"Gigantic Jets" Blast Electricity Into the Ionosphere 168
New Scientist has an update on the so-called "gigantic jets" first discovered in 2003 — these are lightning bolts that reach from cloud tops upward into the ionosphere, as high as 90 kilometers. (There's a video at the link.) What's new is that researchers from Duke University have managed to measure the electrical discharge from a gigantic jet and confirm that they carry as much energy skyward as ordinary lightning strikes carry to the ground. According to the article, "Gigantic jets are one of a host of new atmospheric phenomena discovered in recent years. Other examples are sprites and blue jets."
Twice (Score:2)
Re:Twice (Score:5, Funny)
only if it accidentally the whole thing.
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But can it the same place twice ?
If your delete key can, it can too.
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But can it the same place twice ?
Generally it can't the same place twice because after the first time the same place isn't anymore.
3 times in a row (Score:2)
There was a guy on Nat Geo TV got hit by lightning 3 times and still alive. Of course, he is not very happy about it.
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Was he attempting suicide those three times?
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No shiat.
We should take action against Boeing. (Score:2, Funny)
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Not only does their production get delayed all the time but it turns out they have environmental impact!
Having that dream you walk into the wrong class naked?
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So? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't stand high above Cumulonimbus clouds. Important safety information. Thank you.
The "video at the link" (Score:2, Insightful)
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Worry not, I am hard at work on an animation that will be even more disappointing.
I wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
Error? (Score:2)
There must be a mistake in the article. The amount of charge isn't very big. Maybe they meant kilo Couldombs?
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1 Coulomb is a charge, not a current. Not a terribly big charge either. A "gold cap" 1F capacitor charged to 1V holds 1C. Discharging 1C at an extreme voltage in a very short time, now that's impressive.
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A Coulomb is an ampere-second. Granted, the leading edge of a strike is microsecond, and I think there is flow both ways, but a lightning strike at least appears to persist for some time, and can do a lot of work. Maybe my intuition is misleading me, but do you have a reference?
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Your typical Diehard stores about a quarter million of them.
And it's charge, not current.
rj
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I did mean charge! Trying to post comments while in the middle of a conversation at a party - probably not the best idea :)
Oh, sure. 'Charge up the "gigantic jets."' (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want your atmospheric phenomena to be taken seriously, don't give them names that belong in an Austin Powers movie.
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If you want your atmospheric phenomena to be taken seriously, don't give them names that belong in an Austin Powers movie.
Yeah, no kidding! That's why I refuse to believe in fundamental physics and their stupid "quarks". Charm? Bottom? Strange? Really? Please... with names like that, it must be bullshit.
Exactly! (Score:2)
How much respect does theoretical physics get from the public? How much tax money do you think they are willing to vote for research into something called a charmed, strange, or bottom quark?
When it was electrons and mesons and baryons, physics kicked ass and we got nukes 'n' stuff. Now that it sounds like a line of toys for toddlers from Playskool, or worse, Teletubbies, physics has lost all respect. This is why the LHC was built in Europe, of course.
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How much tax money do you think they are willing to vote for research into something called a charmed, strange, or bottom quark?
Very little, just as they don't value funding research into *any* fundamental scientific field, because America has developed a hostility toward all things scientific, and that includes fundamental research and the scientists that work on it. This would be why the US is falling behind in a whole range of fields, no matter how subjectively silly or not silly the naming conventions
Okay, so where's the ball lightning? (Score:5, Interesting)
We've discovered, documented, and explained a major new form of lightning that, previous poster notwithstanding, hadn't even really been rumored until recently. So where are the videos and large-scale studies and quantitative models for ball lightning, which has been "generally accepted as real" for well over a hundred years?
Seriously, come on. We've got millions of hours of footage of lightning, tornadoes, meteors, and even rarer and more transient phenomena. But, as far as I know, there isn't one single unambiguous high-quality video of ball lightning "in the wild". So why are we still giving it the benefit of the doubt? How many years will it have to evade our ubiquitous cameras before we just stop believing in it?
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Given that they have actually produced them in the lab, I am going to have to say a while. Given that there isn't a shred of any kind of scientific evidence for alien visitations, bigfoot, loch ness monster, santa clause or the tooth faerie, their should be no one who actually thinks they exist. Yet there are those of us amongst the rest of us who believe in the existence of those things.
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Given that they have actually produced them in the lab, I am going to have to say a while.
Really? A glowing ball of something, persisting for many seconds without any visible energy source, variously gliding along a conductor without affecting it or blowing a metal object to bits?
