beekeeper wrote:According to some researchers the oceans as well as the large bodies of fresh water are electrically charged. For some the oceans have a negative charge for a few tens of meters from the surface, as the fresh water bodies are charged differently. So electrical interaction may very well be at play in the coming and going of the tides.
You don't happen to remember which researchers were talking about surface charges? This is a well known fact, as is the positive charge in the ionosphere, but I'd still like to review your references -- you never know what you're going to find.
But yes -- electrical charges are IMO the only thing that can explain the tides.
Sparky wrote:But i contracted terminal Lurkites while in training to be a CIA spook...
Oh, I am adopting CFDL for now.....
Ummm... does that mean that CFDLs are CIA-approved?
Or just lurker-friendly?
Who do I talk to about getting on a watch-list or something? Then I'd be "special" (at least more so than I am right now).
celeste wrote:Charles, I think you are still missing the effect of magnetic fields? To answer Aardwolf's third post in this thread: Do you see that if we have a charge distribution as you describe, and we have the Earth and Moon orbiting each other in some external magnetic field over the course of a month, we end up with the effect he is describing here?
I'm grossly oversimplifying again, but if we have a positively charged Earth,with negatively charged lobes of ocean on each side, then for half the month,Earth is traveling one direction through an external magnetic field (with the negatively charged oceans pulled to the inside of the orbit,the positively charged earth to the outside) , then the opposite relationship for the next half month.
What is more, if we accept that Earth and Moon are not each net neutral, but at least slightly charged compared to each other, we can explain the correspondence of tides to perihelion/aphelion? In other words, besides thinking of Earth and Moon being bound by some inverse square force (gravity or E-M), just consider what happens to two electrostatic charges as they orbit in some external magnetic field. Do you see what happens?
Magnetic fields might influence the crustal tides, due to the iron in the ground, but not the oceanic tides. The response of water to magnetic fields is extremely weak, and it would take a field 200,000 times the strength of the Earth's field to be as powerful as gravity. I guess I could see how a cumulative effect from a small force could set up the resonating waves in the oceans that are actually directly responsible for observed tides. (It has more to do with harmonic frequencies of ocean basins than the instantaneous tidal forces.) But I don't see how this would vary the oceanic tides as fast as a 28-day cycle. As concerns the crustal tides, they would be strongest at the magnetic poles, where the lines of force converge. To my knowledge, crustal tides are the strongest at the equator. But I have a lot to learn. I really only just finished writing up the basic idea of tides as effects of electric forces, just to get a good look at the idea. Next comes the more thorough research, now that I know what hypothesis I'm testing.