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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Roadrunner (talk | contribs) at 03:28, 28 January 2004. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

It's an active field of research, is it?

http://au.arXiv.org/find/astro-ph/1/plasma+cosmology/0/1/0/all/8/0

-- Tim Starling 07:53 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Looks like some ppl are looking into it .... http://arXiv.org/find/gr-qc,astro-ph/1/fr:+AND+plasma+cosmology/0/1/0/past/0/1 [BTW, you gotta do a full records search, not just a titles search] -- reddi 21:47 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Have to be careful. Of the 6 papers, 3 of them use standard cosmology.


These are examples of plasma physics and not plasma cosmology.

Observable phenomenon explained:

Ummm ... all those are facets of origins and structure of the universe ... explained by the theory ... cosmology is the science of the world and universe and it's parts .... so they are part of the cosmology ... or the order and course of all of nature nature. -- reddi 21:57 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

What theory. How does plasma cosmology handle quasars differently than big bang cosmology? How does "the theory" that you talk about handle interstellar medium differently than what is standard astrophysics?

This article needs some serious work. The premise that many if not most astronomical phenomenon has something to do with magentic fields and plasma is not controversial and part of standard cosmology and astrophysics. The premise that the big bang never happened is non-standard, but there are some non-crankish people who seriously believe this.


Part of the problem is that the article is talking about five different things and confusing all of them.

--Roadrunner

The only phenomnon which plasma cosomology comes up with different approaches or results than standard cosmology is in the large scale structure of the universe. The idea that the interstellar medium is mostly plasma and controlled by magnetic fields is something that pretty most all astrophysicists believe.

--Roadrunner

This is still amazingly confused.

Most plasmas are electrically neutral at large scales. The sun is one big giant ball of plasma with huge magnetic fields, but its electrically neutral.

Also, you have one paragraph that says that its not generally accepted and then the next paragraph that it is.

Let me take a stab at this.

--Roadrunner

Actually no. Interstellar gas is at scales too small to be relevant cosmologically.

These are not about cosmology....

  • Physics of Solar System Plasmas., Thomas E. Cravens, Cambridge University Press; September 1997., 495 pages ISBN 0521352800
  • Sun-Earth Plasma Connections (Geophysical Monograph, Vol 109)., James L. Burch, Robert L. Carovillano, and Spiro K. Antiochos, Amer Geophysical Union, June 1999., 273 pages ISBN 0875900925

None of this papers have anything to do with plasma cosmology


This paper argues that the distribution of galaxies can be represented as a fractal. This paper assumes standard big bang cosmology.

This has nothing to do with astrophysics.

Ditto paper one. There's nothing in the paper that suggests that the author is talking about a plasma cosmology at all.

The following has nothing to do with plasma cosmology. The authors subscribe to standard big bang cosmology. I also happen to know one of the co-authors of the paper.

This has nothing to do with plasma cosmology. The fact that they are talking about quark-gluon plasma means that they are using standard big bang cosmology.

I'd be willing to give a short lesson on what is and isn't standard cosmology and how Alven's ideas are different, if I thought it would do any good.

In terms of actual, published, refereed journal articles that mention "plasma cosmology" in their title, abstract, or keywords, the INSPEC database for the past 40 years lists only five, none from the past six years:

  • Meierovich, "Limiting current in general relativity," Gravitation and Cosmology 3 (1), 29-37 (1997).
  • W. C. Kolb, "How can spirals persist?," Astrophysics and Space Science 227, 175-186 (1995).
  • J. E. Brandenburg, "A model cosmology based on gravity-electromagnetism unification," Astrophysics and Space Science 227, 133-144 (1995).
  • J. Kanipe, "The pillars of cosmology: a short history and assessment," Astrophysics and Space Science 227, 109-118 (1995).
  • G. Arcidiacono, "Plasma physics and big-bang cosmology," Hadronic Journal 18, 306-318 (1995).

Of these, the Kanipe article is a brief review of arguments for and against Big Bang cosmology, not new research per se. Only the Arcidiacono paper specifically mentions Alfven. (The search finds only a conference paper by Alfven on plasma cosmology, no journal articles.)

The Web of Science databases finds a few more, but none after 1995.

