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Space

Deep Impact on Comet Theory 189

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-got-a-theory-it-could-be-bunnies dept.
AlexGP writes "Proponents of the Electric Universe theory have gone out on a limb ahead of Deep Impact. They're predicting it will show comets are just rocks and not dirty snowballs. Controversially they assert comets are highly negatively-charged asteroids on eccentric orbits. As they travel further into the Sun's radial positive electric field, they discharge into space, expelling material at supersonic speed."
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Deep Impact on Comet Theory More

Deep Impact on Comet Theory

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  • from the WTF? dept. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03, 2005 @08:41AM (#12973356)
    from the i-got-a-theory-it-could-be-bunnies dept.

    No, really, WTF?
    • I find your lack of Faith ... disturbing.
      (And your lack of Buffy too)

      • Re:from the WTF? dept. (Score:4, Funny)

        by schon ( 31600 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @09:36AM (#12973536)
        Bunnies aren't so cute
        like everybody supposes,
        They've got them hoppy legs
        and twitchy little noses,

        And what's with all the carrots?
        What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?

        Bunnies! Bunnies!
        It must be BUNNIES!

        (from memory, so it might be wrong.)

        I'm surprised that there's only been one person who knows the origin of this.


    • > No, really, WTF?

      It's part of Slow News Day Theory.

    • Re:from the WTF? dept. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Unnngh! ( 731758 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @09:01AM (#12973427)
      From the Electric Universe page...An electric comet would forever change the picture of the solar system and force astronomers to consider the overwhelming evidence that electricity lights not only our Sun but also all the stars in the heavens.

      When they find the big power cord coming out of the sun, who'll be laughing then, huh?

      • Nah, comets have batteries, therefore it-could-be-bunnies, thump thump thump thump...
      • No, actually, in the electric model the Sun is a giant anode at the center of a giant vacuum tube. No wire is required. Perhaps you also believe that EM radiation requires the luminiferous ether to operate?

        There is nothing whacko about the electric model of the Sun. It is simply a competing model. Keep in mind that there have already been failures of the fusion model, for example, the deficiency of neutrino production.

        I have no horse in this race, but it would be nice if those who claim to believe in scie
        • No, it's whacko. Ya see, physics works. It predicts thing, often with astonishing acuracy. This is how scientists can get up in the morning. Just because some idiot with a web page says different and manages to sell a few books, does not invalidate a massive body of knowledge. Not dogma, knowledge. There is a difference.

          The electric model is infantile.

        • "Electric Universe" is viewed by the scientific community with about as much credence as Creationism, magnetic health rings, the Face on Mars, and Scientology. They have a small handful of real scientists, and that's it. And no, there are no neutrino shortages [nobelprize.org]. A number of crackpot theories grabbed onto the supposed "missing neutrinoes" and inserted a themselves into it; EU was one of them. The neutrinoes were detected, and and scientists were correct in why they weren't detected previously. Quit readi
    • It's a line from Once More, With Feeling [wikipedia.org], the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical.

      Happy to help!

      --grendel drago

    • Do you mean "Watts, Teslas and Farads?"

  • Shocking! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @08:45AM (#12973369)


    As someone on Usenet already put it, seeing how the Electric Universe proponents rationalize the failure of their predictions may be more interesting than seeing what the mission discovers.

    • Finally, we get to extract vengeance upon the comets for killing off our dinosaur cousins. Comets gotta learn that for every action there's a reaction. Halley, you're next! And to all the planets out there .. you're either with us or against us.

      Anyway, about Electric universe folks ..their theory is interesting .. I dont think they are whacko ..science thrives because of diversity in thought .. However, if you read their predictions, nothing short of a massive water splash of water folllowed be an ice tsun
      • "I wish they'd put some numbers (if the crater is larger than "100 feet" then we are wrong. "If the ice detected in the debris is greater than X percent, we are wrong" etc."

        Well spotted; scientific theories *must* be disprovable.

