'HannesAlfven' tries to respond to my 'Real Electric Universe':
Fair enough. It looks like we're about to get an actual response here. Then, he changes the topic on the third sentence ...
Yet electric currents and fields are discussed throughout the professional astrophysical literature, predating much of the Electric Universe.Suddenly, Bridgman is no longer talking about modeling plasmas as though they lack electrical resistance. He clarifies this towards the bottom of his "rebuttal":
All these mechanisms create the charge separations and currents using energy from other processes, usually gravity. The charge-separation itself is not the original energy process but can create non-thermal distributions of charged particles.
What Bridgman has failed to tell his audience is that, if he were in a laboratory and needed to accelerate a charged particle, there's a fantastic chance that he'd use the bunching up of electric charge (an E-field) on a plate of metal to do the job. An E-field is by far the easiest way to accelerate a charged particle. Bridgman doesn't mention this important detail for his audience. In fact, he prefers that his audience focus upon other means of accelerating charged particles in space -- which stem from gravity -- even though these other means could not even be used to explain the aurora:Note he tells you to go into a laboratory!
"Only electric fields can accelerate charged particles. Gravity is too weak by several orders of magnitude, and collisions are much too rare"
Why?
Because in the laboratory we have access to batteries, generators, and other energy sources needed to separate charges.
Because it is difficult to form electric fields over large scales for long durations in nature! In nature, we largely encounter matter in the neutral state. There, the strongest and longest lasting electric fields exist at atomic scales, between atomic nuclei and their bound electrons.
Our experience with electric fields on everyday scales requires the input of energy from some other source.
Want an electrostatic field? Apply some rubbing energy between dissimilar fabrics (Wikipedia: Triboelectric effect). You must apply energy to separate the charges. Where does that energy come from? How long does the electric field last before it returns to an electrically neutral state? Not very long!
Lightning? You need moving gases containing dust and precipitation to slowly build up an electric field that can sustain a discharge. The energy to do this ultimately comes from the motions of gas and dust ultimately driven by heating and other forces. Again, the energy to separate the charges comes from other sources. Again, the discharge moves the system to a more electrically neutral configuration, very fast.
Even the plasmas in space must be at high temperatures to maintain ionization by collisions or other processes, or they must have sufficiently low density that the ions and electrons do not quickly collisionally recombine to neutral atoms. Let the plasma cool too much and you'll soon be back to neutral atoms. Even then, you only get electric fields of a transient nature.
Electric fields are most easily created by charge separation (the other mechanism, by Maxwell's equations, is induction, but EU supporters deny many of those processes which mainstream astrophysics has identified in the space environment). Charge separation takes energy. EU wants to take electric fields as a given, invoking them anywhere they want them assuming they will appear whereever they need them, indistinguishable from magic. They never worry their little heads about HOW the electric field forms at that location. Saying an electric field is at some location for EU stops all further investigation - like the creationist chant: "God Did It!"
Real scientists recognize that electric fields do not form spontaneously and for no reason. In cases where there is an electric field (see The REAL Electric Universe) real scientists must determine just how that field is created. Magnetic reconnection (a process denied by many EU supporters) is one of the few known processes that can create an electric field in an otherwise neutral plasma (see On Magnetic Reconnection and "Discharges").
If I want to accelerate things using gravity, I don't have to go a laboratory. I can hold something out at arms length and let go. That's accelerating charged particles as well - just collected as equal numbers of positive and negative charges, and that is how most plasmas must be considered throughout the great majority of the Universe.
No astronomer denies the electrical nature of the aurora, but EU supporters seem oblivious to the origin of the electric fields that drives the mechanism. The same physics and observations that established these understandings of electric fields in the cosmos have also ruled out the idea that stars like the Sun can have their primary power source derived from external electric currents. What astronomer deny are EU's claims of electrically-powered galaxies and stars like Sun.
1 comment:
If I thought the Sun was a burning lump of coal and then proceeded to burn a lump in a laboratory, then my idea must be correct!
The fact is I have absolutely no real evidence to support my claim, my laboratory test is nothing more than manufactured evidence that bears no resemblance to observation.
HannesAlven uses the same absurd methodology.
"What Bridgman has failed to tell his audience is that, if he were in a laboratory and needed to accelerate a charged particle, there's a fantastic chance that he'd use the bunching up of electric charge (an E-field) on a plate of metal to do the job. An E-field is by far the easiest way to accelerate a charged particle. Bridgman doesn't mention this important detail for his audience."
Perhaps HannesAlven would care to explain how an electric field can accelerate positive and negative particles in the same direction as is observed with the solar wind.
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