# The Higgs Fiasco and the Electric Sun



## Metryq (Dec 30, 2012)

*The Higgs Fiasco and the Electric Sun*

The one glaring error in the article is: "Both the Sun and other generators of power in the universe – Black Holes, pulsars, quasars, etc. – are rather to be understood as nodes in a cosmic webwork of electrical filaments spanning the universe." This suggests that Electric Universe proponents believe in Standard Model phantoms, such as black holes, when they do not. Meanwhile pulsars and quasars have radically different explanations that do not resort to ad hoc fantasies, such as neutronium.

In the movie FORBIDDEN PLANET the captain addresses the bosun by his given name on one occasion, but we never hear the surname. Too bad the writers didn't engage in a little humor by naming him Higgs.


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## RJM Corbet (Jan 1, 2013)

_... Both the Sun and other generators of power in the universe – Black Holes, pulsars, quasars, etc. – are rather to be understood as nodes in a cosmic webwork of electrical filaments spanning the universe. A star like our Sun is best understood as a node where two or more such filaments meet in space ..._

 There obviously will come a time when Einsteinian, like Newtonian, physics is superceded by a new more expansive model which does not invalidate it, but takes it further.

But does the 'standard model' establishment really close-up against even investigating new ideas like this plasma model? It's the conspiracy element that makes me a little suspicious. 

The fact the standard model is not able always to explain _everything_ -- well, 95% of the universe actually -- does not invalidate it.

Does this electric model explain brown dwarf stars, supernova etc, which are adequately covered by fusion? 

The fact the Higgs Boson may be a bit more complicated than at first expected does nothing to invalidate its prediction and then  proof (99.99%) by the LHC experiment. Hardly a 'fiasco' anyway?

Sorry ...


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## Metryq (Jan 1, 2013)

RJM Corbet said:


> Does this electric model explain brown dwarf stars, supernova etc, which are adequately covered by fusion?



The fusion model _does not_ explain any of those phenomena, even poorly. As noted in other posts, the best primer on the Electric Universe is Donald Scott's THE ELECTRIC SKY. Tom Findlay's A BEGINNER'S VIEW OF OUR ELECTRIC UNIVERSE is longer because it is written for the layman, but it is free. (It is a well made PDF, although a portable ereader might make for more comfortable reading.)

The one major advantage that EU has over the Standard Model is empirical lab tests. Although there were many natural philosophers studying electricity and magnetism before 1900, Kristian Birkeland essentially kicked off plasma cosmology when he studied the auroras. (Lucy Jago's book on Birkeland is excellent.) Birkeland and Hannes Alfven, another major name in plasma physics, were both scorned and/or suppressed. So I know the conspiracy angle makes all of this sound fishy. But I leave that up to you. Do some reading, then tell me if you think NASA is living in a dream world every time they refer to comets as "dirty snowballs" in a press release.

But briefly back to brown dwarves and supernovae—Scott's book has a chapter covering the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, and it does not mean what mainstream astronomers think it means. FG Sagittae is the most interesting example from that chapter. Standard Model astronomers tie themselves into knots trying to explain it.


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## RJM Corbet (Jan 2, 2013)

Metryq said:


> The fusion model _does not_ explain any of those phenomena, even poorly. As noted in other posts, the best primer on the Electric Universe is Donald Scott's THE ELECTRIC SKY. Tom Findlay's A BEGINNER'S VIEW OF OUR ELECTRIC UNIVERSE is longer because it is written for the layman, but it is free. (It is a well made PDF, although a portable ereader might make for more comfortable reading.) ...


 
It has enough to make it worth reading about, Metryq, so I'm going to enjoy doing that. Thank you. 

I mentioned brown dwarf stars because they are not like black-dwarf ex-suns that have exhausted their fuel. They are suns-that-never were: stars that never achieved ignition and, in my short reading so far, Findlay has already glossed over this fact by treating brown and black dwarf stars as essentially the same object?

However, the plasma theory does neatly explain this:

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/532348-mars-features-caused-by-electricity-not-water.html

I've always wondered why the Mars experts people seem to completely ignore the convincing electrical theory for the dendriditic/scalloped scarring on Mars, in favour of the implausible water erosion explanation ...