        It must be possible, in principle, to disprove a theory otherwise its an axiom. And axioms need some justification (like Newtons laws of motion which are not scientific theories but (justifiable) axioms).

      • If you go to the trouble to read what they have predicted, you will learn that they see comets as just asteroids with highly elliptical orbits. Just exactly how much of a splash would YOU expect from a spacecraft hitting an iron-nickel asteroid?
  • expelling material at supersonic speed

    Supersonic speed in hard vaccuum? interesting...


    • > > expelling material at supersonic speed

      > Supersonic speed in hard vaccuum? interesting...

      Presumably any motion at all is supersonic.

    • Re:That's slick (Score:3, Interesting)

      by polymath69 ( 94161 )
      Yeah... did they mean "faster than about 1000 km/h" or "faster than 0 cm/yr"? Of course, once you have a cloud of dust in space, it's no longer quite a vacuum, so maybe some sound could travel through it in some fashion, depending on its density.

      The article looked like crackpot stuff to me, but what clinched it was this from the linked article on megalightning [thunderbolts.info]:

      One might have expected this photograph to catch the attention of media around the world. But NASA officials seized both the camera and the p

      • Re:That's slick (Score:2, Interesting)

        by zogger ( 617870 )
        NASA did take the camera and the film, I remember reading about it when it happened. It is probably googleable and I believe it was discussed on slashdot before during that time frame. Haven't kept up with it though so don't know what they did with it.
      • In the Electric Universe, our Earth is an integral part of solar system circuitry, fed by currents streaming along our arm of the Milky Way.
        Sounds a bit crackpotty to me. I checked off at least three, probably four of those factors [sl4.org] appearing in there.

        --grendel drago
      • Intersting photo, but thers is a better, simpler, OBVIOUS explanation of that photo than unprovable phenomena.

        Something blew off the shuttle at hypersonic speed, the zig-zag is the white hot (something).

        The increasing brightness is the now more damaged shuttle burning up, faster.

    • It is interesting actually (Score:5, Insightful)

      by p3d0 ( 42270 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @09:07AM (#12973444)
      Someone says this any time the term "supersonic" comes up in connection with outer space. This Electric Universe theory might have a lot of things to criticize, but the notion of supersonic speeds in space isn't one of them. See bow shock [wikipedia.org] and termination shock [wikipedia.org] for instance.

      Interplanetanetary space (even interstellar space) is nowhere near a "hard vacuum".

      • Yup. Speed of sound for some particular gas mixture 'x' is related only to temperature folks. That is, T is the only variable that changes, if you hold the gas mixture constant.

        a = sqrt(gamma*R*T)

        where R is the universal gas constant (R' = 8.3143kJ/(kmol*K)) divided by the molecular weight of the reaction gases.

        T is the absolute temperature, and gamma is the ratio of specific heats (~1.4 for air, god only knows for comet dust).

        I understand that Cp and Cv are constants with respect to temperature, pressu
      • There are only about 5 particles/cm3 [nineplanets.org] near the Earth, and it decreases from there by an inverse square law farther from the Sun. That's pretty darn hard of a vaccuum by common thinking. Yes, it will have a effect on a space probe going millions of miles, but calling it a hard vacuum isn't really that much of an overstatement.

    • Re:That's slick (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jnik ( 1733 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @09:07AM (#12973447)
      Space isn't a perfect vacuum. Sound waves and shocks can exist anywhere there's enough gas to act in an ordered, collective fashion, and on solar system scales that doesn't require a very high density.

      The solar wind is supersonic--it travels faster than sound waves will travel in it (which is why there's a bow shock upstream of the Earth). In the case of a comet, as you quoted, it's expelling material, and sound waves can travel in that.

      Somebody makes a crack like this every time a space fluids topic gets posted on slash.

      (Incidentally, why the heck is this posted under "Science" instead of "It's Funny, Laugh"? These are absolute crackpots.)

    • Re:That's slick (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 )
      Space vacuum is not 100% particle-free, so there IS a speed of sound.