I hear a lot about shorting out rooms full of submarine batteries, and about candle flames in microwave ovens, but there's still no video of a golf-ball or tennis-ball or basketball-sized globe going for a nice, leisurely stroll around the grounds. One would think by now there would be.
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to quote wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Now, other than what is most likely something I saw on "In Search of" I have nothing that tells me that it exists. Your barking up the wrong tree. I don't imagine that a plasma could retain it's shape for any meaningful duration in our atmosphere.
I am simply pointing out that irrational b
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Here is one of the videos from the lab experiment.
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/401413/ball_lightning_created_in_a_laboratory_very_cool_stuff [metacafe.com]
This one seems to be inside a domestic oven.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgMnsdqHwew&feature=related [youtube.com]
Both of these could be fake of course.
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Here is one of the videos from the lab experiment.
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/401413/ball_lightning_created_in_a_laboratory_very_cool_stuff [metacafe.com]
Bouncing bits of burning metal. Some people theorize that this is behind many ball-lightning reports. Notice that it follows a ballistic trajectory -- no gliding, no hovering. It's kind of cool, but anybody who ever welds sees this all the time.
This one seems to be inside a domestic oven. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgMnsdqHwew&feature=related [youtube.com]
And again, if you're inside an environment that's thick with high-intensity standing waves, it's easy to generate cool plasmas. But the volume around a thunderstorm is not like the volume inside a microwave oven -- there's no easily-coupled, sustained source of h
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I've witnessed "ball lightning" on about three occasions now. The likely reason we have people pursuing the concept but no documentation is probably the same as the reason I never documented it; by the time you yell "Holy crap -- that's ball lightning" it is gone.
Now I've heard some theory that it's supposed to be related to plasma created by tectonic stresses. But my wife and I witnessed it when just passing under a bridge in Florida, and the ball kind of floated along a power line until it hit a transform
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I've witnessed "ball lightning" on about three occasions now. The likely reason we have people pursuing the concept but no documentation is probably the same as the reason I never documented it; by the time you yell "Holy crap -- that's ball lightning" it is gone.
And yet, again, there's plenty of footage of meteors, car crashes, lightning strikes... these are transient phenomena, giving you little or no time to catch any single event, but there are lots of cameras out there.
Now I've heard some theory that it's supposed to be related to plasma created by tectonic stresses. But my wife and I witnessed it when just passing under a bridge in Florida, and the ball kind of floated along a power line until it hit a transformer and blew it up -- right over the heads of rush hour traffic.
There are a lot of things that can make a power line or a transformer light up, and there are a lot of things that can make your eyes (and brain) think they've seen a wandering ball. For transient, high-brightness, high-emotional-impact events, your brain can't even reliably order what it sees -
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um ok. Car crashes are easy to film, they happen around cars.
um ok. "Ball lightning is easy to film, it happens around thunderstorms."
Most of the time though we just film the aftermath, most of the filmed car crashes you've seen have either been in movies or cop car chases.
What's your point? Sure, most car-crash footage is filmed after the fact, not when an accident is actually happening. For that matter, most "footage" has nothing to do with crashes at all. But, as the number of cameras has increased, so has the number of captures of actual accidents as they happen.
Lightning comes in bunches if you didn't know, very easy to film, come on, you can actually smell a lightning storm coming.
Okay, my bad here. I should have said "close-up footage of a direct lightning strike". You may, of course, point out that most footage
Probably written off as UFO sightings (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider though: All of the above-mentioned items are visible unambiguously from miles away. They are all large-scale items. Ball lightning is considered to be small and doesn't act like meteors (falling fireball that you can photograph dozens of on the right night). I would expect that in close proximity, ball l
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Inbred Jed: Here's mah photo of tha' UFO! Now you kin pay me tha fifty dollars ya promised on the teevee!
Educated professor: No, Jed, that's ball lightning.
Jed: Sheeee-oot! Does that mean I don't get tha fitty dollas?
Professor: No. Plus, you lose at life. Move to New York City and start a new life if you ever want to be anything but a hick.
Jed: Sheee-oot!
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I thought he had to move to Beverly. Hills, that is. Swimmin' pools. Movie stars.
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Interesting. They mention the burning-droplet hypothesis, but seem to settle on what amounts to a "fire tornado". I've seen footage of these, and they're very impressive, but I think it's a loooooong reach to propose this as an explanation for persistent and non-ballistic ball lightning.
