Posted on 11/13/2007 10:29:50 AM PST by Swordmaker
Nov 13, 2007
Comets: The Loose ThreadSpacecraft have now visited four comets. What they found contradicts what was expected and falsifies accepted comet theory. But that theory is woven with every other astronomical theory into a cosmology that defines the universe as we know it. The fall of comet theory will inevitably bring us a new and different universe.
Comets are giving accepted comet theory a hard time. Close-up images of comet nuclei from spacecraft have contradicted about every expectation of theory. (“Expectation” is a euphemism for “prediction”; a disappointed expectation is practically the same thing as a failed prediction, except with the former you don’t expect you’ll have to discard the theory.) “If astronomy were a science,” as one astronomer put it, theoreticians would admit that the theory had been falsified, and they would start over with an eye to the evidence. Instead, they hang on to the theory with ever more stubbornness and hope a little tinkering and adjusting will bring the facts into line.
The facts are apt to be more stubborn than the theoreticians: Deep Impact kicked up ten times more dust than expected and stimulated the comet's activity a magnitude less than expected. The dust was not a conglomeration of sizes as expected but was consistently powder-fine. The nucleus of the comet was covered with sharply delineated features, two of which were circular enough to be called impact craters. This was not expected for a dirty snowball or a snowy dirtball or even a powdery fluffball.
The craters, of course, weren’t actually called impact craters. They must have been caused by subsurface explosions, because they had flat floors and terraced walls, despite the myriad of other craters on rocky planets and moons with flat floors and terraced walls that are called impact craters. All the other circular depressions with flat floors and terraced walls weren’t craters because they had “unusual shapes.”
The hard times began with Comet Halley. Theory expected more or less uniform sublimation of the surface as the nucleus rotated in the sun, much as you would expect of a scoop of ice cream on a rotisserie. But Halley had jets. Less than 15% of the surface was sublimating, and the ejecta was shooting away in thin beams.
The theory was adjusted to introduce hot spots, chambers below the surface in which pressure could build up and erupt through small holes to produce the jets. It went unmentioned that the holes must have been finely machined, like the nozzle of a rocket engine, in order to produce the collimation of the jets: Just any rough hole would result in a wide spray of gases.
Borrelly made the hard times harder. It was dry. And black. Theoreticians tinkered with the dirty snowball theory until they got the dirt to cover the outside and to hide the snow inside. Somehow they got the dirt, which ordinarily is an insulator, to conduct heat preferentially into the rocket chambers to keep the jets going.
Wild 2 defied them. Its jets were not just around the sub-solar point, where the Sun’s heat would be greatest. This comet sported jets on the night side. The rocket chambers now had to store heat for half a “comet day”. And something was needed to keep the jets coherent over great distances and to gather their emissions into a stream of clumps: Clusters of particles repeatedly struck the spacecraft.
Comet theorists announced that comets were mysteries and that the theorists knew nothing, that they had to “think differently”. Then they proposed adjustments to the accepted theory that would be acceptable to the accepted way of thinking.
Different theories abound—but outside the walls of astronomical acceptability. For an astronomer to recognize their existence would be to jeopardize his position and salary. But the characteristics of comets that are so difficult to explain with snowballs are fairly easy to explain with electricity.
Electrical theories date back to the 1800s, before “electricity” became taboo in astronomy. They were well-founded on observations and on the proven laws of electromagnetism. In the last few decades, they have been refined to the point where they expected the findings that were so hard on the fashionable theory:
Comets are electrical discharges in the thin plasma that permeates the solar system. Because they spend most of their time far from the Sun, their rocky nuclei are in equilibrium with the voltage at that distance. But as they accelerate in toward the Sun, their voltage is increasingly out of equilibrium with the voltage and increasing density of the solar plasma. A plasma sheath forms around them—the coma and tail. And filamentary currents—jets—between the sheath and the nucleus erode, particle by powdery particle, the circular depressions with terraced walls that are typical of electrical discharge machining. As the discharge channels move across the surface of the comet, they burn it black.
If it were only a matter of explaining with plasma discharges the jets and the blackened rocky surfaces and the powder-fine dust and the terraced depressions, there might not be so much blinkered stubbornness. But modern astronomical theories have been worked into an interlocking web of explanation. Each theory supports, and is in turn supported by, nearly every other theory. If one theory frays, if one loose thread is pulled, the entire fabric will unravel.