      For example, "supersonic" solar wind creates shock waves when it meets interstellar space (Wikipedia has some nice pictures about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliopause [wikipedia.org]).

      Of course, you won't hear anything in space using conventional microphones, but because most of particles in space are ionized we can watch these effects from Earth using radio telescopes.
    • Supersonic speed in hard vaccuum? interesting...

      Good luck finding naturally occuring hard vacuum anywhere inside our galaxy, as it's permiated by the Interstellar Medium [wikipedia.org] (ISM).

      The ISM is a fluid much like any other (albeit extremely rarified), and is capable of transmiting sound waves, shock waves, etc, on very large scales. A short little presentation mentioning supersonic shocks ("sonic booms") caused by objects propagating through the ISM can be found here [cornell.edu]. Another site with some great pictures is
      • "Sorry to get technical but I get really annoyed by ignorant individuals "correcting" other people's technical errors..."

        Alright so your going to get annoyed by this one as well..

        "The ISM is a fluid much like any other"

        No, It's not just some ordinary fluid. You try to apply the basic hydrodynamic equations to these systems and you will get nonsense. The term is magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD), it's a electrically conductive plasma, not just an ordinary fluid.

  • BS? (Score:5, Informative)

    by MustardMan ( 52102 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @08:47AM (#12973381)
    I admit, I'm a materials guy, not an astrophysicist, but I found it odd that I'd never heard of this "electric universe" model, and the best reference the submittor could find was from "thunderbolt.info". I decided to google for it, and the first link that came up was this gem [fixedearth.com], which links the electric universe to geocentric, anti-evolutionary, creationist crap. I can't find a single reputable source describing this so-called theory, just a bunch of crackpot websites. I call bullshit.
    • I think it's funny that this group spouts their theories as a certainty only a couple days before the mission to discover what it really is. If they kept their mouths shut and relied on older material, their predictions would just fade with memory if proven wrong. If they were proven right, then they can yell about it.

    • Re:BS? (Score:2, Funny)

      by cowscows ( 103644 )
      Well, if you would bother to read all the bullshit, you'd learn that this whole theory of the universe is being stonewalled by the institutionalized fields of science . All of the so called "cosmologists" are too comfortable with their huge grants and budgets, not to mention their lucrative telescope manufacturer endorsements. They want to keep control of their billions of dollars, and their fancy cars, and their huge mansions, so they won't let any idea that might threaten that see the light of day.

      You th
      • I think (hope?) you're kidding, but this seems like EXACTLY the kind of argument these nuts would make. As someone who personally knows quite a few cosmologists and astrophysicsts, I can tell you first-hand that the amount of money they make compared to the amount of work they do, and the amount of schooling they have, is TERRIBLE. My girlfriend is a nurse, ,with a BS... she'll be making more than me when I have my PhD in physics.
        • Don't worry, I wasn't being serious. I thought what I wrote was over the top enough to be obvious, but I guess there are enough morons posting around here that it's hard to be sure if someone's actually that insane.

          I know most of the pure sciences have to deal with insufficient funding, and I am saddened by that fact. A lot of jobs are like that unfortunately. You don't get paid for the amount of work you do, you get paid for the amount of money your work makes for someone else.

          That's a tough reality for
          • ESPECIALLY during the bush administration! I'm currently facing the hard reality of a shift in focus from computational physics (low cost due to using commodity hardware running linux) to experimental physics (high cost due to expensive instrumentation). I had originally wanted to go into a tenure-track program at some small college near my family's hometown, but as I become more interested in experimental work and shift away from computational, I'm realizing a small school might not be prestigious enough
            • On the reverse side, our Dean keeps pushing our department toward computational physics because the start-up expenses are small. But we don't really have ANY experimental physicists in the departments, and our students are missing out as a result. Not everyone wants to do observational astronomy for an undergraduate reserarch experience.
              • My undergrad school was a lot like that, they had a healthy computational physics group, and were pushing toward a cosmology group, again because of the low startup costs. Luckily for me, now I'm at a school where there are a lot of biophysicists bringing the big private funding dollars to the university, which trickles down to the rest of us in the way of notoriety and prestige.
      • +5 babbled about the "institiution"

        +5 ignored by peers, and is bitter

        +5 (indirectly) referenced Galileo

        Diagnosis: kook [ucr.edu].

