Astronomers Again Baffled by Solar Observations 299
SteakNShake writes "Once again professional astronomers are struggling to understand observations of the sun. ScienceDaily reports that a team from Saint Andrew's University announced that the sun's magnetic fields dominate the behavior of the corona via a mechanism dubbed the 'solar skeleton.' Computer models continue to be built to mimic the observed behavior of the sun in terms of magnetic fields but apparently the ball is still being dropped; no mention in the announcement is made of the electric fields that must be the cause of the observed magnetic fields. Also conspicuously absent from the press releases is the conclusion that the sun's corona is so-dominated by electric and magnetic fields because it is a plasma. In light of past and present research revealing the electrical nature of the universe, this kind of crippling ignorance among professional astrophysicists is astonishing."
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Submission hypocrisy (Score:2, Funny)
Electric Universe!? (Score:5, Funny)
Codswallop. Everybody knows the universe is powered by good old steam. I'd post a link to the official research site on the prestigious geocities.com server, but space aliens running on diesel stole my bookmarks.
Re:Slashdot is an easy target for kooks (Score:2, Funny)
Re:whaa? (Score:2, Funny)
No wait, hold on.. er... This was evidently meant as a serious scientific story. Okay, now I am officially embarrassed to admit that I read Slashdot.
Re:pseudoscience (Score:1, Funny)
Re:The electrical nature of the universe (Score:5, Funny)
Re:whaa? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:whaa? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The Tao of Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Tflamebait?
I'm sorry, but... (Score:3, Funny)
Dude seriously, who are you kidding? (Score:3, Funny)
In fact I know a B5 scholar who wrote a dissertation on exactly what you wrote last week.
Re:whaa? (Score:2, Funny)
an awful lot of electrical engineers running crank sites claiming to have invented devices and/or theories for all sorts of outrageous things from anti-gravity to free energy to psychic amplifiers.
Some of those guys are always getting "minor" electrical shocks, sometimes getting "bit" dozens of times a year over several decades of practice. While the shocks themselves are peripheral, the simultaneous discharge of huge numbers of afferent neurons from even a very small shock does create unnatural waves of synaptic activity in the central nervous system. One school of thought is that this is the reason that as a group master electricians with more than 25 years of experience are notoriously inarticulate and have speech patterns that resemble certain types of organic brain syndrome.
Ya gotta love those electrical engineers who do lots of hands-on exploration of circuitry. Many of them are literally putting pieces of their minds into the work they do for us. So it's no wonder that some of them are quite obviously losing their minds.
Re:Slashdot is an easy target for kooks (Score:1, Funny)
Please leave Velikovsky's name out of this. He deserves better.
Working within the limited knowledge of his time, Velikovsky did a truly magnificent job of weaving several very dry branches of science into a wonderfully entertaining supertroll. Just the mention of his name in some academic circles can still bring about delightfully enjoyable reactions from stuffed shirts.
Velikovsky should be honored as a patron saint of slashdot trolls. He doesn't deserve to have his name linked to electric universe nonsense. The nonsense he has generated is oh so many magnitudes more brilliant than anything the Lightbulb Sun crowd has produced.