An electrified comet requires an electrified Sun. The Sun is the focus of the electric field that causes the comet to discharge. For the Sun to maintain its electric field, it (and all stars) must be the focus of another electric discharge within an electrified galaxy. And electrified galaxies, with their magnetic fields and x-ray emissions and ejections of quasars, must be connected in larger circuits that render meaningless such fancies of cosmology as the Big Bang theory.
If you pull one electrified comet out of the well-knit structure of accepted theories, the entire garment will become unacceptable. Either the universe is an agglomeration of isolated, gravitating, non-electrical bodies, or else it is a network of bodies connected by and interacting through electrical circuits. Either the universe is a gravity universe or it is an Electric Universe.
I am absolutely certain.
Thanks for the ping. Very interesting. I’m not sorry to see the orthodox theory challenged. And it isn’t only astronomy. The interlocking theories of contemporary physics look like a house of cards.
"The cosmical plasma physics of today is far less advanced than the thermonuclear research physics. It is to some extent the playground of theoreticians who have never seen a plasma in a laboratory. Many of them still believe in formulae which we know from laboratory experiments to be wrong. The astrophysical correspondence to the thermonuclear crisis has not yet come." —H. Alfvén, Plasma physics, space research and the origin of the solar system, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1970
Alfvén was considered a brilliant maverick. He railed against the consensus of big bang cosmology and insisted that we live in an electric universe. He argued that it was not enough to treat magnetism in space without considering the electric circuits in space necessary to generate and sustain magnetic fields. Yet no book on astronomy mentions electricity or circuits. Future historians of science will find this beyond rational understanding, like the belief in a flat Earth. Astronomy labors in the space age under the yoke of gaslight era science. Our model of stars is little better than the ancient one of a 'campfire' in the sky. Only the fuel is different.
Thirty-seven years after Alfvén's speech, the astrophysical crisis is becoming more obvious. Adaptive optics and space telescopes give us much clearer views of stars, nebulae and galaxies, which theorists are floundering to explain. Some express mild concern that their models aren't working. No one recognizes that there is a deep crisis. Denial, minimization and obfuscation can be expected before a paradigm shift begins...
I don’t follow the personalities of science all that closely. It is more than I can handle to deal with the math and the conceptual models. I don’t believe that the universe runs on mathematics but it seems that math can describe if not explain most data that might be collected. The more the detail, the worse the math, that much seems to be the case. It has been said that Maxwell originally had 20 equations rather than four and that he used quaternions and other things that were discarded by Heaviside and maybe it is so, but what are the missing 16 equations? Quaternions and even octonians are still in use, in geology and in compouter graphics of all things.
Well, yes ... it must be very thin indeed, because it exerts no discernable drag on any body in the solar system. So thin, in fact, that one wonders how something so thin could produce these circuits at all.
It's not clear how a comet could be an "electrical discharge," either ... though perhaps in his attempt to be all technical sounding, the author skipped a few important words...?
Why yes it is so thin that reputable scientists and engineers are designing space craft that use it for propulsion with huge Mylar sails. We do see evidence of this plasma and its effects. The aurora borealis is a prime example.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6525.html
Bacteria are genetically modified by lightning
10:12 19 October 2004
Andy Coghlan
University of Lyon
Lightning research, NASA
Applied and Environmental Microbiology
Lightning is nature’s own genetic engineer. By opening up pores in soil bacteria it allows them to pick up any stray DNA present, report Timothy Vogel, Pascal Simonet and their colleagues at the University of Lyon in France.
This hitherto unknown phenomenon might help explain why gene swapping is so common among bacteria.
Mild electric shocks are routinely used to genetically engineer bacteria in the lab, so Vogel and Simonet wondered whether lightning could have the same effect. Although it would kill bacteria near the point of contact, those further away would get a milder shock.
The researchers persuaded physicist colleagues to blast bacteria with artificial lightning. So far they have shown that two strains of the soil bacterium Pseudomonas - as well as a lab strain of E. coli - take up “bait” DNA when zapped by lightning.
The researchers suspect the phenomenon is widespread, speeding up the rate at which bacteria evolve. Genetic studies show bacteria frequently pick up foreign genes, usually from other bacteria, but natural DNA uptake rates are too sluggish to explain the observed diversity.
Lightning might also have speeded up the evolution of the first bacteria, Vogel says.
Journal reference: Applied and Environmental Microbiology (DOI: 10.1128/AEM.70.10.6342-6346.2004)
Well, they both have tails...
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