  • E. J. Lerner, "Intergalactic radio absorption and the Cobe data," Astrophys. Space Sci. '227, 61-81 (1995)
  • A. L. Peratt, "Plasma and the universe: Large-scale dynamics, filamentation, and radiation," Astrophys. Space Sci. 227, 97-107 (1995).
  • E. J. Lerner, "On the problem of Big-bang nucleosynthesis," Astrophys. Space Sci. 227, 145-149 (1995).
  • C. M. Snell and A. L. Peratt, "Rotation velocity and neutral hydrogen distribution dependency on magnetic-field strength in spiral galaxies," Astrophys. Space Sci. 227, 167-173 (1995).
  • A. L. Peratt, "Plasma cosmology," IEEE T. Plasma Sci. 18, 1-4 (1990).

(I can't read the abstracts for this database, so I don't know how relevant all of these articles are, but it's interesting that they almost all came from the same issue; must have been a special issue?)

Anyway, I hope this is helpful in your literature debate. Steven G. Johnson

It's not a coincidence. Around 1990-1995, there were a number of observations that started to make the big bang look a bit wobbly. The main ones were the age of globular clusters and the primordial helium abundance. Also the fact that no one had observed lumps in the cosmic background radiation was making people nervous.

Since then, all of the possible big bang killers have died out and there have been a lot of observations that seem to support the big bang, such as high resolution observations of the microwave background.

Something that would be interesting is if someone would try to see if plasma cosmology would explain the accelerating universe. I suspect that Alfven might try this if he were alive. Arp, Lerner, and Peratt deny that the redshift is due to expansion so they won't do it, but if someone could show that magnetic fields could cause cosmic acceleration, it would really cause most cosmologists to take the field seriously.

Roadrunner


Thanks for your contributions, Roadrunner.

The article contains the following passage:

Despite the importance of plasma in astrophysics, the standard model of the universe asserts that while electromagnetic forces may be important for describing local phenonmenon, they are not important at large cosmological distances. The reason for this is that unlike the other three forces which are attractive only, electromagnetism is both attractive and repulsive and over large cosmological distances, electromagnetic forces are believed to cancel each other.

This is surely referring to the electric force, which can indeed be either attractive or repulsive and experiences cancellation at large distances. However, ISTRT the magnetic force is the most important force in astrophysical plasmas, and it is of course neither attractive nor repulsive. I think the reason for cancellation at large distances is a bit more subtle than this paragraph lets on. -- CYD

It is difficult to understand how Nikola Tesla's dynamic theory of gravity can be involved in this as Tesla never published his theory and there is no evidence he even wrote it down. The theory is refered to in that article an apparent contrivance from unsupported occult sources. I have flagged that link - The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. -- kiwiinapanic 06:23, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Should this page be renamed? It is primarily about the Alfven universe model refered to in Non-standard cosmology. (Or should that be a redirect to here)? -- kiwiinapanic 07:10, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I fixed the link on the non-standard cosmology page so that it properly redirects.

Removed statement about Plasma universe being widely accepted amount plasma physcists. That IEEE transaction reference not withstanding, it isn't.

Removed the statement about Alfven's model being more empirical because there are fewer "wiggle room" parameters.

If you can get Alfven's model and the standard cosmologies to predict galactic power spectrum, Alfven's wins. The current situation though is that you can't get the Alfven model to predict galactic power spectrum, but by tweaking the parameters you can get standard cosmology to match galactic distributions.

The next step is to find out what you have to tweak in order to get those distributions and see if those tweaks make sense. For example, if your tweaks include the presence of cold dark matter, and then you go look and you find cold dark matter, then you get a warm fuzzy feeling.

Roadrunner

Rewrote. Did a google search and Peratt's simulations are nowhere like the simulations that I'm talking about. The problem with Peratt's, is he does the simulation that then says "gee this looks like real galaxies" and that is not good enough to tell if you have a match or not.

Basically, what cosmologists try to calculate is the coorelation function. If I have a galaxy at point X, what is the chance that I can find a galaxy at distance r. Or if I have two galaxies at X and Y, what is the probablities that there is a galaxy at Z. This is something that you can calculate from observations. Think of it as a lumpiness factor.

Now the state of the art of big bang cosmological simulations is that you can assume some thing about the matter interaction, and calculate what the resulting coorelation factors are. The calculations are good enough so that you can rule out some theories, like the idea that the universe is mostly baryons.

