Experiment to Test Electric Sun Hypothesis is Becoming Power Generator Prototype.

Why do you need sources to establish that filamentation is a property of the fourth state of matter??? Why not just look at a novelty plasma globe? All of the claimed features in that article are readily apparent in any plasma globe.

Yes, by all means, Google "electric universe". See for yourself that Google is happy to sprinkle hit pieces very high in the search results for this search term. These are very obviously pieces written by "debunkers" to persuade you to stop learning this idea. It's been very effective. Why has the notion of searching for information suddenly become conflated with judgments about whether or not something is true? And how much effort is Google actually putting into validating the accuracy of these critiques? It's easy to show, through examples, that the answer is not much:

RationalWiki: "Electric Universe (EU) is an umbrella term that covers various pseudo-scientific cosmological ideas built around the claim that the formation and existence of various features of the Universe can be better explained by electricity and magnetism than by gravity alone."

What RationalWiki does not tell you: The US government spent vast sums of money creating electrical cosmology (many billions of dollars). This appears to have occurred shortly after Hannes Alfven was awarded the Nobel Prize for his creation of MHD. Alfven's intellectual descendant, Anthony Peratt, managed these very expensive experiments and summarized his findings - with formal mathematics, where necessary - in his text Physics of the Plasma Universe. Peratt is a plasma physicist, a nuclear physicist and a nuclear weapons researcher. In the late 70's, Peratt was testing the effects of nuclear blasts on electronics by sending very large electric currents through thin metal wires. He noticed in those experiments that he could recreate the most common forms of galaxies. No dark matter is required - just electric currents.

Contrast that explanation with RationalWiki's, and now ask yourself: What in the world is Google thinking? If people are being misinformed about a topic, is Google's job to amplify that misinformation?

The People Who Believe that Electricity Rules the Universe - VICE: "Electric universe theory is at odds with everything modern science has determined about the universe."

Okay ... what has modern science determined about the universe? That 85% of it is missing? That when we try to force-fit gravity as the universe's fundamental force, the most brilliant theoreticians in the world are unable to get it to work?

The Electric Universe Theory - Skeptoid Podcast: "The Electric Universe Theory. Some believe that everything we know about the universe is wrong — and it's all electric ... Filed under Conspiracy Theories, Natural History"

How is this a "conspiracy theory"? IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science has been publishing on electrical cosmology topics for a few decades now. These ideas originated with Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven. The US government created electrical cosmology. What is the "conspiracy"? That electricity flows through space? Astrophysicists have stopped disagreeing with that (since electric currents have been observed spanning 50 kiloparsecs!); they instead try to claim that it's just not important. An electric current that spans 50 kiloparsecs seems like a pretty fundamental force, and fairly important. Can gravity do that? There's so far no reason to believe it.

Testing the Electric Universe - One Universe at a Time: Brian Koberlein claims in this article "The EU model predicts the Sun should produce no neutrinos. The EU model clearly fails this test, because neutrinos are produced by the Sun. We have not only observed solar neutrinos, we have imaged the Sun by its neutrinos."

This is absolutely untrue: The EU model predicts that neutrinos should emanate from the Sun's photosphere. Koberlein was long ago informed of this mistake, and to this day refuses to fix his own error on his own blog. This is a professor at RIT! Try looking him up. Sad:

Prof. Koberlein is not what he seems. He doesn't know as much physics as he claims (as is readily confirmed by his colleagues and some of the other profs in the department), and nowadays seems to be more interested in his blog and online presence. He frequently makes mistakes when talking about relativity and quantum mechanics. Not recommended!

Koberlein is also by now famous for completely misstating the case against Robitaille. Try Googling "Robitaille cosmic microwave background", and you will see Koberlein's mischaracterization of Robitaille's CMB counter-argument: Nowhere does Robitaille ever state - in any of his many online lectures - that the microwaves are "reflected". He claims that the water in the oceans produce an apparent microwave emission. He's talking about the molecular bonds themselves. Koberlein invented this reflection mistake himself, and Google picked it up as their answer! - effectively proving that neither is qualified to be managing our access to these scientific controversies. If you actually read that Koberlein article, the mistake is explained in the comments. Again, Koberlein refuses to fix his mistake in his own blog, even after being informed of it. He literally starts the article by pointing out that he has created 800 of these articles. Well, this is maybe stating the obvious, but how much attention are you honestly able to give to the consideration of each of those subjects?

You want to believe that you can just Google the biggest questions mankind has ever tried asking. You want to believe that these answers will be accurate. If only the world was that easy, we would not even need science.