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## RJM Corbet (Jan 2, 2013)

It all seems feasible, to someone with as little knowledge as I have. Universities teach the standard model: it's the syllabus, wherever you go. It's what a cosmologist has to learn, to get a job, etc. Careers are genuinely at stake. 

But although this plasma model would require extensive modifications to the standard model's view of things like quasars and black holes, it's certainly not attempting to negate the whole SM, in it's entirety. 

This seems impressive:

http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/m87/press.txt
(HUBBLE DETECTS FASTER-THAN-LIGHT MOTION IN GALAXY M87)

The _Wiki_ page remains reserved about it though:

'_In pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1999, the motion of Messier 87's jet was measured at four to six times the speed of light. This motion may be an optical illusion caused by the relativistic velocity of the jet, and not true*superluminal motion. However, detection of such motion supports the theory that quasars, BL Lac objects and radio galaxies may all be the same phenomenon, known as active galaxies, viewed from different perspectives..._'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87


I've always found it difficult to accept that inflation (which suddenly allows for faster-than-light motion) and dark matter/energy are anything more than 'sticking plasters' to make the equations balance. There's obviously a lot more to these things than the Standard Model is yet able to explain.   Obviously.

It's food for thought, _Metryq_. Hope others look at it. Am surprised this thread has attracted so little interest ...


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## Metryq (Jan 2, 2013)

Findlay doesn't gloss over anything. He mentions it in one place, then gets into more detail later, which is not the best way to write a book. That's why I recommend Donald Scott's book as the best primer on plasma cosmology. You will note many superscripts in Findlay's book. They are hyperlinks to Web articles. So in that way, the book is actually larger than it appears.

I'm well-read on the Mars stuff. Heck, one whole hemisphere has been burned away to a depth of almost 10 Km. Sure, water did it. If you want to try something really mind-blowing, jump to page 104 of Findlay's book. And stop thinking gravity-driven fusion. That's an ad hoc idea that gained credibility through repetition. There's far too much counter-evidence now for the idea to hold any water.


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## Metryq (Jan 2, 2013)

I don't believe the speed of light is a universal limit, but neither do I believe M87's jet is necessarily FTL. The superluminal numbers are based on redshift, which has been demonstrated as a poor distance/speed indicator. (There are about half a dozen different ways to produce a spectral shift, but mainstream astronomers know only one: Doppler shift.)

Oh, right. The jets are caused by a supermassive black hole. Too bad black holes do not exist.


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## RJM Corbet (Jan 2, 2013)

I liked this observation:

_... the star nearest to us known as Proxima Centauri is 4.3 light years (25 trillion miles) away ... Consider ... our Sun the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence and the Earth one inch away from it as an almost invisible speck of dust. Pluto’s distance from the Sun would be around three and a half feet away and Proxima Centauri would be another full stop, four and a half miles away ... what do you think the gravitational relationship will be between two specks of burning hydrogen the size of full stops that are four and a half miles distant from each other?_

Does make you think ...


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## mosaix (Jan 2, 2013)

Metryq, what do you think causes gravitational lensing?

http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/334019/view


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## RJM Corbet (Jan 2, 2013)

mosaix said:


> Metryq, what do you think causes gravitational lensing? ...



So, _Metryq_, what?

But _mosaix_, I don't think this plasma idea is trying to deny that gravity exists. That would be a bit idiotic, surely? It's looking at gravity from a different perspective: a plasma universe perhaps no more strange than dark energy/matter, created to balance the books.


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## mosaix (Jan 2, 2013)

RJ, I'm sorry I seem to have confused the issue. 

I was referring to black holes causing gravitational lensing. But, according to the thunderbolts web site, gravity doesn't bend light anyway so I suppose gravitational lensing can't exist either.


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## RJM Corbet (Jan 2, 2013)

mosaix said:


> RJ, I'm sorry I seem to have confused the issue.
> 
> I was referring to black holes causing gravitational lensing. But, according to the thunderbolts web site, gravity doesn't bend light anyway so I suppose gravitational lensing can't exist either.



So, what bends light then? I try to have an open mind. Light follows the warp in timespace caused by gravity, as everything else does. The Einstein/Eddington experiment demonstrated that the sun's gravity bends light. Does the plasma model deny this?

Then what's the alternative explanation?

I'm assuming it does have _some_ explanation for gravitational effects like the lensing caused by galaxies (which are five-sixth dark energy) otherwise it's scarcely a 'model' ...