Then again, as I said earlier, people are bad at making accurate observations of unusual events. Between burning droplets, burning vortexes, sparks, arcs, visual afterimages, and inaccurate perception and interpretation,
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It is all over the news in fact (Score:2)
If you watch general TV, you will see `UFO` stuff caught on camera. They are generally ball lightning.
There are also theories that it is related to xenon gas etc. and all relating to earthquake activity. So, I get alerted when some guy on TV says `UFO caught on tape` near my area.
Before the Marmara/Golcuk earthquake which was wrongly called Istanbul quake, there were some TV news mentioning UFO caught on tape, just a week ago before the 7.4 Quake, in same zone...
I can recall (Score:5, Interesting)
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pilots in the 60 who spoke quietly about these. Of course, scientists said that no such thing exists and as such, most pilots kept real quiet about it. Only at wild 60's parties would I hear some of these guys talking about it.
Maybe an even larger, as yet undiscovered type of these ""gigantic jets" can be used to explain the images taken from the shuttle, Mir space station etc. orbiting earth that clearly show something (an object) leaving the earth's atmosphere, and which have for a long time - at least in particular circles - been used to 'prove' the existence of UFOs on earth. If the jets in the article can reach 80km, could it not be possible that some as yet undiscovered phenomena could reach even higher, with enough power t
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Most videos of "something moving/leaving" in relation to the earth taken by astronauts/NASA are due to random crap (speck of dust sized crap) floating by the window only a couple of inches away from the window. Optically it looks much further away due to the parallax effect not working properly because your eyes/brain aren't used to being able to see 60+ miles without there being a tree/cloud in the way and also due to the curvature of the earth. There are tons of stories of astronauts tapping on the glass
awesome (Score:2)
Ozone Repair System? (Score:2)
I wonder: ozone is known to be created by electric discharges through the air, and a lot of these "new" atmospheric phenomena appear to be related to such discharges. Might this be some sort of failsafe mechanism that could repair a damaged ozone layer, somehow suppressed by a healthier ozone layer but re-emerging when damage occurs?
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Nah, ozone in the upper atmosphere is created when UV radiation from the sun strikes oxygen molecules, producing lone oxygen atoms which combine with O2 to form O3.
How far up... (Score:2)
Could we harness this energy to help us send more planes/shuttles into space, or even be able to use those to power the space stations, how far up the sky does this go up into?
Re:Sprites (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like so many other scientific discoveries like say, the germ-theory of medicine. In many cases, getting the science right is less difficult than getting the science community and the general public to accept your discovery.
Einstein was right: "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
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And that's a serious problem. Those two should be one and the same. Anytime it is otherwise, what you have is not science but a religion that uses scientific language.
I think the view of what "skepticism" means has a lot to do with this. At one point, skepticism meant something like "we really don't know either way, we should assume nothing, and we should ask q
Re:Sprites (Score:5, Insightful)
Einstein was right: "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds...."
That's great. Any idea how we can tell the great minds from the mediocre idiots? There are people telling us that they have been abducted by aliens, can predict the future from tea leaves and that drinking water can cure you (homeopathy) amongst other things. The reason that people do not get believed is not some great scientific conspiracy it is simply that their signal gets lost in the overwhelming noise of idiots making stuff up. Scientists have better things to do than going around checking out every nut job that comes up with something on the off chance that this might be genuine.
It is a shame, because things do get missed and sometimes the short-sightedness of the "establishment" can indeed be a factor (an excellent example is John Harrison [wikipedia.org]). However if you have to blame someone for why people are not believed blame the crystal ball gazers who make it almost impossible to determine those who are genuine.
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Several rules of thumb. If this person can't spell or their grammar is poor, I figure that the odds of them being a "great mind" are poor. Language is a system that requires some intelligence to master. And English as a second language should not be a barrier, there are thousands of grad students from all over the world churning out papers that are "good enough" as far as this is concerned. This will weed out most of the mediocre thinkers ri
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Why do you believe the UFO/Abduction/Ghost/TeaLeaf/ESP/Crystal/Homeopathy/Numerology/Bigfoot/etc crowd makes it up?
Your post is a reason why blanket generalizations are bad. Are you talking about figures in the media, or everyone who indulges in these topics? I ask because I've known a number of people into those topics and I can tell you they do not think they are making it up. They might be hallucinating, misinformed, or simply finding patterns in random data, but they are not making it up nor do they h
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This holds up just fine for me. Perhaps the problem you're having is vocabulary and topic familiarity, rather than validation ;)
Re:Sprites (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sprites (Score:5, Interesting)
My father flew F-102's, the first supersonic aircraft commissioned for battle by the US Air Force. If you get the "official" Air Force post card of the F-102, my dad's flying it. He flew Delta jets later until he retired a few years ago. He told me about red-coloured lightning going up from clouds into the sky when I was a kid (1970's), and the other pilots also knew about them, too. Are these the same as the "sprites" mentioned here?
