Astronomers Detect Two Black Holes in a Cosmic Dance
Written by Anne Minard
Artist's conception of the binary supermassive black hole system. Credit P. Marenfeld, NOAO
Paired black holes are theorized to be common, but have escaped detection — until now.
Astronomers Todd Boroson and Tod Lauer, from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, Arizona, have found what looks like two massive black holes orbiting each other in the center of one galaxy. Their discovery appears in this week's issue of Nature.
Astronomers have long suspected that most large galaxies harbor black holes at their center, and that most galaxies have undergone some kind of merger in their lifetime. But while binary black hole systems should be common, they have proved hard to find. Boroson and Lauer believe they've found a galaxy that contains two black holes, which orbit each other every 100 years or so. They appear to be separated by only 1/10 of a parsec, a tenth of the distance from Earth to the nearest star.
After a galaxy forms, it is likely that a massive black hole can also form at its center. Since many galaxies are found in cluster of galaxies, individual galaxies can collide with each other as they orbit in the cluster. The mystery is what happens to these central black holes when galaxies collide and ultimately merge together. Theory predicts that they will orbit each other and eventually merge into an even larger black hole.
"Previous work has identified potential examples of black holes on their way to merging, but the case presented by Boroson and Lauer is special because the pairing is tighter and the evidence much stronger," wrote Jon Miller, a University of Michigan astronomer, in an accompanying editorial.
The material falling into a black hole emits light in narrow wavelength regions, forming emission lines which can be seen when the light is dispersed into a spectrum. The emission lines carry the information about the speed and direction of the black hole and the material falling into it. If two black holes are present, they would orbit each other before merging and would have a characteristic dual signature in their emission lines. This signature has now been found.
The smaller black hole has a mass 20 million times that of the sun; the larger one is 50 times bigger, as determined by the their orbital velocities.
Boroson and Lauer used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a 2.5-meter (8-foot) diameter telescope at Apache Point in southern New Mexico to look for this characteristic dual black hole signature among 17,500 quasars.
Quasars are the most luminous versions of the general class of objects known as active galaxies, which can be a hundred times brighter than our Milky Way galaxy, and powered by the accretion of material into supermassive black holes in their nuclei. Astronomers have found more than 100,000 quasars.
Boroson and Lauer had to eliminate the possibility that they were seeing two galaxies, each with its own black hole, superimposed on each other. To try to eliminate this superposition possibility, they determined that the quasars were at the same red-shift determined distance and that there was a signature of only one host galaxy.
“The double set of broad emission lines is pretty conclusive evidence of two black holes,” Boroson said. “If in fact this were a chance superposition, one of the objects must be quite peculiar. One nice thing about this binary black hole system is that we predict that we will see observable velocity changes within a few years at most. We can test our explanation that the binary black hole system is embedded in a galaxy that is itself the result of a merger of two smaller galaxies, each of which contained one of the two black holes.”
LEAD IMAGE CAPTION (more): Artist's conception of the binary supermassive black hole system. Each black hole is surrounded by a disk of material gradually spiraling into its grasp, releasing radiation from x-rays to radio waves. The two black holes complete an orbit around their center of mass every 100 years, traveling with a relative velocity of 6000 kilometers (3,728 miles) per second. (Credit P. Marenfeld, NOAO)
Source: NOAO
Filed under: Black Holes, galaxies
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March 4th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Utterly absurd.
If black holes suck in light, how did they detect and observe them? With a crystal ball?
At 1/10 a parsec distance from eachother how come the massive black holes don't fall on eachother by their overwhelming gravitational pull?
The article alleges that material falls into black holes but at 1/10th of a parsec the black holes aren't falling into eachother.
Rather they are orbiting eachother regularly, thus defying Newton's occult so-called law of gravitation.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Wiki "orbital mechanics".
March 4th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
@OillsMastery:
It's my understanding that these objects are observed indirectly since, as you point out, black holes trap everything including light. Astronomers look at how the objects around the area in question are behaving and deduce that a large, super-dense body is present. If there is another explanation for things like Quasars or unseen gravitational bodies, I'd love to hear it.
Wouldn't this situation be possible if the two black holes are outside of each other's respective event horizons?
I pride myself on keeping an open mind about the nature of the universe and being willing to entertain exotic explanations/different theories regarding it, but I wouldn't say black holes are outside the realm of possibility.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
One parsec is 3.26 light years. The nearest star beyond the Sun is Proxima Centauri at about 4 to 4.2 light years. Unless there is a 'star' closer then saying 1/10th of a parsec is the same as 1/10th the distance to the nearest star doesn't compute There seems to be a discrepency of about 28%. Using navigation like that on a flight from London to New York would put you somewhere between the equator and the north pole. Not a small matter, I wouldn't have thought. Try going fom New York to Los Angeles on that kind of accuracy.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
That's actually answered in the article:
The material falling into a black hole emits light in narrow wavelength regions, forming emission lines which can be seen when the light is dispersed into a spectrum.
Supposing you can read, there you go. Black holes may "suck in light", but that's within their event horizons. The matter falling in is outside the event horizon, and therefore we can detect the light it emits.
Ever heard of something called "orbit"? It's a bit like space sex in the sense that everybody does it. Well it's a bit more common than sex; for, clearly, not everybody does sex, which is a shame.
In space, though, nearly everything orbits something.
Besides, the gravitational pull of black holes is only overwhelming when you're a bit too close to them. There's a distance at which it's exactly the same we feel at the surface of the Earth. And farther out is even smaller.
Finally, don't you have better things to do with your life? Are you really so idle that the best thing you can do with your time is spit electrical universe garbage in every single UT comment box? Don't you have work to do in some supermarket somewhere?
March 4th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Error correction to my last comment. London to New York is about 3600 miles / 5760 km apart, and 28% of that is around 1000 miles / 1600 km or about 17 degrees of latitude range; which means that with New York being about 40 degrees North – you could end up some where between 23 and 57 degrees North – still a substantial navigation error don't you think.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
@Jorge: Great work on clearing up Oilsmastery's obvious delusions for the people here who havent experienced his craziness…unfortunately with people like them, their minds can never be swayed with logic, vast amounts of evidence, reason, and all the good things that are the hallmarks of Science. Ive been following his previous posts on UT, and his unbelievably delusional blog…he has the mindset of a creationist. You know, the rants against "mainstream science", the attacks on anything that goes against his superstitious magic believing worldview….im sure evolutionary biologists the world over have experienced these sorts of people too.
If it wasnt for all that wasted effort he put into his blog, i would discount him as a Troll trying to get some Lulz, but it obviously goes much deeper down the rabbit hole than that….
I think the best we can do is just ignore the blatantly fallacious logic and complex sounding words he employs to give a perception of intelligence, and respond to credible and honest questions by our other readers instead.
He is starting to wear a bit thin….
March 4th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Jorge,
Falsified hypothesis: Material falls into a black hole by gravitation.
Actual observation: Alleged "black holes" orbit eachother.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Dear UT staff – can we see about having "OillsMastery" blocked. He's a plonker. Thanks.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Rob,
Why do you think censorship = science?
Been reading Mein Kampf lately?
March 4th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
I have to agree with Rob. It's one thing to have an alternate opinion, but OillsMastery has been literally spamming every UT thread for a while. His rants are long-winded and not very logical (see above), he has an agenda, and he is deliberately trying to drown out reasonable discussion. It's not a rarity to see him take up almost half the posts in a thread.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
OIM:
There's this small thing called angular momentum that means that when an object falls into a black hole, it doesn't fall in a straight line like your limited experience on this small ball of rock would seem to indicate it should.
It tends to follow a curved path.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Trippy,
So according to you, material doesn't fall into the alleged black holes?
March 4th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Many people (scientists are people, too, you know) don't buy into "black holes".
The idea that a so-called accretion disk (out side the so-called event horizon) can generate the prodigous amounts of electromagnetic energy has never been quantified. Nor is there any experimental basis to suggest a so-called accretion disk, i. e., a result of gravity, can generate electromagnetism on this prodigous scale.
Let's do some comparison: Cygnus X-1 was the first so-called "black hole". When you scrub down Cygnus X-1 to bare facts which are observable & measurable all science has is it's intense and somewhat fluctuating x-ray signature."
What observations & measurements are there for these objects in the present post if you scrub down all the "black hole" hype.
"[The object] emits light in narrow wavelength regions, forming emission lines which can be seen when the light is dispersed into a spectrum."
Talk about vague and non-specific — this article is completely conclusionary, no layman gets anything from this article except "black holes exist"
And then:
"This signature has now been found."
What signiture? How do they arrive at their conclusion?
I guess, as part of the unwashed masses readers are supposed to just take the post's word for it.
Maybe so, but that shouldn't persuade anybody that hasn't already been persuaded — this article is for the Kool-Aid drinkers, not independent thinkers.
The point is over time astronomers have never provided convincing evidence and reasons for their conclusions. From the first day to the present day.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Using creationists tactics OiM. Calling people Nazis because they do not like what they are saying about you.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Davidlpf,
"Using creationists tactics OiM."
Newton and Lemaitre are the creationists. I deny their tactics.
"Calling people Nazis because they do not like what they are saying about you."
You are lying. I didn't call anyone a Nazi because I don't like what they are saying about me. I called someone a Nazi for advocating censorship in science. But this isn't about me this is about the myth of gravitation so please refrain from ad hominem fallacies and try to come up with a logical or scientific counteragrument for why you believe in 17th century occult forces and miracles.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
"Rather they are orbiting eachother regularly, thus defying Newton's occult so-called law of gravitation."
This proves it, he has no clue of the even simplest laws from Newton!
Ok time not to feed the trolls!
Ignore mode on!
March 4th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Olaf,
I can assure you I understand the "simplest laws from Newton."
Since you seem to be either unable or afraid to discuss the so-called "simplest laws from Newton," here is an actual quote from Newton"s Principia, Book III, General Scholium:
"…lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other, he [God] hath placed those systems at immense distances from one another." — Isaac Newton, mathematician, 1687
As I said, utterly absurd.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
@OiM maybe people would treat you better if did not start off with "Utterly absurd".
And about things failing down the potential well of black hole in spiral fashion you say things do not fall down like that. How do you explain whirlpools.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Davidlpf,
I really don't care how people treat me because despite what the mainstream pseudoscientists here might think, this isn't about me, despite the multitude of long winded ad hominem fallacies devoid of all logical and scientific counterargument.
This is about science, conjectures, and refutations — namely Isaac Newton's occult 17th century myth of universal gravitation and the myth of black holes.
"How do you explain whirlpools."
Very easily. See Winston Bostick and Anthony Peratt's work on plasmoids and plasma vortices.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
" How do you explain whirlpools."
