Lloyd wrote:Have you read Thornhill's articles on star and planet formation...
From
http://holoscience.com/synopsis.php?page=6:
Thornhill wrote:Plasma physicists argue that stars are formed by an electromagnetic "pinch" effect on widely dispersed gas and dust. The "pinch" is created by the magnetic force between parallel current filaments that are part of the huge electric currents flowing inside a galaxy. It is far more effective than gravity in concentrating matter and, unlike gravity, it can remove excess angular momentum that tends to prevent collapse. Stars will form like beads on a wire until gravity takes over.
I can't seem to make the transition from mental image to mechanistic physics with this. A pinch is a relativistic effect, meaning extreme velocities and high energies. And except in carefully contrived circumstances, it's electrons. To get protons involved, you need a relativistic jet, which has to be accelerated by a force other than voltage. (Protons are 2,000 times heavier than electrons, so if a voltage exists between clumps of charge-separated matter, the electrons tend to travel 1,999/2,000 of the distance, while the protons travel 1/2,000 of the distance. In other words, the protons stay where they are, and the electrons do all of the moving.) If you can accelerate protons to relativistic speeds, you're definitely going to see pinch effects, including Marklund convection that might develop a thread of condensed matter in the middle. But we can't forget the context in which all of this occurs.
- Something other than voltage had to accelerate the protons to relativistic speeds. Once accelerated, it's going to take something other than voltage to slow the matter down, if you're trying to make a star or planet out of it.
- If a current is present, you have to explain how the electrodes got established, without electrostatic repulsion dispersing them. If free space, you can't have the electrostatic attraction of opposite charges motivating a current, and not have the electrostatic repulsion of like charges at the electrodes. This is easy to forget if you're looking at laboratory experiments where fancy things are happening in plasma when a voltage is applied, and you're not thinking of the physical characteristics of the solid electrodes, because the mental focus is on the plasma in the middle. But out in space, developing voltages between clumps of gas or plasma presents difficulties, and sets limits on charge densities and therefore the voltages between opposite charges. If you're not working within these limits, you might visualize all kinds of fancy things happening that are actually not physically possible.
I'm not denying the evidence of magnetic fields that coincide exactly with the observed filaments and star clusters. Such fields are definitely telling us something. But I am questioning whether or not this is evidence of relativistic electric currents. Could it rather be evidence of the "like-likes-like" principle, wherein negatively charged bodies are surrounded by positively charged plasma, and then the bodies are pulled together by the shared opposite charge? Perhaps we should take a closer look at the magnetic field data. We can't expect it to be simple, because of all of the spins and drifts and whatnot. I know I've seen data that appeared (to me at least) to be saying that magnetic lines of force are parallel to the arms in spiral galaxies. What does that tell us? It could be evidence of a field-aligned "current". But the "current" does not necessarily have to be between electrodes at the galactic scale. Charged bodies getting pulled together by the "like-likes-like" principle would create the same telltale signs of a "current", in that a "current" is just moving electric charges.
Something else that I'd like to mention: if you're saying that there is
some electric current in these filaments, and you're getting
some pinching that is
helping the plasma condense, I'd be more inclined to agree. But if you're saying that
all of the energy responsible for pulling the plasma together into stars, and then
all of the energy released in the stars themselves, is coming from this current, I'll definitely
disagree. You have to work within the physical limits of the forces in question. This is how I arrived at my model of the Sun. I have magnetic fields that accomplish
some magnetic confinement of like charges, and
some separation of opposite charges. But it's only barely relativistic, and it doesn't create a singularity -- it creates a star, which is not a singularity -- it's an object of definite size and shape. It's just that it displays properties that are outside the limits of gravity alone. But I don't invoke EM as an all-or-nothing force, as physics isn't like that. Besides, an all-or-nothing stellar theory would only work on all-or-nothing stars, which wouldn't work on the stars in
our Universe.