Re:Sprites (Score:4, Interesting)
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I had the same Aha! moment when I heard about sprites.
I like the enhanced VHF propagation that occurs when hurricanes are brewing along the east coast. I live in FM17fr, and I can hear/work 2m repeaters in NC when there's a hurricane off the coast. I attribute it to tropospheric ducting (what I call tropo-ducto; sounds rather magician-ly) rather than sporadic E, of course.
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Eyewitnesses are often wrong about what they see. There are lots of studies on it. Asking for actual evidence rather than anecdotal reports isn't really that much to ask before accepting something as true.
Science doesn't just accept something new as being true just because someone says it's so. That's a good thing.
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Eyewitnesses are often wrong about what they see. There are lots of studies on it. Asking for actual evidence rather than anecdotal reports isn't really that much to ask before accepting something as true.
Science doesn't just accept something new as being true just because someone says it's so. That's a good thing.
That sounds good and all but I believe you have missed my point. I was not talking about whether or not something should be accepted as true. I was talking about whether or not it is worthy of serious investigation. If many eyewitnesses report something, it's reasonable to say "we don't know, but we will look into it and get back to you about whether this is a previously-unknown phenomenon." That reasonable action is not what generally happens. Instead, what happens is more like "we KNOW that's not pos
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So if you are a scientist, and you think the thing extremely unlikely to be real, even though there are (notoriously unreliable) eyewitnesses, exactly how much time and money do you think you are going to invest in it?
With unlimited budgets and resources, sure, I'd look at it. With the realistic amount of resources at my disposal? I think I'll investigate something else that I already believe is real and have a curiosity about.
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And one of those resources is time. It takes a lot of time to do good research. Do you want to spend part of your finite lifetime attempting to ascertain that Raelians live on the far side of a comet and will be visiting us shortly, or do you want to spend part of your finite lifetime working on your computation model of rainfall to predict drought...decisions, decisions...
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So you're saying that scientists just reject all phenomenon that don't fit in with their preconceived view out of hand ?
In an article which explains the latest results of scientists scientifically investigating what was originally the observations of various people which didn't fit with their previous model.
You will forgive me if I think you're not really making much sense.
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Evidence of gravity was there, long before it was acknowledged that it was there. We had evidence of electricity for lots of time, before we acknowledged that it was there.
The point is, your attitude is one of dismissal, just as the GP was talking about. Your approach, like many people out there, is "Let's not investigate because I believe it can't happen or be true.". The more reasonable approach would be "There's a massive amount of space in the universe, and we haven't explored even the most minuscule fr
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There is a big difference between "we need better evidence" or "we need more evidence" or even "we have no evidence for it" and "it's impossible because we don't know how it would work, so we don't believe it".
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There is a big difference between "we need better evidence" or "we need more evidence" or even "we have no evidence for it" and "it's impossible because we don't know how it would work, so we don't believe it".
Why? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And if your current theory says something should be impossible, and that theory is fairly well established, then it's absolutely reasonable to respond with "Sorry, that's impossible according to currently established theory. Get back to us w
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There's a subtle shade of difference you missed. Too often something is called "impossible" NOT because it's existence would violate established fact or well tested theory (that would be an extraordinary claim), but simply because a bit of thought doesn't yield a suggested mechanism that would produce the observation (hardly extraordinary, there's a lot of things we don't know).
For example, observations of sprites and jets were ignored for years as "impossible". Nothing about them violates known laws or eve
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What element of solar winds isn't accurately modelled by current theory? The solar wind is a lot more complex a charge flow than charge flow in a wire - you get magnetohydrodynamic effects, the particle flows are also partially ballistic, all sorts. EU is an over simplistic model in itself and current models can accurately explain all the observations, while EU cannot.
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What's your point? That science is a process of constant discovery? That science requires proper evidence for something to be accepted? What element of solar winds isn't accurately modelled by current theory? The solar wind is a lot more complex a charge flow than charge flow in a wire - you get magnetohydrodynamic effects, the particle flows are also partially ballistic, all sorts. EU is an over simplistic model in itself and current models can accurately explain all the observations, while EU cannot.