How do you explain why we are not sucked into the Sun right now since we get attracted by it!
Also the space shuttle is a big hoax. Everybody kows that the Shuttle will be sucked to the Earth.
And birds! Don't talk about birds, they are an illusion created by the Aliens to hide the truthe! LOL
March 4th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Its a real shame that the UT comments start to turn to this mess…ie, the Oils/anaconda ongoing saga…. I have to agree with what people say about having them removed, its obvious that oils and his ilk are completely close minded to reason, in exactly the same way as creationists, but censoring them would set a bad example. They are more than entitled to their beliefs, as delusional as they are, and any person of reasonable intelligence can see right through the obvious logical fallacies they fall into….time and time and time again.
But this is the internet, and crackpots and the close minded are an unfortunate reality here, so we might as well grin and bear it, and ignore them. Personal attacks just dont accomplish anything…
March 4th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Back on topic! If they rotate in about 100 years, so we migh actually see them orbitting in the next few years. Maybe create a movie out of it
March 4th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
I am also wondering if they orbit that fast, that you can actually see gravitational lensing in our lifetime happening.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
The mainstream consensus cult of Newton and Einstein are so afraid of the science coming from Los Alamos National Laboratory that Anthony Peratt's Wikipedia page was deleted by the advocates of censorship in science…LOL.
http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/TheUniverse.html
March 4th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
My point about whrilpools was, when objects are in the vortex and lose energy due to friction and eventually fall into the center. If the shuttle was slowly losing energy it would eventually fall to Earth.
OiM way don't explain the paper on Plasmas that explains whrilpools.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Olaf,
You will sooner see invisible pink unicorns aboard Noah's Ark than you will ever see a gravitational lens: http://www.extinctionshift.com/SignificantFindings.htm
March 4th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
@Olaf: The article mentions this, they will be observing them again in a few years, where they would have moved enough for us to see any movement, thereby confirming that they are indeed orbiting each other, instead of being superimposed galaxies…Impressive stuff!
One can imagine the sort of incredible event it would be to witness the two supermassive black holes actually colliding and merging into one super-supermassive balck hole…it boggles the mind…The energies involved would be astronomical by astronomical standards!
March 4th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Davidlpf, I was just joking about the Whirlpool and space shuttle!
March 4th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Dave,
You personally attack me and then you say personal attacks don't accomplish anything. Does that you mean you plan on not accomplishing anything?
March 4th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
@Oills: It looks like Harvard has quite a few examples of gravitational lensing. That was just one website I found after 2 minutes of Googling.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
OilIs – pack it in for good. You are not a misunderstood genious ahead of your time, simply a ranting loon who can't follow an argument. How I'd love someone to blow physics wide open. It may happen soon, but it isn't going to be you.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Dave,
Since photons are alleged to have no mass it is impossible for gravitation to act on them.
Harvard needs to think things through more clearly. I seem to remember a certain pseudoastronomer from Harvard named Harlow Shapley who used to claim that the Milky Way was the entire universe.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Oils,
Images of gravitational lensing has been brought to your attention. What do you think they are?
March 4th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
@OiM,actually you are attacking people when you call the cult members because you have a problem with gravity.
@olaf sometimes hard to tell.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
ND,
"Images of gravitational lensing has been brought to your attention."
Those aren't images of gravitational lenses anymore than they are images of invisible pink unicorns.
"What do you think they are?"
I think they are images.
Since photons are alleged to have no mass it is impossible for gravitation to act on them.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Oils,
You remember the Shapley debates? How old are you?
March 4th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
"Since photons are alleged to have no mass it is impossible for gravitation to act on them."
This is again proof of not understanding the even the basic parts of gravity and the Universe.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
"Since photons are alleged to have no mass it is impossible for gravitation to act on them."
This is explained by Relativity….
You dont seem to realise that massive objects warp *spacetime*, which most surely affects the path of photons…and everything else.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
@ND the reason OIM knows about Shapley debate because he is fan of Velikovsky who Shapley discredited. (Yes I been to your websit OIM.)
March 4th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Olaf,
Newton's Second so-called Law: F=ma
m=o
You do the math.
Or how about F=G x 0^1×0^2/r^2
Again, you do the math.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
OIM: You are using the wrong formula. You are trying to explain is the effects of relativity using classical newtonian mechanics.
Your logic is flawed at a fundamental level.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
@OilIs – get a grip man, your brain has become very confused. Learn more, talk less.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Davidlpf,
Ah. In that case Oils must be a young little bugger with pimples.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Poor Anaconda, he's being completely ignored in this thread.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
It is actually funny how he makes himself look more and more like a fool! LOL
March 4th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Calib,
"OIM: You are using the wrong formula."
I agree Newton's formulas are wrong. That's my whole point. In fact, Newton's entire 17th century so-called "theory" of universal gravitation is wrong.
"You are trying to explain is the effects of relativity using classical newtonian mechanics."
No. There are no effects of relativity so why would I try to explain them? Do you honestly believe time is curved? If time has a shape then what color is it may I ask? Yellow? Purple?
"Your logic is flawed at a fundamental level."
It's not my logic it's Newton's but I agree that it is flawed at a fundamental level.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
I have a theory that both Anaconda and Oils is one and the same person!
If one dissapears then the other takes over… Split personality?
March 4th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Excellent article
I wonder if this arrangement of supermassive black holes might throw up evidence of gravitational waves? Perhaps a statistical analysis of the distribution of the positions of stars in the galaxy, especially those closest to the black hole binary…
Maybe a supermassive binary at the centre of a galaxy affects the whole shape of the galaxy, and might help to explain the diverse shapes of different catagories of galaxy.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
"No. There are no effects of relativity so why would I try to explain them? Do you honestly believe time is curved? If time has a shape then what color is it may I ask? Yellow? Purple?"
SPACETIME, not Space or Time but SPACETIME!!!
March 4th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Olaf,
If this alleged material object "spacetime" has a shape then what color is it?
If "spacetime" is a material object then where is it located? In what space is "spacetime" located?
March 4th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Well, UKDavid , maybe these gravitational waves are so big that you might see gravitational lensing because of this wave.
If that is the case then we probably could predict where it will be once we see it happening and follow it.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Oils you keep on making a bigger and bigger fool of yourself! It is clear that you even have no concept of your own EU since you compare color with spacetime.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Oils: You havent understood a word i said. I said you were applying the wrong formula to the question at hand. Your missaplication of the formula does not imply the formula is wrong, in fact, it implies your logic is flawed, and that you dont have a real grasp of physics…if you did you would have known that newtons laws are an approximation used for non-relativistic effects. You are trying to explain the efects of relativity with the wrong framework.
Your logic is flawed. Period.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
What color is spacetime? The biggest mystery in physics yet to be cracked.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
"What color is spacetime? The biggest mystery in physics yet to be cracked."
Is transparant a color? LOL
March 4th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
ND: Oh come on, we all know what colour spacetime is…its pink!….but we dont see it that way because its also invisible…and attached to a unicorn : )
March 4th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Olaf,
"SPACETIME, not Space or Time but SPACETIME!!!"
Thanks for the laugh. I think this belongs on a t-shirt.
I wonder what spacetime tastes like.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
"I wonder what spacetime tastes like."
Well, how does a pink unicorn tast? LOL
March 4th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
You know pink unicorn tastes like, chicken.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
"You know pink unicorn tastes like, chicken."
So you mean that pnk unicorns evolved from dinausaurs?
Maybe back on topic, how cool it is to have 2 black holes orbitting each other!
March 4th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Very cool, how cool.
Uber cool.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Olaf,
As long as they're not orbiting nearby or at the center of the Earth, I'm ok with it.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
It depends how big that black hole is.
It could also be very tiny and portable. LOL
March 4th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
It sounds like bullshit, but if it is true, just another proof
for the shrinking Univrse theory.
I told you guys before.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Olaf,
About gravitational waves from the orbiting black holes, would not cause wripples in the gravitationally lensed image. I'm comletely guessing here. I don't know if this object has any lensed lighted around it.
Also, won't we need massive objects orbiting much faster than these two black holes? Again, just guessing.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
I don't know ND, the wripples are wripples in spacetime so light will follow and bend too.
I am just guessing too.
These wripples would be similar like a whirlpool I guess with the center between the 2 black holes if they are equal in mass.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Olaf,
"Is transparant a color?"
Is imaginary a shape?
March 4th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
drbubo,
"It sounds like bullshit"
The voice of reason…=)
March 4th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
There are not appreciable gravity waves produced. At 1/10 a parsec (1 Pc = 3.26ly) the relative distance is .326ly or about 3e^{11}km. The Kepler law for the reduced mass is quoted as a periodicity of 100 years. So if we imagine large gaussian surfaces around the BHs that act as shrouds which conceal the "black holishness" then the orbital dynamics is essentially Newtonian.
Too bad! But in the rather distant future the two BHs will collide. Frictional drag due to absorbing material and then later gravity wave production will insure their collision. The inspiral and coalescence will produce a lot of gravitational radiation, which will ping a LIGO. This article does not say which galaxy this is, but it looks to be close enough so that it would be detectable. The galaxy has to be close enough for the 2.5-m scope to get this data.
Lawrence B. Crowell
March 4th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
I can't wait that long, but if we have found one double, then it is highly probable that more double black holes exists! So it is a matter of time to find more of them.
Maybe in those galaxy centers, those massive black holes could also be double black holes orbitting each other at very close distance that now appears to be one single one.
So we need bigger telescopes!
March 4th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Lawrence, how close would those Black holes need to be in order to produce gravity waves that would be noticable with current equipment?
I mean with the masses of these blak holes!
I am trying to get a sense of scale.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Lawrence,
"the orbital dynamics is essentially Newtonian."
Does that mean God intervenes "deus ex machina" to produce occult miracle works and action at a distance on behalf of Newtonian gravitation?
March 4th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
"What color is spacetime? The biggest mystery in physics yet to be cracked."
I'm betting that with enough crack our illogical pal OM might crack it. He'll call the result Electric Universe and…
Oh, wait!
March 4th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
"I'm betting that with enough crack our illogical pal OM might crack it. He'll call the result Electric Universe and…"
So what color is this Electric Universe?
March 4th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Calib,
I thought the same thing you were thinking, that Oils can't be a troll given how much effort he has put in. But I'm starting to change my mind. He's got to be a troll given his most recent comments and "logic".
Unless he *is* this thickheaded. Argh. I can't tell the difference.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
And does this Electric Universe actually contain intelligent life!
March 4th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Interesting stuff… I am curious as to how they managed to calculate the separation distance considering that the two objects can't be resolved.
How about instead of censoring the crackpots their comments get drawn off into another thread reserved only for loons and trolls. That would make this much easier to read.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
ND, Oils just needs attention, I think that he is a very lony guy that just needs a lot of attention even negative ones.