Dark matter link to regular matter’s dominance fails to show up
If axions influence antimatter's behavior, the effects are tiny.
JOHN TIMMER - 11/16/2019, 5:30 AM

Meanwhile, as the dark matter failures have piled up, astrophysicists acknowledged the existence of a variety of Alfven's predictions, including MHD waves, Birkeland currents, CIV's and plasma double layers:

Prediction and theory evaluation: Alfven on space plasma phenomena

According to some scientists and philosophers of science, a theory is or should be judged by its ability to make successful predictions. This paper examines a case from the history of recent science---the research of Hannes Alfvén and his colleagues on space plasma phenomena---in order to see whether scientists actually follow this policy. Tests of five predictions are considered: magnetohydrodynamic waves, field-aligned (``Birkeland'') currents, critical ionization velocity and the existence of planetary rings, electrostatic double layers, and partial corotation. It is found that the success or failure of these predictions had essentially no effect on the acceptance of Alfvén's theories, even though concepts such as "Alfvén waves'' have become firmly entrenched in space physics. Perhaps the importance of predictions in science has been exaggerated; if a theory is not acceptable to the scientific community, it may not gain any credit from successful predictions.

Yes, and notice that gravitational cosmology is just as screwed up as it was since I last posted. The dark matter situation has not one bit improved - a remarkable situation given that so much of America's best intellectual talent has by now been directed at the problem for so many decades now. Over this same time period, the US government has poured literally billions of dollars into the creation of Anthony Peratt's Plasma Universe framework at the national laboratories. How many more decades of no progress will it take to realize that dark matter is gravitational cosmology's dead-end? What a colossal waste of human resources! A person need only think to realize that gravity has a very serious distance problem: The very idea of building a cosmology on gravity is just a tragic idea. After all, if the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, then the next nearest star would typically be about 4 miles away! The lesson implied by galaxies synchronized over kiloparsec scales is that we need a force which can be extended to kiloparsec distances. Gravity is obviously not that force. But the filaments are pointing you to the obvious answer: Plasmas tend to form into filaments when they conduct electric currents, and astrophysicists have already acknowledged that such filaments do not share gravity's distance problem. The tragedy of cosmology is that if people were to simply think about the problem, the problem of dark matter actually just disappears.

The original Vice article does a good job of capturing how cosmologists approach the issue of these large-scale structures:

"These discoveries hint at the enigmatic influence of so-called 'large-scale structures' which, as the name suggests, are the biggest known objects in the universe. These dim structures are made of hydrogen gas and dark matter and take the form of filaments, sheets, and knots that link galaxies in a vast network called the cosmic web. We know these structures have major implications for the evolution and movements of galaxies, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of the root dynamics driving them."

The article invites the reader to assign the known features of cosmic and laboratory plasmas - filaments, sheets and knots - to "hydrogen gas and dark matter". What is remarkable is that Slashdot readers - many of whom are electrical engineers! - apparently do not notice the bait-and-switch. Experimental work with plasmas has taught us exactly why plasmas tend to do these things: Plasma's many complex structures can be traced to a physical phenomenon known as the plasma double layer - a tight layering of plus and minus charged particles which commonly occurs, without recombination. These surprising structures have been observed in both the ionosphere and the Van Allen belts - the first two things we encounter when we go into space. There is no escaping the conclusion that plasma double layers must be incredibly common in space and incredibly important for astrophysics and cosmology.

But, the many articles we see written on this subject of space's large-scale structures ignore all discussions of plasmas - which are sometimes referred to as the "fourth" state of matter even though they literally constitute 99% of what we see with telescopes. These articles ignore the actual photographs and remarkable videos of counter-rotating double layers which have been taken in recent years. They also completely ignore the historical prediction of filamentation - a prediction first made by Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven in 1963:

"Most theoretical investigations of cosmical plasmas have been devoted to the study of homogeneous plasmas. However, observations indicate that most cosmical plasmas are strongly inhomogeneous. In the ionosphere a small-scale structure is often observed, most pronounced in connexion with aurorae. Auroral rays are often very thin, and the degree of ionization and hence the conductivity may vary by two or three powers of ten within a few kilometres or less. Also the magnetosphere has probably a filamentary structure as indicated by the study of whistler propagation. Similarly, the solar atmosphere has a ray structure. On good eclipse photographs the ray structure of the corona is often very pronounced, and radio observations indicate that the rays continue at least out to 10 or 20 solar radii ('supercorona'). Closer to the surface of the sun we observe prominences, which very often have a threadlike structure. The chromosphere is often regarded as a filamentary network of miniature prominences. In gas nebulae filamentary structures are often conspicuous.

