Is there a tipping point with respect to "dark matter"?

[willendure]

the mainstream remains in *pure denial* of any need to upgrade their 'baryonic mass estimates of galaxies"! Oh no. Instead we're spending more world public tax dollars on another song and dance denial routine to the tune of *millions* more wasted taxpayer dollars.

When I read this it makes me think about the problem with deeply hierarchical organizations - they are slow to listen and slow to act. This is because the 'ears' and 'arms' of the organization are at the bottom, but the 'brains' (*ahem*) are at the top, and there is a game of chinese whispers and inter-personal politics in between.

I work in IT, and there have been many experiments and anecdotal results you can read about where folk have experimented with flat organisations and found that they move faster and adapt quicker. One of the most famous examples is the computer games company Valve:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_organization

Is this the root of the problem in Physics?

[sketch1946]

Haha, there's a children's story or is it a adult's story? The Emperor's Clothes...

[willendure]

Haha, there's a children's story or is it a adult's story? The Emperor's Clothes...

Right, and there is a lot of inflated egos too. After all, you do have to be damn clever to make it to the top in physics. Yet somehow it comes as a surprise to learn that intelligent people can also surround themselves with flatterers that give them a warped perspective on things where they are always right. But also I sense that physics does not believe in itself 100%; Einstein said that he worried his theories were no more than a house of cards.

This is what keeps me interested in this forum; the genuine and humble truth seekers and thinkers.

[Michael Mozina]

Haha, there's a children's story or is it a adult's story? The Emperor's Clothes...

Right, and there is a lot of inflated egos too. After all, you do have to be damn clever to make it to the top in physics. Yet somehow it comes as a surprise to learn that intelligent people can also surround themselves with flatterers that give them a warped perspective on things where they are always right. But also I sense that physics does not believe in itself 100%; Einstein said that he worried his theories were no more than a house of cards.

This is what keeps me interested in this forum; the genuine and humble truth seekers and thinkers.

I just frosts my cookies to know that those very same people, funds and facilities could be absolutely certain to get useful information about our universe simply by doing some basic solar physics experiments instead of wasting their professional careers away on pseudoscience and supernatural creation mythologies. What a huge public waste of funds and human lives.

[willendure]

I just frosts my cookies to know that those very same people, funds and facilities could be absolutely certain to get useful information about our universe simply by doing some basic solar physics experiments instead of wasting their professional careers away on pseudoscience and supernatural creation mythologies. What a huge public waste of funds and human lives.

From an economics perspective this is an 'opportunity cost'. The funds and brain-power that are being consumed on the wild goose chase are being denied to other research programs that could be pursued instead. The tipping point comes when we recognize that some of those alternative programs offer a better bang-for-your-buck than the dominant one.

A question then to ask is why do those who distribute the funds who we might expect to be familiar with economics not recognize this as an opportunity cost? Perhaps they physics is too specialized and they don't understand it, or measure its performance by some innacurate metric such as 'number of papers produced'.

Another angle is that the mainstream program has already sunk a huge amount of capital. At the time those programs were started, dark matter seemed like an attractive hypothesis. Now that we have the LHC and all the rest does it not make sense to 'keep looking' rather than write off all that capital? After all, you can't know without searching and we never know what else we might learn along the way.

[sketch1946]

I'm just trying to get my head around the electric universe concept... although I've been thinking about stuff like atoms, light, waves etc for many years... read lots of Steven Hawking, Isaac Asimov, and all the stories about Niels Bohr and Heisenberg etc... for a few decades things in big science seem to have stalled...lots of work with lots of lovely images of the solar system, the surface of the sun, solar flares and CME's etc...

I saw that experiment with the two spheres demonstrating aurorae on a model... Everywhere though I read disparaging remarks about anyone who suggests the sun or the planets might have a net charge.

I was trying to be diligent and looking over Maxwell's field equations.. not the equations themselves, they might as well be Heiroglyphics to me, just the animated graphics of what they are supposed to represent.. have I missed something... there seems to be an ether in there... energy being built up in the 'field' then released back, forces that are like 'springs' consisting of nothing...

The 'field lines' of the earth's magnetic 'field' seem uncannily like the field lines of Maxwell's equations?

How does heat alone cause this plasma to accelerate with such astonishing energy without an associated magnetic or electric field from a surface of only 6000K?