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## Metryq (Jan 2, 2013)

Mosaix, let me ask _you_ why you're so certain that ring around the galaxy in the photo is a gravitational lens effect? There are many who think light-bending effects might be due to a more everyday cause: refraction. Refraction through what, you ask. The Michelson-Morely experiment "proved" that there is no aether, right? All the textbooks that tell you so are wrong.

However, I'm not suggesting that your example is refraction at all. Two galaxies might line up in _perfect_ alignment with Earth to give us such a view. Then again, that particular example might not be lensing or refraction at all, but something else. 

It is well known that gravity cannot account for the structure of galaxies—that's why astronomers invented the ad hoc patch of Dark Matter. Dark Matter is allegedly non-baryonic matter whose _only_ interaction with the universe is by gravity. It amazes me that any professional astronomer can make such an assertion with a straight face. Such stuff is pure conjecture—invented out of imaginary math.

Meanwhile, plasma effects in the lab have been closely studied and found to match what we see in the sky. Plasma effects are known to scale over at least 14 orders of magnitude (10^14), growing longer in duration with increasing size. Anthony Peratt has computer modeled the exact forms of galaxies using only electro-magnetic forces—_and reproduced those same structures in the lab._ (Extremely transient at that scale, as you might imagine.) EM forces are 39 orders of magnitude (10^39) more powerful than gravity. That's a lot of zeroes.

Now tell me again why you believe that HST photo is _gravitational_ lensing. If gravity cannot account for the structure of a galaxy, how can the meager gravity of the galaxy's billions of components account for such a unified lensing effect?

***

I'm not a PhD, but the Standard Model has many features that sound like pure hokum to me. I've worked with electricity all my life, even though I do not have an EE degree. So I understand the theories behind plasma cosmology—and better yet, the descriptions of lab experiments make sense to me. Meanwhile I've read the work of PhDs in astrophysics who say (for example) that no experiment to date favors either Lorentzian Relativity or Einsteinian Relativity, yet somehow big Al went home with the trophy. On top of that, I understand that Einstein, Hubble, Schwarzchild and other physicists whose names are attached to certain concepts did not agree with those derivations or outright misinterpretations of their work.

To put it humorously, you do the math.


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## RJM Corbet (Jan 2, 2013)

Metryq said:


> Mosaix, let me ask _you_ why you're so certain that ring around the galaxy in the photo is a gravitational lens effect? There are many who think light-bending effects might be due to a more everyday cause: refraction ...
> 
> 
> Now tell me again why you believe that HST photo is _gravitational_ lensing. If gravity cannot account for the structure of a galaxy, how can the meager gravity of the galaxy's billions of components account for such a unified lensing effect?...



I'm sorry, that's a VERY weak defence. Refraction? That's the plasma model's answer? All these invested SM guys, who built the Hubble/LHC etc, are looking at REFRACTION and mistaking it for lensing?


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## Ursa major (Jan 2, 2013)

Metryq said:


> ...that no experiment to date favors [...] Einsteinian Relativity, yet somehow big Al went home with the trophy.


The "trophy", i.e. the Nobel Prize for Physics, was awarded (in 1921) to Einstein "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", so mostly for his work on the photoelectric effect.


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## Vertigo (Jan 2, 2013)

Agree with you RJM to write off all the evidence of gravitational lensing as refraction is to label several generations of astronomers since Einstein and Eddington as idiots. Eddington's experiment to confirm the gravitation lensing effect of the Sun is just one observed example of this effect (and one that incidentally perfectly matched Einstein's predictions of gravity bending light) as far as I'm aware there are many more. To write this all off as refraction that just happens to bend light exactly the same amount as the Einstein's gravity equations predict is well... 

I'd better stop there. Sorry!


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## RJM Corbet (Jan 2, 2013)

Vertigo said:


> ... I'd better stop there. Sorry!



Nevermind. Welcome to the thread ... at last.

Poor old _Metryq_ has to sleep sometime ...


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## Metryq (Jan 2, 2013)

Ursa, I know about the photoelectric effect. I have no problem with that.

RJM Corbet, I never said refraction was the position of the plasma cosmology crowd. I am not an official spokesman. However, don't take everything as either-or. No one expects plasma cosmology to replace _all_ of physics, but it contests some of the major points of mainstream cosmology. 