      • Dammit! Where's my mansion??? And I want a yacht, too. If I step on only six more crackpots, I'm sure I can afford the yacht -- that's what my textbook said back in grad school (you have to know the "secret code" of differential equations to "get the message" of course).

        Now I have to get back to Donald Trump about that meeting...and I'll ask about the mansion, too.
        • (you have to know the "secret code" of differential equations to "get the message" of course)
          You think you are being exact but you are too partial. Your theory is a pseudo theory and your ideas are FIOled again; Hormander refuses to support your ideas. Now the FBI is interested but Iagolnitzer remains silent. Most importantly, Singer isn't singing.
      • Re:BS? (Score:1, Flamebait)
        by cowscows (103644) on Sunday July 03, @10:02AM (#12973430)
        (http://shawn.redhive.com/ [redhive.com])
        Well, if you would bother to read all the bullshit, you'd learn that this whole theory of the universe is being stonewalled by the institutionalized fields of science . All of the so called "cosmologists" are too comfortable with their huge grants and budgets, not to mention their lucrative telescope manufacturer endorsements. They want to keep control of their billions of dollars, and their fan

    • Re:BS? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MustardMan ( 52102 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @09:06AM (#12973437)
      As a followup to my previous post, I've done some more googling. I found one of the biggest proponents of this wackjob theory happens to be one Jim McCanney [jmccanneyscience.com], whose other claims include such gems as "weather is being manipulated". For a good thorough debunking of this crackpot, you might want to check out one of my favorite sites, Bad Astronomy [badastronomy.com].

      The best part about the internet is, it's given everyone a voice.

      The worst part about the internet is, it's given people like this a voice.

      • Re:BS? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Peter_Pork ( 627313 )
        The best part about the internet is, it's given everyone a voice. The worst part about the internet is, it's given people like this a voice.
        But, it takes 5 minutes of googling to find the problems with these alternative theories. In a sense, the Internet is the ultimate dream of peer reviewing, which is the foundation of modern science.
      • And the biggest proponent of those whackjob motion theories (you know, F=ma and all that crap when clearly when you stop pushing something it slows down) happens to be Isaac Newton, whose other claims include such gems as transmuting lead into gold.

        • Nowhere have I ever seen it written that newton claimed to have succesfully transmuted lead into gold. Indeed, he was very secretive about his alchemy research, rarely telling anyone what he was studying. You are making the most common argument I've ever seen by people who defend pseudo-science. It goes something like this: newton tried to transmute lead into gold, yet you all worship him, so clearly you are hypocrites.

          Now's the part where I point out the fallacy of this argument. Newton discovered ve
          • All I was trying to point out is just because a nutjob who thinks governments are manipulating the weather or aliens are running the UN also thinks theory X is true doesn't mean theory X is complete whackjobbery.

            It also doesn't mean theory X isn't complete whackjobbery of course.

            There are lots of places to argue against this "electric universe" theory - but pointing out that one of the people who argue for it is a nutjob isn't one of those places.

            As for Newton, he made an amazing contribution to science.
      • And the worst part of Slashdot is that for some odd reason, crap like this keeps getting on the front page, despite the fact that the Editors should know better.

      • Re:BS? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Alsee ( 515537 )
        Yep.

        Another good one is where the Electric Universe explains that dinosaurs died out because the force of gravity abruptly multiplied. [thunderbolts.info] Better yet it ALSO says that the lower gravity may have helped in the building of ancient giant monuments like Stonehenge. Another good one is the Electric Universe explaining that "stellar electric discharges manufacture all of the heavy elements seen in their spectra" and that "nuclear energy is not the source of their radiance". [holoscience.com] It goes on to explain that the best place

    • Re:BS? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by internic ( 453511 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @09:24AM (#12973493)

      From what little I know, the so-called "Electric Universe" theory (or theories) is a variant on Plasma Cosmology [wikipedia.org]. Plasma Cosmology is a fringe scientific theory that asserts that plasma physics should play a more prominent role in cosmology and that the electromagnetic force should be considered more important than gravity in the evolution of the universe. This idea apparently originated with Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfvén.

