I am sitting in the Las Vega$ airport coming home from a party at Penn’s house (I’m such a jetsetter — long story) and I see that XMM-Newton — a European observatory that detects high energy X-rays from space — stumbled on the most massive cluster of galaxies ever seen in the distant Universe. Tipping the scale at more than 1000 times the mass of the Milky Way (most of this in the form of million-degree+ gas — or plasma if you’re a picky antiscientist), it’s lying at a distance of 7.7 billion light years. That’s quite a hike.
Since I’m at the airport and my plane leaves in a few minutes I don’t have time to wax poetic on this bruiser, but go ahead and check out the story to read more and see pretty pictures in detail.
August 25th, 2008 at 11:50 am
WAY cool! As much mass as a thousand large galaxies. I see they used XMM-Newton, Sloan and The Large Binocular Telescope to “scope” it out. Truly International. Great story. “The existence of the cluster can only be explained with dark energy,” and they have found “a cosmic needle in a haystack”. My stars but I love this stuff.
August 25th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
That is a cool find. I’m still trying to recover from all the NASA pictures in the image archive you pointed us to. This definitely bears a great deal more investigation. What surprised me is the sheer amount of plasma. Maybe I read the article wrong, but it seems to me that we got a lot of hot gas there! Did we accidentally send some congress critters 7.7 Billion light years away?
August 25th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Ooooh, Shiny. Hey Phil, speaking of Penn next time you see him ask about his role on VR5. I’m curious to see what he has to say.
August 25th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Did Penn have you over to his house to celebrate your ascension to the JREF presidential throne?
August 25th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Hobknobbing with the stars again? The ones on earth instead of space?
Oh you kid! Go for it, dude!
Rich
August 25th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
This anomaly can be easily explained if redshift has nothing to do with distance.
August 25th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Is there any way we can get Hubble to look at the area? Cool find!
August 25th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
“Picky antiscientists” hehehe, great image too.
August 25th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
“Picky antiscientist” good one, great picture too.
Davudlpf is me too but had a typo.
August 25th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Cool! I love how we’re finding bigger and bigger things further and further back in time. It’s surprising at first, but maybe we just underestimated the speed of galactic formation, at least in some cases.
August 25th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
I love it if people leave out half of the circular logic in their argument to make it look real. I think the sentence should have been “the existence of the cluster can only be explained with the existence of dark energy IF THE CURRENT MODEL IS CORRECT”. This doesn’t prove the existence of dark energy, since you can also express it as “the standard model can’t explain the existence of the cluster unless we add dark energy”.
August 25th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Mu,
Unless there’s an alternate supported model that also explains the cluster, it does prove the existence of dark energy. The difference between your point and that is entirely pedantic.
August 25th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Correct terminology is “anti-science” now? Correcting falsehoods and outright deceptions, as well? Phil, your descent into punditry is complete; move over, Rush.
Of course what is always described around here as “million-degree+ gas” is often just synchrotron radiation emitted by electrons at ordinary temperatures. Has anybody verified a blackbody emission curve? Phil hasn’t, of course. Name-calling is more fun than facts, and gets the blog stats up.
Never let an astronomer who calls corrections “anti-science” pretend to skepticism. Randi would turn over in his grave if he were dead.
August 25th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
I am with Nathan Myers on this. Phil doesn’t play by his own rules. If you want to attack the merit of his statement, do so with facts and links. Name calling is silly and doesn’t educate the honestly curious people who visit the site.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
I have no opinion either way about whether it is a universe of dark matter and dark energy with gravity reigning supreme, or a universe ruled by electromagnetics.
I would suspect the answer is somewhere inbetween, however, and taking polarizing sides means that both of you are acting in a way that is fundamentally antiscience.
To suggest that someone is a “picky anti-scientist” for supporting a theory that is currently Against The Mainstream seems unnecessarily insulting. He is not suggesting a conspiracy theory. He is not babbling about Nibiru or 2012, or the evils of vaccinations. He is debating a theoretical cosmology model.
I am typically a supporter of your crusades against the anti-science barbarian horde Phil, and am a fan of your political commentary and of course the wonderful astronomy you present here, but in this instance you are wrong.
