Lloyd wrote:But the amount of detail that the model provided seemed too limited. Charles was able to answer questions much more thoroughly than anyone supporting the EU model did. So I had to go with the most thorough model.
And anybody who has been following this board over the last 6 years knows that Lloyd never cut me any slack. I don't think that he ever will.
And if you were paying really close attention, you know that 3/4 of the models that I have proposed met the garbage can, because they didn't stand up to further scrutiny. But the CFDL model has been stable for over 2 years now, and it explains so many things that it has emerged as a paradigm. So it isn't like I came in here with an epiphany, and I've been doing consensus-building ever since. Rather, I've been pursuing the truth the whole time. I have no way of knowing if the CFDL model will stand the test of time. But at this point, I'm starting to think that it's the one to beat. It solves otherwise intractable problems in solar physics, in a plausible manner, and it generalizes nicely into geophysics, explaining stuff like volcanoes and earthquakes. So this is starting to look like a basic principle of how celestial objects get organized. The measure of a paradigm is not how well it explains one thing. Rather, a paradigm has to explain so many things that it's worth learning to think differently about the problem domain. More critically, a decent paradigm has to continue to bear new fruit, and promise to keep at it. The CFDL model scores well in those regards. I know that few people understand it, and many think that I'm a mainstreamer, which as Lloyd correctly pointed out, is just not true. Yes, I'm doing conventional physics, but no, that doesn't make me a mainstreamer, since they aren't doing conventional physics, and therefore, they think that I'm a crackpot.
But if any of you are wondering about the degree of specificity currently supported in the CFDL model, as concerns stellar and planetary theory, just ask.
Lloyd wrote:Galactic Filaments
EU supposes that galactic filaments are like lightning. Charles, would you like to explain your understanding of galactic filaments? Do they exist in all regions of the galaxy? Are they different in different regions? In the giant molecular clouds do they act at all like lightning? Are there filaments in thunderstorms that form lightning bolts?
Filaments are everywhere, but to think that they are carrying electric currents has yet to be demonstrated. I agree that there isn't any mainstream explanation for them. Gravity doesn't prefer them, and hydrostatics hates them. So there isn't any Newtonian reason for them. But I'm not convinced that they're electrodynamic -- my working hypothesis is that they're electrostatic. In other words, they're kinda like huge polymer chains that formed because the particles got polarized in an electric field, and then all fell in line. Alignments like this happen all of the time in nature, so it should be no surprise when we see them happening at the galactic scale. Just remember that all of the particles in a polymer are net neutral, and the force that binds them together into filaments is polarization of charges, not net charges nor electric currents.