He really lives in his own very tiny Electric Universe because he simple cannot grasp the basics of the universe.
I did once meet some guy that got into conflict with up and down. He knew that Earth was not flat since the US went to the Moon, but he had a hard time to understand how it is possible if you go up from Earth that you must come down on the Moon. Oils gives me the same impression. Oils has basically no concept of physics but somehow feels the need to pretend that he knows a lot. This works on dumb people but not on those people that actually understand science.
The theories from 1700 are still within his grasp of understanding but anything later is waaaaaay beyond his undestanding.
I also believe that he is using multiple account names and posts like a split personality.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
@ND: Yeah, normally I wouldnt give that sort the time of day…they probably wouldnt believe me! But the problem is that he could cause confusion amongst other readers who ask genuine questions and get garbage answers from him, and end up walking away with incorrect ideas about the universe. spreading ignorance like that is just unethical…and all becuase he cannot accept that his worldview is wrong….its just so unscientific.
Its also embarrassing seeing the sort of comments from him and his sort on a science minded site like this, but i guess theres nothing we can really do…its quite time consuming having to counter every fallacy and ignorant rubbish being spouted by that sort.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
# OilIsMastery Says:
March 4th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Lawrence,
"the orbital dynamics is essentially Newtonian."
"Does that mean God intervenes "deus ex machina" to produce occult miracle works and action at a distance on behalf of Newtonian gravitation?"
No, it means that in the weak-field limit, the full General Relativistic mathematical treatment of the situation can be closely approximated by the Newtonian treatment. I.e – relativistic effects only accounted for in GR will be small enough to disregard for all intents and purposes due to the separation of the holes.
I suggest you actually read Issac Newton's Principia, and then Einstein's '1915 papers' on General Relativity so you comment intelligently on the theory of gravitation.
See what I did there? I took your own comment from a couple of posts ago, but modified it and beat you down with it. Man I'm awesome.
On another note – are you one of those guys that emails people at universities incessantly to attempt to explain how Einstein was all wrong and plead with them to take a look at your speculations? They are always telling me how often it happens; you strike me as the type is all…
March 4th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Olaf,
So people like that really do exist? I thought they were completely theoretical and could not be observed.
As for multiple accounts, someone posted under "ND" and saying that ND himself was an idiot. This was after Oils could not answer a question. I'm guessing it was him but I don't know.
I think Oils and Anaconda are seperate people.
Calib,
I would agree with you, but I think misinformation about vaccines/autism impacts us more. I would even put astrology before the promotion of PC/EU. People make decisions based on readings The existence of gravitational waves and black holes, or lack there of has no major impact on daily life.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
The two body problem is difficult in general relativity. I could lay down some mathematics, but that might gloss over eyes. I will say this, There is the Schwarzschild factor
A = 1 – 2GM/rc^2,
which enters into the metric. The metric is a distance in spacetime. It also defines the four velocities, and the geodesic equations, which are equations for "flows of motion.." This is somewhat heuristic, but … .
The radial part of the metric has a 1/A term which is smaller than the time part by a factor of 1/c as well. We can expand the 1/A using binomial formula and derivatives of this give geodesic terms which deviate from Newton's laws. So as a rule the Schwarzchild factor has to deviate from one, or that
2GM/rc^2 —> 1.
For two black holes I will abuse things further by letting the mass be the reduced mass M = mm'/(m + m') for the two black holes. For approximate situations this is not too bad. One black hole was 20 and other 50 million solar masses, so the reduced mass is ~ 14e^{6}m_[sol}. Let us assume that 2GM/rc^2 = .1, and we compute the radius
r ~= 20GM/c^2 = 20*6.67e^{-11}1.4e^{39}/9e^{16}
MKS units not written in. This is
r ~= 2.1e^ {13}m = 2.1e^{10}km,
about the radius of the solar system. At that distance between the two BH's general relativistic effects should start to "kick in" in a serious way in the orbital dynamics of the two BHs.
I input these number from memory and with some mental running of numbers. Yet this looks about right. For gravity wave production to occur at a significant rate the Schwarzschild factor has to be about half, or this distance about 1/5th the above or about the distance between the sun and Jupiter.
Lawrence B. Crowell
March 4th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Astrofiend,
"I suggest you actually read Issac Newton's Principia"
Based upon your ignorant remarks it is obvious that you've never read Newton's Principia.
As I was saying in agreement with Leibniz, "deus ex machina": http://hss.fullerton.edu/philosophy/GeneralScholium.htm
"lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other, he [God] hath placed those systems at immense distances from one another.
This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God …, Or Universal Ruler; for God is a relative word, and has a respect to servants; and Deity is the dominion of God not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants. The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect; but a being, however perfect, without dominion, cannot be said to be Lord God; for we say, my God, your God, the God of Israel, the God of Gods, and Lord of Lords; but we do not say, my Eternal, your Eternal, the Eternal of Israel, the Eternal of Gods; we do not say, my Infinite, or my Perfect: these are titles which have no respect to servants. The word God* usually signifies Lord; but every lord is not a God. It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God. And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not eternity and infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures forever, and is everywhere present; and, by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space. Since every particle of space is always, and every indivisible moment of duration is everywhere, certainly the Maker and Lord of all things cannot be never and nowhere. Every soul that has perception is, though in different times and in different organs of sense and motion, still the same indivisible person. There are given successive parts in duration, coexistent parts in space, but neither the one nor the other in the person of a man, or his thinking principle; and much less can they be found in the thinking substance of God. Every man, so far as he is a thing that has perception, is one and the same man during his whole life, in all and each of his organs of sense. God is the same God, always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially; for virtue cannot subsist without substance. In him** are all things contained and moved; yet neither affects the other: God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies; bodies find no resistance from the omnipresence of God. It is allowed by all that the Supreme God exists necessarily; and by the same necessity he exists always and everywhere. Whence also he is all similar, all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand, and to act; but in a manner not at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly unknown to us. As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things. He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, nor touched; nor ought he to be worshiped under the representation of any corporeal thing. We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of anything is we know not. In bodies, we see only their figures and colors, we hear only the sounds, we touch only their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells, and taste the savors; but their inward substances are not to be known either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds: much less, then, have we any idea of the substance of God. We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing. But, by way of allegory, God is said to see, to speak, to laugh, to love, to hate, to desire, to give, to receive, to rejoice, to be angry, to fight, to frame, to work, to build; for all our notions of God are taken from the ways of mankind by a certain similitude, which, though not perfect, has some likeness, however. And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy."
March 4th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
ND: Oh definitely, you are absolutely correct, those topics do have a more real-world effect, but Universe Today is not the forum for those topics…either way, the less misinformation in the general populace the better, no matter the topic. Most especially when it involves silly "mainstream science" conspiracy theories…whatever "mainstream science" is supposed to be….something is either Science or it is not…there are no grey areas.
March 4th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
OilsMastery: AHA!! your true colours are revealed… "Lord god" ….this explains your ignorance!
Thanks Oils!
March 4th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
ignoring the previous arguements…this makes no sense to me and I do have a background in Nuclear Physics….how can it be that a single black hole has the gravity to bend space and time and suck the insides out of a galaxy, …but this says that 2 black holes within 50million miles of each other don't have enough gravity to immediately combine? I could understand with enough centrifugal force they could be kept apart but an orbit of 100 days does not indicate to me to offer enough force to overcome the gravities involved…aside from that…a question…what kind of energy/partical burst could be expected to be observed if the 2 black holes do attempt to combine??
dennis
March 4th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
oops. I misread teh distance stated in the article…sorry…
March 4th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
verbal diarrhoea
March 4th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Has anyone else noticed most of OiM arguements are strawman. Instead of dealing with questions being asks he goes to whether or not some one is creationists.
March 4th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
can anyone solve me the anagram 'yes me is a troll' ?
March 4th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
@middenrat : HA! Well ill be….
Guys and gals, i think weve been duped all along…OilIsMastery is definitely a troll. Middenrat is correct, OilIsMastery is an anagram of "yes me is a troll"
Well spotted man!
Now we dont need to waste our time with the Troll anymore and can out him on every comment he makes from now on. He has been playing us all along…
Congrats Middenrat!
March 4th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Calib,
Can you please explain how Newton's reliance upon occult forces, divine intervention, and miracles, explains my ignorance?
March 4th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Oils: Nice try Troll
March 4th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
That would be due to the well known effects of Troll'ism Theory. As Dave said, Nice try Troll.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Newton lived in a different time. His invokation of divine intervention involved the problem of solar system stability. His work though was largely mathematical and did not invoke divine forces as causal agents.
Remember, Newton lived at the end of a time where irreligious thought could get your head chopped off. Issac spent his youth under Cromwell's Commonwealth.
Lawrence B. Crowell
March 4th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
yes me is a troll is not strictly an anagram of OilIsMastery. The first has two e's and the name has only one.
L. C.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Has anyone described what happens when the accretion disks surrounding two black holes begin to interact? I can only imagine that would be a very active and very interesting place to be.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
its so damn close tho, and seriously, look at all the rubbish he spouts…if hes not a troll by anagram hes a troll by action. Hes busted wide open.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Isn't it amazing with OilIsMastery, the closer you we get to something that is harder for him to disprove , the more radical is his response is. Obviously he is a creationist, and has hooked on his misplaced Plasma Universe doctrine to justify his faith. Sadly faith is not science, so the only way he and others of his kind can survive now is to disprove science.
He now stands totally naked and exposed.
"The fool shall be servant to the wise at heart."
Finally now I believe it is true.
Best of all binary black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs – through gravity's signature – leaving direct evidence of the mass and nature of the beasts.
Neither Oilismastery and Anaconda can avoid it and that what has them worried. Jackasses be damned!
March 4th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Salacious B. Crumb Says:
March 4th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
"Obviously he is a creationist, and has hooked on his misplaced Plasma Universe doctrine to justify his faith."
That would also explain his disbelief in plate tectonics! Plate tectonics and the Big Bang – the two arch enemies of the creationist agenda… Too bad the forward march of science is irrepressible.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Oills brain, enlarged 1,000,000,000,000 times —————–> .
This explains his inability to comprehend even simple physics, and hang onto priciples and theories which have been disproven for almost a century.
March 5th, 2009 at 1:38 am
I sincerely hope that OilIsMastery hasn't a clue as to where we all live — he's archetypal stalker material.