Not necessarily about the facts, but about the methods we must employ to reach consensus in science. The very spirit of it is in dissent and falsification. If this Nathan individual is wrong in his assertions about plasma and an electric universe, the science will bear that out over time and one day we’ll laugh about how wrong he was.
But drawing a line in the sand in this fashion is unproductive.
Just my opinion, I hope you understand I have no stake in this either way, other than the hope of a continued (relative) spirit of scientific cooperation and progress on your blog.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Well, coming on my blog and making a public comment telling me I don’t understand physics, while saying plasma isn’t a gas… well then, you get called out.
Plus, synchotron from normal-temperature electrons? What? I assume you have copious links to radio observations backing that claim up.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Mr Myers has a record of coming here and insulting posters and the BA if there views do not agree with his own. He seems to be into antivaxx and the electric universe theory. He does not back any of his claims he just comes here and insults people. So before anyone else jumps to his cause just go back through the old posts of blog to find his true character.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Another thing Mr Myers Dr. Plait is just reporting somebody elses findings, so he did not measure the temperature but they did. And what are your qualifications in science and physics?
August 25th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
My apologies - I was not aware of the poster’s history. I stayed out of the Antivaxx debate because I knew it would draw in a free-for-all in which no opinions were changed and it would essentially devolve into name-calling on all sides or at best a repetition of the same arguments.
And I did not read the previous thread because I thought the article itself was self-explanatory and would not draw any responses at all.
I still think name-calling in a followup article is unnecessary, however. It seems like taking the high road would speak for itself. And if the troll appeared again, simply debate him in the comments, or if he really got out of hand, ban him.
But that’s just my opinion. I moderate tech forums and as such I tend to try to be, well, moderate. But of course you can’t please everyone, and no, the customer is not always right, and I understand that.
However, I do think it is more productive for two scientists with diametrically opposed theories to sit down and rationally debate and come up with a compromise that explains the ideosyncracies of both into a unified theory that fits both observational data and theoretical models. That’s not always possible though.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Davidlpf: I’m a professional astronomer, and my accomplishments are on record. Try here for a start. I have a PhD in astronomy, and used Hubble images and spectra to analyze ionized gas for many years.
For others; In general, I do take the high road. But sometimes pointing out ridiculousness is called for (this was at worst a middle road; I didn’t insult him except to call him picky; the “antiscientist” moniker is, I think, appropriate). Myers comes here, insults me, insults my readers, holds on to a long-disproven and discredited idea, and then says I’m the one who’s wrong.
But in fact he comes here with no real science to back up his claims, nitpicks me about calling a plasma a gas — which it is — and then goes on to tell me that everything we know about astronomy and physics is wrong.
So I’m not terribly sorry for pointing these facts out. If you got to a public place, like this blog, and start hurling around insults, I don’t feel terribly obliged to say “thank you sir, may I have another”. Neither will I call him childish names, or hurl insults. But you can bet your last dollar I’ll call ‘em like I see ‘em.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Dr Plait I know your background, I was saying you were reporting on what someone else found, the qualifications remark was aimed at Nathan.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Oh, David, sorry. It read ambiguously to me.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I was also just saying Dr Plait that you did get the readings and did the analyses to determine the temperature of the gas, he implied you were the one that you personally did this.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
oops should have waited of waited a couple more minutes,
August 25th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
For the record, I haven’t promoted any sort of “Electric Universe” model, theory, or what-have you; that was more of Phil’s name-calling. The existence of electromagnetic phenomena is not controversial and needs no promotion. I’m also not promoting any “theoretical cosmology” model; I’m no more qualified to comment on cosmology than Phil is. I’m calling attention to simple observational facts that Phil is using dishonest rhetorical tricks to try to distract readers from. His dishonest rhetoric is manifest. His reasons are obscure, but I smell fear.
It’s a simple fact that all the detectable mass in the universe, save planet(oid)s, is plasma, partially or fully ionized, high-density or low. It’s a simple fact that the mass of low-density plasma far, far out-masses all the mass in stars and planets. It is a simple fact that the presence of large-scale magnetic fields implies equally large-scale electric currents — however much Phil dishonestly insists otherwise. (This last is simple undergraduate E-M; Phil had to pass that course, so he cannot claim ignorance.)
