrated data often displayed as a 2D array of pixels. To be of use in science, one must have confidence in data such as this; how can you be certain that it includes "photos of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko", for example?

Specifically, given EU zealots' intense skepticism (or hostility towards, or hatred of, or ...) of "mainstream science" (particularly as it relates to comets), you'd expect they'd subject such data to "extreme vetting", wouldn't you? Starting perhaps with "how do we know that Rosetta was anywhere near 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko?"

AFAICS, no EU zealot has ever addressed this question, publicly anyway (maybe one did, in a post in the Rosetta blog?). And that, in and of itself, points to "the EU" being something other than science. You see, in "the EU", G is extremely variable (see this ISF thread for details), and Rosetta ended up near 67/P after three Earth "gravity assists" and one Mars one, as well as two asteroid flybys. The relevant navigation, and burning of rocket fuel, relied not on "Thornhill's theory of gravity" but on Newton's. How is it possible - assuming "the EU" is fundamentally scientific - to accept that Rosetta "arrived at" 67/P, given that an incorrect theory of gravity was used to get it there?

This is just one of possibly thousands of questions I'd expect EU zealots to have asked about data from OSIRIS, to confirm to their skeptical minds that that data is what the Rosetta team says it is. How could radio communications between ground stations and spacecraft work, given that the IPM is permeated by intense "Birkeland currents" in "dark mode" (these power the Sun)? Why did none of the rocket motors on Rosetta fire unexpectedly, given the intense electrical fields it must have passed through? (that's just two of such questions).

"OSIRIS comprises two cameras: a high resolution Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) and a Wide Angle Camera (WAC). Both are unobstructed off-axis mirror systems, equipped with two filter wheels containing 8 positions each, and with backside illuminated CCD detectors comprising 2048 x 2048 pixels with a pixel size of 13.5 µm." (source) Per T&T (and Sol, and MM, and ...), 67/P is (mostly) rock, with a density waaay higher than that of ice, and that the apparent observed density (ice-like) is due to intense electric fields. Likewise, the streams in OSIRIS images are electric discharges (I think I got that right), which produce intense x-ray emissions far beyond what mainstream scientists expect. Etc. Given this incredible electric/electromagnetic environment, how is it that the OSIRIS CCDs weren't frequently overloaded? that the electronics were not fried? that the data not riddled with artifacts caused by stray electrons or x-rays?

And so on.

As I said, I don't recall reading anything by an EU zealot explaining how Rosetta's OSIRIS images are consistent with "the EU", in terms of how Rosetta got to 67/P, how OSIRIS obtained its data, and how that data was received here on Earth (do you, dear reader?). To not do a detailed analysis to address these fundamental questions, and yet accept OSIRIS' data at face value, is surely hypocritical in the extreme, isn't it?

No, it's not.

Because whatever the EU is, it isn't science; EU zealots merely pretend to care about objectivity, consistency, independent verifiability, ...

1 Not only Rosetta of course; almost all remote sensing space probes
 
jonesdave116 said:
I would agree that it bears far more resemblance to a religion/ cult than it does to science. The problem with EUers, in common with e.g, IDers, is that they try to pass off their beliefs as being scientific. One would struggle to find anything vaguely scientific in what they write.
However, I think this belief system resembles religion due to the fact that Wal & Dave are unashamedly pro-Velikovskian. Pretty much every piece of nonsense they come out with will, if you scratch away at it, reveal itself to be Velikovskian in nature. Such as the need for comets to be rocks, blasted off planets during a recent game of interplanetary billiards.
If one is basing the whole of ones worldview on Velikovsky, then it is, by definition, absolutely nothing whatever to do with science. It simply has to be a belief system, involving faith, and a suspension of one's higher thinking skills.
Even with the scientists that they do invoke, such as Birkeland and Alfvén, the regard in which they are held borders on a cultish hero worship. Very few of them actually seem to have much of a clue about what Alfvén, in particular, wrote. They just trot out the usual whines of his about the dreaded 'mainstream.'
So, indeed, whatever it is, it isn't science.
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I think you're right in identifying Velikovsky's writings as the inspiration for much of what T&T have published.

However, it's clearly not the whole story. For example, there's a (sub-)cult which adheres to "natural philosophy", with core beliefs which overlap only somewhat with what you find in Velikovsky's writings. This cult is also pseudoscientific (actually anti-science), with relativity their common, most basic enemy (QM too, but more ambivalence there, possibly because they don't understand QM). In a recent thread whose content overlaps somewhat with this one, there's a post which rather neatly summarizes this cult's views:
michaelsuede said:
I understand your (the standard model) solution completely, and I'm saying it has about the same scientific and philosophical value as Ptolemy's epicycles.

There's no doubt that you can get a reasonably accurate model of behavior with the standard model solution. It's just that the solution tells you absolutely nothing meaningful about the causal nature of gravity.

Philosophically speaking, it is impossible for any solution involving spacetime to provide a meaningful answer as to what causes gravity, given that spacetime isn't some tangible thing beyond being a useful way to mathematically model the behavior of physical systems - not unlike Newton's laws of gravitation.

They work - they just tell you nothing about the underlying causes.

Thornhill and Van Flandern on the other hand are also providing solutions, that not only address behavior but also the related causes. Even if they are wrong (which they aren't), they are at least a million miles closer to providing some understanding of the underlying causes.

Further, your example is applying Van Flandern's theory to a totally separate problem that is completely unrelated and may have completely different underlying causes and explanations. Your argument is logical, but it's also fallacious.
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(my bold)

As ms knows very well, Thornhill does not provide a solution which "address[es] behavior" (i.e. is objectively consistent with all relevant experimental and observational results)! :eye-poppi

And there's those who seem to have little understanding of anything much, whether "the EU" or physics or astronomy. But they seem to hate mainstream science (why?), and as EU zealots clearly also hate science, they hang out together.

Perhaps most curious is a very small minority who seem quite unfazed about dropping almost any - indeed, almost every - core EU idea ... the Sun is not powered by giant interstellar Birkelend currents? OK. Comets are not rocky? Sure, why not. Get them started on magnetic reconnection, say, or the redshifts of galaxies and quasars however, ... (that this is primarily anti-science can be seen in the extraordinary number of times the words "believe" and "belief" are used, as if a religious cult and science differ only in their belief systems).
 
Get them started on magnetic reconnection, say..........
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Ahh, would this be the magnetic reconnection that Alfvén's mate, Falthammar, doesn't seem to have a problem with, as I linked to previously? :)
 
Sol88 said:
It is concluded that the dust particles are strongly charged and partially coupled to cometary plasmas (or vice versa).
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It is not concluded that this is evidence for a delusion that comets are rocks blasted from the Earth by electrical discharges from a close by Venus in recent times.
 
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