March 5th, 2009 at 1:47 am
Dave — "Its a real shame that the UT comments start to turn to this mess…ie, the Oils/anaconda ongoing saga…. I have to agree with what people say about having them removed, its obvious that oils and his ilk are completely close minded to reason, in exactly the same way as creationists, but censoring them would set a bad example. They are more than entitled to their beliefs, as delusional as they are, and any person of reasonable intelligence can see right through the obvious logical fallacies they fall into….time and time and time again. But this is the internet, and crackpots and the close minded are an unfortunate reality here, so we might as well grin and bear it, and ignore them. Personal attacks just dont accomplish anything…" The truly annoying thing about people like OillsMaster is their utter lack of clue concerning what is and is not appropriate in any sort of discussion, scientific or otherwise. They are egregiously rude, they hog the limelight, and they never shut up. OillsMastery is entitled to his beliefs — but he is *not* entitled to be rude and uncivil to people, unless he expects to get ejected from the groups he is rude at. Which he may be. Discussions like the ones on this blog are the outward and visible signs of the most social activity on Earth: science as a way of arriving at some sort of objective understanding of how things really work, at whatever scale, taking place over centuries or millennia among people most of whom never meet one another because they're in generations that are widely separated from one another. The lack of respect for that process evidenced by people such as OillsMastery is the antithesis of what civilization is all about. If we can't get OillsM to shut up and go away, we are certainly entitled to resent his total lack of manners. While feeding the trolls is ultimately unrewarding — it backfires a lot, just keeps the trolls going and going and going and . . . because what they *really* want is attention, and it gives them that — it's a very understandable reaction to endless harassment, bullying, and sophomoric behavior in general. We can try to talk around him and his ilk, but what we talk about is going to evidence the general annoyance of the rest of us with the trolls, whether it ought to or not, simply because each of us has a limit, and OillsM has been pushing the envelope of our limits for quite a while now.
March 5th, 2009 at 2:48 am
Yael, here's where I disagree with you (although you make a very good pont):
Scenario A
Person 1: I think A, B, and C are the explanation for this phenomenon
Person 2: Actually. it's more likely X, Y, and Z
Scenario B
Person 1: I think A, B, and C are the explanation for this phenomenon
Person 2: Obviously you are an idiot and blind to the true nature of the universe, not to mention a Nazi (not exaggerating here, this accusation was made by this individual a couple of threads back).
Person 2: All of you are involved in the conspiracy against our beliefs!
Person 1a: Um, could you please form a coherent argument?
Person 2: You are obviously all sheep in the throes of the conspiracy to hide the real truth! (insert obviously incorrect mathematics and physics here). Obviously I am right and you are wrong!
100 posts later, 40 of them by Person 2
Person 448-512: Can we get Person 2 (and his friends) banned!?
QED
Tell me, which scenario would you like better? I can tell that you, Mr. Dragwyla, are interested in rational discourse, but there are obviously others on this thread who are not.
March 5th, 2009 at 6:08 am
I took a brief look at Oil is Mastery website. Clearly this is a case of some strange "alt-science." Lots of abiotic oil stuff, gravity is a myth etc. Abiotic oil in the lore of drilling for oil is a "dry hole." There seems to be lots of other confusing stuff as well.
A person is free to believe anything. A person can think the Earth is flat and the moon made of green cheese and be free of undue pressure to think otherwise. This does not of course mean that this person is entitled to equal time for their oddball ideas about things. John Baez has a section on his website devoted to a crackpot list. I recently was badgered by somebody who was certain that lunar gravity did not cause tides, where this person turned nasty and snarky as I tried to argue otherwise.
Such people ultimately base their arguments on weak foundations and they get testy when pushed. In a physics conference presentations are subjected to some review so that oddball ideas are screened out. Alt-science types might scream "censorship," but really this is just a way of saying their views are inappropriate and they must take them elsewhere.
In the case of a blog things are obviously more free-form. Yet if you want to keep discussions on some intellectually respectable level the only option is to ignore such people. As it is said, don't feed trolls.
Lawrence B. Crowell
March 5th, 2009 at 6:22 am
I agree with the sad necessity of banning both OilIsMastery and Anaconda, for the simple reason that they don't come here to talk about the discoveries reported on UT, they come here to make a big noise and get attention for their plasma-non-gravity ideas. This is an open forum for discussion but it is not the place to try to slag off astronomy and cosmology and get your personal alternative theory accepted. If they wish to do this then how about submitting work to some scientific journals.
I appeal to the people running this website to ban them both because they make the average person's experience of visiting the website very frustrating, by swamping the discussion threads and preventing others commenting by wasting space. It is a form of spamming not trolling, and if it was endless religious proselytizing it wouldn't be any different.
I resent having to scroll through 6 pages of the same arguments about gravity/plasma on EVERY post when all I want is to read the views of people who are genuinely interested in astronomy, and talk about the cool stories that are posted here.
March 5th, 2009 at 7:23 am
Becky,
Sadly here as well. Most people who have debated with these guys have not asked for a ban. Most have tried to point out specific problems with their arguments and in turn they have either played games or insulted their debaters. This has in turn led to some strong words towards Oils/Anaconda. I myself am a little guilty of this, mostly for continuing the debates. Although I stand by the accusation that they are cranks.
Oils, is completely loony. Anaconda has tried to go deeper in the discussions but his tactics are clear. Try to lure people into a discussion and berate them when the other person disagrees with PC/EU. The best example of this is his interactions with Lawrence B. Crowell. Initially Anaconda acted all respectful but tried to move the discussion towards plasma cosmology. Lawrence stuck to just talking about the details with no personal attacks. Eventually Anaconda berated Lawrence as well and became abusive as well through his frustrations.
I don't know what the right answer is when it comes to banning Oils and/or Anaconda. I think disruption level would be the metric to use.
March 5th, 2009 at 7:29 am
As for pink unicorns, wouldn't redshifting throw off their pinkish color? Just a thought.
March 5th, 2009 at 7:37 am
Wow,
All of this attention. I feel like a little boy in crowd of emotional prom queens.
If you pseudoscientists spent half as much time studying the history of science as you do typing voluminous ad hominem fallacies you might actually learn something.
And by studying I mean something other than regurgitating by rote the pre-Space Age creationist Scripture of Newton and Lemaitre.
March 5th, 2009 at 7:41 am
Oils,
You're the only one here regurgitating with all your quotes. Mind you, you get all emotional and frustrated yourself when you're stuck and can't answer scientific questions. You run right back to quotes. And you call it scientific discourse?!
March 5th, 2009 at 7:53 am
I am not the biggest fan of banning people or imposing negative sanctions, both personally or against nations, for I doubt these do much good. The beginning of this year has seen some creationist school legislative activity in a number of states — of course south of the old Mason-dixon line
It is annoying that after the Kitzmiller-Dover decision that this crops up again. It's shooting duck in a carnival shooting gallery, the things pop back up. We can't just exclude these people from society or ban them. We have to engage the issue one more time. I suppose it keeps us on our toes.
When it comes to alt-science "trolls or flamers" it is best to adopt something from the Dover decision, "No we will not engage this on equal time." Just as we can't ban creationsists to some exile, I suppose with blogs we can't ban either. But we can exclude them from discussion and ignore them.
Lawrence B. Crowell
March 5th, 2009 at 8:10 am
I call for a ban for either those yellow spacetime continuum marshmallows that OiM is using or OiM himself. But please, this has to stop.
March 5th, 2009 at 8:22 am
ND,
At least I've moved beyond the pre-Space Age creationist Scripture of Newton and Lemaitre. Obviously you haven't.
To the fascist chorus/herd of censorship advocates,
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." — Aldous Huxley, author, 1927
March 5th, 2009 at 8:38 am
Oils,
Your trolling has become tiresome and not adding to the discussion. You are not being taken seriously at all. That's all I have to say. Thanks.
March 5th, 2009 at 9:17 am
We don't need to ban them. Just simply say they are a "moron" and leave it at that. Don't enable them further. Don't engage in their off subject, off color, no logic statments.
If they want to ramble..so be it. If they want to make a statement… allow it. Just don't answer or respond. Simply ignore anything they add.
Don't worry about their feelings. I'm betting they are used to having conversations with only themselves.
March 5th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Only the government is banned from censoring. This is Ian's site and he can do with it as he pleases. Ian could start posting upside down and backwards in alternating pink and green letters if he so wishes. That said, I hope Ian does not ban anyone. As just plain silly as OilsMastery is, the best course of action is not to ban him (it?), but rather for everyone to ignore him/it. Quit responding to anything he/it posts. Any replies just egg him/it on. After a while, he/it will get bored and go bother some other site.
March 5th, 2009 at 10:13 am
I think a ban on these troublemakers is also hard to do – because it empowers them to spread the underlying deception and deceit. They are entitled to their opinions, however misinformed.
IMO the experience with Oils and Anaconda for me has been most revealing and enlightening. It shows the growing divisive war between science and scientism – the former appealing the reductionist way of seeing the world while later applies to mostly the radial religious or christian apologetics using it as a wedge through gaps between various scientific authorities.
The difficulty is the current professional work applied to plasma astrophysics. Its history has been a very difficult task, because of the complexities in the mathematics (as Lawrence Crowell has said) and the problems of measuring plasma, magnetic fields and there interactions through space. It is true, that the laboratory experimentation has been extraordinarily interesting, and no doubt, the confirmation will advance our knowledge of the universe and astrophysical processes.
Most of the hostility expressed by them has been by keeping to pressure on them. From the many other similar blog wars and the attack upon Wikipedia entries on plasma studies by these same two individuals has been exactly the same – keep hammering the message regardless of what others say or do – until the site bans them. So then they act like the victims of some dreadful crime of censorship, then move on to another target. Meanwhile the number of site, like Google increase, till those who type "plasma astrophysics" do not get the legitimate institutionalised science-based work but the garbage of this wrong alternative cosmological view. (That is why Anaconda mostly refers to "plasma cosmology" instead of the other legitimate forms of plasma science. If you don't believe me then just type the two terms in Google and you immediately see what I mean. Every time "plasma cosmology" appears it is registered by Google (and others) and this ups the story in the ranking.)
Those who do not know better, eventually believe the deception as true – so it become entrenched by bring real doubt into the whole evidence-based cosmology, astrophysics and astronomy, even though there is little doubt as confirmed by observation and theory.
The problem that has to be solved in not banning these crazy ideas site by site, but to wage a campaign exposing the basic deception. Fraser Cain here in Universe Today, has had similar problems with the adjoining Bad Astronomy – having to place a 30 day period those expressing alternative cosmologies. (Casual looking at it, it did not work.)