Hence medium-density plasmas (and perhaps also low-density plasmas) seem very often to be strongly inhomogeneous, exhibiting a filamentary structure which often may be parallel to the magnetic field. Therefore it is of basic importance to discuss mechanisms which are capable of producing a filamentary structure."

- Cosmical Electrodynamics, Fundamental Principles, 2nd Ed., Hannes Alfven + Carl-Gunne Falthammar, p.192 (1963)

That was the first time that anybody ever claimed, in print, that the universe should be filamentary. Gravitationalists have a very awkward relationship with Alfven's prediction: They've completely ignored it.

"Among the earliest predictions about the morphology of the universe that differed significantly from the common astrophysical assumption is that the universe be filamentary (Alfven, 1950, 1981, 1990) ..."

- Physics of the Plasma Universe, by Anthony Peratt (the 1950 reference should be 1963, since the quote appears in the 2nd version of the text, best I can tell)

"The suggestion that the universe should be filamentary and cellular was generally disregarded until the 1980s, when a series of unexpected observations showed filamentary structure on the Galactic, intergalactic, and supergalactic scale."

- Physics of the Plasma Universe, by Anthony Peratt

So long as science journalists, cosmologists, astrophysicists and even Slashdot readers refuse to apply what is today known about laboratory plasmas to our observations of cosmic plasmas, space will continue to be mysterious and "dark". The enigma of the coherence of the universe at the largest scales directly follows from the unsupported assumption that the universe must be dominated by gravity at the largest scales. There has never been good reason to believe it; the observations are pointing us towards the inherent properties of plasmas - not gravity. Once this awkward conjecture is removed, the mystery of the universe's large-scale coherence completely disappears - and we return to the mundane business of applying what we know from the laboratory to our observations of space. A lot of time is being wasted going in circles on these matters; just learn the behaviors of laboratory plasmas. Look closely at the filamentary features of a novelty plasma globe; there's no need for dark matter to explain filamentation.

Rather than just asserting that there is nothing new here, you can make your case by showing us all a single example where any of the critics of either Peratt or the Electric Universe refer to Peratt as a nuclear weapons researcher or mention that he discovered that there is no dark matter as a consequence of doing classified research. Show us just one single example.

I can definitively tell you that electrical cosmology has never been introduced in this manner - and for the record, I'm quite certain that none of the future critiques - including your own posts - will be stated that way either - since it would literally undermine whatever argument they or you are about to make.

What Peratt is arguing is that only he had access to the experimental rigs necessary to perform the high-energy experiments that are necessary to witness the solution to the dark matter problem (and clearly he means that to include Phil Plait, who was privy to the same unclassified information as the rest of the world). To my knowledge, Peratt has never stated the situation in this manner. What he's saying is that the conclusions that academics - Plait included - have come to is a direct consequence of their inability to fund these high-energy experiments.

This certainly is a news event, and I will continue to push for its coverage in other mainstream news channels even if Slashdot refuses to break the story.

You seem determined to pretend as though no news event has occurred. The way that a journalist would handle the situation would be to break the Peratt story, and then having had a chance to review this new information which Peratt has revealed, provide Phil Plait with another opportunity to make a statement.

Most of what you would need to know about his galactic simulations are here. Keep in mind that much of what we are hearing about today is the result of research which was done about 40 - 50 years ago. There's nothing too surprising about that if the knowledge arrived as a byproduct of nuclear weapons research.

This 2004 explanation of the history of what happened from page 84 of James Hogan's Kicking the Sacred Cow: Questioning the Unquestionable and Thinking the Impermissible is unique in that it adds additional important details that I'm pretty sure have not been printed anywhere else before or since:

Peratt's Models and Simulations: Galaxies in the Laboratory

Encouragement came, nevertheless, from a different direction. In 1979, Anthony Peratt, who had been a graduate student of Alfven's ten years previously, was working with the aerospace defense contractor Maxwell Laboratories on a device called Blackjack V, which generated enormous pulses of electrical power —10 trillion watts! — to vaporize wires into filaments of plasma, producing intense bursts of X rays. The purpose was to simulate the effects of the electromagnetic pulse produced by a hydrogen bomb on electronics and other equipment. High-speed photographs showed the filaments of plasma moving toward each other under the attraction of their magnetic fields, and then wrapping around each other in tight spiral forms strikingly suggestive of familiar astronomical pictures of galaxies. Computer simulations of plasma interactions that Peratt performed later at the Los Alamos National Laboratory duplicated with uncanny faithfulness the features of all known galaxy types. By varying the parameters of the simulations, Peratt was able to match the result with every one of the pictures shown in Halton Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and guess with confidence just what electromagnetic forces were shaping the galaxies.

