And theres nothing to be afraid of. You’ve referenced everything exciting in your story with fear.

Everything is what it is…

And… I like your column very much. It’s very informative.

I wish I had happened to have been looking up in the sky at that very moment at that very spot. I want to see a GRB.

With 7 billion people, im sure dozens or even hundreds did see it and it’s possible that thousands did —if there was other cause to look up at that moment—

I think there is a good chance and study of the afterglow will show that we did infact see into the direct path of a GRB from
7.5 billion light years in distance. How else could we see it (with the naked eye) from that far away?

Had this occurred from… say… 300 light years away… we wouldn’t be blogging right now…

The star beattlejuice in the constelation orion that is relative to the distance mentioned afore. This star, I’m sure you know, is aging and could go supernova on us in our lifetime, and therefore could… direct a GRB directly at us and destroy us…

The universe is so limitless that i do believe that somewhere right now monkeys are flying out of peoples butts… or some simulation that would make it appear to us that that is infact what we are seeing.

Ryan, if pulsars are caused by electrical interaction between stars in a binary system then why do we frequently find them associated with nebulae which may be interpreted as supernova remnants?

Some examples are:

The Crab Nebula
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_Nebula

The Vela Supernova Remnant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Supernova_Remnant

And why did Chinese astronomers observe a supernova in the year 1054 CE at exactly the same location where we observe the Crab Nebula and its associated pulsar today? Where is the binary star system in the Crab Nebula? Where is the binary star system in the Vela Nebula?

One question does occur to me. If the GRB is being caused by a blackhole in formation then how do we know that the observed redshift of 0.937 is cosmological in nature and not a gravitational redshift caused by the photons climbing out of an intense gravity well? Is there a way to tell the difference between a cosmological redshift and a gravitational redshift observationally?

Well, I’d say it’s been too long since I watched Battlestar Galactica. I didn’t know there was a plasma cosmology reference. What episode?

Electric Universe and Plasma Cosmology are the same thing.

The reason I doubt anyone could see an explosion from that far off is the amount of energy necessary to get that light all the way here in such a bright state. I’m sure you know the theories behind GRB’s, that they are so energetic they have to be caused by collapsing super massive black holes or colliding neutron stars. The sheer volume of energy and the sheer mass of non-empirical object necessary to produce such a thing is never experienced anywhere near the Earth. That doesn’t make a wink of sense. If these explosions are part of the universe they shouldn’t only be a part of distant quadrants or distant times in the past. I mean, that’s what you are saying right? A long long time ago there were these huge things called neutron stars and from time to time a couple of them half the size of our solar system would slam into each other, but it never happens any more, and it never happened anywhere nearby. Listen, a day later I completely regret using the word stupid, and I’m sorry to anyone who was offended, it’s just rather unbelievable and I’d like to think people would not accept it on faith.

If you look at the history of inflation theory and the big bang theory, every time we make better telescopes we find incredibly interesting things that don’t line up with the old model, so ad hoc modifications are made up. GRB’s used to be of reasonable size, and so they were thought to be a sort of supernova. Then we found bigger ones and offered black holes as the ad hoc excuse. Then GRB’s were discovered in boring parts of the edges of spiral galaxies, where, according to gravity cosmology, there are no black holes, so the ad hoc explanation of colliding neutron stars was proffered. I mean, doesn’t that clue you in that there’s some problem?

Compare that to the electric model. First, it’s based on experimental evidence. You can make a GRB in a laboratory that closely resembled GRB’s in space. And, the mechanism for a GRB in a capacitor as star electric model perfectly explains why synchrotron radiation almost always follows the explosion. However, the electric model doesn’t require a thousand different types of these explosions to deal with sizes varying over several orders of magnitude. That is only required in the gravity theorists who have to explain how some GRB’s could be thousands of times more powerful than others, which species of the same event should by logic not be. And the “relativistic shock fronts” necessary to churn up all the baryonic matter into gamma rays are pretty darn non-empirical.

I’m not sure what ‘overwhelming’ evidence for the Hubble law you are referring to. I’ve seen compilations of distance versus red shift for galaxies and objects for distances close enough to be measured with methods other than the Hubble law. In each case there is no linear relationship between red shift and distance. It’s a mild correlation at best. If there is some data set out there that shows known distances versus red shift and a R^2>.9 linear relationship I’d like to see that data. If there is no such data set then how in the world could there be any “proof?”

As for so called neutron stars. Let’s talk about what’s actually being observed. It’s a pulsing radio signal. It emits short bursts of light at frequencies sometimes reaching thousands of hertz. It’s easy to make such a thing happen on Earth. Get yourself two capacitors, a voltage source and a non linear resister. Stick an amp meter on the sucker and watch the current pulse by at those same high frequencies. High frequency radio sources in deep space arise for the same reason. A star is highly energetic plasma where the nuclei of the ionized atoms migrate toward the center and the electrons migrate outwards. In between the two what’s referred to as a “dual layer” forms where most of the electrical potential energy is concentrated. This dual layer acts just like a capacitor, it stores voltage. So, the radio sources are quite likely binary star systems, where the two stars as capacitors exchange current in a non-linear way.