I believe you have missed my point the same way that the AC has done. Please see this post [slashdot.org] (in the same thread) for clarification. Nowhere did I talk about the criteria that must be met for something to be accepted as factually true. My view on skepticism (in this post [slashdot.org])may also help you to understand my position.
I see this fairly often and I think it's just a brand of cynicism. That is, you read a post and find a very easy objection. At that point you must make one of two choices: either I'm stupid
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Your points on issues of scienctific acceptance of new paradigms might be true, but that has no baring on whether or not any particular theory like EU is actually suffering from this unfair rejection (hint: it isn't).
Don't try to mark me as misunderstanding what you said, you made an assertion regarding scientific progress, then tried to tie it into an unrelated point about EU (which was factually incorrect).
It's a wond
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Proper???
Please enlighten me as to what constitutes proper?
Frankly, it sounds like the same kind of tripe as "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"; as if the standards of proof change for what some people consider "extraordinary".
The part that's most galling about this argument is that it usually comes from people who purport to be "scientific", when in fact subjectively shifting standars of proof are anything but.
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Can be reproduced by others. Eye-wittness accounts are neither evidence nor extordinary.
"Frankly, it sounds like the same kind of tripe as "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"; as if the standards of proof change for what some people consider "extraordinary"."
The correct quote is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and you have failed to comprehend it's meaning, science is not in the bussiness of proof.
Re:Sprites (Score:5, Insightful)
"The flow of charged particles" is the very definition of an electric current but mainstream science doesn't regard the solar wind (or any other celestial phenomena) in those terms.
You sure have drunk the Electric Universe kool-aid.
"Mainstream science" recognizes the flow of charged particles from the Sun as an electric current. It's the rest of the Electric Nonsense like the Sun being powered by electricity instead of fusion that it rejects.
But sure, tell us all about how physicists are so stupid they don't know what a current is. If they won't admit that the Sun is powered by electricity then they certainly can't admit that charged particles exist in the solar wind. Oh wait. They do, and this has been established by "mainstream scientists" long before EU "theory" was invented. I hate to break it to you, but they occupy their time by sitting around thinking up new ways to deny the Truth of EU Theory.
And while you're at it, follow it up with an extended rant about how all these idiot scientists are putting down all the brave genius Galileos. That never gets old. It's always good for a Slashdot up-mod, though.
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He may have been overly harsh, but the Electric Universe idea has been disproven [dumbscientist.com] for many years. It's fair to say that it isn't science, but rather a conspiracy theory promoted by people who don't understand [bautforum.com] physics (or science) very well.
In addition to my critique, Tim Thompson has rebutted the electric sun idea in
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After rebooting the router, I can give you W.T. Bridgman's review [mac.com] of "The Electric Sky" and Tim Thompson's review of the electric sun [tim-thompson.com] idea, and a follow-up [tim-thompson.com].
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The funny thing about that is that the many eyewitness reports of sprites were routinely disregarded because we "knew that wasn't possible". Thus, for a long time they were regarded in a fashion not unlike the way people who experience paranormal phenomena are treated today, that is, relegated to the fringes because they were considered unworthy of serious formal investigation.
There is a difference, which is that people have actually seriously looked into various paranormal stuff (mostly looking for military applications, I think) before dismissing it, rather than dismissing it without investigation.
I just wanted to mention that because the biggest obstacle to new discoveries seems to be the unwillingness to question those things that we "know" to be "impossible." If there's one lesson that institutional science should have learned from its history it's that one.
The absence of that obstacle would itself be an obstacle, when all the researchers got DDOSed with investigating people's perpetual motion machines and reactionless thrusters.
I am seeing more and more surprises like this that are not really surprising from alternative viewpoints,
It's amazing how much we see what we look for [wikipedia.org], isn't it?
such as the Electric Universe (I said those two words, so I guess that makes me automatically Flamebait eh?).
The trouble with EU is that you can look at what it sa
Re:Sprites (Score:5, Informative)
As I mention here [dumbscientist.com], the solar wind is electrically neutral. The Sun isn't "electric." It's a giant ball of fusing hydrogen and helium, and the solar wind is primarily thermally-driven (with exceptions due to solar flares, etc.)
You're not flamebait, just confused or seriously lacking in graduate physics education. The Electric Universe idea has been disproven for many years. It's fair to say that it isn't science, but rather a conspiracy theory promoted by people who don't understand [bautforum.com] physics (or science) very well.