These simulations also suggested a possible answer to another mystery that astronomers had been debating for a long time. In a galaxy held together purely by gravity, the velocity of the component stars about the center as it rotates should decrease with distance from it — as with the Solar System, in which the outer planets move more slowly in their orbits around the Sun. Observations, however, show that the speeds of stars orbiting the galactic center remain fairly constant regardless of distance. This is just what the simulations showed would be expected of an electrically formed galaxy, where the spiral arms form coherent structures that trail back like the cords of a gigantic Weed Eater, moving with the same velocity along their whole length. Conventional theory had been forced to postulate an invisible halo of the, strange gravitating but otherwise noninteracting dark matter surrounding a galaxy — there for no other reason than to produce the desired effect. But with electromagnetic forces, behaving not peculiarly but in just the way they are observed to on Earth, the effect emerges naturally.

It's important to note that what is new is that Peratt is now acknowledging that he has been studying nuclear weapons - a fact that could be discerned if somebody did the research - yet very few did. I must emphasize that the Electric Universe theorists and even some advocates were actually informed (myself included), but to our credit, we refused to publicly disclose - as requested - for a full 15 years despite all of the vicious attacks by critics from Slashdot and elsewhere. It's not yet clear what has changed that now permits Peratt to publicly discuss this. This new public revelation somewhat vindicates James Hogan himself, who risked his stellar reputation with his decision to put forward the electrical cosmology argument.

For those who want to fully diagnose the emerging history, you should also read this 2008 rebuttal by Tim Thompson here, where Tim alleges that Peratt published in IEEE in order to ensure that his papers "will not be seen by the community of relevant astrophysicists". With the recent revelation that Peratt was in fact far better funded than the galactic researchers and actually doing classified research, Tim's allegations that Peratt was being evasive can no longer be used to discount Peratt's claims. It seems likely that Tim wasn't allowed to know any more than the rest of the public - and if he tries to say that he did, then he was actually part of the deception.

My own personal take is that what is happening with Peratt today closely mirrors what happened with Robert Goddard back in the early 20's, when he claimed that Americans could send a rocket with a small explosive charge to the Moon, and observe its collision using a telescope. The public - some scientists included - ridiculed Goddard for the suggestion, and this had important historical consequences which are not today widely recognized. For instance, the thousands of German V2's which rained down upon Europe in WWII had all of Goddard's key inventions (not too surprising since Goddard was in regular communication with them). You could say that the V2 was an American-designed rocket which was built in Germany. Nazi scientists were keen to point this out when they were being grilled after the war's end, and Werner von Braun - the scientist who oversaw the construction of the V2 - stated emphatically:

"And in the light of what has happened since his death, we can only wonder what might have been if America realized earlier the implications of his work."

This information bubble - observable on Slashdot, but also very much dominating Silicon Valley at large - where electricity in space is treated as a crank or crackpot idea regardless of what evidence is put forward, risks similar consequences that none of us today can today accurately predict. That is actually the lesson we failed to learn from the Moonshot which only becomes evident when the full story of Goddard's ridicule is told.

The tech community, imho, should be more concerned and thoughtful about ending up on the wrong side of history. Peratt's recent disclosure that he has been doing classified research should send up red flags that this is in fact a true American patriot who has been busy behind-the-scenes defending us all (after all, his bio clearly states that he advised the Department of Energy on its Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations). Nobody should treat this man as some sort of scientific heretic, and we need to come to grips with the very real emerging possibility that the theoretical basis for the Electric Universe - the very successful prior work of Nobel laureate, Hannes Alfven - has been permitted to be rejected by the mainstream physicists for the simple reason that it became a classified weapons program. A course correction is immediately required in the tech community. Slashdot can help to correct the mistake by helping to break the Peratt story.

It's apparently not news if you disagree with it.

Re: "I'm a geologist, which is a subset of scientist. I've met the Electric Universe before. I should have printed it's materials onto soft, flushable paper so I could get some use out of it."

Perhaps people can judge for themselves the extent to which you are keeping up with the changes happening right now within your own domain.

Electric Currents in Outer Space Run the Show

Editors’ Vox
Perspectives on Earth and space science: A blog from AGU’s journal editors

A new book explores our understanding of electric currents, which are fundamental to the structure and dynamics of space plasmas.