Perhaps, the only way is to place for every article or post made a formal scientific based disclaimer. This would say, something at the bottom of articles containing something like;
*********************
"Views that might be expressed by responders to this article that relate to alternative cosmological theories of the universe or various energetic phenomena are there own. Under our present understand of the universe, pseudo-subjects or theories like plasma cosmology (PC), plasma universe (PU) or electric universe (EU) have yet to be formally proven as significant influences on the vast majority of astrophysical phenomena. This is also the case will our current cosmological theory. While there is no denying that so-called "plasma astrophysics" is an important emerging aspect of astronomy, the view that it predominates over our general knowledge of basic gravitational theory, general relativity, nuclear physics or quantum mechanics has yet to be shown. Those who profess such ideas remain in a very small minority (<0.1%) of professional astronomers and cosmologists. also does not endorse these unconfirmed views."
*****************************
In this way, plasma (whatever) proponents can say what they like, but the stated premise cannot be denied. (It wording could be shorter though!)
If this was done across the community, the goals of these deceivers could be somewhat diminished or redirected.
Just an idea.
Comment : Dave Flinton said; "not to mention a Nazi (not exaggerating here, this accusation was made by this individual a couple of threads back)"
I actually never said they were Nazis.I said they were using methods that Adolf Hitler used to convert the masses. ND comment, was regarding the word "nazi" to demonise someone. This was not the case, as my argument states above.
(Again many apologies for the length.)
March 5th, 2009 at 10:28 am
For some reason the last line is incomplete…
It should read "SUBSTITUTE NAME OF SITE also does not endorse these unconfirmed views"
*********************
"Views that might be expressed by responders to this article that relate to alternative cosmological theories of the universe or various energetic phenomena are there own. Under our present understand of the universe, pseudo-subjects or theories like plasma cosmology (PC), plasma universe (PU) or electric universe (EU) have yet to be formally proven as significant influences on the vast majority of astrophysical phenomena. This is also the case will our current cosmological theory. While there is no denying that so-called "plasma astrophysics" is an important emerging aspect of astronomy, the view that it predominates over our general knowledge of basic gravitational theory, general relativity, nuclear physics or quantum mechanics has yet to be shown. Those who profess such ideas remain in a very small minority (<0.1%) of professional astronomers and cosmologists. SUBSTITUTE NAME OF SITE also does not endorse these unconfirmed views."
Apologies for the confusion
*****************************
March 5th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Meh. It's a no-brainer that opinions expressed in the comment boxes are the commenters' and the commenters' alone. Be they smart, stupid, delusional, reality-based, each of us is the sole responsible for what we write here below the "related stories" links. And each of us builds his/her own reputation and credibility among the others and the people writing in UT. No question about it.
So there's no need for such a disclaimer. In fact, putting something of that sort after the articles would be highly counter-productive, for it would reward those attention-seekers.
The best way to shut them up is to force them to earn their own living in an actual job. That way, they just woudn't have time to make that nonsense up, much less to spam it around.
As a second-best alternative, the ignore method also works in the medium run.
March 5th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Anonymous,
Yes, Anaconda was using the god-of-the-gaps technique, specially when debating Lawrence and others on the 3-body issue. Here he asserted that according to the 3-body problem and chaotic orbits, there could never be any orbits like we see in the solar system. "Could it be that EM has a role here in keeping orbits stable?" he suggested (summary and not a direct quote).
He has also been very quick to put down theories with strong evidence behind them as mere thought experiments and mathematics.
He has been very dogmatic about his views. Very committed to them emotionally as well as intellectually. I've had the deep suspicion that he may actually be one of the contributors to the PC/PU/EU web sites.
I had not looked at all these debates from the perspective of Google search hits.
The problem I have with bringing up Nazis is that the tactics and debate style might be the same but the end goal is different. But I can understand the urge to use that comparison. I used god-of-the-gaps comparison above but Anaconda's preaching is not about any religion. Same tactic tho.
March 5th, 2009 at 11:10 am
One effictive medium that does not include an outright ban would be a personalized ignore list (they do this on the infamous FARK and it does wonders for improving the level of discourse there).
Like Becky said above, it is extremely difficult to ignore someone who posts the most posts in a thread, so the point that someone made above that we should just "not respond to them" is effectively moot. I've seen threads where the Oills/Anaconda duo take up 80% of a thread, dittoing each other. The rest of the posts were attempts at debating them or ineffective attempts to get them to post somewhere else. It's disheartening to log onto this website, pick a article, read the thread, and realize that NONE off the posts have anything to do with the article thanks to a couple of bad apples in the bunch.
March 5th, 2009 at 11:23 am
OilIsMastery Says:
March 4th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Trippy,
So according to you, material doesn't fall into the alleged black holes?
No, that isn't what I said. What I said was:
Trippy Says:
March 4th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
OIM:
There's this small thing called angular momentum that means that when an object falls into a black hole, it doesn't fall in a straight line like your limited experience on this small ball of rock would seem to indicate it should.
It tends to follow a curved path.
March 5th, 2009 at 11:56 am
@ Oilismastery and Anaconda,
Found an interesting site named thunderbolt.info. Really interesting stuff, which I'm assured the sceptics here might find illuminating. I was amazed at some of the information contain here. Some of the words are exactly the same as you use here or are paraphrased. Is what you are saying here yours or someone else?
It is interesting about some of the suggestion for 'plasma' sites.
Why is it that anyone who has an alternative view, has statements like "they contain computer viruses" to stop people going there, eh?
More interesting is the methods of gain recruits for plasma (whatever) See http://www.thunderbolts.info/aroleforyou.htm
I absolutely love the statement;
"Media Communications
The editors of scientific media will certainly pay more attention as our Internet presence grows. Communications can also include the science editors of regional newspapers, particularly those who may be looking for emerging scientific controversies. More than once a reader’s simple note, directing an editor or journalist to an "alternative explanation," has produced surprising results."
What is this a scientific site or some fringe religious cult?
I mean "In your communications, please be sure that, unless you have developed specific strategies with Thunderbolts management, you not identify yourself as a member of the Thunderbolts group, but as a curious or interested observer."
Clearly this is not science, this is just voodoo mumbo-jumbo based on methods of psychological persuasion – mindless faith over the rigours of the scientific method.
Your same methods used here again stand before you…
(ARE YOU WORKING TOGETHER ON THIS PROJECT?)
Bad luck, twilight is coming faster than you think!
Note: I wonder. Do people like you believe in light-sabers like those used in Star Wars, just like Luke Skywalker? Or do you play just with the little action figures, dreaming of some electric future under the neon lights?
March 5th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
I'm getting tired of reading astronomy/science articles that anthropomorphise events. "Cosmic Dance?"
Enough already.
March 5th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Selecious,
More than once Anaconda mentioned how he refused to believe that the universe would use a weaker force over a stronger one (ie gravity over EM). I found this almost word for word on one of the sites Anaconda linked to quite often in his debates on Bad Astronomy. I always thought that he was using these sites as his playbook, but I've started to wonder if Anaconda is from those sites. thunderbolts.info was linked to quite often on BA by Anaconda.
I may also have a suspect for the identify of Anaconda. But obviously I can't be 100% sure and in the end I don't even know if Anaconda contributes to these sites.
March 5th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
So, um, what is the best estimate of the timeline of activity between these black holes? Is it possible to figure out how long it will be before they collide and/or start releasing all of those gravitational waves?
March 5th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
here is what really interests "astronomers" – personalities, deliberation of personalities, bans, kicking s-es etc. not space.
Very sad, intelligent beings
March 5th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
ND said;
"I may also have a suspect for the identify of Anaconda. But obviously I can't be 100% sure and in the end I don't even know if Anaconda contributes to these sites."
I already know who he is, and better still I have another level or two of this exposé to go. He invited me to "go deeper" – so I said why not!
As to whether or not Anaconda or Oils is associated with Thunderbolts site (I know) actually matters not. The probability that the aim is deception is almost certain. It is organised and subversive. Denying association to some group is said in the document as exactly quoted.
Note: Now let watch the diversions from what is written above. Now we will see damage control. (Already started) – but I'm one step ahead of them.
I waiting the tongue lashing, and another slip up or two…
March 5th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Oh Anaconda (is that still your avatar?)
There are fewer and fewer places to hide now.
Sorry to ruin your illusions.
March 5th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Salacious B. Crumb: "What is this [Thunderbolts group], a scientific site or some fringe religious cult?"
They sound like Scientologists.
March 5th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
To andrew,
Yes this can be calculated, but I can't quote the formula or a number just yet for the decay time due to gravity waves. Before that happen there must be a frictional drag first which brings them close enough from gravitational radiation to become appreciable.
Lawrence B. Crowell
March 5th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Oh, I'm sure that the formulas for the general case are known. I'm asking about these specific black holes talked about in the article. Is there enough information at hand yet?
March 5th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
The thunderbolts web site is TTLSHT. It looks more like a scientology-like religion than science.
L. C.
March 5th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Hello, guys!
Believe it or not, I am still trying to find anyone at my university who can tell me something about double layers. They all don't know much about it (nothing more than what is presented on wiki) and they say I should ask one professor. The problem is that the "specific" one is actually in America right now, so well out of my reach.
Greetings from Germany…
March 5th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Salacious, Ivan3Man, and Lawrence,
Do you 17th century Newtonian crackpots and cranks also think Los Alamos National Laboratory is a Scientology website?
http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/TheUniverse.html
March 5th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
DrFlimmer! Hello to Germany. Hope your studies are going well.
March 5th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
@ Oilismastery
No, this is a fake web address you give.
1) The actual Los Alamos National Laboratory is; http://www.lanl.gov/ There is no "Plasma Cosmology" at this site.
The National Laboratory says it is not associated with the redirect site.
2) The site that alleged by other appear as like "scientology", based on the Media Communications is the 'Thunderbolts.Info' site.
i advise you some moderate caution…
March 5th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Salacious,
As usual, you didin't answer the question. Do you or do you not think the research at Los Alamos National Laboratory is Scientology?
March 5th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Oh for the love of (whatever you believe in),
Please stop feeding these morons the debates they love so much.
Great article other than the trolls who don't believe in gravity.
March 5th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Emission Nebula,
There is a conceptual difference between gravity and gravitation. Nice straw man argument. You and Don Quixote are fantastic warriors.
March 5th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
DrFlimmer,
can you by any chance name this professor?
March 5th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Emission Nebula said;
Oh for the love of (whatever you believe in),
Please stop feeding these morons the debates they love so much.
Great article other than the trolls who don't believe in gravity.
Really appreciate you concerns, however please be patient because their life expectancy may soon be shortened.
March 5th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
To save this general text being buried for others who wish to read it. (sincere apologies if you think it seems inappropriate.)
The moderators will do so if it is deem improper.
@ Oilismastery and Anaconda,
Found an interesting site named thunderbolt.info. Really interesting stuff, which I'm assured the sceptics here might find illuminating. I was amazed at some of the information contain here. Some of the words are exactly the same as you use here or are paraphrased. Is what you are saying here yours or someone else?
It is interesting about some of the suggestion for 'plasma' sites.