I don't know of anyone that has done anything like that with plasma cosmology. My guess is that if you tried and long range magnetic fields really were important, you'd end up with a very lumpy universe, and probably one that is much lumpier than what we observe.

Also looking at the Peratt's simulations, they don't look a thing like active galactic nuclei. They don't look much like real galaxies either.

Roadrunner

I believe this article is supposed to be about plasma cosmology. Peratt's research is fundamentally important in this field, and should be remarked upon in the article. His simulations very much resemble some radio isophotes of agn.

Above you said:

Removed statement about Plasma universe being widely accepted amount plasma physcists. That IEEE transaction reference not withstanding, it isn't.

On the contrary, most of the plasma physicists I come into contact with, the ones that think about cosmology anyhow, consider the plasma models far superior to standard models. However, I will refrain from placing the statement back into the article.

Also, the fact that Alfven's model is hard to manipulate due to its few free-variables is a testiment to the entire approach of plasma cosmology as being experimentally and empirically based. I do not see why the comment was removed, as it is important to note.

my two cents.

thanks, Ionized

reply -

Because having fewer free variables doesn't make it more empirical or experimentally based. The problem with Alfven's approach is that if it turns out that the most of the universe consists of exotic particles, then most of the universe consists of exotic particles. Assuming that there are no exotic particles and that the universe can be explained by table-top physics is a good starting point, but the problem is that no one has gotten any of the plasma cosmology models to work quite as well as the standard cosmologies, and the excuses used to explain why for example, we don't see a general glow of 511 Kev gamma rays are more ad-hocish than invoking cold dark matter.
Sure you can invoke the Leidenfrost effect, but then one needs to take the next step. Assuming that the universe does have a lot of antimatter and annihilation is being surpressed, what is the limit of observation before you start considering the possibility that you are just wrong. With Big Bang, you can set some limits, and people were getting really excited in the early 90's when we were reaching those limits, and not seeing anything. But then we did.
Also invoking unknown physics is not necessarily a bad thing. If you can't get a big bang model to work without cold dark matter, and then you see evidence of cold dark matter, then you get a nice warm fuzzy feeling. If a plasma cosmologist had in 1992, predicted a general acceleration of the universe, he would have been seen as nuts in 1992, but people would be taking him *really* serious now.
What plasma cosmologists need is some prediction that is totally nuts, that everything thinks is ridiculous until it is actually observed.
Roadrunner

If you believe plasma cosmologists have made no 'nutz' predictions, you are ignoring many of the predictions made by plasma cosmologists in the last 40 years. This includes the isotropy of the CMB, the lack of need for expansion, the possible formation of galaxies, and many other things. They lack verification not because the data is not there, but simply because it is being looked at from the standard paradigm.

Ionized - August 11th, 2003

reply -

Those aren't "nutty" predictions. You are explaining things that people are observing or think that they are observing. What I'm talking about is predicting something that is totally contrary to what people think that the observations are or would be. For example, if plasma cosmologists predict that there are stars with 100% helium, people would say this is stupid, because we can't see stars with 100% helium. Of course, if you star finding stars with 100% helium....
Also with the issue about data not being there. You start getting a nice warm fuzzy feeling when your theory makes predictions about data that you don't have that turn out to be sensible. One of the reasons people like the big bang was that in the late-1980's it became clear that the big bang wouldn't work if the cosmic microwave background radiation was isotropic. No one had ever observed anisotropy in the microwave background. Once people looked, it was there.
Hans Alfven *did* have a good point in critcizing prophetic cosmology. However prophets are worth listening to if their prophecies start coming true.
Roadrunner

Ok, one more from me. I don't think a theory has to only make predictions about data we dont yet have to be a good theory. If a new theory better explains existing data, it may be viable.

But you really pull a rabbit out of your hat if you predict something totally stupid that turns out to be true. If there was any plasma cosmology model before 1999 that predicted an accelerating universe, people would be looking very seriously at it right now. -RR
What you really want for a theory is something that predicts something totally stupid, that turns out to be true. -RR

On cmb isotropy: In plasma cosmology, the anisotropy of the cmb comes naturally from the spatial configuration of the inter-galactic filaments which absorb and re-emit the radiation. This accounts for the near isotropy and also for the small fluctuations, which in this view are more local than they are primordial. Ionized

It's really easy to come up with a mechanism for lumps. It's really hard to come up with a mechanism for lumps that have the right consistency. Big bang cosmology has gone way past "it is bumpy" and the name of the game now is to try to calculate how bumpy.
The problem with inter-galactic filaments is that one ought to seem some sort of emission spectra. Before explaining why there isn't an emission spectra, remember the rabbit I just talked about earlier.