Modern society relies on electric currents. We can generate them, guide them from one place to another (including very remote places), and make them work for us. The use of electricity has provided the greatest technological advances in humankind. But electric currents also occur in nature by themselves and “run the show” in outer space. Electric Currents in Geospace and Beyond, a new book just published by the American Geophysical Union, explores our most up-to-date understanding of electric currents in the solar system. Here the editors answer some questions about past and recent advances in this field ...

You might not be understanding just how integrated into the Electric Universe this concept is; although it is possible to focus exclusively upon the science they raise, what Wal Thornhill, Dave Talbott and especially Dwardu Cardona have argued is that this is actually what happened to Earth - that the Earth has a complicated history as a wandering planet which began within the illuminated envelope of a brown dwarf star. They then proceed to re-interpret the many confusing aspects of the mythological record from this starting-point hypothesis.

In terms of the claim, there is nothing really extraordinary happening here: We see many exo-planetary systems today which are plainly suggestive of migration; in fact, that is oftentimes the go-to inference for planetary scientists trying to explain their observations of these systems. We also today see transient wandering planetary systems where the bodies are all strung out in a linear sequence (they are called Herbig-Haro objects). And if a system is wandering, then why not suggest that the planet is subsequently captured by a different type of star? Each of the individual steps of the process which have been suggested are not actually extraordinary by the standards of modern astronomy, and if you actually think about the situation, the wandering planet scenario can easily explain why we do not see alien life anywhere around us.

Think a bit further through it all, and you will start to realize that primitive forms of life which emerge within the illuminated envelope of a Brown Dwarf star would not necessarily even know that other worlds exist (!) - since that illuminated plasma would probably obstruct both their visuals and radio frequencies of the outside world. In other words, we can construct a very reasonable solution to the Fermi Paradox using this approach.

Either way, the EU has taken this concept considerably farther than the mainstream, and to the extent that people here find this idea interesting, you should probably consider that the reactions here on Slashdot have blocked you from even knowing that Dwardu Cardona, for instance, has written almost 2,000 pages of referenced arguments in support of the Earth having a Brown Dwarf origin.

Dwardu Cardona, God Star, 2006, 518 pages
Dwardu Cardona, Flare Star, 2007, 547 pages
Dwardu Cardona, Primordial Star, 2009, 392 pages
Dwardu Cardona, Metamorphic Star, 2011, 334 pages
Dwardu Cardona, Newborn Star, 2016, 518 pages

Re: "THIS is the sort of thing that I read Slashdot to learn about. Interesting, if provocative, speculation based on scientific reasoning. Places to look for signatures of extra-terrestrial life."

Other stars, other worlds, other life?

December 15th, 1999, Wal Thornhill

In the last few years a new class of faint stars has been discovered. They are called L-Type Brown Dwarfs because the element lithium appears in their spectra. They are the most numerous stellar objects in the galaxy and bridge the gap between stars and Jupiter-sized planets. They are too small to be shining from internal thermonuclear power. A further puzzle is that they radiate blue and ultraviolet light even though they are cool at a temperature around 950K. Water molecules dominate their spectra.

... Astronomers recognize that such stars could swallow planets yet their plasma envelope is so tenuous that it would not impede the planetary orbits within the star’s atmosphere ...

... Since an electric star is heated externally a planet need not be destroyed by orbiting beneath its anode glow. In fact life is not only possible inside the glow of a small brown dwarf, it seems far more likely than on a planet orbiting outside a star! This is because the radiant energy arriving on a planet orbiting inside a glowing sphere is evenly distributed over the entire surface of the planet ...

There are no seasons, no tropics and no ice-caps. A planet does not have to rotate, its axis can point in any direction and its orbit can be eccentric. The radiant energy received by the planet will be strongest at the blue and red ends of the spectrum. Photosynthesis relies on red light. Sky light would be a pale purple (the classical “purple dawn of creation”). L-type Brown Dwarfs have water as a dominant molecule in their spectra, along with many other biologically important molecules and elements. Its “children” would accumulate atmospheres and water would mist down. It is therefore of particular interest that most of the extra-solar planets discovered are gas giants, several times the size of Jupiter, orbiting their star extremely closely. It is our system of distantly orbiting planets that seems the odd one out. In fact it argues in favor of a galactic traffic accident between the Sun and a sub-Brown Dwarf like Jupiter or Saturn.

Ignore this junk.

It's time. Pull the trigger, Slashdot.