Why is it that anyone who has an alternative view, has statements like "they contain computer viruses" to stop people going there, eh?
More interesting is the methods of gain recruits for plasma (whatever) See http://www.thunderbolts.info/aroleforyou.htm
I absolutely love the statement;
"Media Communications
The editors of scientific media will certainly pay more attention as our Internet presence grows. Communications can also include the science editors of regional newspapers, particularly those who may be looking for emerging scientific controversies. More than once a reader’s simple note, directing an editor or journalist to an "alternative explanation," has produced surprising results."
What is this a scientific site or some fringe religious cult?
I mean "In your communications, please be sure that, unless you have developed specific strategies with Thunderbolts management, you not identify yourself as a member of the Thunderbolts group, but as a curious or interested observer."
Clearly this is not science, this is just voodoo mumbo-jumbo based on methods of psychological persuasion – mindless faith over the rigours of the scientific method.
Your same methods used here again stand before you…
(ARE YOU WORKING TOGETHER ON THIS PROJECT?)
Bad luck, twilight is coming faster than you think!
Note: I wonder. Do people like you believe in light-sabers like those used in Star Wars, just like Luke Skywalker? Or do you play just with the little action figures, dreaming of some electric future under the neon lights?
March 5th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
The website:
http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/TheUniverse.html
is run by a Los Alamos National Security LLC, which may or may not be a contract outfit. The thing could be fake. It is not hard to lift a webpage and use the logos and symbols of any organization, LANL, IEEE and so forth to create an apparently realistic page.
This site appears to feature Physics Today and other journals on plasmas in the universe. As I said, about 90% of the luminous matter (actually only 5% of the mass energy of the universe) is in a plasma state. Plasmas play a big role in the MHD of quasar jets, accretion disks, stellar dynamics and so forth. This DOES NOT mean plasma physics somehow abbrogates the existence of the gravitational interaction.
This website also appears a stand alone site. It does not seem to be part of an overall broader website concerning other activities and the LANS-LLC or LANL, but soley dedicated to the purpose of promoting bogus physics. To be honest this sort of thing I find very annoying.
Lawrence B. Crowell
March 5th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
LOL. Now Los Alamos National Laboratory is fake. You cranks are hilarious.
March 5th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
First off baning OIM will just give him another
site he was banned from to put on his list he has on his website.
Second OiM he is saying the website you posted is the fake.
(Trying to avoid an Ad Hom here)
March 5th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
The page
public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/TheUniverse.html
is a redirect page set up by Peratt on what appears to be a server for lanl employees to have a public site. I don't think one can infer just from this that Lanl supports PC/PU/EU…
For example, here's the public page of one person who works at Lanl:
public.lanl.gov/kmh/
The redirected page lives on plasmascience.net and according to public whois information it was registered by one Peratt, Anthony a.peratt@att.net. One might want to use this context when viewing that site.
March 5th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Here a fake peer-reviewed paper from a fake scientific journal by a fake Nobel Prize winner for you to ignore: http://plasmascience.net/tpu/downloads/AlfvenPlasmaUniverse.pdf
March 5th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
And here is another fake peer-reviewed paper from the fake IEEE you were talking about by the same fake Nobel Prize winner: http://plasmascience.net/tpu/downloads/CosmologyAlfven.pdf
March 5th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Lawrence,
Thanks for the information. It is interesting the Los Alamos National Laboratory says they know nothing about it, and now likely doing some investigating. Of course, the give away is looking at the source, and there is no link to the Disclaimer/Privacy.
I hope these guys really know what they are doing, as faking sites, US Government ones especially, might evoke National Security or something else. He might be laughing now, but someone in one of his friends in his clandestine little group might now become now a little more nervous.
But you know what, even it was 100% true, not one of them can avoid the evidence of dedicated recruiting drive and undisclosed methods of trying to convert others to the cause. Hell, the Jehovah Witness or Mormons do exactly the same for their recruitment to their church – why not science. (At least these people have some scruples, because they will meet you face to face on your doorstep!)
That is why the truth is that it is NOT the astronomers and astrophysicists are covering up or hiding the information, it really instead the rouge plasma brethren! Yet they openly are telling us all the time that it is astronomy which is in crises! If others are having to use stealth tactics to show truth – right or wrong – their wacky theories are already on shaky ground.
I wonder if someone like S&T would take an article on all these crazy machinations?
March 5th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Salacious B. Crumb said:
Really appreciate you concerns, however please be patient because their life expectancy may soon be shortened.
They probably don't believe in death either
March 5th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Sheesh, you people should really try to find a way to get laid.
Seriously. Get laid.
March 5th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
The Aflven paper is nonsense. Alfven did ground breaking work on the physics of plasmas decades ago. Yet he is out of his territory on this.
Since Oil-M is so gung ho on plasmas, why does he (she?) not write a cogent post here on what Alfven waves are. Give at least a qualitative description of them, maybe with some reference of the coupling of Maxwell's equations and Navier-Stokes or the Boltzmann-Vlasov equations. Hint: think of what will happen to the charged species when an electromagnetic wave passes through the ionized gas.
Lawrence B. Crowell
March 5th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
ND
The company who host the site is vDeck.
Also note, according to the site, it is "Copyright 1998-2007 LANS"
If it is not associated with the government LANS site, then this page is faked too.
If you click on IEEE @ PLASMAUNIVERSE. INFO at the bottom of the page, even the e-mail address is fake – because it comes up as a "Page not found". Definitely another bogus link.
It also says it is "Associated with the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Science Society", so to confirm the association, (I have written a kindly written letter to them to confirm if this is true.)
The disclaimer is extraordinary and very cryptic, saying;
"For completeness, but not exclusive, we must mention other websites with names very close to the Plasma Universe and Plasma Cosmology.
Unless you entered this site through the Los Alamos National Laboratory gateway /public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/universe.html ; then www .plasmauniverse.info ; www .plasmacosmology.info or www .plasmauniverse.com got you to this page. If you used another suffix .xxx attached to the preceding names, and not from an institution or university, then you are reading a version with an agenda unconnected to the physics-based research of Kristian Birkeland, Hannes Alfvén, and their hundreds of collaborators."
Eh?
It is signed ;
"Anthony L. Peratt, Ph.D.
Los Alamos National Laboratory"
But again this is a dead link. It is not an e-mail address, but is a link to an IEEE Newsletter of March 2006> Again it look really bogus.
The plot thickens.
(Note : None of the paper of Alven paper is earlier than 1987 (most are not paper they are articles in journals. I.e. S&T, etc. The latest Peratt is 1990 – 18 years old!
Also the link for these paper's permission from the IEEE are also dead. (I've contacted the IEEE nicely about this too!)
The plot thickens.
March 5th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
In comparing the writing styles of Anaconda and Oil-M there is reason to suspect these are one and the same people.
L. C.
March 5th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Lawrence,
Assuming Anaconda and I are the same person, how would that prove Los Alamos National Laboratory is fake?
Assuming Anaconda and I are the same person, how would that prove the IEEE is a Scientology journal?
March 5th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
NOBODY SAID LOS ALMOS OR THE IEEE IS FAKE.
They a saying Thunderbolts read as a scientology webpage and the websites you are providing might be fake.
March 5th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
According to Whois.Net (Domain-Based Research Services), public.lanl.gov is registered with Verio Inc. — A Web Hosting Company!Here, see for yourselves:
http://www.whois.net/whois_newdg2.cgi?d=http://public.lanl&tld=gov
March 5th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Lawrence B. Crowell ;
"In comparing the writing styles of Anaconda and Oil-M there is reason to suspect these are one and the same people.
I thought that too. They never appear together on the same thread and they have only contradicted each other once – and not very convincingly. This was Oilis' extraordinary wrong claim the gravity is probably electromagnetic in origin. After that he went on the rails into quotes and contradictions to put people of the scent. (I have some more ammunition I'll keep in reserve, though their aggressive mood has lost some of its bite. As part of there conversion techniques have been exposed, the next few days might be interesting.)
I can't wait to hear from the IEEE.
(A nice summery of the debate of May 2008 – the last Post 321 is a real killer for PC. You might get some comparison of Anaconda writing style from there – though different avatar. http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=112661&page=9 )
Yet Anaconda finding the 1122 Hz star, however, is also almost extraordinary, even though the evidence seems pretty slim by reading the original and associated papers, If only he use his time for something constructive… and just dumped half the ideology. What a waste!
Note: I also found an interesting quote of Alfven, who said "The big bang never happen. Our cosmos is eternal… The 'expanding universe' is only an expansion in our part of the universe, and one of countless mini-bang – each sparked by the mixing of mater and anti-matter – that have occurred to eternity." 1966
[See "Wrinkles in Time : Imprint of Creation" by George Smoot and Keay Davidson (1993) This has about two dozen papers on the Antimatter-Matter Debate and Alfven.
"Alfven work was literally killed by COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) in 1989, who results were made available in April 1992. Plasma astrophysics when in to top gear just before the results, but the homogeneous nature of the background radiation immediately dispelled Aflven theories. This is why the papers end in about 1990!!
Bitter resentment in the work it seemed laid dormant, but considering the effort that went into the 'alternative' cosmology the rise of plasma astrophysics (the dreaded PC) re-resurrected Alfven work. Modern astrophysics moved on – but a few kept up the small numbers of published work. In reality – it is the same message – just different packaging. This was struck a down a second time with the WMAP microwave in 2008. Again Alfven's model was exterminated – at least so we thought.
March 5th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
IVAN3MAN said;
According to Whois.Net (Domain-Based Research Services), public.lanl.gov is registered with Verio Inc. — A Web Hosting Company!Here, see for yourselves:
Thanks. It is a mirror, and is certainly fake.
Also explains the odd disclaimer. Great.
March 5th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
public.lanl.gov belongs to Los Alamos National Laboratory or lanl.gov. All .gov sites are government related and strictly reviewed, unlike .net and .com sites:
http://www.dotgov.gov/program_guidelines2004.aspx
And anything like aaa.lanl.gov and bbb.lanl.gov cannot be independently registered and have to go through whoever is in charge of lanl.gov. So I'm not sure what the issue is with lanl.gov. It's the site that redirected is where the issue may lie. I think those pages may have been on public.lanl.gov before being moved by Peratt.
March 5th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Assuming Los Alamos National Laboratory is fake, what relevance would that have to the discussion that graviation is a 17th creationist myth?
March 5th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Pardon typos, what relevance would it have to the discussion that gravitation is a 17th century creationist myth?
March 5th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Assuming a 17th creationist myth is fake, what relevance would that have to the discussion that gravitation is Los Alamos National Laboratory ?
Oh dear, at least this now makes a bit more sense.