It’s a simple fact that the dynamics of low-density plasma is very, very different from that of equally-dense gas, again however much Phil — dishonestly or ignorantly — denies it. (Phil claims to know all about plasma, which, if we believe him, implies dishonesty; we may generously impute, instead, aggressive ignorance.) Only plasma interacts appreciably with electromagnetic fields, and such interaction is not described by gas laws. At the densities that have been discussed here, as Phil well knows, ordinary gas is hard to distinguish from vacuum. To insist, as Phil does, that plasma “is” gas is as transparently foolish as insisting that gas is identical to liquid.
Therefore, when we look through a telescope — most especially a radio or x-ray telescope (although one doesn’t, exactly) — and see evidence of trillions of tons of plasma moving in what are easily determined to be multi-light-year spanning magnetic fields (which even Phil admits), we have no honest choice but to deduce correspondingly large electric currents, and correspondingly great masses of ions to carry them, and must conclude that plasma fluid dynamics have an essential role in explaining what we see. When (as Phil claims, probably honestly) astronomers laugh at any of their own number who dare mention it, and (as we see) prefer such purely speculative inventions as neutron stars and dark matter to explain observations, we know that Science has left the building.
It does not surprise me that Phil and his apologists have descended to name-calling. It’s all they have left.
Why does Phil fear honestly confronting plasma fluid dynamics? We must speculate, because he is not honest about it, but the mystery is not deep. Quite simply, the mathematics of plasma fluids is — as Phil has imputed to “magnetics” –”fiendishly difficult”. In practice, this means the equations do not yield to symbolic solution, or aught but numerical simulation. Furthermore, many important details cannot be measured. It’s much more appealing to pretend that plasma behaves just like neutral (”hot”) gas, or, even better, to pretend all that mass has no effect at all. Other astronomers give him a free pass — they have no more desire to get mired in intractable maths. Instead, they give each other grants and publish one another’s papers in a happy fantasy land filled with neutral point masses, hot gas, and shock waves, and such unobservable speculations as neutron stars and dark matter; and they banish from publication anyone rude enough to mention plasma. They didn’t become astronomers to get mired in the sort of complications “dirt physicists” must confront. Of course all this is only speculation; I would welcome alternative explanations.
Fortunately, the space probes and telescopes are built by engineers, and the data are safely archived for a future generation more willing to see, and less inclined to pretense and speculation (not to mention name-calling). You know, scientists.
August 25th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Also, for the record, I am not “into antivaxx”. I have never suggested, despite Phil’s dishonest assertion, that “everything we know about astronomy and physics is wrong”. I love science and hate seeing it misrepresented, most particularly by people paid to do it.
I readily admit to being opposed to public dishonestly. Name-calling is bad enough, but to defend it with more dishonesty (“I didn’t insult him …. the ‘antiscientist’ moniker is, I think, appropriate”) is worse. You’re not taking the high road at all if, once the facts are against you, you abandon it.
@Tyler Durden: You retire too easily.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:12 am
I’m a moderator. It’s my job to see both sides.
I sympathize with you Nathan Myers, but I understand where Phil is coming from too.
What of my suggestion that, in fact, you might * both * be wrong?
It is not unheard of for two opposing theories to both be wrong. To both have holes in them that you could fly a Shuttle through, and it is exactly because people polarize on their pet theories that no one comes together and comes up with a unified theory that plugs the holes evident in the others.
Perhaps if you were willing to compromise, a solution would present itself that satisfies both the prevailing theories of dark matter/energy accounting for missing mass (which as I understand it has its fair share of holes) and your contention that superheated gas is not gas at all but actually plasma, and that this needs to be taken into account in EM field measurements. Admitting that your own theory is still, well, theoretical, would be an incredibly useful step towards actually incorporating your ideas into mainstream science.
You are the one presenting an idea that is against the mainstream. Unfortunately you will get a lot more “no way” answers than you will “maybes” because the burden of proof is on you. Ridiculing dark matter, dark energy, and neutron stars is not productive when your main point is that plasma is not a gas and will not behave as such. By throwing stones at those three things you are effectively laughing at all scientists who have devoted their professional careers to finding proof of these phenomena.
