Post
by jjohnson » Thu Mar 11, 2010 3:19 pm
Giday, Harry,
Ignoring your pun about "the EU has potential", I agree that the EU ideas or interpretations should not be considered final or "correct". In fact, in general they do not rate yet as a theory, only the beginnings of a fairly well reasoned-out set of ideas to throw out for serious evaluation in the marketplace of ideas. Science should be in flux, in my opinion. The EU approach, to me, seems to have noticed that the standard model is all about gravity, and other than a short bow to magnetism being detected in space, and some interesting mal-applications of MHD to cosmic phenomena, and a few other potential errors like BBT and an expanding universe, noticed that it has forgotten to consider the potential (there's that P word again!) of electromagnetic forces.
The EU is trying to evaluate the effect of those forces and the applicability of them toward aiding in a better descriptive model of the universe and its phenomena. The EU so far is not so much into explaining how things work at the lowest level of existence - it's like Newton and gravity, working up a better descriptive model of macro-effects by including some macro-effects that the Gravity Model dismisses or ignores.
I just wrote a letter to Dr. Bryan Gaensler at the University of Sydney about his article titled "The Magnetic Universe". It - the article - was very nicely done with some good illustrations, but he kept noting how no one seems to know how these magnetic fields are being created. (!!!) "Let me count the ways" as the Bard said. Since there are not a huge swarm of bar magnets floating about in space, it stands to reason that the only other likely mechanism (besides his mention of planets and stars acting as homopolar motors) is that of electric currents, i.e., moving charges in the form of weak but rather large filaments of plasma yield the observed magnetic fields. I think in mechanisms of this type the EU ideas have some useful insights to offer, which, if they are scientists, astronomers would be eager to evaluate and incorporate in order to get better results. I have not yet heard back, and may never, but at least we [here] are trying to tell one another of what we are thinking about, and why.
As I do not own a pair of rose-colored glasses, I do not live in the perpetual hope that I will live to see this evaluation of EU offerings come to pass. But in the event that Dr. Gaensler might not have connected his magnetic field observations (based on polarization patterns of starlight) to plasma currents as a possibility to consider, I politely mentioned Peratt's textbook and noted that there might be a copy in the physics library at his school. All we can do is plant seeds of ideas and see what happens. I'm open to some of the difficult ideas and research that you reference from time to time, although my problem is that I am hardly up to speed in being able to evaluate them if I can't really understand them.
Jim
