Electric Sun: A Quantitative Calculation

[mharratsc]

I'll throw a 'thumbs up' at Psychegram for the proposed 'peer-review-revision' idea!

I agree that we need to keep some accountability going on the new information front, but the "frat-brothers-clique" mentality that seems to be the norm (visible from Wiki entries, astronomy boards, and up the chain from there)- all that simply has got to GO if we're going to start making progress again, seriously. :\

[Lloyd]

* Peers are hugely overrated. If you start with the peers we have today, they're 90% brainwashed. We can't have good science without openness to the knowledgeable public. Science needs to be done by people who don't necessarily have a brainwashing degree. This is off-topic, so I'll try not to say anything more here on that.

[PersianPaladin]

* Peers are hugely overrated. If you start with the peers we have today, they're 90% brainwashed. We can't have good science without openness to the knowledgeable public. Science needs to be done by people who don't necessarily have a brainwashing degree. This is off-topic, so I'll try not to say anything more here on that.

I agree. A lot of pioneering work can be done by professionals in their field, without having to have permission from peers to publish in journals.

[psychegram]

* Peers are hugely overrated. If you start with the peers we have today, they're 90% brainwashed. We can't have good science without openness to the knowledgeable public. Science needs to be done by people who don't necessarily have a brainwashing degree. This is off-topic, so I'll try not to say anything more here on that.

There are more scientists than you might think who are willing to think outside the box. I'm one, and I know others personally, and many others besides by reputation. It's always dangerous to start setting up homogeneous 'others' ... the reality is generally far more nuanced.

[psychegram]

Of course, openness to the knowledgeable public is what an 'open' peer review process would be all about, at root. The names of reviewers would be known, rather than secret, allowing the author to respond to criticisms ... and anyone else who wanted could jump in with criticisms (with the advisory warning that the authors are of course, at liberty to respond). Of course, such a system would require people to say up front what sort of expertise they had in the field.

One way or the other, some sort of agnotological control is necessary. Otherwise the information stream gets mucked up with noise. Peer review as presently practiced is deeply imperfect, and in sore need of reform. But that doesn't mean we can do without any sort of system.

[webolife]

I've made it my mission for the last and remaining few years of my science teaching to arm my students with the tools they need for critical review of scientific articles. Besides daily emphasizing the tentativeness of science, I hope my students leave my class at the end of the year with the ability to ask meaningful questions, to probe for premises, and openness to alternative ideas. I've been told this is a tall order for middle schoolers, but to me it is paramount.

[psychegram]

I've made it my mission for the last and remaining few years of my science teaching to arm my students with the tools they need for critical review of scientific articles. Besides daily emphasizing the tentativeness of science, I hope my students leave my class at the end of the year with the ability to ask meaningful questions, to probe for premises, and openness to alternative ideas. I've been told this is a tall order for middle schoolers, but to me it is paramount.

Teaching children to question those who would teach them is an order that can never be submitted to early. Good for you.

[David Talbott]

I've been a little puzzled by the length of Nereid's absence.

Can anyone tell me if she's returned to activity on the Internet in recent days?

[mharratsc]

Not that I've seen, sir. I've been checking the boards daily for over a week, and haven't seen anything new from her.

[GaryN]

She did reply to a couple of my BAUT posts, almost 2 weeks ago now.

[Lloyd]

* Looks like she posted on BAUT on April 5: http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php ... k-Universe.

[Nereid]

Hi everyone.

It's good to see that this thread has been quite active over the last month or so!

She did reply to a couple of my BAUT posts, almost 2 weeks ago now.

* Looks like she posted on BAUT on April 5: http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php ... k-Universe.

GaryN, is the post Lloyd provides a link to what you are referring to? If not, may I ask what?

Just a reminder to everyone of Nereid’s previous note concerning her absence through March and into early April.

Until I hear otherwise, I’m going to assume that a reasonable start date for the debate will be April 15. It’s a bit arbitrary on my part, and we can certainly be flexible, but that should give us time to nail down remaining details as to ground rules.

The debate will focus on the electric sun hypothesis and its claimed advantages over the standard model of the Sun. The primary references will be The Electric Universe (Thornhill and Talbott) chapter on the electric sun and The Electric Sky (Scott), though numerous other citations should be expected.

If we really need a moderator, that will be okay with me, so long as a fair and open-minded individual is available. Most folks advising us do not believe that moderation is necessary, and I tend to agree, so long as the rules are clear. Certainly BAUT’s Tusenfem would not be an appropriate “moderator,” since that would require me to debate two people.

As you all have, no doubt, correctly assumed by now, April 15 won't work. For one thing, I'm still not really back in the land of the internet, and may not be - fully - for another month or so.

There've been several (new to me) posts on the scope, topic, moderation-or-not, etc of the debate; thanks all for the inputs. When I can, I'll respond to each and every one; for now, I'd just like to say that I trust that the setting of these details will be done openly, so all forum members will have a chance to participate.

On the content part of this thread - the calculations in the first post - there have also been a number of substantive posts! I'll address just part of just one for now (from Mar 02):

In the Electric Sun hypothesis, this energy comes from an electric current, comprised of incoming ("entering") electrons and outgoing ("leaving") positive ions; let's look at the electrons.

The maximum average energy that an electron in this (Birkeland) current can deliver to the Sun - to be converted somehow into light - is ~1 MeV, which is 1.6 x 10^-13 J (MeV is a unit of energy).

Why?

