Talk:Plasma cosmology/Archive 1

message: I don't understand the 'Major Figures' section.  What does, say, Max Born have to do with plasma cosmology?  Even Buneman -- does he have any relationship with plasma cosmology in particular or just plasma physics?  I also wish the article was a bit better at indicating sources for particular points.  I may try to do something about this once I understand the subject well enough. -?
:Since I didn't put in Max Born, I can't give you an answer, and I indeed wondered myself why he was in the list.  Please do not remove Oscar Buneman, without his computational techniques and developments in the field of plasma physics, Plasma Cosmology itself would either not be around, or would be much less developed anyhow, since parts of it rely heavily on computation.  An example being that methods developed by Buneman where used to some extent by Peratt in modelling large scale Birkeland currents.  This article is indeed far from where it should be.  I have a small list of things I would like to change over the summer, including expanding the work by Peratt, and showing how his work was actually inspired by early experimental work in the 1960's.  Please make a list of what points you would like sourced, so that it can be discussed, and so that I can help you in locating the correct citations.  Overall, it must be remembered that the general principles concerning Plasma Cosmology are based primarilly on laboratory and local space environment work, so that indeed anyone working on the general principles of plasma physics in the lab or on computer, or in space physics, is in an indirect way a contributor to the Plasma Cosmology.  This point was expressed by Alfven himself at least once. -Ionized 02:46, Mar 3, 2004 (UTC)
:As a follow up on Max Born-  born indirectly contributed by advocating non-Big-Bang cosmologies.  This is also discussed in the Assis and Neeves paper I referred to in non-standard cosmology talk page.  I also just now found that Peratt has basically said the same thing.. here is what Peratt writes
::Max Born. Nobel prize for Physics...Together with scientists like Regner, Nernst (the father of the third law of thermodynamics), Finlay-Freundlich and Louis de Broglie, Born advocated a third model of the universe that helped lay the foundations of a cosmology that today forms the bulkwork of the Plasma Universe. Born, in a 1953 edition of Nachrichten, brought forth the seriousness of Finlay--Freundlich's few--degree temperature prediction for interstellar space and suggested radio astronomy as an arbitrator between expanding and infinite cosmologies, noting that they differed orders of magnitude in energy density. It is noteworthy that Born's manuscript was printed 12 years before the Penzias–Wilson radioastronomy measurement. We quote from the opening of Born's paper:
::Freundlich glaubt zeigen zu können, dass die übliche relativistische Deutung der R.-V. durch die Beobachtungen nicht best\"atigt wird, wogegen die Formel [$\Delta \nu / \nu =-AlT^4,\ A=2\cdot 10^{-29}$ $cm^{-1} grad^{-4}$] mit allen bekannten Tatsachen in Einklang ist, einschlie{\ss}lich der Nebelflucht (Hubble-Effekt), sofern man dem Weltenraum eine Temperatur von wenigen Graden beilegt. Ein solcher Widerspruch gegen die auf einfachsten \"Uberlegungen beruhende relativistische Erkl\"arung ist nat\"urlich eine sehr bedenkliche Sache. Trotzdem schien es mir angebracht, die Freundlichsche Formel ein wenig zu analysieren; dabei bin ich zu dem Schlu{\ss} gelangt, da{\ss} die Formel eine einfache wenn auch seltsame Deutung erlaubt, bei der \"uberdies Zusammenh\"ange mit einer anderen Gruppe von Erscheinungen, nämlich der Radioastronomie, nahegelegt werden.
:This text can be found at this URL: :http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/people/history.html
:So, I am still in doubt on some of the contributors in the section, some are quite obviously non-major (which is why I long ago added a comment about this under the section heading.)  What should we do about this? -Ionized 03:08, Mar 3, 2004 (UTC)
::I think the first thing is that the 'figures' section should explain what each figure has to do with plasma cosmology; I think the only entries that do this right now are Lerner (who happens to be a friend of mine), Alfven, and Peratt.  Once it's been clarified what the relationship with the subject, we can talk about who belongs there.  I think that it confuses things unnecessarily to include people, and from Ionized's comments Born and Buneman fit in this category, who are neither proponents of plasma cosmology or people who made a direct contribution to it; the article ought at least to make this distinction.  I think as thing stands this list looks like a very dubious attempt to attach big names to the theory and consequently makes the article less credible.  I think if no-one more knowledgable comes forward to sort this out I will eventually try to separate the list into two categories along these lines.  -Rafaelgr 02:33, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Major Figures?

