Merged The Electric Comet Theory Part III/SAFIRE

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JeanTate

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In one of the Electric Comet threads, Haig introduced SAFIRE (or maybe it was Sol88?). In the Phys.org ("PO") comments on an article entitled A celestial butterfly emerges from its dusty cocoon, cantdrive85 ("cd") also introduced SAFIRE.

Here's how it stated:
cantdrive85 said:
It would also seem as if BK completely dismisses lab experiment as being valid to science. He prefers his pet theory to rigorous scientific discovery. What else would you expect from a pseudoscientific metaphysicist tho?
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"BK" refers to Brian Koberlein, and the blog post cd cited first cited is Hot Topic; however, the one he was basing his comments on is actually Quacks Like a Duck (as he later clarified).

The part in this blog post which apparently triggered his ire is this:
For example, there’s a recent experiment by electric universe supporters known as the SAFIRE project. The basic setup is a plasma globe (or Tesla ball) where things like voltage, current, and gas pressure can be varied. What the project shows is that there are some broad similarities between a plasma ball and the Sun. There are current hot spots, an overall surface glow, and the surrounding plasma gets hotter than the surface of the ball. The similarities are kind of interesting to see, but from them many EU supporters claim that this demonstrates the Sun is actually electrically charged. That is, the similarities show that the underlying physics must be the same.
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I asked cd about whether the project had published any papers (no), and then "in what way(s) does SAFIRE test anything to do with the Sun?"

Here's his response:
It's an exercise in approximation, fulfilling and developing the quantitative constraints you keep blathering about, further developing our knowledge of plasma discharge given certain conditions, and addressing questions regarding anomalous phenomena observed by astrophysicists. Not purely mathematical gymnastics but experimentation, ya know that ol' nugget.
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I invited cd to come over here to have a deep, detailed discussion of SAFIRE, and its role in testing "the Electric Sun", partly because PO's comments are severely restricted in length and formatting. Rather than wait for him to take up my offer, I thought I'd be proactive.

From memory, the link in BK's blog post is the same as the one Haig (or Sol88) posted, repeatedly; it's an interesting read ;)
 
I suspect the argument wouldn't get very far, tbh, JT. To quote from the latest (AFAIK) SAFIRE pdf: "Further refinements in Juregen’s theory have been put forth,(7) but the exact mechanism that could account for an electrically powered sun is still under question."
So the nonsense model proposed by Jurgens, has been added to! The reference in the text leads to Don Scott's equally silly Electric Sky, which was comprehensively taken apart by Tom Bridgman. And, no doubt, a number of high school physics students.
So for them to say there is no exact mechanism, is double speak for "they haven't got a clue."
It's all still dependent on an Electric God.
Any amount of messing around in a lab, even if it were scalable, is pointless without telling us where the power source comes from, and why we don't detect it.
And good luck to them scaling up the nuclear reactions they'll need to account for the neutrino flux!
 
From the section entitled "Experimental", sub-section "Instrumentation" of the PDF:
Anderson+ said:
SAFIRE was envisioned to proceed in three stages, the first was a thorough assessment of the electric sun model and how it relates to the current fusion/gravitational model.12 The next stage was to assemble a small scale “prove out” to test instrumentation capabilities and satisfactory concepts. The work presented in this paper will report on this second stage work. The final third stage would be the actual scaled instrument capable of supplying the desired wattage upon the electrode assembly.
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12 is M. Childs. “SAFIRE: Stellar Atmospheric Function in Regulation Experiment”, 2013 Electric Universe Conference, Albuquerque, NM. I could not find this, but did find two videos of M. Childs making presentations entitled "SAFIRE: An Experimental Investigation of the Electric Sun" (Parts 1 and 2). These do not seem to be a summary of "a thorough assessment of the electric sun model and how it relates to the current fusion/gravitational model". Perhaps it will be included in the paper which reports the results of the "final third stage".