Alternative theories—which are often suppressed (not merely rejected through scientific trial, but literally suppressed)—help me to better understand the position of mainstream scientists. Some of the time I find theories that sound _better_ than orthodoxy. Tom Van Flandern's DARK MATTER, MISSING PLANETS AND NEW COMETS covers a lot of ground that I feel is better explained by plasma cosmology. Yet I would still recommend the book just for the first five chapters which cover an alternative called the Meta Model. Make of it what you will, but I find it mind-broadening.

My problem with mainstream pop science is that it is usually delivered with authority as hard facts. "This is established" when so often that is not the case. I mentioned the Michelson-Morley experiment above. Almost every book I've seen claims that the experiment found _no_ indication of an aether at all—which is flat out wrong. Fringing effects were found, though not enough to account for Earth's orbital motion. If you follow the podcast on RelativityChallenge, you will see that the "missing" velocity is accounted for. But even without the missing velocity, to state that MM found *no* indication of an aether is a highly biased statement.

Vertigo—"to write off all the evidence of gravitational lensing as refraction is to label several generations of astronomers since Einstein and Eddington as idiots."

Not at all. Scientists can be wrong, that's part of the process. However, when observations contradict a theory, some "scientists" will become dogmatic, burying inconvenient data or worse, and otherwise resist the error-correcting nature of the scientific process—then I have a problem with it. 

By the way, show me where I wrote off ALL gravitational lensing as refraction. If you read my words again, you'll note that I referred to the HST example given by Mosaix, which I suggested may not be lensing OR refraction at all, but something else. What makes you so sure the effect is due to gravity? The same "reasoning" that asserts all spectral shifts are due to the Doppler effect?

By the way, Einstein was not exactly an astronomer.


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## Ursa major (Jan 2, 2013)

Metryq said:


> Ursa, I know about the photoelectric effect. I have no problem with that.


But those who don't might have assumed from your offhand comment that Einstein received his Nobel prize for his work on general and/or special relativity. I was merely pointing out the main reason for its award.


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## RJM Corbet (Jan 2, 2013)

Metryq said:


> ... I never said refraction was the position of the plasma cosmology crowd. I am not an official spokesman.  ...



That's quite alright. That's a perfectly good answer. An honest and sincere one. _mosaix_, take note. And now I'll read the rest of your post.

_EDIT: Correction here, while there's editing time: Galaxies which are five-sixth dark MATTER, not dark energy. Sorry ... _


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## Ursa major (Jan 2, 2013)

Remember, please: we insist on the playing of the ball, not the man (even if the latter is only implied).


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## Vertigo (Jan 2, 2013)

I admit I have sort of avoided this thread. Newspaper headlines like this rather annoy me. There is no "Higgs fiasco." There are some very interesting results that will require rethinking quite a lot of the current theories but that does not a fiasco make. Currently, as far as I'm aware the current results from the LHC don't match any theories perfectly (including the more radical alternative ones). Well there should be no surpise there, I doubt any of the physicists involved expected the Higgs particle to just pop out, perfectly matching the predictions. But still no fiasco; rather we have some new evidence that will allow the physicists to further refine the existing theories. Isn't that what science is all about?

Metryq, I apologise if I misunderstood the reference to gravitational lensing as all being refraction. However I stand by my statement on labeling of astronmers. The reason I do so is what I was saying was not that Einstein is an astronomer, of course not, that's why he didn't try to do the experiment. What I was refering to was all the observations done by astronmers since then that have confirmed that inital experiment. I am not aware of _any_ observations of light being bent by a massive object that have not fitted perfectly with the existing gravitational theory, but I am aware of a lot that do fit.


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## RJM Corbet (Jan 2, 2013)

_*Ursa:* Remember, please: we insist on the playing of the ball, not the man ..._

I've still got to check-out that _Michelson-Morely_ link properly. Hope someone's raincoat doesn't leak.


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## mosaix (Jan 2, 2013)

RJM Corbet said:


> An honest and sincere one. _mosaix_, take note.



Not doubting anyone's honesty or sincerity, RJ. Anyone can be honest, sincere and wrong all at the same time.

Vertigo has said all I need to say on the subject. 