Compare that with neutronium for a moment. The radio source is assumed without any corroborating evidence to be a strobe light effect, a beam is rotating very quickly and we’re catching the flashes, like a lighthouse. The highest frequency radio sources correspond to rotational speeds of several hundred revolutions per second. Since a star made of empirical matter would fly apart in no time at those speeds, a new sort of matter had to be invented ad hoc to not fly apart at those speeds. Enter neutronium. You asked me if all of nuclear physics must be wrong? How can you ask me that when it’s neutronium that flies in the face of nuclear physics. No two neutrons ever under any circumstance stick together outside of a nucleus. You could shoot two streams of them together at near the speed of light for the rest of your life and no two will stick together, but somehow trillions can? I know someone must have told you they had evidence that it could happen, but I bet you it wasn’t experimental data or an observation of some sort, but rather it was a large pile of mathematical equations. Math is not evidence, it’s a model. It’s not an explanation, it’s a way of parsing explanations that are too complex to be communicated in words.

C’mon y’all. We “know” there is such a thing as “dark matter” because we “know” that only gravity governs the motion of a spiral galaxy, and that for gravity to make the galaxy move that way there would have to be a ton of other matter distributed in fantastically odd shapes. In plasma cosmology spiral galaxies move exactly like they’re predicted to, with no ad hoc invisible matter helping.

I appreciate the fact that you want to base your positions on evidence and not pseudoscience, but what evidence are the gravity theorists giving you? When do they say, “I made this happen in the laboratory and it’s just like what we see in the telescope.” They never say that, when you’re looking at a telescope they’re singing a country song called “don’t trust your lying eyes.”

To the extent that modern astronomy asks you to believe in non-empirical things like dark matter, dark energy, neutron starts and ort clouds, then it’s the one that ought to be called pseudoscience. I think your aversion to the electric universe model probably arose from you having a bad teacher. Try the thunderbolts.com webpage, they sell books and link to papers that you might find interesting.

[[you are the one who thinks an explosion 7.5 billion light years away could be seen with the naked eye. That’s phenomenally stupid. ]]

Why is it stupid, Ryan? Give us the reasoning behind your statement. What is the maximum distance that an explosion can be seen at, and how did you derive that figure? Show your work.

[[Does this mean that the GRB actually occurred 7.5 billion years ago and that it has taken that long for the light to reach us so that we could actually see the event?]]

Yes. Light in the sky is “fossil light,” a celestial object N light-years away looks the way it looked N years in the past.

I read the papers you linked and neither of them relate in any way to the argument I was making. Please, if you’d like me to believe there is a relationship of some sort between redshift and distance link me to published data that relates reliable measurements of distance to redshift. I’ve seen a lot of compilations of said data and none are in any way consistent with the Hubble law.

The first paper you linked dealt with the descriptive differences in special and general relativistic formulations of an expanding universe. Please, take a second look at part 5, “discussion” where the author concedes he has no empirical evidence for his positions but rather just finds them intuitively more appealing. The author says, “If
recession velocity were meaningless we could not refer to an “expanding universe” and would have to restrict ourselves to some operational description such as ‘fainter objects have larger redshifts.’”

The author concedes the only justification for his view of redshifts is his commitment to the expanding universe idea. I guess you hoped the paper would be too “high level for me” and that I wouldn’t be able to see the flaws in the logic?

The second paper has absolutely nothing to do with my argument. I frankly find it insulting you would think I was so completely unfamiliar with the ideas of how to measure cosmological distances. But the most important point is the paper is not a compilation of empirical evidence, rather it’s just an overview of conclusions. Please, if there really is some sort of empirical evidence for the redshift distance relationship, let me read that paper. But until then, don’t link irrelevant papers and tell me to read em before I speak nonsense. Remember, Mr. What???, you are the one who thinks an explosion 7.5 billion light years away could be seen with the naked eye. That’s phenomenally stupid. You also conflate something being 7.5 billion light years away as being the same as an event happening 7.5 billion years in “the past.” What the hell past are you talking about? 7.5 billion years ago for who? Earth? That star? A galaxy one million light years off to the left? People talking about so many light years away means so many light years in the past completely misunderstand time in general relativity.

Dr. LHA, every term I used is a specific term of art in plasma cosmology. I know you may find it challenging, and as a fan of star trek myself I can see how you might make that mistake. However, just because you don’t know what a term of art means doesn’t mean it is necessarily star trek gibberish. It quite arrogant on your part to assume that because you don’t understand something it must be nonsense.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/03/21/exploding.star.ap/index.html

GRB 080319B was one of four bursts that Swift detected, a Swift record for one day. “Coincidentally, the passing of Arthur C. Clarke seems to have set the universe ablaze with gamma ray bursts,” said Swift science team member Judith Racusin of Penn State University in University Park, Pa.

“overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”