Despite what Anderson+ write, "this paper" seem to go rather beyond the stated scope. For example:
Anderson+ said:
The parallel between certain aspects of the sun’s atmosphere and such a discharge may lie in the supergranulation aspect of the photosphere. Figure 5 shows a typical high resolution picture of a sunspot, showing the photospheric granules “reaching” thorough the atmosphere in the opening. On the right are the anode tufts in our experiments. It is logical to assume that with a higher current density they would closely packed and forced together.
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According to cd, the third stage results will be presented shortly, at an EU conference. I expect this presentation will also be a video; will a paper follow?

Should the authors seek to publish in a relevant peer-reviewed journal, they will likely be asked to fix the real bloopers in the PDF; for example: "Visible light emission arises from the atmosphere (photosphere and chromosphere) of the sun, not the core. This is known because the temperature of the layer below the chromosphere (the layer below the sunspots as in Figure 5) was measured using various spectrographic techniques, and is estimated to only be ~4000°K."
 
jonesdave116 said:
I suspect the argument wouldn't get very far, tbh, JT.
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Maybe not, but this thread may turn out to be a good resource.

Any amount of messing around in a lab, even if it were scalable, is pointless without telling us where the power source comes from, and why we don't detect it.
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Well, one very useful result may be that the preferred model, for how the Sun is powered, will be quantified to some extent. For example, one of the scaling parameters SAFIRE is being designed around is the "surface wattage as the sun". From Figure 7, this seems to be ~64000000 W/m2. Assuming the final report contains details of the scaling, together with the voltages and currents, there may be something which Scott has never opined on.

Also, a perfectly legitimate question will be, as you say, what is the analog on the Sun for the wires in the pedestal, through which the current flows.

And good luck to them scaling up the nuclear reactions they'll need to account for the neutrino flux!
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To be fair, that's beyond the scope of SAFIRE.
 
So it sounds like the plan is:

a) Build a big glow-discharge tube
b) Run a bunch of basically uninteresting glow-discharge experiments
c) Take photographs of the discharges to put next to photos of the Sun.
d) Brag about how the photo-comparisons were obtained from "real laboratory experiments"
e) Ignore everything else we know about the Sun.
 
This is just a modern version of Birkeland's 1908 experiments with terrella ("little Earth"!) where he made bad analogies with solar activity using images of electrical discharges from metallic spheres containing magnets and in a high electric field.

They are already repeating this mistake in the small-scale experiment (JMP and SAFIRE: What makes the sun shine? (PDF)).
  1. There are tufts "caused by enhanced electric fields around high points on the surface of the anode". They compare a image of a sunspot surrounding granulation with an image of tufts all around their anode :eek:! They seem ignorant that solar granules are the top of convection cells distributed around the Sun with lifetimes of hours. They are not separated "tufts" that can last as long as they want them to last.
  2. Figure 5 (actually 9) - A quiescent anode discharge in the SBJ unit (left) and a screen capture from Stereo-A Secchi EUVI detector at 171 nanometer wavelength.

More mistakes in the "Spectroscopy" section.
  • Sunspots are in the photosphere (not a vague "below the chromosphere").
  • The photosphere has a temperature of ~5700°K (not ~4000°K which may be the sunspot temperature).
  • No one should think that the "standard fusion model" explains the high temperature of the corona. The coronal heating problem is that the heat from the Sun from fusion alone cannot heat the corona and thus there have to be non-thermal mechanisms to do this!
  • Magnetic reconnection in the form of nano-flares happens to be one of the mechanisms to solve the coronal heating problem.
  • An implied delusion that an electrical discharge is the only mechanism that can ionize atoms as if they were ignorant about the temperature of the Sun!
  • The actual delusion that electrical discharges (such as lightning) can happen in plasma.
 
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Whoops, looks like Mozina may not be too happy! From the Thunderdolts forum;
Mozina: "I'm curious if the Safire experiments include any work with a *cathode* solar model, or if it's been primarily limited to studying the anode/Jergen's/Scott solar model?"