message: IMHO the section Figures in plasma cosmology is grossly misleading, as a lot of the names are very indirectly involved with plasma cosmology and I assume never endorsed. By including, those  helped, ... or indirectly, to develop this field, nothing but an argument by authority, and faked one to be more precise, is achieved. I suggest to remove the entiere section, and all persons directly involved with plasma cosmology to be included and wikilinked from the prose. --Pjacobi 18:23, 2005 May 25 (UTC)
It should be made sure that no scientist is misrepresented as a Plasma cosmologist if he is nothing of the kind. Decius 05:26, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Figures in plasma cosmology 

message: I think this article has a lot of problems with it that have nothing to do with whether or not plasma cosmology is a good physical model. Here they are:
*The overview section. It contains many ambiguous, unreferenced statements. It could be made less controversial by making these statements more precise and using the references. For example
::It can be shown that the electromagnetic forces are several orders of magnitude greater than the gravitational forces in certain plasmas and that the electromagnetic forces can have a longer range than gravitational forces.
:This statement has absolutely no content. Nobody would be surprised to hear that electromagnetic forces are stronger than gravitational forces in a tokamak. Moreover, electromagnetic forces and gravitational forces both have exactly the same range, since they both have the same inverse-square nature.
::On the largest scales, evidence that plasmas exhibit external forces on physical objects such as galaxies is the same as that which has led standard model researchers to derive the existence of both dark matter and dark energy.
:This sentence is very difficult to understand. Does it mean: Big Bang researchers have been led to postulate dark energy and dark matter for many of the same reasons that plasma cosmologists assert that there are long-range interactions due to plasmas in the universe?
*It is not clear what model is being described. I suggest that Alfvén's model be described in the first section, with criticisms by cosmologists, and followed by the more recent modifications.
*The sections on Arp and Velikhovsky need to go to separate pages. They have little if anything to do with plasma cosmology. Alfvén accepted that the redshift was a genuine Doppler shift.
*The "Figures in plasma cosmology" section is really bad. Why is everyone who ever worked on plasma physics included, along with David Bohm and Max Born? It makes no sense. It might as well be titled "List of names the authors thought to compile."
*Finally, as far as I'm concerned, the major problem with Alfvén's model is that it violates the Copernican idea that we should live nowhere special in the universe. In order to be compatible with the isotropy of X-ray and CMB data, as I see it, one would have to live, by chance, at the absolute center of the matter-antimatter explosion. Without this, it is not clear to me how the model can even get off the ground. This is not mentioned as a criticism.
I was thinking about making some of these changes, but I'm not interested in a pointless revert war, so I thought I'd test the waters. –Joke137 23:21, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi there, I tried contributing to this article, but prickly anonymous physics students kept vandalising it so I gave up. Pity really, because PC has some very interesting ideas, though I've no idea what Velikovsky has to do with plasma cosmology either. I'd like to completely rewrite it from scratch and make it as npov as possible, but it is difficult because PC is incomplete and very much still in progress, which makes it vulnerable to attack. The biggest stumbling block I found in the attempt was that one has to provide a background critique of standard cosmology (from the point of view of PC theorists) in order to introduce it and provide the starting point of its development. This critique, no matter how it was worded, seemed always to be distasteful to Big Bang apologists and the subject of attack. --Jon 10:48, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criticisms 

message: Since I haven't seen a real respnse to my comments on it some time ago or Joke137's more recent ones, I've gone ahead and edited the Figures section, removing any who didn't have a direct connection to plasma cosmology, as opposed to plasma physics in general.  I've left a few who were ambiguous.
Rafaelgr 18:43, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks good, thanks for doing that. --Jon 05:46, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  June 2005 ~ present 

message: Physical cosmology
*Big Bang
*Big Bounce--Jon 05:05, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Physical cosmology Table 

message: From the introduction:
:While the Big Bang model of cosmology suggests that the early universe was composed entirely of plasma from reheating until recombination, plasma cosmology proposes that many cosmological processes that are explained through gravitational physics in Big Bang cosmology are in fact electromagnetic in nature. A tenative list of such properties include scaleability, Birkeland currents (electric currents), double layers (charge separation), filamentation, plasma instabilities, and current circuits.
What on earth does the sentence in italics mean? The only thing I can see that ordinary cosmology would argue is not a plasma phenomenon is filamentation. And what are "current circuits"? Perhaps it is not these phenomena that are disputed, but when they are applicable to astrophysics?  
Moreover, why doesn't the page explain, in a simple way, how plasma cosmology differs from the big bang? Here are some questions that could be answered
* Was there a big bang in plasma cosmology?
* Is the universe expanding in plasma cosmology?
* Does plasma cosmology accept general relativity as the fundamental theory of gravity?
* What is the role of gravity in plasma cosmology? (i.e. are galaxies held together by gravity?)
Joke137 20:34, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  question