Because if it were much greater than this, a significant fraction of such electrons would generate electron-positron pairs (through collisions with matter in the photosphere), which would in turn result in emission of 511 keV gamma rays (electron-positron 'annihilation radiation'); the Sun does not emit much of such radiation, certainly far less than that which would be produced by huge numbers of electrons with >1.02 MeV of kinetic energy (see below for details).

Herein I may state politely that I don't agree with you! - Most of the "incoming" current-bearers - mainly electrons - don't "collide" only with the photosphere, as they experience first interaction with higher regions of the Sun - though creating the p-n-p effect by balancing in/outflow over the "puffer" of the Chromosphere and -- to a smaller degree -- with the Corona.

Simply said -they are slowed down above the photosphere.

This doesn't change the calculation in the OP in any substantive way.

Why not?

First, "in the photosphere" could simply be re-stated as "in the region of the Sun from photosphere to upper corona".

Second, and much more important: the total energy output of the corona (in the form of electromagnetic radiation) is trivial compared with that of the photosphere. Suppose the corona's total energy output (in the form of electromagnetic radiation) is ~1% of that of the photosphere (also in the form of electromagnetic radiation); the calculation in the OP then involves replacing 3.85 x 10^26 J/sec with ~3.82 x 10^26 J/sec ... which is essentially the same (even 50% - which is completely ridiculous - makes little difference).

A hint for all this gives us the "hot" torus around our Sun, that can befound as well as at the big gas planets -- Jupiter and Saturn -- in our solar system. They seem to function as some kind of energy-"puffer".

I don't follow this, partly because I do not know what this image is.

Can you give a source for it please? Also, what waveband(s) is it taken in?

(to be continued)

[GaryN]

GaryN, is the post Lloyd provides a link to what you are referring to? If not, may I ask what?

Hi Nereid,
This is your first reply to my post on BAUT.
http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php ... ost1870238

[Nereid]

Since the 1st of March there have been quite a few posts in this thread that seem to have nothing to do with either the calculations in the OP or with the proposed debate; for example, kiwi's two posts on March 23.

However, there are a number of posts which may be directly relevant, even though they don't seem to be (to me). That's what this post is about, clarifying relevance; in two (or more) separate later posts I'll catch up on 'calculations' posts and 'debate' ones.

* If all this energy came from fusion in the Sun's core, wouldn't the thousands of miles thick mass of matter above the core absorb all that energy, especially since that mass is only 5800°K?

This is but one of the many "anomalies" that the Standard Model finds hard to come up with a plausible answer for.

And stars are certainly not ideal blackbodies, although a lot of the anomalies are resolved simply by taking into account the behaviour of atomic lines at various temperatures, 'line blanketing' (which is when there are so many lines, crowded very close together, that the continuum is obscured), and other effects. Which is not to say that there are not other anomalies, which as yet we cannot model.

* Psychegram, spectral line blanketing is interesting. I hadn't heard of that. How large a range of frequencies or wavelengths are typically blanketed in that way? And what kinds of sources produce such line blanketing? Stars, quasars, galaxies, GRBs, pulsars, supernovae, comets, electric discharges, UFOs?

I'm not really sure what the wavelength range is for line blanketing, off the top of my head. What really matters is the temperature of the star: the cooler it gets, the greater the number of atomic lines, and line blanketing generally only becomes a factor when there's so many lines they all crowd together. Mostly it's M and K class stars that it affects.

These five - I've extracted just a snippet from each - are from April 4 (the first two) and April 5 (the other three).

They concern the total energy radiated by stars, in the form of electromagnetic radiation, and its SED (spectral energy distribution). However, no part of any of these posts seems to be directly relevant to the calculations in the OP. After all, there is no disagreement that the Sun's energy output is 3.85 x 10^26 J/sec (give or take a tenth of a percent or so), is there?

As you know, the EU ideas are still being developed. Nereid's suggestion to defend the Sun's "circuitry" or method of operation from the EU perspective is useful, but I know that it is not advanced enough to be taken up seriously in a refereed journal in the sort of debate Nereid has in mind. IMHO it is too early for anyone to be trying to dismiss the EU set of conceptual ideas from a scientific perspective because they have not been prepared for that yet.

It seems to me that EU Theory is on a much firmer basis than conventional theory, so, if any other theory is a contender, EU Theory should be even more so. I don't see any sense in acting as if EU Theory is second-rate. I think it's better to be bold and confident, not submissive to establishment "authority". They're the ones with No Clothes, not us. I don't buy at all that EU Theory isn't yet ready to go head-to-head with anyone.

My dislike of having a debate with Nereid on her terms is less about "who wins" than about "who's wasting their time?"

These three posts (again, snippets only) - the first two on April 6, the third April 8 - are highly relevant in a broader context than the calculations in the OP; namely, the framework of the debate David Talbott has proposed. I'll comment on these posts later, when I catch up with comments on the debate.

I dont know if you are familiar with the iron sun idea. See this : http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/

Maybe this would give you more to work with with your calculations, an iron core would at least change the resistivity.

Several following posts comment on this, including one by psychegram. However:
* there are no calculations of the Sun's radiant output, from "electric (Birkeland) currents that flow in our arm of our galaxy", in any of that material
* Manuel's model is inconsistent with the Electric Sun hypothesis (per Scott); in it, the Sun is powered internally, by a neutron star.

Did I miss anything of direct relevance, in these posts?

Oh, and one more:

As the hypothetical electric discharge must then have a power input of 4 x 1026 Juergens ...

I think that should be Joules ...

[earls]

Nereid,

Please refer to the fourth post in this thread for a description of the solar torus image.

http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php ... 546e5327c3

It's a composite image of two images taken by SOHO.

Huh. The thread was closed by you? I guess that's how science is actually done.