The "cathode" model is his one

Turns out they aren't looking at that one, only Scott's equally nutty model. There may be trouble ahead.
 
This is a continuation from here, and as is usual, the split point was arbitrary. Participants are free to copy & paste from the previous iteration of the thread.
Posted By: Agatha








As has been pointed out by RC,, the flaring mentioned by Talbott is (presumably) to do with an increase in the non-existent electrical woo that he believed (surely he can't still believe it?) causes the jets at comets.
We already knew before Rosetta that the jets aren't any kind of electric woo. I point the interested reader to some of the papers on the Hartley 2 mission. CO2 gas and ice, was the outcome in that particular case. So, Sol discussing particular aspects of perfectly mainstream science, regarding what happens in a cometary coma during a CME, is a totally pointless discussion. Interesting, but totally unrelated to any of the woo dreamed up by T & T.
For what it's worth, we know that solar wind heavy ions are responsible for the x-ray emission seen at comets. So, an increase in the solar wind flux should see an increase in x-ray production. Want to call that a flare? Fine, if you must, but it's a perfectly mainstream one. The whole of the sunward coma will be compressed. There has been a paper on this. Again, very interesting, but nothing to do with EU woo.
Given how vague the predictions of Talbott were, it is hard to know exactly what he was on about. Which is the whole ethos of EU; keep it as vague as possible, so that you can later claim to be right. A bit like tabloid psychics.
 
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What Sol needs to concentrate on are the core claims of T & T, regarding their lunatic 'electric comet' idea. That is;

1) The jets are electrical discharges to (from?) the nucleus: Either way, that has been 100% debunked by observation and measurement. Or lack thereof.

2) The comet is a rock: Yet again, 100% disproven. By the impact at Tempel 1, and the results from MIRO and CONSERT at 67P.

3) The comet charges up due to a radial electric field around the Sun: Zero evidence of any such thing.

4) The H2O at comets is not H2O, but is OH, that stupid scientists mistake for H2O (I kid you not!): Well that was dead long before T & T wrote their horrific poster on electric comets. From 1985, in fact. And many observations since. Definitively, unarguably, 100% H2O. Solid and gaseous.

5) Said OH will be caused by solar wind H+ striking O- ions, which have been electrically machined from the non-existent rock of the comet (deary me): Not going to happen. SW H+ is far too energetic to combine with anything. There is naff all O- for it to combine with anyway, even if it were possible. And, when you do the sums, it turns out that even if every H+ ion was somehow involved in production of OH (or H2O, or magic fairy dust, whatever), then there ain't anywhere near enough of it to account for even 1 litre of water production. By many orders of magnitude. So, all in all, a really dumb idea. And very unscientific. Which is not at all surprising, given who dreamed it up.

So, Sol, how do you think all that has gone? Not well, really, eh? Console yourself by having another look at all those pretty pictures from Hartley 2, back in 2010, of all that fluffy ice floating around the comet. And then ask yourself, "why are we still discussing this woo?"
 
Sol88 said:
Tusenfem says no, comets do not "flare" with the arrival of a CME. :thumbsup:

I think the term "flare" may need to be defined because the comet most certainly responded to the CME and I'd say it in fact flared from it's "normal" state to a more active (electrically speaking) state.
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No there was no "flare", it was just the CME arriving, compressing the magentic field, the higher density of SW particles interacting with the neutrals (ionization) and the ions (charge exchange) and other processes.

Has absolutely noting to do with T's flaring electrically speaking.
 
Sol88 : The persistent delusion that there are images of comets that are rocks

Sol88 said:
As imaged by ROLIS and CIVA?
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27 July 2017 Sol88: The persistent and irrelevant delusion that there are images of comets showing that they are rocks.
ROLIS and CIVA were cameras on the Philae lander. During the decent they took images of a comet nucleus made up of ices and dust.
Reality Check said:
The model here is that the surface of comets initially consist of a mixture of ices and dust. Sublimation when comets get close to the Sun form a layer of weakly cohesive dust on the nucleus surface.
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A layer of dust was detected by the Philae lander. Underneath that layer of dust was a layer of ice. The MUPUS instrument that you know about found that this ice layer was harder than expected.
The CONSERT instrument in the Rosetta orbiter used the Philae lander to measure the density of the interior of 67P which was not the density of rock as in your delusion as you already know.