Lloyd wrote:Velikovsky was the one in this camp who first considered that electrical forces may have been involved in ancient planetary catastrophes. The ancients described what sounded like electrical phenomena. Ralph Juergens, an electrical engineer, then began explaining how electrical forces were likely involved and he even went on to start suggesting that the Sun is an electrical phenomenon etc. Thornhill then took over from Juergens and Scott chimed in later. Talbott apparently decided that the Electric Universe angle was the best one for proving the Catastrophist model, including the Saturn Theory. He's the one who organized the Thunderbolts team and this website and its predecessor, the Thoth email yahoogroup. It seems that Thornhill and Scott aren't very interested in alternative ideas on their models. Once you've heard a thousand theories, it probably gets tiresome trying to explain why theirs is better. But I think most of the forum members are interested in whatever makes the most sense.
Nobody expects Talbott, Thornhill, or Scott to spend all of their time getting tag-teamed by every wannabe (like me?
). The number of theoretical
possibilities is vast, and anybody who maintains a website gets asked to review everybody else's ideas. I get the same thing from my site. I "try" to respond to all inquiries, because it helps them and it helps me too, but I can't respond to everybody. If my site got as much traffic as thunderbolts, then I wouldn't be able to respond to hardly anybody. Nevertheless, if Thornhill and Scott have dug into their existing positions, then the progress will be in leap-frogging them. Here we have to respect our elders, and understand that the ideas that we're considering all originated with Birkeland, Alfven, Juergens, Peratt, etc. Had they not
conceived these ideas, we wouldn't be considering the implications. But if it was actually their intention that scientific progress
end with them, they wouldn't be worthy of any respect at all. If somebody discovers a gold mine, but only gets 1% of the gold out of it before passing on, shall we, out of respect for them, leave the other 99% in the ground? That would be ridiculous. Similarly, previous generations found
some of the value in this approach, but they didn't get all of it, and there are many riddles yet to be solved. If we further this initiative, it's more to their credit than ours, as they will always be the ones who started it, and that's how history works. Going beyond previous generations is not disrespect -- it's the highest form of respect one can give. So such is our task.
But that brings up another question. Here I quote from the thunderbolts guidelines:
davesmith_au wrote:A reminder to all users of our forum, that this is the Thunderbolts.info forum and NOT the publishing house for all other theories of the universe. [...] Out of respect for our hosts please could all users think twice before hitting the "submit" button if their post is contrary to the board on which it is being posted, or contrary to our purpose for being here.
If we are, in fact, building a new model, it is certainly the right of our hosts to ask us to take this discussion elsewhere. (I have a
board we can use, if it comes to that.) I'll be content to wait until they kick us off.
Personally, I think that we're well within the scope of the "Electric Universe" paradigm, as we all agree that the Universe is Electric.
Velikovsky didn't invent EM -- God did!
But in all due respect to Talbott who got this whole thing organized, and who I sincerely admire in that respect, if he wants to keep this board centered on EDM, symbology, and catastrophism, that's his right, and there's nothing wrong with that. But we're definitely talking about new ideas here, not anticipated by previous generations, and some of which specifically refute central tenets in the existing EU paradigm.
The only other comment that I'd like to make is that my site is more than just a bulletin board -- it also allows people to post articles. So it can be used like a wiki as well as like a bulletin board. I bring this up because I have been thinking that somewhere in here, all of the great ideas and hard work going into this board should evolve into more than just discussions -- it should become structured knowledge. In other words, we need a wiki that can be logically organized, and people contributing material should add it to the relevant section, not just to a new thread. Discussions are great for exchanging ideas, but later, to see the big picture, it's tough when you have to read a huge discussion to see where it eventually concluded, and then read a bunch of other discussions to find out what they were taking for granted. So I think that for every 100 pages of discussion, there should be a 10 page summary of the consensus. The next discussion shouldn't start over with a new picture-of-the-day or whatever — it should be a criticism or supplement to what came out of the last discussion. So we need a wiki so that we can build something, instead of just discussing stuff ad nauseam. Where do we put material like that? There are a couple of wikis around, such as plasma-universe.com. I'll contact the webmasters and see what they want to do. But I truly believe that in all of the back-and-forth discussions on this board, there is the opportunity for a lot more forward progress if we can create structured knowledge in addition to free-form discussions. So this is something that we should investigate. If all else fails, we can use my site for this.