      Of course, even Nobel Prize winners make mistakes (or at least the one I know does :-) ). Plasma Cosmology is almost uniformly viewed as incorrect and irrelevant by physicists and astronomers. The reasons, as far as I can tell, are that standard cosmology has been quite successful in predicting things like the cosmic microwave background and elemental abundances, not to mention things like cosmological redshift. Plasma cosmology cannot reproduce these things without adding on a lot of convoluted features that rely on some unproven (and seemingly outlandish) new plasma physics that has never been seen on Earth. In short, Plasma Cosmology doesn't explain a lot observations correctly in a simple way. It hasn't proven itself useful, which in the end is the measure of a good scientific theory.

      So the short answer is, "Yes, it's BS". Now cue the die hard supporters claiming there's some sort of conspiracy to cover-up their theory, which is pretty silly if you know how science really works.

      • Hannes Alfven and Science Fiction; Re:BS? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Hannes Alfven, Swedish Nobel laureate physicist, also wrote Science Fiction under the pseudonym O. Johannesson (not to be confused with Eric O. Johannesson, Professor Emeritus, Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley).

        Hannes Alfven is worth considering carefully in the context of allegedly crackpot theories. Nobody believed him about waves in plasma, until they found them (and named them after him). Nobody believed him about the solar wind causation of aurorae, until (50 years later) it became the conve
      • You claim that Plasma Cosmology does not predict as well as standard cosmology. This is exactly what Plasma Cosmology promponents say in reverse, and it's meaningless without examples and data. You mentioned three examples.

        The evidence that I have seen is that standard cosmology did not accurately predict the microwave background level, but predicted wrong several times and then adjusted to "predict" it after its level was measured. It did not "predict" elemental abundances either, rather someone found a w

        • I don't think it's fair to discount Plasma Cosmology as a fringe theory based on its merits.

          I do. They claim that comets carry extreme electric charges. Well, the electrical capacitance between a comet and the sun is at most perhaps a few hundred microfarads. Assume it to be C = 200 uF, and assume that the primordial voltage on the comet is V = 500 million volts. The amount of charge is then Q = C*V = 100,000 coulombs. If the unavoidable leakage current due to the solar wind was a paltry one microampe

          • Yeah, your calculation is right, I had the same idea ...
            However your post has nothing to do with your quote. And your parent was not talking about the "electrical charge" but about his parent, who was discounting Plasma Cosmology.

            Well, I did not RTFA (as the few sentences in the /. article allready gave em he idea that it is BS), so I dont know if the article is also reffering to Plasma Cosmology.

            angel'o'sphere
        • (On topic, this comet theory is bunk. I believe in spectroscopy, which proves that comets have lots of ice. Off topic again, I also believe that the big bang is a theory in need of replacement and that the redshift/distance correlation is not just about doppler shift, but that's just me)

          I should say it's not about doppler shift, or ... maybe it is, but there's another piece of the puzzle missing/not-understood. Consider the pioneer 10/11 blueshifts (slowing down w/ relation to Sol/us). The latest the

        • What makes Plasma Cosmology a fringe theory is not that I say it's useless, but that almost every expert in the field feels that way. Certainly, a theory can be a fringe theory and later turn out to be useful, but the vast majority of them do not. My purpose was to inform people of how the scientific community views this idea.

          Standard cosmology and Plasma Cosmology are certainly not "just as good" as you suggest. The former has proven extremely useful, which is why it is used by scientists across the

  • Spectrograph already disproves these crackpots (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03, 2005 @08:52AM (#12973401)
    Apparently the Electric Universe doesn't believe in Spectroscopy [nasa.gov], which has already shown the object to be an icy snowball ejecting gas.