We have been through EU abysmal ignorance of astronomical images leading to the delusion of "I see rocks in images of comes made of ices and dust" a few times before. for example, 16 February 2016 Sol88: a follower of the deluded Thunderbolts cult who has the insane idea that he can look at an image of a comet and tell what it is made of
That composition is hard to establish from images is illustrated by Ziggurat's earlier post I've asked this of EU advocates before, I'm going to give it another shot. Here are two photographs. What kind of material are we looking at in each picture?

I am surprised that we did not see that delusion applied to jonesdave116's image in this post a few days ago on of Tempel 1! Look at all of the "rocks" on the surface :p! We would see yet again denial that Deep Impact ejected water and dust. And ...
Two years and counting of fear of doing basic physics: 25 June 2015 Sol88: Use a impact calculator to calculate the size of the crater on a comet made of rock by the Deep Impact impactor.
 
Sol88: Did the Stardust mission sample the subsurface composition of comet Wild 2

Reality Check said:
We also have Thornhill's now 12 year old (:eek:) web page with lies about confirmed Deep Impact predictions
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My previous analysis of the lies, etc. on this web page did not include the Stardust fantasies from Thornhill.

The "Subsurface composition" paragraph is several lies, starting with the title :eek:! Let us see if Sol88 can understand this:
27 July 2017 Sol88: Did the Stardust mission sample the subsurface composition of comet Wild 2?
 
Sol88: Where is the EU prediction of subsurface composition

27 July 2017 Sol88: Where is the EU prediction of subsurface composition in the "Subsurface composition" paragraph or linked web page?
 
Sol88: What does a deluded denial of Solar System formation have to do with comets

27 July 2017 Sol88: What does a deluded denial of the formation of the Solar System have to do with the EU subsurface composition of comets
Their delusion is that planets whizz around the Solar System to match their fantasies.

We have had measurements of the subsurface composition of Tempel 1 since 2005 (the Deep Impact mission) and from 2017 there is 67P (Rosetta mission).
The ages of the planets and Sun match, i.e. they formed together.
Planets have not "remained in their present orbits ever since". The Moon was probably formed by a planet colliding with the Earth. The Nice model has Jupiter starting close to the Sun and migrating outward.
 
New Comet: C/2017 O1 ASAS-SN Takes Earth by Surprise
On a long term parabolic orbit probably measured in the millions of years, O1 ASAS-SN has an orbit inclined 40 degrees to the ecliptic, and reaches perihelion 1.5 AU from the Sun just outside the orbit of Mars on October 14th. This is most likely Comet C/2017 O1 ASAS-SN’s first passage through the inner solar system.
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So in the EU delusion, a comet that has a period of millions of years and thus last visited the inner solar system millions of years ago (before the existence of human beings) was blasted off the Earth some thousands of years ago as reported in human myths :eye-poppi!
 
Then to be more constructive, some of the latest Rosetta papers:

Marshall et al.: Spatially resolved evolution of the local H2O production rates
of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from the MIRO instrument on Rosetta

Gunell et al.: Ion acoustic waves at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko - Observations and computations

Hoang et al.: The heterogeneous coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
as seen by ROSINA: H2O, CO2, and CO from September 2014 to February 2016

Skorov et al.: Is near-surface ice the driver of dust activity on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Then there are lots more papers in the ADS data base.