Lloyd wrote:If you haven't already, I hope you may like to read that article, as it explains that cosmic ray sources to the north and the south are good evidence of an electric circuit of the Sun where exploding double layers produce them. Maybe you can explain double layers for us better.
This is interesting:
Thornhill wrote:In an ESA report last month the high-resolution of the Herschel space observatory produced another surprise, “The filaments are huge, stretching for tens of light years through space and Herschel has shown that newly-born stars are often found in the densest parts of them... Such filaments in interstellar clouds have been glimpsed before by other infrared satellites, but they have never been seen clearly enough to have their widths measured. Now, Herschel has shown that, regardless of the length or density of a filament, the width is always roughly the same. “This is a very big surprise,” says Doris Arzoumanian, Laboratoire AIM Paris-Saclay, CEA/IRFU, the lead author on the paper describing this work. Together with Philippe André from the same institute and other colleagues, she analysed 90 filaments and found they were all about 0.3 light years across, or about 20,000 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. This consistency of the widths demands an explanation.”
This is evidence of an organizing principle, and I'd tend to agree that it's an electric current, but as noted above, I don't think that the current is actually forming the stars, much less powering them. I think that it's just helping to condense the matter.
In electrostatics, double-layers are fairly simple. If you have a conducting plate and you apply a charge to it, you can expect an opposite charge to build up in the air around it. So if the plate is negatively charged, you get positively charged air around it. Once that happens, you might also get a layer of negatively charged air outside of the positive layer. The net charge between the plate and the air around it will be zero, as an equal amount of charge in the air will be attracted to the charge in the plate. But outside of the first layer of charged air, another layer can form, because it's closer to the charged air than it is to the plate, and the electric force falls off with the square of the distance. So if the plate is negative, the first layer of air is positive, and the next layer of air is negative, attracted to the positive air because that is the closest.
Note that all of this happens only because air is an insulator. If it wasn't, the first layer of charged air never would have formed -- whatever charges were available would have simply flowed into the plate. Only to the extent that the air has capacitance can these "space charges" (as opposed to point charges) develop.
My understanding of electrodynamic double-layers in plasma is the same, except that we have to remember that plasma is an excellent conductor, so charges aren't going to stay separate for long. To my knowledge, the only thing that can maintain charge separations in plasma is opposing magnetic fields, if opposite charges are flowing rapidly in the same direction. So in a relativistic plasma jet composed of both atoms and electrons, the atoms will get pinched together, and so will the electrons, but the atoms and electrons will be split into parallel streams, separated by opposing magnetic fields, but still bound to each other by the electric force. This results in a "twisted pair" of particle streams, one positive and the other negative.
I "think" that this accurately describes the nature of the "DLs" in this diagram:
http://www.holoscience.com/news/img/Alf ... ircuit.jpg
But I don't understand what is meant by "unipolar inductor", and it says, "Such double layers have not yet been discovered." So I really can't explain the diagram. I looks like a perpetual motion machine. And the rest of it that whole page is beyond me. Anybody?
Lloyd wrote:Have you heard of Earth's global electric circuit? The video explains that the power of the global circuit increases when more land area is facing the sun, because more thunderstorms occur over land and the thunderstorms help short out the space between the Earth capacitor [to the ionosphere].
The "fair weather field" (between the negative Earth and the positive ionosphere), at roughly 100 V/m, appears to be important in setting the stage for charge separations in thunderstorms. But then the storms develop much more powerful fields, averaging 10 kV/m, and at times exceeding the breakdown voltage of the air (3 MV/m at sea-level, or 2 MV/m up in the middle of the cloud, 5 km above the ground). The close correlation between electric fields and storm structure pretty much proves that the fields are artifacts of the storm itself. The storm is not acting as a conductor that concentrates the fair weather field, or if it is, the contribution is insignificant. I discuss the topic of thunderstorm charge separation in greater detail in the
Electric Clouds thread.