In addition to my critique, Tim Thompson has rebutted the electric sun idea in depth, and W.T. Bridgman examines the idea in detail on his site "Dealing with Creationism in Astronomy." Unfortunately, my internet connection is screwed up so I can't provide direct links to these articles at the moment.
Re:Sprites (Score:5, Informative)
After rebooting the router, I can give you W.T. Bridgman's review [mac.com] of "The Electric Sky" and Tim Thompson's review of the electric sun [tim-thompson.com] idea, and a follow-up [tim-thompson.com].
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I just wanted to mention that because the biggest obstacle to new discoveries seems to be the unwillingness to question those things that we "know" to be "impossible."
Hallelujah. Some time during the 20th century (or maybe the late 19th century) we decided that we knew mostly anything about everything, and we "froze" our conception of what is possible or impossible. A great parallel and maybe one reason for that attitude is that we live in closed world that we have entirely mapped. No more "HERE BE DRAGON
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What a load of crap, compare the military technology used in WW1, WW2 and Iraq. During WW1 it was thought the sun was made from coal and that people would not be able to breath in an open top vehicle that exceeded 60mph.
"It doesn't matter how compelling the evidence is, it doesn't matter if 1,000 peopl
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Hallelujah. Some time during the 20th century (or maybe the late 19th century) we decided that we knew mostly anything about everything, and we "froze" our conception of what is possible or impossible. A great parallel and maybe one reason for that attitude is that we live in closed world that we have entirely mapped. No more "HERE BE DRAGONS" on maps, we've seen it all, there's no mystery, no Atlantis, no big cave leading to the centre of the Earth, no lost 7th continent, and so on... And I think that it's something that anyone can confirm. Deep down, you know we know mostly everything about anything. You know there's no such things as ghosts, witches, mysterious dragons, angels, giant sea serpents, mole people, space aliens roaming our atmosphere, reincarnation, because what you really think is, if any such thing really existed, we would surely know by now.
No. It's that what we don't know has moved to an area that "layman" no longer easily understands, such as incompatibility of general relativity and quantum mechanics, string "theories" (or whatever you want to call them), current problems in cosmology, etc.
Currently (21st century) scientists very acutely know we don't know everything, not by a long shot. It's just that there are many things experimentally known to match current theories to the limits of current measurements. Offering something that doesn't
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In any case, when an counter example observation is validated, the theory
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Poppycock, "extrodinary claims require extrodinary evidence". Eye-witness reports are N
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"The flow of charged particles" is the very definition of an electric current but mainstream science doesn't regard the solar wind (or any other celestial phenomena) in those terms.
But if I throw a lit flashlight from here to the next planet, I wouldn't call that interplanetary flow of electric current. Certainly an electric charge is moving. That doesn't mean it makes sense to talk about electricity.
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What about rogue waves? (Score:2)
Oh, guess this one, disregarded for ages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave [wikipedia.org]
Of course, as captains saw it, they spoke openly about it since nobody would send them to psychological checks. This one is seen by pilots mainly and of course if you are a commercial pilot, you don't speak openly about it.
The Wiki link I gave to you has been really vandalized by (citation needed) freaks and missing a very important photo, taken before photoshop age. Here is the photo which finally made scientists think about th
Re:Question (Score:4, Informative)
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Only xhtml has the "/" in the <br> tag
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Use "Plain old text" posting mode in the options.
It's not really plain text (that's extrans), it still allows html tags for formatting, but it does automatically add <br> tags for line breaks.
Re:HAARP (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, that was an interesting description. You might note that any US auroral research is best performed in Alaska more for reasons of auroral proximity than prying eyes -- and there are a number of US citizens in Alaska, anyway.
But, while I find myself unable to share your paranoia (the ability for humans to perceive false correlation with such things is legendary -- ask the 1000s of hams whose neighbors suddenly "start" suffering TV interference when they see a new tower put up), that is a very interesting facility -- 3.6MW of RF is nothing to sneeze at, and pumping the ionosphere with HF to transmit ELF is damn cool. Thanks for the info, and here's a link [alaska.edu] for others who may be interested.
73 de ab9ul
Re: (Score:2)
Most of Humanity has not heard of the word "Cheeseburger" either.
Re: (Score:2)
So you're saying ice falling from the sky in Alaska is some sort of unnatural "freak" event ?
Re: (Score:2)
It is possible that HAARP can screw with things, but come one, it is ran by the government and the government has a good track record of always doing the right thing. I am not worried in the least, you can trust the government.
Re: (Score:2)
"For $35 you will receive the watermarked print of your choice" of the 750 photos in their possession.