There is also the EPSC meeting in September with 2 cometary sessions:
Comets: Observations, laboratory simulations and models Oral session
Comets: Observations, laboratory simulations and models Poster session

What do we know and what don’t we know following the cessation of the operational phase of the Rosetta mission Oral session
What do we know and what don’t we know following the cessation of the operational phase of the Rosetta mission Poster session
 
An interesting line from he EU conference woo:
few if any “dirty snowball” comets;
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https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2017/01/22/eu2017-homepage-2/

Strange that, eh? Few? So, they still think 'dirty snowballs' are possible? Wow. Mainstream gave that up a while ago. Shame that these people are still basing their unscientific nonsense on Whipple's model from the 1950's. Having said that, they still think it is possible. Weird. Wish they'd make their minds up. Come on Wal, what is it that you actually believe, you old charlatan? So how are you going to spin this? I've got an idea; given that all of the comets that have been visited, and all of the comets that have been spectroscopically investigated by instruments that can detect H2O have detected H2O, why not start your woo with comets that have never been visited, nor probed by IR or sub-mm? Good place to start for a conman, yes?
 
To put that woo in more context :
Speakers will not be projecting popular ideas and mathematical contrivances into an imagined future. EU2017 will call for science minus the fiction. No Big Bang, no dark matter, no black hole singularities, no neutron stars, no thermonuclear core of the sun, no planets on clockwork orbits for billions of years; few if any “dirty snowball” comets; and no claim whatsoever that comets and asteroids trace to the primitive origins of the solar system (one of the more popular fictions).
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All sorts of idiocy in the Thunderbolts dogma.
  • The evidence for the Big Bang is overwhelming, e.g. the CMB temperature, black body spectrum and power spectrum.
  • The evidence for dark matter is very strong with many independent lines of evidence.
  • Black hole singularities are a simple consequence of the known laws of physics, i.e. nothing we know can stop their formation.
    In reality this is Thunderbolts idiocy that black holes do not exist. But that does not depend on the singularities in GR which are expected to vanish when QM is added. If there is matter with enough density a black hole will form, with or without a singularity.
  • "no neutron stars" is really delusional when we have observed neutron stars since 1967.
  • "no thermonuclear core of the sun" is abysmally ignorant about basic astronomy.
    Basic astronomy: A stable star needs a balance between gravity and pressure. That needs an interior where pressure and temperature increases with depth. That leads to conditions at the core of a star where thermonuclear reactions have to happen. We have observed the neutrino flux produced by that fusion.
    This may be the repeated idiocy of the solved solar neutrino problem + neutrino oscillations do not exist.
  • "no planets on clockwork orbits for billions of years"
    At last - simple ignorance rather than delusions!
    The Nice model has Jupiter starting close to the Sun and migrating outward. Planetary migration is a standard part of the formation of planetary systems.
    We do not have "clockwork orbits" as in fixed orbits. Interactions change the orbits.
    This is probably the Thunderbolts idiocy of believing in planets whizzing around to fit with what they imagines myths say they do, e.g. Venus erupting from Jupiter, Saturn moving around, etc.
  • The comet delusion is that only a few and maybe no comets are made of ices and dust.
    Over 60 years of comet observations show that assertion is abysmally deluded about comets. No comet has been measured to have a density of rock. Deep Impact did not hit rock and ejected water and dust. Then there is the Rosetta mission.
  • A lie about "one of the more popular fictions".
    The scientific evidence is that "comets and asteroids trace to the primitive origins of the solar system".
    Meteorites are dated to be a bit younger than the Sun, like the Earth and Moon.
    Comets can have periods of millions of years, i.e. that is a minimum age for comets.
    Some comets have hyperbolic orbits so we see them just once. That means that they have a origin in a existing reservoir of bodies, e.g. the Oort cloud.
    No comet has an orbit that originates in the inner solar system at the Earth or other planet as in the Thunderbolts delusion.
    Stardust collected dust from a comet that are consistent with material from the early solar system, including possible interstellar dust particles.
    One of the Thunderbolts lies seems to be that Stardust confirmed their delusion that comets are rock blasted from planets. However nothing characteristic of planets was detected - no basalt, granite, limestone, sandstone, etc.
 
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