User:Roadrunner

So what is the coorelation function (i.e. the lumpiness factor) that plasma cosmology predicts and how does it compare to observations. Inventing a mechanicism to create lumps simply will not do, you have to show that the amount of lumpiness is the same. Within the big bang the models have gotten good enough to rule out baryonic matter models because it produces lumpiness that is too high. -- Roadrunner

This is an odd statement

If Alfven where to know this today (i.e., that redshift may be caused by non-linear optical phenomena as radiation travels through a plasma), it is possible that he may not have postulated a local expansion.

Then it's possible he wouldn't.

Roadrunner

RR, I understand your concerns about the coorelation function and will (eventually) do what I can to give an explanation as to why there are none published (that we know of.)
Do a literature search out of ApJ or arxiv. The web has made it pretty much impossible for there to be a large body of invisible astrophysical research.

User:Roadrunner

There are certainly many predictions made about the distribution of clusters and such, but maybe the same statistical methods are inapplicable in the plasma approach. In plasma cosmology, the universe is inherently cellular and filamentary structured, due to the dynamics of the plasma.
So it ought to be possible to statistically calculate the amount of lumpiness and compare to observations.-RR

This is not some contrived mechanism 'made up' to explain the clumpiness. It is experimentally derived, and can also be theoretically derived from the governing dynamics. Low and behold when the 'great wall' and superclusters where discovered, it made quite the stir within the big bang community that purports 'homogeneity'.

This is a *big* misunderstanding. The Big bang commmunity never purported homogenity. The way you do the Big Bang is to first *assume* that the universe is homogenous, which will get you the broad features of how the universe behaves. This is the equivalent to assuming a spherical cow. Cows aren't spherical, but it makes the math easier. The next step (which people started to do in the 1980's) is then to put in the lumps. In order to do this you have to make assumptions of what the lumps are made of. This pretty much rules out baryonic matter, and the consensus over the 1990's is that the lumps are made of cold dark matter which gets you more or less the correlation functions. The current research is on using the lumpiness of the cosmic microwave background to get a handle on how galaxies were formed. User:Roadrunner

However this was a confirmed prediction of the plasma cosmology. For now I will refrain from further modifying the article and do more research in order to display accurate information concerning this topic.


The universe is lumpy is not a good prediction of anything.-RR


On 'primordial abundances' - Here we have a simple paradigmatic difference, where there is no correlate for anything 'primordial' within plasma cosmology, from what I can tell so far. We start from current physics of the local space environment (that which is accessible to in-situ spacecraft experiment, along with laboratory experiment here on earth) and extrapolate up to larger scales (yes we are well aware of the speculative nature of this move, but as has been thoroughly discussed by the founders, these steps and their corresponding scaling laws have been experimentally justified so far.)
Which fails to account for the numerous ways that the universe now is different from the universe 5 billion years ago or 10 billion years ago. -RR

This means that the question of what is primordial and 'when' the entire universe began are not quite appropriate in the plasma paradigm. Asking us to predict primordial abundances leaves us stranded in this respect, as there is no way for us to show you that this question is somewhat meaningless in our minds. We can not predict a beginning to something when we think it has existed in different states forever. Once I further re-elucidate these concepts in my mind, I will make the appropriate addition to the article, explaining why Alfven's model and plasma cosmology as a whole does not really touch on anything primordial.

So can you explain the fact that older stars appear to have less helium than younger stars and very little content of anything heavier than helium? --RR


So far I like the way the article is beginning to shape up. Your additions have helped me remember that I must be comprehensive in my explanations, and considerate of the standard view when making responses. -- Ionized

Continuing references to "most" and "almost all" astrophysicists, have been changed back to "many". To truly determine that most or almost all astrophysicists are indeed supporters of the standard Big Bang would require one to perform a large statistical measurement from a true sample of all real astrophysicists out there. Surely this has not been done. A more neutral wording is "many". I understand that for a theory to be the standard, then the majority must follow it, but this is supposed to be a neutral ground.