March 6th, 2009 at 1:52 am
Salacious B. Crumb:
I've dealt with OIM over at sciforums.com for a number of months.
Trust me when I say you're waisting your breath and your time, simply ignoring him won't work either.
Ultimately, he was banned for lying, he continually quoted people out of context, lied about and misrepresented what they were saying, and used doctored evidence to prove his point.
He started out claiming all Oil must be abiotic in origin, because Oil is found deeper than the deepest fossil (among other reasons).
It was shown to hiim that because of Plate Tectonics, fossils are routinely buried deeper than the deepest wells.
Then he started denying subduction, in order to support his claim that all oil is abiotic all the time.
So I poined out to him that studies of tidal rythmites proved that there had been no significant change in the earths mass or volume, and that there was no evidence any significantc hange of the angular momentum of the earth moon system in the last 600 million years or so.
So then he started claiming that G had changed at the same time, and started invoking plasma cosmology – it was right around this time that he got banned.
And so it goes on.
March 6th, 2009 at 2:44 am
To get the most out of OIls and Anaconda do what some guy on another UT thread does with the lunatic fringe on that site – post their idiocy on the faculty notice board for the entertainment of colleagues. You'll never stop them but at least they can amuse a wider audience.
March 6th, 2009 at 5:54 am
Look at me… Look at me!
I know EVERYTHING… because I read it on the internet, so it has to be true!
I may only understand about 40 percent of whatever I read, but it doesn't matter, because I am so smart I can illogically figure out the rest.
One day I hope I Anaconda figures out how much I want him and we can spend a whole evening acting as if we were experts in science.
Then we can spread our love by teaching people how to forget about things which are proven, and only believe that which is seen on the internet, without proof or reason.
I owe my expansive knowledge to nobody… for everyone else is wrong. If I didn't think of it, then there is no way anybody else could.
I will write more tomorrow, but right now my mom says I have to go to sleep.
March 6th, 2009 at 6:16 am
I upbraid the Moderators of this website for permitting the trolls. I ask the question: 'Who benefits from all the hits and traffic this turgid debate is creating?'
Oops I just shot myself in the foot.
March 6th, 2009 at 6:33 am
I found Alfven's question about how we can know that alpha centuri is not made of antimatter interestng. The answer to that is easy. If the universe consisted of pockets of matter and other pockets of antimatter then the boundary regions would have e-e^+ and p-p^- annihilation processes going on. The universe would have a .51MeV and 938MeV radiation signature that would be nearly obiquitous. Of course this is absent.
Alfven did good work on the physics of plasmas decades ago. BTW, I still have yet to receive an answer about the physics of Alfven waves for Anaconda/Oil-M. Alfven waves, or related plasma waves, hav been found to be responsible for the heating of the solar cornona. I am still waiting for an answer to that one. It is a topic graduate students learn in their 2nd semester EM course. Yet Alfven, Arp and others went off the deep end on this stuff. Another plasma physicist Kruskal did some gravitry work right however.
The "public" mirror site appears to be an independent creation. I doubt that IEEE would sign off on any cosmology model, it is outside their domain of expertise. It is easy enough to life the logo-link from a page, attach it to one's own page and reference papers on solar or interstellar plasma dynamics as some indicator of a plasma cosmology.
EM and gravity are clearly different interactions. Gravity iinvolves the local SU(2) group of rotations for 3-space with 3 parameters, plus the three boost parameters in the group SU(1,1). The later is a hyperbolic group structure. The Cartesian product of these two gives the special linear group SL(2,C), which is a double cover (multiply by the Z_2 ring) of the four dimensional group SO(3,1). Electromagnetism is an internal group U(1), which is a "circle group" on the argand (complex) plane. To call gravity electromagnetism is to equate apples with oranges, or worse — apples with roast beef..
Sheesh, it is beyond me why people want to embrace such errors!
Lawrence B. Crowell
March 6th, 2009 at 6:39 am
Ha! I can't wait to see was OilsM makes of your paragraph on the different interactions of EM and gravity.
March 6th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Many other forums have a voting system attached to each and every post made. I think such a system would benefit forums like this one better than banning etc.
If a post receives a positive push above treshhold it becomes yellow (marking it as well written and understandable, not necessarily the universal truth)
If a post receives negative push below threshhold (negative value, so below) it becomes collapsed and can only be read by opening it up.
This would obviously require software upgrade, but in the long end it would allow the community to filter away unrelated posts without automatically prohibiting any view. And it would allow the casual reader to get a decent view of what is generally supported, and what is generally called fringe, without having to filter through huge amounts of posts with no real content.
March 6th, 2009 at 10:59 am
EM and Gravity can be separated by the fact on how each affects light.
A really simple thing, which they couldn't ever begin to understand.
If they were one in the same, they would both affect light the same way, and obviously they do not.
Since he's so fond of Plasma. They also both affect plasma in different ways. So if he still doesn't get it, then he doesn't understand plasma like he believes he does.
March 6th, 2009 at 11:07 am
@ ND
Do you want to "search" for my professor (papers or personally)?
The name is Prof. R. Schlickeiser. He is working on blazar models and related stuff (he also collaborates with the HESS telescope in Namibia). Quite interesting thing. I made my Bachelor work (thesis) under his guidance last summer and I will soon start my Master thesis, again with his supervision.
Btw: My study makes good progress. Right now I'm attending a lecture about cosmic rays and their interaction with magnetic fields…. THAT would be something for Anaconda and OiM
@ (my close (non)personal friend (TM)) ANACONDA
If you will ever read this: I urge you to take a look at the AAS5 thread over at BA, where we first met, 2 month ago. I have made some brief calculations about your "fact" that the sun is on a 10^10 V potential! Probably you are interested in it.
@Lawrence B. Crowell
Now I see why the mathematics are important. The argument with the rotational groups is excellent but I wouldn't have thought of it!
March 6th, 2009 at 11:16 am
@ OilisMisery
Yes, that's right. And a note to add:
It's interesting that neither OiM nor Anaconda ever mentioned what EM is… it's light! The EM interaction is provided by light since it is the boson of the EM interaction. So EM cannot "act" on light since it is light "itself".
Gravitation on the other hand can act on light. Gravitational redshift (not the cosmological one…) is the best proof for that!
March 6th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Trippy,
You're a liar.
I was banned from Sci Forums because James R. was afraid of my words and therefore had to censor them.
March 6th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
OilIsMastery says:
"You're a liar."
You just lost it big guy!! Bye, Bye.
March 6th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
No OIM.
You were banned for being a Liar, and I was able to prove on multiple occasions that you were lying. It IS that simple.
March 6th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Trippy
I'm sorry. You sit in the background, then you spring into this thread attacking with guns blazing and sprouting irrelevant verbal insults. We do the work YOU take the credit!
Really, I wouldn't want to defend Anaconda and Oilismastery, but you have contributed absolutely nothing to this discussion!
All I see is you seemingly trying to disrupt our line of verifying the source of the current rise of PC contentions and the methods being used in infiltrate main stream astronomy and cosmology.
Whether Oilismastery lied on another site is irrelevant. I see no evidence he is doing here, even though his comments are mostly irrelevant or nonsense. I.e. He hasn't lied to me!
Clearly someone lying or stating falsehood about something is not a reason for to toss someone of some site. As Oilmastery in the thread you were referring to was just breaching rules of general discussion. No guideline say you will be banned for lying, as sometimes ideas beliefs or words can be misplaced or said in ignorance.
You have had you own go at destroying the PC arguments and illogic of Oilismastery, please let someone else try a different tact and let them find out for themselves If someone was to be banned from this site, you too would now be added to the list.
As for your comments;
"'I've dealt with OIM over at sciforums.com for a number of months." So what. Clearly all you have done is made Oilismastery even more impossible to deal with. Are you saying this because you are better than me? eh?
"Trust me when I say you're waisting your breath and your time, simply ignoring him won't work either." Trust you? What? You sound like snake oil salesman or some money pinching evangelist. I trust you mush less than than anyone else so far who has placed an opinion in this whole thread! Frankly, I think Oilismastery illogic is much preferable that this ego driven assumption.
Realy, if I need your help, I'd ask!!
I do say as I say, and really don't need you butt in even if you were 100% correct. [Got it!]
I noticed the last time you posted about my comments you were desperately attacking me in the exact same way. How hypocritical is that?
Please just mind your own business next time!
As to…
"So I poined out to him…" I think you mean "pointed." So really, so what?
All this looks like is gloating you were right and he was banned, and so this validates you own inflated ego.
Both Oilismastery and Anaconda at seem less egotistical then you. Or am I now a liar?
You too just lost it big guy!! Bye, Bye.
March 6th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
In science. Who's more trustworthy.
That some is a liar or someone who says "trust me"?
Answer. At lying is a least based on evidence. "Trust me" relies solely on faith.
Oilismastery actually wins hands down.
Have you go a quote for that one OiM?
March 6th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Coming back after a week or so, I see there is a discussion about OilIsMastery going on and, something like a fight. A have been one of first readers recommending "Don’t feed the troll". Some have said he's not a troll.
Since Universe Today's comment section can't count as being about _astronomy_ any more, I don't hesitate contributing to the "bad behaviour" topic, as I call it.
The informations you have found about OilIsMastery are impressive, but, sorry to say, I think, you are wasting your time, which is no problem for me. But above that in publishing your results here you are wasting the time of readers who are interested in astronomy but have to wade through OilIsMastery's post _and_ your posts. Like before.
Some say simply ignoring the person showing bad behaviour won't work. I don't believe this, because on each and every website where I have met people showing bad behaviour, some participants say routinely "simply ignoring won't work", they continue _not_ ignoring (they have never tried ignoring, haven't they), and the bad behaviour continues. Like before.
An interesting policy working against bad behaviour I have found on a website about something completely different from astronomy. The publishers says, the "broken windows theory" applies successfully to websites like it does to urban environments.
"Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside." (Google to find more.)
A successful policy for preventing bad behaviour on websites is to fix problems when they are small. Moderate small scale bad behaviour within a short time, and the tendency is that bad people are much less likely to show more of this. Do this every day, and the tendency is bad behaviour not to accumulate. Problems do not escalate and thus respectable participants do not flee a website.
I have seen this happening on the website of a newspaper I'm reading, which has been invaded more and more by trolls, vandales, offenders, one-issue-promoters, anti-what-you-wants, etc. I'm not sure, but, may be, an important reason for doing something considerable, was some of the respectable readers threatening they won't pay for this no longer (I did this too). For several years now they successfully use a policy which is effectively identical to the one described above.
For Universe Today this means, the publisher and the moderators have to learn their tasks. — "Ugh, originally I wanted to moderate an interesting astronomy website only, because I love astronomy, and you know …" — "This is not possible any more. Welcome to web-reality, you sheep".