  • An some say comets are antimatter (Score:3, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @08:59AM (#12973423)
    Electric universe isn't the only interesting group out there. Some [matter-antimatter.com] claim that comets are made of antimatter. If so the Tempel 1 collision should be a whopper. On the otherhand the lack of hard evidence (or hard radiation) coming from comets makes this theory a bit improbable. If comets were antimatter, I suspect we would have noticed the 0.51 and 938 MeV gamma rays produced when particles in the solar wind struck the comet.

  • what a bunch of hooey (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LMCBoy ( 185365 ) * on Sunday July 03, 2005 @09:07AM (#12973448) Homepage Journal
    Yeah, interesting theory. Too bad no one has ever taken a spectrum of a comet tail to find out if it's sublimated ices or 'supersonic' bits of rock. </sarcasm>

    How does their 'theory' purport to explain the second tail of comets, which points along the comet's direction of motion, rather than away from the Sun? Maybe only *some* of the bits of rock are electrically charged? Maybe magic comet elves rub the charge off of some bits?

    I had never heard of the Electric Universe, but they seem on par with the flat-earthers and creationists.

  • The *what*? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Deep Fried Geekboy ( 807607 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @09:10AM (#12973456)
    Here is the [cough] official [cough] statement of the Electric Universe Model, which appears to have been thought up by an electrical engineer during his lunchtime:

    http://www.electric-cosmos.org/ [electric-cosmos.org]
  • Sounds like a description of your average Slashdot reader...
  • I'm going to go out on a limb here, and before Deep Impact hits the comet I'm going to say these guys are totally, completely, 100% wrong.
  • From a different page [thunderbolts.info] on that site: "But as astronauts now prepare to ride another shuttle into space, few Americans are aware of the most critical issue raised by the Columbia disaster. Did a super-bolt of lightning--called "megalightning"--strike Columbia, causing the breakup of the craft?"

    Sounds somewhat plausable until you get to "But NASA officials seized both the camera and the photograph itself, prohibiting the San Francisco Chronicle from publishing it after the newspaper had received the picture.

  • More crackpot theories... (Score:3, Informative)

    by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) ( 613870 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @10:28AM (#12973718) Journal
    ...here [mac.com]. But at least this one makes a prediction that's about to be tested, so I should give it some credit. But crackpots have a tendency of adapting ingeniously to data that doesn't fit the theory. We'll see...

  • Why was this greenlighted? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No, seriously? Is there really not enough happening in the world this morning that you have to give 5 minutes of fame to a BUNCH OF RETARDED IDIOTS who's claims are obviously bunk if you think about it for 2 seconds.

    And people actually subscribe - pay money to this website - when it has shit like this for an article?

    • And even if it's a slow newsday, they could always post a dupe or five.

      Hell, a dupe of an old pre-Y2K story would be better than this kooky stuff.

      Hey, maybe the probe will hit the comet and release Mothra! That's my theory.
  • Is it too much to hope that these biscuit-headed nimrods will STFU forever if, erm, WHEN their predictions about Deep Impact are wrong?

    Also, a swift kick to the 'nads for Taco for considering this news, nerdy, or something that mattered.
  • Well, Zeus is going to be severely pissed at Nasa for this fender bender...
  • We're going to look really stupid if the comet fires back!

  • The Orbital Macarena (Score:3, Informative)

    by DynaSoar ( 714234 ) * on Sunday July 03, 2005 @06:54PM (#12976072) Journal
    "the Sun's radial positive electric field" ... ... exists half the time. The other half, it's negative. The solar wind changes in predominant charge two cycles per rotation, or roughly one switch per week.

    If the comets were negatively charged, we'd no doubt have noticed them dancing in their orbits. And if the sub had a constant positive charge apart from the solar wind, we'd have noticed the fluctuations in it also.
  • Out of all the countless theories circulating the vast expanses of the internet, why choose this one? Why was this comet theory put on the front page of /. to be ripped apart while others are completely ignored or unknown?

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