You have no right to do so unless you first sit down with at least one, preferably many, scientists who support the mainstream theory and see where your ideas could fit into their models, and where theirs could fit into your model.
If at that point the math shows that dark matter, dark energy, and neutron stars are mere bandaids to patch the theory holes, then you have a right to ridicule them.
But you will also have to accept that if your plasma and electromagnetic assertions turn out to be bandaids on your own model, they have a right to laugh at them as well.
Until such a meeting happens you are effectively just blowing smoke and no one will take you seriously.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:01 am
Tyler: I don’t have a theory. It’s a simple fact (which even Phil will readily admit, in private) that “million-degree+ gas” must be fully ionized. There is also a mature literature on plasma fluid dynamics, of which Phil must already be at least dimly aware. Plasma fluid dynamics differs, in many fascinating details, from gas dynamics in the presence of electromagnetic fields. Finally, we know both plasma and electromagnetic fields are abundant in the cosmos. None of this is, objectively, even slightly controversial, outside Phil’s walled garden. Inconvenient, certainly.
Is plasma the same as gas? Like gas it’s made of atoms and or molecules in free ballistic motion, but some fraction of them are ionized. Provide an E-M field, and it behaves much more interestingly than gas. Phil would like us to ignore that inconveniently interesting behavior, so he insists plasma is just gas. My dictionary disagrees with him. Anyone may look it up. Again, it’s not objectively controversial
outside Phil’s walled garden.
Nobody has forced Phil to be dishonest, or to begin name-calling. He can begin being honest any time he likes. Now would be a good time.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:09 am
@Nathan:
).
I’ve recently watched a german scientific TV show called “alpha centauri” about the giant magnetic fields and how they are created. The problem is I don’t remember the whole thing, now, it was very complicated. But (if you understand german) check out the website
[link]http://www.br-online. de/br-alpha/alpha-centauri/alpha-centauri-magnetfelder-2005-ID1207910760655.xml[link]
I watched it once more, now, and hopefully I can give a short and precise explanation:
In galaxies we have neutral, cold gas and a small amount of ionised gas (plasma). The collision between the free electrons and the neutral atoms is much more efficient than the collisions between the protrons and the neutral atoms. So we yield a charge separation. Due to the rotation of the galaxies the current is aligned which is important. So we have a current and we get magnetic fields which are very weak - as we observe in galaxies. It’s almost like a dynamo. (I don’t know if this is correct, but it should be close to it
But: neutron stars are no invention! We can measure their effects (if I can say so). Heard about pulsars (the best clocks in the universe)?
[link]http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Pulsar[link]
Or X-ray Binary Systems?
[link]http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Cygnus_X-1[link]
To dark matter… well, I must confess that I don’t like it, either. It sounds like the “ether” (the medium of light) which was discussed about 100 years ago… but we have much more evidence for dark matter than for the ether - it is possible that this “thing” is possible…
(damn spamfilter
put away the blanks if you copy the links…)
August 26th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Damn. I’ve written such a nice and long posts with many scientific things (and links to prove it) and because the site went down everything is away…
So. But one very important thing:
Of course, Nathan, a hot gas is a plasma, and even Phil will agree. BUT: The motion of the particles in that plasma are RANDOM and NOT aligned. So on scales much larger than the (so called) Debye-length (I guess there is a wikipedia-article about it) the plasma is (over-all) neutral. So you don’t find large-scale magnetic or electric fields and the plasma will behave (on LARGE scales) just like a neutral GAS… that’s the story…
You are right that magneto-hydro-dynamics are a much more complicated way to calculate a plasma… but as we have seen, it is neither necessary nor useful for a large-scale plasma (as we have in a galaxy or in intergalactic space) to actually do it because the motions are random.
Anyway: Check out the wikipedia article about “Binary star”. And find out more about “pulsars”…. we have much evidence for neutron stars.
) back in the 1930’s discovering that there has to be some extra matter to bind the clusters.
