http://www.sarahscoles.com/
I'm a science writer interested in the stories behind, around, underneath, and within scientific research (I may have left out a few relevant prepositions). My work in that vein has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, Wired, Smithsonian, Popular Science, Discover, New Scientist, NOVA, Aeon, Motherboard, and others.
I am a former Associate Editor of Astronomy magazine. From 2010-2012, I was the Public Education Specialist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. Among other things, I acted as the Program Manager for the Pulsar Search Collaboratory and the Curriculum Development Lead for Skynet Junior Scholars.
I have a degree in Astrophysics from Agnes Scott College and an MFA in Fiction from Cornell University.
I'd have to say that qualifies Sarah as being a "professional", and the follow statements qualify her as engaging in professional misconduct as it relates to astronomy:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/electr ... -thornhill
The electric universe concept does not meet the National Academy of Sciences’ definition of a “theory,” which is “a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence” and “can be used to make predictions about natural events or phenomena that have not yet been observed.”
In physics, theories need math. That’s how you predict, gather evidence, verify, disprove, and support. But EU theory isn’t big on math.
https://youtu.be/m58-CfVrsN4
Not only has EU/PC theory been "big on math" since the time of Birkeland, it's also been supported by a vast body of *empirical lab tested* evidence for 100 years, it's supported by the standard particle physics model, circuit theory, and it has been so since the day it was first proposed.
Using his electric sun model, Birkeland successfully "predicted" both types of high speed charged particles from the sun, polar jets, cathode rays, electrical discharges in the solar atmosphere, and a host of other observations related to solar physics and the Earth's aurora that it took *decades* to later verify with satellites in space.
Alfven, Bruce, Peratt, Lerner and others have also provided plenty of maths and books full of maths to support the EU/PC paradigm as well.
Sarah's article on this community was a complete piece of unadulterated trash with an obvious political agenda. It spread the mainstream's "party line propaganda" toward EU/PC theory just as she intended, and Sarah made no attempt whatsoever to embrace the overall range of beliefs within the whole EU/PC community. Instead she intentionally portrayed
all EU/PC proponents as rejecting GR theory, the concept of massive objects, and of embracing Jeurgen's solar model and Velikovsky's ideas. While that may indeed be true for some EU/PC proponents, it is absolutely not true for everyone as she portrayed it.
The formal scientific definition of theory is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence.
By the way, by this definition of a "theory", Lambda-CDM certainly doesn't qualify as a "theory" either. It's certainly not a "comprehensive explanation" of anything. In fact 95 percent of it is a placeholder term for human ignorance. The mainstream cannot even name so much as a single source of "dark energy", let alone explain why it remains at a constant density during exponential increases in volume, and that makes up the vast majority of their claim! Dark matter isn't defined or "explained", in fact the mainstream cannot even agree upon it's "properties" with respect to it's mass or it's gamma ray/xray emissions during "decay". Furthermore the whole concept of invisible forms of matter was based upon the now falsified premise that the mainstream had the ability in 2006 to correctly estimate the amount of baryonic mass present in any given galaxy.
The more I think about this article, the less "professional" it sounds, and the more it reeks of dishonesty, professional misconduct and yellow journalism.