Sun has been emitting unknown particles, carbon dating may be completely off

No, watching you is like that. There are lots of candidate theories, and they ruled some out - which, you may note, is something we do in science.

Specifically, we ruled out some events that we thought had been detected earlier... the problem with getting science 'news' from non-scientist sources is that people like you only see things that confirm what was already believed.

Then again, we'll never see the whole picture because nobody writes news articles titled "The experiments to check predictions of 'theories' like EU and MOND still haven't happened, because there are no predictions, because those aren't theories," but we can all safely guess how you'd take to that.

Check out the history of the neutrino to see just how pointless your catty twattery actually looks in context.

Jef
 
I don't know what that means.

Imagine our relief at your position firmly outside any body that determines where funding goes...

(snip) wasted (snip) fruitless search (snip) non-existent ...

Once again, you *can't* say things like that because *we don't know these things yet*. You don't know, and much more qualified and competent people don't know. Even if dark matter needs to be thrown out, discovering that would be *huge* and this would be far from a waste.

Either way, we get more than our money's worth.

to starving children around the world?

There were starving children when the refrigerator and airplane were developed; we need those to save the starving children more efficiently. There were starving children when electricity was discovered, and getting that sorted out had among its many byproducts a massive benefit for the 'don't have so damn many starving children' effort. Same with quantum mechanics, relativity, and the carefully-tweaked wheat that we'll be using to feed children.

At the time those were being done, you'd have *exactly* the same perspective on those subjects as you have now, and if anyone had listened to you and just fed a few more kids then we'd be far behind schedule today.

Of course, posting in a conversation like this isn't a great way to convince people that you actually care about starving children. I blatantly don't care about starving children, but the stuff I do will help them later... and what you're doing isn't likely helping them *now*.

Advancing technology helps everyone, and if you don't have the patience to see today's revolutions through then you should strongly reconsider such irresponsible, short-sighted, uninformed blathering through the fruits of yesterday's discoveries - this message had to go through computers (which can't be anywhere near this advanced without quantum mechanics), across time zones via advanced cables (quantum mechanics again) and satellites (relativity, quantum mechanics), using protocols developed at an institute for high-energy physics, and in each of those steps - a narrow selection of the involved steps, at that - something we did for abstract nonsense's sake wound up far better for the world than anyone had imagined... and you can be damn sure some similarly myopic objections were raised against *all of those*. It's disconcerting that this needs to be pointed out.

If you really want to live in the kind of world where *anyone* in science listens to people like you, buy some damn stamps and raise your next objections like your grandparents would have. If you want to be taken seriously, have some perspective and learn the history.

Jef
 
"Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity...The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded."

-Eisenhower's farewell address, January 17, 1961
 
I think that even a casual look at the available funding for pure science shows his suspicion to be misguided.

The fact that you're quoting a politician, not a scientist, and at that a politician who followed that statement with

Eisenhower said:
For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

as if that's a bad thing, really doesn't speak well for you.

Many science projects are simply impossible without government funding - the Van Allen probes, whose data I use (for studies that definitely fit under the umbrella of 'intellectual curiosity'), cost nearly $700 million. Other satellites cost even more. Particle accelerators cost much more still. Hell, we've nuked space.

Once again, put your effort in or quit blabbing. If we are really doing science completely wrong, I'm sure you can make short work of our vain, overly-funded, too-technically-rigorous, shockingly-cohesive-and-predictive folly.

Jef
 
Dolts indeed

https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2014/08/16/rosetta-mission-predictions/

The Rosetta Mission Predictions

By David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill

After a 10-year journey, Rosetta spacecraft has now reached Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It looks like the mission is going to be a goldmine for us.

Already one self evident prediction of the electric comet model has been confirmed: a spectacular, sharply ‘spark machined’ surface—just the opposite of what the “sublimating ices” model of comets would predict and a refutation of all published artistic visualizations of the comet prior to Rosetta’s arrival.

As most of our readers will know, the double-lobed form of the nucleus, similar to the observed forms of so many comets and asteroids, is no surprise to electrical theorists. Standard theory, on the other hand, must call upon repeated astronomical improbabilities (merging of two tiny and remote bodies in space) to explain these recurrent morphologies. If such improbabilities are common in a gravitational scenario, why no triple-lobed comets or asteroids?

While no electrical theorist would deny the possibility that a chunk of dirty ice could still be circling the Sun today, none expects substantial water-ice either on or below the surface of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. More likely would be a possible localized dusting of frost as trivial levels of ice crystals, created electrochemically in the coma, drift to the surface.

Significant things to look for as the Rosetta mission continues:

No evidence of subsurface ice at the sources of the jets;
Virtually no interstellar dust, the second component of the “dirty snowball” theory;
Discovery of minerals on the nucleus that are typical of planetary surfaces within the
Habitable zone of the Sun; characteristic concentration of plasma jet activity eating away at the cliffs of elevated terrain and the margins of well-defined depressions;
Measurable retreat of active cliff regions in the wake of this activity; and
The presence of unexpected electric fields within the coma and/or close to the comet nucleus, possibly even disrupting the anticipated landing on the surface. This could occur on or after touch down because the sharp metallic edges of the spacecraft make an ideal focus for a diffuse plasma discharge, which would disrupt communications and possibly interfere with spacecraft electronics.
And, if a strong coronal mass ejection from the Sun strikes the comet, we expect the comet to respond electrically with a surge of activity, confirming that the jets are not due to warming from the Sun but to charged particle distribution in the electric field of the Sun.