I don’t like dark matter, either. It sounds to me like the “ether”-theory 100 years ago. But unlike then there is also evidence for dark matter. Light is bended by mass (and only by mass) and we see “gravitational lenses” which are bending light stronger than the visible light (including hot plasma) possibly could. Another thing is that galaxies are moving much faster in galaxy clusters than they should to be tight together. It was Fritz Zwicky (a really strange guy, who wanted to make explosions right under a big telescope to reduce seeing
And one last thing: synchrotron radiation can only be radiated IF there is a magnetic field. But as I said before… there is no magnetic field in a hot plasma because there is no current due to the random movements. So, the intergalactic hot plasma will only emit “normal” thermal rediation and no synchrotron radiation..
August 26th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Tipping the scale at more than 1000 times the mass of the Milky Way.
The article reads “2XMM J083026+524133, is estimated to contain as much mass as a thousand large galaxies.” That would make a significant difference, I think.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Well, and we don’t count the Milky Way to the really big ones. Andromeda (M31) is far bigger than we are…. so the estimate MORE than a 1000 times is quite right …or.. not wrong at all! And significant? I don’t think so. I guess, Phil thinks, people might roughly knwo the size of the Milky Way and can deal with it better than with a big galaxy if you don’t know what is a big one… (check out M81 - THAT is a big su**er
)
August 26th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
I’m really interested in the exploration of dark energy…this is exciting!
August 26th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
LaurenM: How are you on epicycles? N-rays? Phrenology? Phlogiston? String theory? Epic failure is a part of the scientific process, too, I suppose. Generally we like it better if it’s somebody else’s failure, but there always seem to be plenty of volunteers.
August 27th, 2008 at 9:20 am
@Nathan Myers
Please post a link or journal citation that irrefutably shows that either the hypothesis of dark matter/energy cannot possibly be true or that the hypotheses you are putting forward cannot possibly be wrong. Or better yet, how about both? That would help those reading this thread who know bupkus about either to see the arguments on their own merits, rather than just taking anyone’s word for it.
Phil, it would be helpful if you could provide the same, except pro-dark matter/energy and anti-plasma/E-M Universe. I know you’ve written about this some before, but having fresh links, particularly to the actual science, would help readers of this thread.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Ian,
I don’t know which theory is going to work at the end. But in my lifetime, I’ve seen the standard model go from “100% visible” to “20% visible” (when we introduced dark matter) to “4 % visible” (taking dark energy into account) mass in the universe.
At some point, if your model needs too many untestable (or, as I stated, circular reasoning) explanations, you might have to at least allow the possibility that you have to start over. I don’t know if F~1/d^2 might not be valid for very large d, if there’s an EM force governing interactions, or if there’s dark energy. But there is a massive circling of the wagons going on right now behind a single model. I just hope this is not going to be the phlogiston of the 21st century. My current life expectancy is about another 30 years, I’d like to read the end of the story before that.
August 27th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
@Mu: Last I heard it was 2% hadronic; maybe less now. Anyway the asymptote is obvious. The sooner they can forget those pesky protons, the happier they’ll be.
@Todd W: The only problem with dark matter/energy is classic Occam’s: it’s not much different from invoking the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It would be amusing to see Phil pretend to debunk Maxwell. Of course there’s no paper.
Never let an anti-Maxwellist astronomer pretend skepticism.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
@Nathan Myers
Okay, so…you have links to support your claims? Or are you only going to try to find faults with dark matter/energy?
I’m not just being nitpicky, here. I really would like you to provide links to quality research that supports your claims. Your comment about Occam’s Razor as it relates to this issue is less a refutation of the dark matter/energy theory than it is a critique of the details behind the theory. You need to critique the data used to support the theory, not just the idea itself.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Nathan Myers says: Phil would like us to ignore that inconveniently interesting behavior, so he insists plasma is just gas. My dictionary disagrees with him. Anyone may look it up.
I did. A number of dictionaries I looked up say it is gas. So does the wiki for whatever that is worth. BTW Phil didn’t say it was just a gas as Nathan misquotes he said “calling a plasma a gas — which it is”. Subtle difference.
