Hubble Snapshot of ‘Molten Ring’ Galaxy Prompts New Research

Wow … what’s with all of the vitriol against the merry band of Heretics that is the Electric Universe?

First, I would like to point out that you, John Tillman and McSwell, and most everyone else reading this post, are Climate Heretics. The “Scientific Cannon” (an oxymoron) for Climate Change is that the excess CO2 produced by human activities will dangerously warm the atmosphere. You do not believe that, so you are a Heretic. And you are willing to argue your heresy on the merits because you have ideas and data that support your position (or a least that point out deficiencies and wrongdoing in the orthodoxy.)

There have been Heretics before us; Aristotle, Galileo, Einstein, Hubble, Velikovsky, Arp. Each have fathered ideas that have disagreed the prevailing consensus … the Earth is not flat, the Earth is not the center of the universe, space-time is warped and there are no absolutes except maybe c, Red-shift is an analog for distance and means the universe is expanding, the solar system has a chaotic past is has not run like Victorian clockwork, Red-shift does not equal distance so scratch that idea that the universe is expanding. All of these Heretics were savaged with personal ad-hominem attacks, silenced, killed, or had their telescopes taken away from them. Einstein was the only one to eventually escape his Heretic label while alive, but it was a long struggle. At the time he was called a quack who lacked evidence to support his outlandish theories. Max Plank was apologizing to the university regents for Albert’s views while trying to bring him to Berlin to teach physics.

The astrophysics cannon of “there is no electricity in space” is indefensible. Everything about the modern world is based on electricity. But astronomers want to cling to their 19th century horse and buggy and oil lamp universe. Gravity is all they understand. The solar wind is comprised of charged particles in motion (the definition of an electric current is charge in motion) and the solar wind accelerates as it travels away from the Sun; fast at Mercury, faster at Venus, even faster as it passes the Earth … The only method that we have to accelerate a charged particle is the application of an electric field. Ergo, there must be a large electric field centered on Sol to produce the acceleration that we observe in the charged protons that form the solar wind. But the astrophysics cannon says that plasmas short out electric currents immediately so there cannot be an electric field around Sol. Hannes Alfven and Kristian Birkeland proved otherwise experimenting with plasmas that self organize into double layers with very messy mathematics. This is the essence of the Electric Universe. Seems plausible.

EU theory does make interesting predictions, like there should be no difference between comets (rocks) and asteroids (rocks) other than their orbits. But traditional astronomy says comets are ice balls because we can point a telescope with a spectrograph at a comet and we see the spectrum of water in the tail, ergo the comet is an ice ball. The EU guys say the comet is a rock moving through an intensifying electric field gradient as it approaches the sun on a highly elliptical orbit such that electric discharge machining (electrical arcing) occurs on the surface, which decomposes the silicates in the rock generating OH radicals as a byproduct (actual verifiable chemistry that can be replicated in a laboratory). Combine the OH radical with the naked hydrogen nuclei that is the solar wind, and you manufacture water on the spot.

So which theory is correct? Well, every time we have sent a spacecraft to rendezvous with a comet, the comet appears to be a rock.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/comets/9p-tempel-1/in-depth/

And the streamers photographed coming off the comet nucleus sure seem to be collimated like they are bound by an electric field. And the Rosetta lander that was designed with harpoon spikes to grab onto the icy surface of the comet that we KNOW is made of ice has bounced off the surface and has been lost.

https://www.space.com/27788-philae-comet-landing-bounce-photos.html

Nasa says the harpoons failed to fire, (really, all four of them?) but a more plausible explanation is that they did fire and the lander was pushed away like a pogo stick when the harpoons struck solid rock.
And even when they are close to saying electricity is responsible for phenomena in the vicinity of a comet …

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17695

… they weasel away and maintain their “Sun is melting ice” theory (because we know that it must be true), and then electricity gets involved after the fact.

And when the Electric Universe community learned that the Deep Impact mission included a large copper slug that they would fire at Comet Temple 1, they predicted the cameras would be over-exposed at time of impact due to the blinding nature of the electric arc discharge that would likely occur when two dissimilarly charged objects contact each other and one of them was an excellent conductor of electricity. The impact pictures were severely overexposed. NASA said “Hmmm, that didn’t go as planned. I wonder what happened?” EU said, “We told you so.”

