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To: Right Wing Professor
Everything You Know Is Wrong Dept.: On Thunderstorms    11/05/2003
Time to rewrite the textbooks again, or maybe throw them away till a new theory comes along.  This time it’s about lightning.  There isn’t a big enough electric field in a cloud to make lightning possible, claims Joseph Dwyer, a Florida Tech physicist, as reported in EurekAlert.   There is a limit to how much charge a cloud can accumulate.  The triggering mechanism also “remains a mystery.”  Obviously lightning happens.  So how are we going to explain it now?  We don’t know.  “Although everyone is familiar with lightning, we still don’t know much about how it really works,” said Dwyer.
Here is a phenomenon observed for thousands of years, based on electromagnetic theory that is well understood, and we cannot explain it.  The assumptions were wrong, and what we have been taught to believe “for generations” is wrong.  The point is not that this phenomenon is impervious to scientific explanation.  But if something this observable, this physical, this amenable to real-time analysis and modeling is so baffling, how can evolutionists be cocky about processes they imagine occurred millions of years ago?

Link

12 posted on 11/12/2003 9:02:10 AM PST by bondserv (Alignment is critical.)
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To: bondserv
The Grand Canyon cuts through a ridge called the Kaibab uplift, which proves the flood happened.

No. It only suggests that there may have been water present. Perhaps a flood, perhaps a trickle. This, in itself, does not prove "the flood".

14 posted on 11/12/2003 9:14:33 AM PST by elbucko (Once you admit your cuckoo, your' re half-way out of the clock.)
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To: bondserv
Stupid headline. Not everything we know is wrong. All it says is that we haven't found fields sufficient to initiate a lightning strike. We know what lightning is. We know the amplitude of the current.

What an intellectually and spritually bankrupt exercise - to nitpick perhaps the greatest collective human acheivement, because parts of it appear to conflict with a particularly narrow reading of one religion's foundiong documents.

23 posted on 11/12/2003 9:30:13 AM PST by Right Wing Professor (proudly serving as academic smokescreen for the cornhusker semipro football team)
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To: bondserv
Florida Tech? I live just a few miles from it and never heard of it.

Yes, I looked it up. They do appear to have a real campus.

operations research, physics, science education and space sciences. In addition to the degree-granting departments listed above, the college also includes the Division of Languages and Linguistics within the humanities department and the military science department (Army ROTC). The university offers twoand four-year Army ROTC programs to interested, qualified students. Students may qualify for a reserve commission in Today, over 4,500 students are enrolled, with more than 3,000 students on the Melbourne campus and about 1,400 at Florida Tech’s off-campus graduate centers. All of the off-campus students and more than 850 on-campus students are enrolled in graduate programs. Florida Tech offers more than 130 degree programs in science and engineering, aviation, management, humanities, psychology and communication. Doctoral degrees are offered in 22 disciplines,

Twenty-two Doctoral programs with 3000 on-campus students. These folks are busy bees.

52 posted on 11/12/2003 11:41:07 AM PST by js1138
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To: bondserv
Time to rewrite the textbooks again, or maybe throw them away till a new theory comes along.  This time it’s about lightning.  There isn’t a big enough electric field in a cloud to make lightning possible, claims Joseph Dwyer, a Florida Tech physicist, as reported in EurekAlert.   There is a limit to how much charge a cloud can accumulate.

The funny thing is, here's a recent report, citing Dwyer, that says the exact opposite. Quoting "The results suggest that the electric fields associated with lightning storms are strong enough to overcome the drag forces experienced by electrons as they collide with air molecules in the dense lower atmosphere, thereby allowing them to zip around at relativistic speeds."

In my experience, news releases of the sort Eurekalerts cites are written by PR people whose knowledge of science is so meager that they generally manage to say the exact opposite of what they've been told. Anyone have access to the Geophys. Res. Lett. article?

76 posted on 11/12/2003 12:55:10 PM PST by Right Wing Professor (proudly serving as academic smokescreen for the cornhusker semipro football team)
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