Also, I wouldn’t use a dictionary as the last word for a scientific definition anyway.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:49 am
@Todd W.: Why are you asking me about dark matter? Am I supposed to disprove ghosts and goblins too? Electromagnetics needs no defense. When Phil insists on magnetic fields spanning light-years without a corresponding varying electric field (i.e. current), he’s making an absurdly extraordinary claim, akin to flat-earthism or geocentrism. His nervousness — name-calling, lying — betrays him. He’s stuck, though, because his astronomer colleagues will call him names if he ever says “current”.
@shane: Wikipedia has “Plasma therefore has properties quite unlike those of solids, liquids or gases and is considered to be a distinct state of matter.” To say, as it also does, that plasma is “an ionized gas” tells you how to get it, but not what it really is. Try it: do “liquid is melted solid” and “liquid is solid” mean the same thing, or is one true and the other false?
August 28th, 2008 at 5:19 am
@Nathan Myers
I’m not really asking you about dark matter. I’m asking you to support your claims regarding the plasma/E-M bit. Rather than continuing to cry out “He’s wrong, he’s wrong,” show us that you are right.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Todd W: I’m still not clear on what “claims” I’m supposed to support. Am I supposed to demonstrate that Ampere’s Law hasn’t been repealed, or that it applies outside of laboratories? This is ordinary textbook stuff. Phil’s making the absurd claims, ask him.
If a former scientist turned blogger-clown started promoting perpetual motion, and I called him out, what sort of proof would you demand of me?
August 28th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
@Nathan Myers
You are claiming several things:
1) That it is plasma and not gas (and that pkasma is not gas).
2) That this plasma is suffused with E-M energy
3) That it is this plasma that accounts for all of the mass of the universe outside of planet(oid)s.
4) That E-M energy is the major force at work in the universe, rather than gravity (implied in your arguments).
Now, I am not an astronomer, so your statement that the idea of dark matter is absurd really is not “ordinary textbook stuff” for me. What I am asking from you is:
a) Proof that plasma is not a gas. I want studies showing this, not just your word.
b) Proof that the plasma in the universe is suffused with E-M energy, as you describe. Again, studies rather than only your word.
c) Proof that the plasma in the universe accounts for all of the mass of the universe outside of planet(oid)s. Yet again, studies to support your claims.
d) Proof that E-M energy is the dominant force at work in the universe, rather than gravity. If my supposition here is wrong, please correct me, but if not, then show me to the studies that support your contention.
As I was trying to say in my first post to you and the BA, while you may be convinced of all this and it may seem perfectly clear to you that you are right, it isn’t clear at all to me. I have no background in cosmology, so all of these topics are new to me. Show me the evidence. Let me evaluate it as best I can. I expect the same kind of information from the BA, as well.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
@Todd W: (1) and (3) are in Wikipedia (look up “plasma”) and are wholly conventional facts. Phil called attention, himself, to (2). I never claimed (4). (Obviously the nuclear strong force dominates.) Phil, on the other hand, has repealed Ampere’s Law and insisted that plasma fluid dynamics is identical to gas dynamics. Those are on a par with promoting perpetual motion and a flat earth.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
@Nathan Myers
Umm…Wikipedia is not exactly a scientific, scholarly work. So, again, please point me to the scientific studies which prove your points. Thank you.
August 28th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Is Nathan Myers related to Billy Meiers, by an chance?
August 28th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
insert: y
August 28th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
@Todd W: The sky is blue. Need a reference?
August 28th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
@Nathan Myers
I’m assuming that your lack of providing any sort of resources with a scientific basis that I can learn from means that you are merely spouting opinion, rather than concepts that have any valid scientific basis whatsoever. What is so difficult about providing links to sources? Where did you come by your ideas, if not by scientific study? What education have you actually had in any field related to your claims?
I ask you for serious information because I have no background in astronomy or any related field, and I’m met with “the sky is blue”? Mr. Myers, whether you believe it or not, I really am interested in learning. You can either provide some links to some scientific literature supporting your claims, or you can continue to act like a troll.
August 28th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
@Todd W.: The point is that these are commonplace facts, not cutting-edge research. The place to learn about them is in standard reference works. The Encyclopedia Brittanica has a very nice writeup on the basics of plasma, with citations if you care to follow them. (Good luck getting cites for Phil’s inventions.)