And comets frequently flare up and become visible near the orbit of Neptune, which is way outside the frost limit where the sun is capable of supplying enough insolation to melt the ice. But the electric field is available for electric discharge machining.
By my count, that score is EU:5, traditional astrophysics:0. The EU are Heretics, and their message cannot be heard by those who learned what they know from someone who learned it from someone who learned if from someone who got it wrong at the beginning. Too much tradition.

Halton Arp, who succeeded Hubble at Palomar Observatory, was claimed by the EU as a fellow Heretic when he published The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and Seeing Red in which he destroys the Red-shift equals Distance meme that Big Bang cosmology is based on. Arp documents the existence of linearly aligned sets of galaxies and quasars that are physically close to each other (immersed in the same hydrogen cloud or lined up with the quasar obscuring the galaxy) where the Red-shifts of the quasars are quantized plus and minus the same amounts on each side of the galaxy, and the quantized differentials follow the same progression of values everywhere. But the “Red-shift equals distance” meme says those quasars and galaxies must be separated by great distances, and that the quasars that are optically in front of the galaxies are really far off in the distance. They say, “Do not believe you lying eyes.”

And how is it possible that the Red-shifts are quantized! This should be a leading question in astrophysics today. But it cannot be allowed to be investigated because all of those PHDs who learned it from a PHD who learned it from a PHD who got it wrong at the beginning would all die of embarrassment. So, what is to be done? They took away Arp’s telescope time and banished him to Germany. We treated him no better than Galileo.

Dr Robitaille published “Forty Lines of Evidence for Condensed Matter – The Sun on Trial: Liquid Metal Hydrogen as a Solar Building Block” in which he collects together actual observational evidence that suggests the Sun cannot be made of a gaseous plasma. Oh my. The Heresy!!! But that’s not what we learned from Eddington! (a Quaker who grew up on a farm without electricity) If Arp’s or Robitaille’s evidence is true, the wheels don’t just come off the bus, the whole bus disintegrates. So, “we ignore your reality and substitute our own!” In many ways traditional astronomy is far, far worse than the Climate Change scam. Big Physics routinely run billion dollar experiments, and at that money scale they brook no dissent. And the large sums of money required force them to run things backwards. They have a theory, so they are working backwards to find the evidence that they need to support their theory. Sound familiar?

The worst example of this working backwards was the recent report of how they have finally imaged a black hole. If you actually read the paper, you will discover that they have pre-processed, massaged, and post-processed many terabytes of data from telescopes spread across the Earth to render just a few values for a few pixels spread across a synthetic image plane. Then they used a pattern matching algorithm to match that data to the pixels in artists renditions of what they think a black hole should look like. Then they printed the artist rendition that most closely matched the data, and unabashedly said, “We have an image of a black hole!” Well, I have been meaning to repeat the final phase of that experiment feeding in the portraits of US president as the image set to match to the data. I am 100% sure that the answer will be Grover Cleveland. He was certainly round enough and wore a lot of black, and my result would be just as scientific.

The EU are more a collection of like-minded Heretics than anything else, where the central theme is “there has to be a place for electricity in cosmology”. They are fellow travelers of ours who are railing against an obviously deficient orthodoxy, differing from us only in the heresies they espouse. So please refrain from the ad-hominem attacks anytime the EU is mentioned. Instead, how about a succinct critic of the theory being presented?

For the record, I enjoy the Electric Universe the same way I enjoy an episode of Mythbusters. But I find that most of the Electric Universe episodes end with … “Plausible”. The trouble is that too many of the Astronomy episodes with all of their add-hoc additions to handle experimental evidence contrary to theory (missing neutrinos, dark energy, dark matter, violations of thermodynamics, etc), look to end with … “Busted”. Sad but true.

I believe that Mark’s point can be paraphrased as … “The Astronomers found exactly what they were looking for, and they considered no other possibilities.”

That sounds remarkably like  … “every time they go looking for Global warming, they find it.” They only find what they are paid to be looking for.

And by the way, I am not sure your statement is true … “Refraction cannot account for gravitational lensing observations. The light bent by massive bodies is achromatic.”
You use a rainbow as a counter example. The individual rays that comprise a rainbow are also achromatic, meaning one color. The difference is that with a rainbow, you have millions of lenses, where each water droplet falling as rain forms a refractive element. Each droplet (lens) delivers only one color to your eyeball. As you look outward from the center, the angle of incidence at each lens corresponds to a different color, so that the entire rainbow has many colors. But if you only had one droplet (one lens), you would only see one color. So your analogy is insufficient.

I would be interested to hear a more complete argument for how a gravitational lens could be differentiated from a lens formed from a curved tapering density gradient.