Nov 01, 2013 It’s exciting to discover a new idea that explains more facts with more unity than previous ideas. It’s exhilarating to discover two such new ideas that interact to reveal opportunities previously unimaginable. That’s what happened with heliocentrism and gravity. Copernicus’ idea that the planets moved around the…
Sep 20, 2013 The large ALMA radio telescope in Chile has discovered that “billowing columns” of “gas” are “fleeing” from gravitational forces that would snare them into new stars. The size of the Sculptor Galaxy depends on the outcome. Unless, of course, star formation is not so much a…
Sep 18, 2013 Popular accounts of nebulas usually omit mention of their “hairy” structure. Because gravity can’t produce long, evenly spaced filaments of matter, astronomers don’t talk about them. Perhaps they don’t even see them. This double nebula is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small, irregular galaxy that’s considered to…
Sep 11, 2013 Modern astronomy has a planetary nebula (PN) problem: Gravity can’t do what PNs do. Astronomers invent a kind of pseudo-magnetism to fill the explanatory holes. This pseudo-magnetism is a reified presumption that’s unplugged from the electric currents that generate real magnetic forces. Consensus theory has PNs…
Sep 06, 2013 Radio-wave observations of a Herbig-Haro (jetted) star at the edge of an opaque plasma cell reveal the wiring harness that drives it. In visible light, a spiraling filament jets toward the upper left of the image. It ends in a bright double layer. Surrounding it is…
Sep 02, 2013 A gravity-only Universe cannot explain certain discrepancies. Ilya Prigogine, from a young age, was concerned that accepted physical theory had a couple of glaring discrepancies from observation: determinism and time symmetry. Most observations are of contingency and irreversibility. No one has yet seen an egg “un-fry”…
Aug 16, 2013 Rediscovering F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order has been exciting. Hayek began his inquiry into the foundations of theoretical psychology in 1919 before specializing in economics (and winning a Nobel Prize in that latter field in 1974). He didn’t publish The Sensory Order until 1952, when…
Aug 13, 2013 It has the body of a snake and the head of a lion. It has legs that end in clawed feet. It often has wings: it flies, or at least it comes from the sky. It breathes fire. It’s an absurd creature, and the stories can be…
Aug 08, 2013 It twists like a Birkeland Current; it’s stringy like a Birkeland Current; it’s dense like a Birkeland Current; but Everyone Knows (if they want to pursue a career in astronomy) that There is No Such Thing as Electricity in Space. The press release for this new image of…
Aug 05, 2013 NGC 4666 is one of the younger additions to the Virgo cluster of galaxies. It has also apparently given birth to another generation. The galaxy lies eight degrees south of M49, the great-grandmother of the Virgo cluster. Whether NGC 4666 is the daughter of M49 or…