If you’re wondering about the electrical theory, facts, and reasoning behind these expectations, it’s time to watch The Electric Comet documentary, along with the accompanying video on reported infrared readings of “water” from the Deep Impact event at Comet Tempel 1.
 
Ok, so two non scientist who believe in mythic God/Gods are exactly the people I should go to for information concerning the cosmos?

No thanks, I'll stick with people like Neil deGrasse Tyson. I don't know, they have a certain, what could we call it, uhm, education in the field.
 
They're not scientists, the last sentence regarding a CME displays *on its own* several blinding flashes of the stupids ranging from heliospheric physics to comet-solar wind interaction to what 'heating' in space actually is, and they show almost as little regard for properly explaining the views of their 'rivals' (read: the people who actually know stuff) as they do for the facts they're also not actually explaining. If they had an actual point, they could publish in an actual journal - but instead they keep blathering mindlessly at the layman without trying to play at the level where they could call themselves scientists.

I'm not sure I'd go with 'dolts' as a first choice, but it'll do for now.

Jef
 
Jul 8, 2015

Modern astronomy is like a blind man, panicked, without his cane, running. There are collisions.

It’s not because astronomy has lost its sight; it’s because it has gained a second sight, another sense beyond the five that evolved. It has gained a sixth extrasensory perception conferred by its own invented machines, a machine sense, an instrumental perception. New telescopes can “see” ultraviolet, x-ray, infrared, and radio “light”; space probes can “touch” and “taste” other planets; they can “smell” interplanetary space; and they can “listen” to interstellar and intergalactic space.

Perception of the cosmos with these machines is entirely different from visual and earth-based perception. The perceived cosmos is entirely different: interstellar space is not silent; interplanetary space is not empty; planets do not have the textures or flavors that had been predicted; the new light reveals shapes and behaviors that were thought to be impossible.

And the new perception disrupts the old: the old no longer makes sense. The consequence is indistinguishable from blindness. Mystery objects appear where astronomers never imagined anything. The old concepts crash into them and break and bleed. The new percepts don’t conform to the old concepts. Astronomers make up fantasy objects, silly things, to save their theories: black holes that pull everything in while simultaneously blowing everything away, dark matter that can’t be detected, dark energy that always exactly makes up for what gravity can’t explain: blank checks for which swindlers would go to jail. None of it can be tested in a lab: the imaginary universe is mostly unobservable, like the universe of the leprechauns.

Astronomers model the fantasies with video games and pretend that the games are more real than the data they crash into. But the surprises continue, the crashing into data continues, the invention of silliness continues. They need new sight and new insight, new theories and concepts: They need serious things, testable things, in place of silly things.

But the silliness has institutional inertia: the crashing of silliness can crush seriousness. Astronomers are running, blind and panicky, through a crashing and crushing landscape. One foot treads on defeat, the other on despair, and the stars they see are from crashing into the mysterious things. This will not go away with a vote among the good ole boys. It’s likely that no one will survive.

Someday, a new astronomy may be constructed on the blood and broken bones. It will be an extraterrestrial and transhuman astronomy that is organized around Birkeland currents and double layers and plasma instabilities. Its laboratories will contain terrellas and discharge tubes instead of Cavendish balls. It will not recognize Newton or Einstein or their followers as having done real science.

Scientists hate to acknowledge the emotional content of their learning: The passive voice protects them from their feelings. They fail to understand that their minds are webbed with metaphors, and they take their light as literal. So even their light is darkness. Isaac, how sad, after your victories over all the obstacles that confronted you, now to be impaled on the otherness of an alien cosmos, to be gored by its strangeness, to die without being able even to limn its outline. Your believers are cast into utter darkness.

Mel Acheson
 
Good to know that, no matter how many more verifications of the current way of doing things we seem to run into on a daily basis, we'll always have some dolt quoting some quack who can only insult current scientists while producing no meaningful work on his own.

Throw in a few things that'll be cool-sounding but out of context for the problems under consideration (care to explain to the class what a Birkeland current is? Thought not...) and misaddressed complaints (what makes you think the people whose objects under consideration are plasma phenomena will be ignoring plasma instabilities outright? I have to deal with those daily!), and it almost distracts from the miserable failure that is the EU movement's attempt at justifying their blathering based on not having a clue what to do with Rosetta data.

This isn't science, this is a crotchety old fart pretending that poetry beats proof.

Do us all a favor and read an actual plasma dynamics book. Go back to the father of MHD (and the guy EU loonies pretend is their new god), Hannes Alfvén, and see that he was *wrong* on things too. We see magnetic reconnection, and he soiled the bed on that one; find actual predictions with actual experiments out of these guys, or can it. This is Creation Museum-grade poppycock.

Jef
 
^just this, it is quite well written, but demonstrates just NO actual understanding of what science and the concept of a model is...
A text that seems cool to read because is quite well written and poetic to an extent, that has just no scientific value.

Believing in this would be like believing in a Lovecraft short story, because it is thrilling to think that "Astronomers are running, blind and panicky, through a crashing and crushing landscape. One foot treads on defeat, the other on despair, and the stars they see are from crashing into the mysterious things.", but frankly? That's it.
 
These days astrophysics seems to be more about models than observation.

I would add that the Electric Universe people seem to do a more satisfactory job explaining recent anomalies that we see in the news these days (particularly with regard to comets) than mainstream scientists.
 
Models are used, and they are useful, but they're still secondary to observation - any belief otherwise is misled and mistaken. And I say that as a modeler.

EU people don't explain *anything*. Their foundations are totally wonky. The difference is that they're 100% PR - all they do is aim at laypeople, with no real science going on (at least that passes any real sort of test), which is why you haven't been able to link published, peer-reviewed papers.

JB