"The solar wind is a stream of energized, charged particles, primarily electrons and protons, flowing outward from the Sun, through the solar system at speeds as high as 900 km/s and at a temperature of 1 million degrees (Celsius). It is made of plasma."

In that pic there are no magnetic field lines around the sun... but....

Here's a link showing lots of magnetic field lines but they're all local, ie curving back to the sun...
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/20 ... etic-field

but.... are we not looking carefully enough, or no-one wants to look for fields extending to the heliosphere....

"The sun's magnetic field extends all the way to the edge of the solar system," explains Opher. "Because the sun spins, its magnetic field becomes twisted and wrinkled, a bit like a ballerina's skirt. Far, far away from the sun, where the Voyagers are now, the folds of the skirt bunch up."

"When a magnetic field gets severely folded like this, interesting things can happen. Lines of magnetic force criss-cross, and "reconnect". (Magnetic reconnection is the same energetic process underlying solar flares.) The crowded folds of the skirt reorganize themselves, sometimes explosively, into foamy magnetic bubbles."

"We never expected to find such a foam at the edge of the solar system, but there it is!" says Opher's colleague, University of Maryland physicist Jim Drake."

Wow! There it is!...

"Theories dating back to the 1950s had predicted a very different scenario: The distant magnetic field of the sun was supposed to curve around in relatively graceful arcs, eventually folding back to rejoin the sun. The actual bubbles appear to be self-contained and substantially disconnected from the broader solar magnetic field."
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voya ... prise.html

[sketch1946]

Here's a diagram of the earth's magnetic field
then Maxwell's field lines of two like charges...

https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/classroom/ ... iddle.html
"The Earth's magnetosphere is distorted by the Sun's magnetic field pushing magnetic lines in toward the Earth on the Sun side and stretching them out on the space side."

http://web.mit.edu/8.02t/www/802TEAL3D/ ... oc27302315
"Two charges of the same sign that repel one another because of the stresses transmitted by electric fields."

[Metryq]

@Sketch1946, magnetic field "lines" do not exist. They are a graphical representation of field density. Imagine instead a space-filling haze, like fog using greater or lesser transparency, or even variations in color to show the same thing. Such a representation might be easier to generate and understand using computers and 3D imaging. But for static, 2D images and print, people fall back on the "lines." But those lines can no more break and reconnect than the contours on a geologist's map.

[sketch1946]

@Sketch1946, magnetic field "lines" do not exist. They are a graphical representation of field density.

Thanks, Metryq,
I appreciate your input,
The sun's and earth's 'field densities' represented by the two diagrams look like remarkably similar geometry?
The words of the description of interacting 'field lines' ***pushing against the earth's 'field lines' in the cosmic magnetic field diagram are NASA's not mine...

"The Earth's magnetosphere is distorted by the Sun's magnetic field pushing magnetic lines in toward the Earth on the Sun side

Wouldn't the force against the earth then act in a similar way to the force in an electric field diagram, at right angles... ie force the rotating earth into a circular orbit?

I haven't been able to find any descriptions how forces would behave in the laboratory on a rotating charged body in a spherical magnetic field of another more highly charged body

"Theories dating back to the 1950s had predicted a very different scenario: The distant magnetic field of the sun was supposed to curve around in relatively graceful arcs, eventually folding back to rejoin the sun..."
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voya ... prise.html
What's your opinion of the 'surprise' that is reported when these non-existent field lines extend to the heliosphere as reported in the voyager link?

[sketch1946]

magnetic field "lines" do not exist. They are a graphical representation of field density.

I found this quote:
"It was Faraday’s “lines of force” model that Maxwell embraced in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. In Maxwell’s words,

“…Faraday, in his mind’s eye, saw lines of force traversing all space where the mathematicians saw centres of force attracting at a distance. Faraday saw a medium where they saw nothing but distance. Faraday sought the seat of the phenomena in real actions going on in the medium, they were satisfied that they had found it in a power of action at a distance impressed on the electric fluid"
http://web.mit.edu/8.02t/www/802TEAL3D/ ... oc27302315

[willendure]

Field lines, whether electrical or magnetic are analagous to contours on a map. They are lines added to a diagram to link up points that have something in common; height above sea level, electrical potential. Magnetic field lines are confusing because they show the direction in terms of where a compass north would point, rather than a scalar value like contours of electrical field lines. That said, none of these things are real physical constructs, they are just a kind of short-hand that is used to annotate a diagram, or an image to aid our understanding of the real disitrbution of geography, electicity or magnetism in space.