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/463509/plasma
August 29th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
@Nathan Myers
Okay, so your knowledge on the topic comes from Encyclopedia Britannica? I suppose it suffices for a rudimentary understanding. It did help me learn a bit more about about what plasma is and how it behaves, though the article still lacked some of the more specific details that would pertain to this discussion. Still and all, from a basic, layman’s viewpoint, plasma, in an astronomical sense, seems somewhat gas-like: the particles are far apart, are in an agitated state, and expand in a volume, rather than all conforming to a container or droplet, like a liquid would. This may not be an accurate assessment, but, again, to the layperson, it looks like a gas in all those photos of celestial phenomena.
The article in EB mentions that plasma is often considered the fourth state of matter. My questionm then, what are the ionization temperatures for transforming something into plasma? There are specific temperatures at which all elements turn into the various states (e.g., water is solid below 0C and gas above 100C). There is a clearly ordered transition from solid to liquid to gas. Is it only possible, then to turn a gas into plasma? Are there any occasions in which a solid can be turned into a plasma without going through liquid or gas stages, even if for a very small fraction of a second?
Out of curiosity, I also looked up dark matter in the EB, and found this quote:
So, according to the same source you provided saying that plasma is not a gas, evidence for dark matter does exist. If EB is a solid resource for the “commonplace fact” that plasma is not a gas, then by the same logic, it is also a solid resource for the current evidence for or against dark matter.
August 29th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Todd W: (1) I had not read the EB “plasma” article before. (2) Of course plasma “seems somewhat gas-like”. It is somewhat gas-like. It’s all made of the same stuff. However, ordinary gas at that pressure would not do the interesting things you see in photos of celestial phenomena; it would be practically indistinguishable from absolute vacuum. (3) Solids may go directly to gas by a process called “sublimation”. If you plunged into the sun I expect your bones would not proceed sedately through liquid and gas phases. Maybe I misunderstood your question. (4) “Dark matter” is in no sense a commonplace fact, so the EB is not a very reliable reference for facts about it, but it remains a good source for recent conjectures.
August 29th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Nathan are you saying that dark matter doesn’t exist? From what I’ve read dark matter can be inferred from a variety of measurements much as Todd has said. The scientific consensus supports dark matter. Consensus doesn’t mean proved, by the way, and it certainly isn’t the same as theological dogma but consensus often ends up as fact.
August 30th, 2008 at 1:44 am
Shane: I’m saying that to assume dark matter is not parsimonious. “Expectations don’t match reality? Must be dark matter.” When 98% of the universe is undetectable stuff sprinkled about wherever needed to make your calculations match measurements, it’s much more likely that the calculations are wrong. Then you start looking at assumptions. Maybe plasma fluid dynamics do matter. Maybe there are other causes of red shift than recession. Maybe red shift isn’t always exactly proportional to distance. So you seek out anomalies — a high-z quasars physically in front of an opaque nearby galaxy, beams of “gas” that remain collimated across light-years (or thousands), light sources impossibly bright. You study them more closely. You do that if you’re a scientist. Anyone not interested in what doesn’t fit, who only looks for “confirmation” of the favored model, is no scientist at all.
August 30th, 2008 at 4:00 am
@ Nathan Myers:
Parsimony, or any other beauty measure on theories, is irrelevant as long as there isn’t any alternatives. The point with the observation of the Bullet cluster was that it rejected modified gravity theories up to a high significance. I assume the very similar observation of another cluster recently reported confirms this.
So given that only dark matter can explain observations, and that it has been directly tested, these observations give us more detail of the standard cosmology and dark matter itself.
As regards your unsubstantiated speculations on plasmas, it is ironic for three reasons.
First, astronomers like physicists in general likes to term their objects with the behavior exhibited. Thus interstellar plasmas are gases (as AFAIU they can be modeled thus in a first approximation), just as the electrons of a metal is often called a Fermi gas despite that it is actually a Fermi liquid (since it can be modeled as a gas in the first approximation, due to the idiosyncrasies of fermions). Similarly wrapped up branes are still called strings, because they can be modeled thusly - and the list goes on and on.