If the publisher and the moderators don't want to learn the easy way, they have to learn the hard way. We, the respectable readers, are able of keeping away. We don't need and don't want this annoying mess. We want astronomy.
March 6th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Salacious B. Crumb:
Chill out dude.
You've taken what I was saying completely the wrong way.
You don't have to trust me, and I wasn't literally asking you to trust me, I was simply using a turn of phrase. If you were genuinely interested in verifying anything i've said it's as simple as going to the afformentioned forum and looking into it for yourself (for the record, I've named the forum, and implicit in the fact that OIM and I have recognized each other is the assumption that we use the same handles over there).
I'm not trying to take credit for anything.
As for my not contributing anything, I've pointed out at least once that Alfven, and Perat, and Arp (et al) predicted the existence of Ambiplasmas, something which haven't been found in a laboratory yet (which is one of the main draw cards of Plasma Cosmology the whole 'Triple Jump' aspect, and the fact that experiments that can be conducted in a laboratory can be scaled up and extended to systems like the sun earth system).
Also note that I originally didn't say he was just banned for lying.
And no, I haven't made OilIsMastery any more difficult to deal with, his posting style and his method of arguing is exactly the same here as it was over there.
The only thing I have done, which you seem to find objectionable, is plainly state that I have argued with OIM on another forum, and on that forum he would routinely use false or doctored evidence to support his case.
Take it however you want, in all honesty I don't really care, ignore it or take it as a warning, no skin off my nose.
As for attacking you? In all honesty, I have no idea what you're going on about that. I don't specifically recall attacking you.
Perhaps you'd care to provide some evidence to back up your assertions, or I am I supposed to take it on faith?
Dude, I don't know what your problem is, but perhaps you should check your assumptions before you start attacking people.
You just lost it, big time.
March 6th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Salacious B. Crumb.
Case in point.
As near as I can tell, I have made 23 or 24 posts on this site.
As near as I can tell, I have posted on the same article as you three times, and in none of those cases were my comments directed at you.
If you choose not to believe me, you have two choices, you can go through every article on this website, or do a Google search.
I'm about done with this conversation.
I think you over reacted to what was intended to be a harmless comment, and I don't appreciate being accused of being responsible for OIM's attitude and posting style.
I honestly don't care if you want to try and handle OIM a 'different way'. I tried reasoned debate with verifiable peer reviewed sources, and it didn't work.
Don't beleieve me? Go over to Sciforums and check it out for yourself. I'd post direct links to threads and posts, but I don't want anyone getting the mistaken impression that i'm soliciting traffic for Sciforums, because i'm not. I could just have easily pointed out, and have in another article, that OIM has also been banned from the BAUT forum. You can't blame me for that, because that happened well before I first encountered OIM (I think).
I don't honestly care if you think you're better than me, and it's not something that I'm going to claim to know. I'm not emotionally vested in this argument.
I was simply expressing an opinion, that is completely verifiable if you want to do the work – that trying to convince OIM of anything he doesn't want to hear is a waste of time. He is, quite simply, as has been already pointed out, a Troll with an agenda.
The only reason why I mentioned some of the specific conversations I've had with him, was to point out that everything he says seems to have stemmed from his belief that Oil must ultimately be of Abiotic origin.
Of course, that's just my opinion, but it's opinion based on observation of the evolution of his arguments.
Once again, allow me to explicitly state (or reiterate) that you have taken my post in completely the wrong vein, and have taken offense where none was intended.
March 6th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
I do have one more thing that I wish to say at thia point.
Salacious B. Cumb.
Previously, you have struck me as being a relatively well read poster, you ordinarily have some interesting things to say. I have an inkling that you might have said some things that I ordinarily would disagree with, but, I haven't commented because I've considered your view point to be well thought out and logical.
I was simply making the point that trying to convince someone that displays all the traits of a relgious zealot (OIM in this case, and bear in mind, I can only speak from my experience of his posts) that they're wrong is a waste of the time of a poster your calibre.
Oh, and for the record, OIM has Plasma Cosmology completely wrong, Alfven, Birkeland, and Perat (and everybody else) didn't seek to replace gravity with electromagnetism, the 'simply' sought to include the effects in their calculations, convinced that if they combined it with the calculations of GR that they could do away with the need for Dark Matter, and Dark Energy,
March 7th, 2009 at 6:45 am
OIM failed to make any comment concerning my question on what Alfven waves are. This suggest this person really does not understand plasma physics at all, but rather has some pseudo-science ideations about the subject.
About 1/4 of people have authoritarian mentalities, otherwise known as true believers. Your religious fundamentalists, conspiracy "theory" mavens, political extremists and so forth usually are of this sort. People who are pangyrics for alt-science ideas, often comparing themselves to Gallileo with claims of a mass conspiracy by the scientific mainstream, usually fit this sort of profile. This includes the ardent creationist as well as the firm upholder of cold-fusion and other ideas.
Lawrence B. Crowell
March 7th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Trippy says:
"Chill out dude.
You've taken what I was saying completely the wrong way."
No I haven't.
Calling anyone a "liar" (even if it is true) is an absolute no no.
The moment you do is the moment someone is gone, because they are left with nowhere else to go. "Liar" like the word "murderer" whose connotation is the worst because destroys any possible trust.
It is like when the British Prime Minister said when accused of lying ; "If you were asked whether my answer about lying was true, one of you (or me) would answer with a lie."
If Universe Today were deleting these post IMO yours would be the first one to go! If you or me said such a thing in many other blogging sites – right or wrong – you or me be struck out permanently.
Acting like true bullies and thugs and "sticking the boot in" is no way to treat anyone – and it makes a vigourous debate turn into a lynching. IMO you crossed over that line, and on provocation, so did OiM. That is why I said "you lose" – literally!
March 7th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Lawrence B. Crowell said;
"OIM failed to make any comment concerning my question on what Alfven waves are. This suggest this person really does not understand plasma physics…"
Respectfully, no.
The gate was opened, and 'horse' actually was allowed to bolt…
Perhaps on a future thread (if the moderators again show such remarkable constraint.)
March 7th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Salacious B. Crumb.
I strongly suggest you go bacl and re-read my two posts then if this is what you genuinely think.
I did not actually accuse OIM of being a liar, nor did I actually call him a liar, but stated that he had been banned from somewhere for lying (or being a liar).
There is a very real difference there. One is me making the accusation, the other is me communicating something that someone else has been said.
This is the official reason that was given for his ban over on Sciforums:
"continual trolling and deliberately attempting to deceive readers on scientific topics."
I've given you all the information you need to go and verify the facts and form your own opinion.
The only thing I haven't done is provide specific examples, and i've given a good reason as to why I haven't done that.
March 7th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Salacious B. Crumb:
The other thing that I'm going to say on the issue is that if you take a look around, you will find that In "Titan Dunes Turn Climate Models Upside Down" OIM called me an 'illiterate liar' without provocation because I pointed out that the article has nothing to do with climate change, and he doesn't distinguish between climate modelling and climate change modelling.
So that's twice now? That he's explicitly accused me of lying, the first example of which was with not provocation what so ever, and predates my comments on this thread about his banning from sciforums by a number of days…
Honestly, you're chewing on the wrong ear.
March 7th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
I have no real argument with you, except for your timing, which contributed to killing this thread and letting Oils of the hook..
One point. To deceive readers is not necessarily lying (or being a liar too them) to them.
Therefore "continual trolling and deliberately attempting to deceive readers on scientific topics." and being banned for "lying" are false.
If you need to go on the offensive, in future it is probably to use misleading or deceitful rather the lying – else others who don't know about this plasma (whatever) epic don't thin your as bad and get lumped with these two rather misguided plasma-dolts!
March 7th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Salacious B. Crumb:
If you look through this topic, I made my first comment relatively early on. As far as the timing of my comment goes, I work, full time, and live in a different time zone to most of the posters on this site (GMT +13:00), so take that for what it's worth, but I don't have the time to post here regularly, so on a thread where between getting up in the morning and checking, and then checking again during my lunch break, the number of posts almost doubles?
And I'm sorry, but as far as I'm aware deliberately making a misleading or deceitful statement meets the definition of lying.
(According to Merriam Webster online:
intransitive verb
1 : to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive
2 : to create a false or misleading impression ).
So yes, technically, he was making untrue statements with intent to deceive, and was creating a false or misleading impression (this second part should be especially apparent with the specific wording of the ban).
March 7th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Salacious B. Cumb:
For teh record, I also do not consider that I let OIM off the hook – in my experience this is a typical pattern for him. He'll be back, maybe in this thread, certainly in another, trolling, and pushing the same message, probably as if nothing has happened, maybe with an out of context quote that he thinks negates a specific point you've made against him here.
March 13th, 2009 at 2:44 am
Poor presentation of an argument includes the conduct of the advocate, so that a clever poster may choose to ruin a theory in the eyes of those who might otherwise have found it attractive.
The use of anonymous/pseudonymous names facilitates this, but it is possible to publish the i.p. address of each poster with each post. This would help responsible commentary would it not?
Use of a pseudonym is helpful to objectivity. If an identity is attacked, even though it was used by me, I should feel more secure and more likely to refrain from counter attack?
Exposing emails to others seems a great idea! Rereading a post, before it is made is good too? Fewer spelling mistakes and greater clarity of thought enable the reader who is the target of our writing, to grasp and respond.
We are hopefully building a community interested in science and discussing different theories so as to clarify them and to judge what if any experiments or observations may further our joint interest?
Or just sharing an appreciation of the immensity of reality?
March 16th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
I have a strong feeling I'm going to regret asking this – especially as I haven't read all the comments yet. I did try but, seriously, I read this article for the science, not the petty politics.
So, taking a deep breath, I ask, "What is the Electric Universe theory's interpretation of the data collected from the NOAO?"
Is there somewhere I can find a coherent argument as to why the NOAO data should be interpreted in a gravity-centric manner? At the moment all I'm finding is assertions.
Please forgive me if the question has already been asked and answered here and (please?) direct me to the relevant posts.
PS I just noticed a flaw in my question. Someone's going to dismiss my question by asking which electric universe theory I mean. In that case I'd probably have to admit that I have no tertiary training on the subject at all and skulk away with my tail between my legs. I would, however, be wanting to say "the theory that the universe is not electrically inert, and that observed phenomena can be better described in terms of electrical processes and their associated magnetic fields."
I would kindly thank you in advance for not making fun of my curiousity.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:30 am
Bahnhofstrasse
The eyes that mock me sign the way
Whereto I pass at eve of day.
Grey way whose violet signals are
The trysting and the twining star.
Ah star of evil! star of pain!
Highhearted youth comes not again
Nor old heart's wisdom yet to know
The signs that mock me as I go.
James Joyce