Electrical and magnetic field line diagrams can look very similar, but that does not make them the same thing. See the two example diagrams half way down this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole

[willendure]

Magnetic field lines are confusing because they show the direction in terms of where a compass north would point, rather than a scalar value like contours of electrical field lines.

Worth noting that in the case of the magnetic field lines the scalar value - the strength of the magnetic field - is shown by the density of the lines or how close together they are.

There must be a table of 'field line diagram features' versus 'meaning' somewhere, comparing the meaning of the features of electrical and magnetic field line diagrams in order to aid understanding of how to interpret them and how the two different types of diagram relate to each other.

Its also why the term 'magnetic reconnection' is utter bollocks. Its a bit like saying there was a contour reconnection on my map which caused an earth-quake, when in reality there was an earth-quake which shifted some contours on the map. It is a lazy and unfortunate short-hand piece of terminology which has grown to take on a physical meaning in its own right.

[sketch1946]

Hi willendure,
At the moment I'm trying to see the forest, and all I see is trees...
In general, I'm able to understand contour lines on a map, or even forests of Feynman vectors...
so I appreciate the analogy of contour lines as instantaneous values at different coordinates...
but

I've been told that magnetic field lines don't exist...
Can you help me understand how energy is stored in a field as in Maxwell's equations?

Can you help me with a link to the physics of a lab experiment with a large charged body creating a spherical magnetic field, and a smaller rotating charged body in that field, with diagrams or explanation of what sort of forces would be felt by the smaller body?

I'm just curious...

[Michael Mozina]

I supposed the LUX upgrades, and the PandaX-II experiments give mainstream astronomers three to five more years of stall time, where they can continue to 'pretend' that their dark matter hypothesis might still be valid, in *spite* of every failed lab test to date, and in spite of the numerous baryonic mass estimate flaws in mainstream galaxy mass estimate techniques that have been found since 2006.

This just looks like a deliberate stall tactic, and a means to extend various government grants and subsidies. I doubt even the scientists working on these upgrades actually believe that they are likely to find anything useful, but hey, it's still at least four more years of riding the governmental gravy train all the way to the bank.

[Michael Mozina]

http://spaceref.com/astronomy/radial-ac ... axies.html

"This demonstrates that we truly have a universal law for galactic systems," said Federico Lelli, formerly an astronomy postdoctoral fellow at Case Western Reserve University and currently a fellow at the European Southern Observatory.

"This is similar to the Kepler law for planetary systems, which does not care about the specific properties of the planet. Whether the planet is rocky like Earth or gaseous like Jupiter, the law applies," said Lelli, who led this investigation.

In this case, the observed acceleration tightly correlates with the gravitational acceleration from the visible mass, no matter the type of galaxy. In other words, if astronomers measure the distribution of normal matter, they know the rotation curve, and vice versa.

"But it is still unclear what this relation means and what is its fundamental origin," Lelli said.

How can they possibly be confused by what this observation means, or lack an understanding of it's fundamental origin? This observation makes *perfect* sense when we look at the facts over the past decade. 2006 was the absolute "high" point of exotic dark matter claims. Since then at least five different cosmology studies have consistently demonstrated how badly they "guestimated" the mass of different galaxies in 2006, and every lab test of DM since 2006 has been a complete failure. Both the lab results and the cosmology studies strongly suggest that the mainstream's galaxy mass estimate techniques have been the problem all along, and they never properly account for scattering.

It's pretty clear that they simply *botched* the mass estimates something horrible in that 2006 study which is why the rotation speed of galaxies can be estimated from the baryonic mass layout alone. They simply grossly underestimated how much ordinary mass is present, and they underestimated an entire "cloud" of million degree plasma around every galaxy.

These results are *not* consistent with their exotic dark matter claims:

http://www.space.com/33850-weird-galaxy ... atter.html

In some studies, the dark matter in the galaxy supposedly makes up 99.9 percent of the whole mass of the galaxy. There's no specific or known reason why the rotation pattern of every galaxy should automatically track to a very small subset of the whole mass of the galaxy in their theory. So did they go back to the drawing board and reconsider anything? Hell no.....

The mainstream is constantly surprised by everything they observe in space because they know almost nothing about it.