Reply To: Proliferation?

[jjohnson]

I’m a relative newbie here, but have been studying plasma cosmology and the EU forum for the last year or so. I agree with many of you that their ideas will need to be polished up a bit in the math department in order to look the least bit appealing to the orthodocs, because they themselves have thrown almost everything over to the math department and forgotten the value of observations first, then theory, then models and predictions for more and better evidence, or lack thereof. It’s hard to fight against “math proves physics theories” without just saying, “theories are never ‘proven’ – they last only until a better paradigm comes along”.

That said, Dr. Anthony Peratt’s Physics of the Plasma Universe, Springer Verlag, 1992, has been an inspiration to me, and is based on hard science and unique observations, followed by elegant Particle-In-Cell simulations that bear out much of their findings. They want math? Here it is in abundance. Why these equations? Hannes Alfvén pointed out in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that his work in MHD was not applicable to plasma, a different state of matter from the other 3 condensed states to which it does apply, and well. Peratt studied under Alfvén, and carried the ball with his research at Los Alamos National Laboratory with DOE. He is not exactly what the establishment would call a raving idiot pursuing crackpot physics magic, so they simply shun and ignore him.

It is a sign of the times that increasingly the strong thinkers are choosing to publish elsewhere (viXra, arXiv, self-publish, web publish, etc) rather than face the opinionated and uneven-handed reviewers and editors. Halton Arp, an excellent physicist and observational astronomer who worked with Hubble has effectively been banished by our establishment, to work in Germany instead. It is not surprising that much of the current paradigm shift is coming from the engineering side of things – applied science, where things actually have to work. IEEE members have a plasma cosmology working group, and publish their stuff freely in peer reviewed publication. Of course, that’s not real physics…In the world of tokomaks and the theory (it is still just an idea with no observations having been really made deep inside the sun) that solar style fusion is doable here on Earth, we have yet to see a single success. Billions of research and construction dollars have been thrown at this goal over decades of time, and yet not a single watt of excess, fusion-produced power has ever been introduced into our electric grid by those theorists and mathematicians. Plasma is complex, chaotic and messy, and its simulation is not a trite exercise. That should be a challenge that scientists would be glad to meet, but challengers are held in low esteem by those who get the gold.

That said, my observation is not that PC/EU advocates are trying to overthrow all of (cosmological/astronomical) physics. They are trying to get the gravity-only, BB interpretations to be modified by considering the other forces which are certainly at work in the universe. I am retired so I don’t have my job or reputation at stake, here. I just really want to know how things actually work, with less doubt than the conventional physics establishment has provided me, through the Big Bang, string theory and beyond, quantum gravity, expanding universe, etc. Read Miles Mathis and Crothers if you are interested in seeing some parts of conventional math examined critically. We do not live in a theoretical universe; we live in a real, fairly electro-gravitic-mechanical one. Contrary to dogmatic pronouncements from Those On High, we do not know how old it is, nor how far it extends, nor what powers it. We don’t know much of the basics, actually, such as what mass, gravity, time, and energy are, nor what gives rise to them. We’re not as knowledgeable as scientists with power would like us to believe. That is what makes the search for new evidence and ideas so interesting.