_Edit: If the ether was causing lensing why does it just do it around galaxies and not everywhere we look in the universe? Perhaps ether just concentrates around massive bodies. I wonder what causes that - gravity maybe?_


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## RJM Corbet (Jan 2, 2013)

mosaix said:


> _Edit: If the ether was causing lensing why does it just do it around galaxies and not everywhere we look in the universe? Perhaps ether just concentrates around massive bodies. I wonder what causes that - gravity maybe?_





Metryq said:


> ... The Michelson-Morely experiment "proved" that there is no aether, right? All the textbooks that tell you so are so wrong ...



I've watched/listened to this video (with open mind): this one brave voice disputing the Michelson-Morely experiment's conclusions -- one man supporting the aether's continued existence, basically on procedural objections about how MM measured _Hertz_, and the Earth's orbital velocity, against all previous evidence and thought, and really, though clearly I don't have the scientific knowledge, it's not that convincing to me -- that all the science around the MM experiment is erroneous, and this one guy is finding the chink in the armour. 

Not impossible. What do I know? But I'll need more convincing, I'm afraid ...


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## Metryq (Jan 2, 2013)

RJM Corbet said:


> I've watched/listened to this video (with open mind)



Excellent. That's what matters. But this guy is far from the _only_ one questioning the Michelson-Morley experiment, or Einsteinian Relativity. There are vast numbers of others out there. That you've never run into them is telling. 

There are some who feel that physics took a wrong turn sometime around the early 20th century. Others push the detour back to Maxwell (the "Ultraviolet catastrophe" or other factors). 

Going back to such fundamentals is a good thing. Tests are never wasted if they confirm that we are on the correct path.


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## RJM Corbet (Jan 3, 2013)

Thanks. It's good to question.

Nevertheless, the Relativity/SM is working as a tool to fit the purpose at this stage: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' still applies, mostly.

The proof ('proof') of the Higgs is going to make it more difficult for alternative models.

I do like parts of this plasma idea. It's an alternative view. These quasars and black holes and things are so far away that no-one can probably state with certainty exactly what they really are, what drives them, etc.


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## mosaix (Jan 22, 2013)

A letter in this week's *New Scientist, 19th January, page 31*:

_From W.T. Bridgman_

Peratt's plasma galaxy model, while an interesting alternative in the 1980s, failed later key observational tests.

The orbiting Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and the later Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe found no trace of the spaghetti-like streamers of microwave emission that Peratt predicted would be created by galaxy-powering electric currents. Peratt's models could not reproduce the uniformity of the cosmic microwave background.

And if stars were powered by external electric currents rather than fusion then the accompanying particle fluxes and fields would damage satellites and kill astronauts, which of course is not something we see happening.

_Silver Spring, Maryland, US_


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## Metryq (Jan 22, 2013)

mosaix said:


> Peratt's models could not reproduce the uniformity of the cosmic microwave background.



It is _assumed_ that the microwaves are "background." Many believe it is a microwave "fog" caused by local scattering effects. Just the same, the Big Bang requires lots of hand waving to explain "uniformity" on the one hand and the extreme "lumpiness" we otherwise see in the universe. 

Meanwhile, a wealth of Birkeland currents and other "streamers" have been found in various kinds of light—the Cygnus filament is a good example—including filaments at the center of the galaxy (see last image on page). So I am at a loss to understand this statement that there is "no trace of the spaghetti-like streamers." I guess there are no letters on this page, either.



> And if stars were powered by external electric currents rather than fusion then the accompanying particle fluxes and fields would damage satellites and kill astronauts, which of course is not something we see happening.



"Rather than fusion"—the electric Sun model describes fusion as a "Z-pinch" effect (which has been reproduced in the lab) as the source of fusion, but that is on the "surface" of the Sun (the photosphere), rather than the deep interior. As for killing astronauts and satellites, that would depend on whether or not there is a voltage drop. If you are completely immersed in a charge, then there is no drop. Crossing the boundaries is when it becomes dangerous. Comets blaze like electric arcs because their rapid movement from one region to another results in a massive voltage drop. (Several flyby and impact probes have shown that comets are dry rocks with electrical effects.)

There are many things the standard model of the Sun cannot explain: If the "granular" surface were convection cells, they would not form and dissipate within hours. Why is the photosphere (surface) around 5800K while the corona (farther away) is in the millions of degrees K? Why does the Solar "wind" move faster the farther away from the Sun it gets? What happened to the "missing" neutrinos? Why is the Sun more perfectly spherical than expected?


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