This is, you should know, what scientists do.
Second, if anything speculations in wide charge imbalances manifesting as currents are not parsimonious since space is (parsimoniously without broken symmetry at that) neutral on large scales.
Now, as DrFlimmer describes here, the ionization - recombination process renders plasmas mostly neutral, so we don’t even need parsimony, we know better. And, I assume, if there were large scale currents you would present observations of statistics of different doppler effects on characteristic spectra from different patches in plasma, but you do not.
Third, AFAIU Phil and other astronomers are a tad sensitive to proposals of magnetic fields. You see, it seems that it is easily used to whip up tentative explanations for anomalies. So it is both a question stopper and a bother to test. Ideal for crackpots btw, in their efforts to cherry pick data to shore up any odd denial of verified phenomena, say dark matter. [To be truthful, in this case: DM is verified, but possibly not universally accepted yet.]
Now seeing you are a denialist I assume you can’t accept what we know of nature. But it is IMO a worthwhile effort to show bystanders why denialism is wrong and why stopping asking questions is harmful to science.
August 30th, 2008 at 4:30 am
@ Mu:
Standard cosmology has 6 free parameters, QM makes IIRC 5-10 assumptions (depending on formalization), standard particle physics has IIRC 26 free parameters. By your measure we could shove in a lot of extraneous baggage before we would consider cosmology a failure.
But in reality it predicts data when no other theory does. So you don’t present a reasonable alternative.
Btw, empirical formal systems are circular, first because they are based on irreducible axioms, second because theories predict their data, a fact that you seem to lament. Such circularities aren’t a problem because, famously, theories are tested before they are accepted.
I find it curious indeed that people tries to assign static truth values to facts, as they are a dynamical property of the process of knowledge gathering. Facts and hypotheses doesn’t have truth values; before observation respectively verification they are in degrees “not known, possible, impossible, likely, unlikely”, and after they are “accepted, rejected”. Formal logic comes up empty in describing this process.
August 30th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
@Torbjörn: It is most magnanimous of you to be truthful. In fact, interesting spectra have been published, but are never cited. Name-calling aside, your argument is that since astronomers refuse to discuss any detail of any alternative to Gravity-Only-Universe, every failure of GOU counts as positive evidence for the only models (GOU+epsilon, GOU+DM/DE) that they are willing to discuss. That may be what “astronomers do“, but it does not match my experience of scientists.
Scientists are interested in, you know, observations, particularly the ones that don’t match expectations. They don’t assume as established fact the previous generation’s idle speculations. A healthy branch of science responds to uncertainty by entertaining multiple hypotheses, and by questioning untested assumptions. Maybe some future generation of astronomers will come around. In the meantime, the present observations are (more or less) safely archived for that future generation’s use.
August 30th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
First problem Electric universe theories and plasma theories have is that the charge on the electron and the charge on the proton cancel out but the masses do not so mass adds up faster and charges net sum is zero.
September 1st, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Davidlpf: Are you equipped to calculate how much local imbalance between charges is needed to overcome all this added-up gravity? A millionth? A million-millionth? A million-million-millionth? (You’ll get there if you keep at it.) The first problem of not-only-gravity astrophysics is gravity-only wishful thinking — or parroting, in some cases. How are those calculations coming along?
September 1st, 2008 at 3:44 pm
@ Nathan Myers:
So why can’t you leave references?
Sorry, no - an identification of what you argue for, denial of verified phenomena like gas behavior.
I don’t know what you think the standard cosmology and standard particle physics is, but there are more forces than gravity. The remainder of your argument doesn’t describe any of my comments.
Yes, I would know. And again, that doesn’t change that scientists aren’t interested in ‘answering’ them by question stoppers. The reason that scientists wants tests of theories is because they have predictive theories. Which, you should know, scientists are interested in.
And I note that you consistently refuse to describe your purported “observations, particularly the ones that don’t match expectations”. Instead you continue to describe purported ‘explanations’. It’s the cart before the horse, in typical denialist fashion.
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Torbjörn: So, more name-calling, then. Too much truthfulness would be harmful, I suppose.
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:03 pm
nathan
pot meet kettle.