If you want a statistical sample, you can do a quick count of the articles published in the last year at archivx.org or of papers in Astrophysical Journal at adswww.harvard.edu. If among all of those authors and papers, you come up with more than 10 authors in the last year that implicitly support plasma cosmology, you can change the almost all to most. If you can show that 25% of the articles implicitly reject the big bang, you can change the most to many.
Just because virtually all astrophysicists think something is wrong doesn't mean that it is wrong, there are numerous cases of everything thinking something was wrong and it turned out to be correct (i.e. if you had a theory in 1995 that said that the expansion of the universe was accelerating then pretty much everyone would have thought you were nuts), but it does mean that virtually astrophysicists think that it is wrong. One thing that is important in these articles is not to suggest a controversy when none exists. --User:Roadrunner

Also, since this is an article about plasma cosmology and NOT the big bang (there is a seperate article about the Big Bang within wiki), I have added more things that are actually concerning plasma cosmology (a little more about Arp, a little more about Alfven, and a little more about redshift.)

I appreciate your addition about the scattering RR. I realize that I should have been more specific when I talked about the redshift before. I specifically was refering to forward scattering mechanisms, because, just as Roadrunner has pointed out, they are the only mechanisms which truly have some merit when it comes to astrophysical application. The article is now modified to reflect this. Non-linear forward scattering mechanisms are a very recent laboratory based experimental development (within the late 1990's), and the theoretical treatment is harsh but does exist.

So how does line broadening affect emission lines from distant galaxies? I'm really curious. -RR

You can see a list of articles and associated abstracts relevant to plasma cosmology, including abstracts concerning the scattering, at: http://www.phylab.mtu.edu/~rolewis/seminarbib.html I put this togethor late 2002 while preparing for a seminar that I gave to undergraduates and professional astrophysicists. Ionized

And this is a very small fraction of the thousands of journal articles published every year, and most of the papers are dated (essentially any cosmology paper that is more than five years old is obsolete). The problem with Alfven's and Arp's work is that history has passed them by. Alfven's model and Arp's speculations made a lot of sense in the 1960's, but they have generally ignored the huge amount of data that has come in since then.
The notion that quasars are not distant made a lot of since when Arp first started writing papers because in 1970, no one had any idea how one could possibly generate that much energy. We think we have a good idea now (i.e. frictional heating of matter falling into a black hole) which also nicely explains why there don't seem to be any nearby quasars (the black hole eats up all of the gas). This of course implies the truly absurd and stupid idea that galaxies mostly have supermassive black holes in them. Which is a utterly nonsensical idea until you look and start seeing them. User:Roadrunner

RR, You absolutely MANGLE my posts, and remove pieces of the article which are an important part of plasma cosmology history.

I made two changes. The first was to move Halton Arp to plasma cosmology. As far as I can tell Arp's work has nothing to do with plasma cosmology.

http://www.haltonarp.com/?Page=Abstracts&ArticleId=2

I also noted in the article the fact that almost all astrophysicists think that it is all wrong. This is a very important point. I also deleted the lines about "standard" cosmologists. This makes it seem that there is a significant community of "non-standard" cosmologists, which there isn't. -RR

Just how on earth do you expect me to even want to continue contributing to this article when no matter what I do, you come back and claim its all wrong? Maybe I should go to the Big Bang article and start working some magic like you have been doing here.

By the way, we dont see black holes we see effects which the standard community attributes to black holes...

Reddi, I wish you luck. As for me, I have a degree to finish and dont have time to fight with omniscient Big Bangers. Ionized 02:48, Jan 28, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks ... I'll go with the experiments [on which, as far as I can tell, is what Plasma cosmology rests firmly on]. JDR We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture -- H. A.

p.s. - maybe if you do some of your own research (I cant believe you have the guts to tell me to do research, where do you think my partial abstract list even came from?), you would find the articles by Peratt and others that show that an observation of the emission spectra of an intergalactic filament has actually been made.

There are lots of observations of emission spectra of intergalactic filaments. The problem with using intergalactic filaments to explain bumps in the cosmic microwave background is that you don't see emission lines in them. The CMB looks like redshifted continua. What I was asking was that if the redshift were due to plasma filaments, shouldn't that affect the spectra of galactic emission lines coming from behind those filaments?
Also answering no it doesn't because ... is a good answer. I don't know is also a good answer. User:Roadrunner

About COBE results supporting plasma cosmology results. Need to go into a bit more detail. -RR

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