Rally? Seriously?

"Be nice and brief. Don't advertise your stuff, or promote your personal theories."
That applied to Anaconda more than anyone else here.

There was a lot rational discussion involving actual science and PC/EU ideas. How come we didn't see you in those? Was it out of your league?

Comment policy: Be nice and brief. Don't advertise your stuff, or promote your personal theories. We'll delete any comments that break these policies.

What a joke the majority of posters here, regulars I might add, make of this policy.

Y'all should be ashamed.

Cheers, Dave Smith.

I posted the first paragraph above (w-no links) earlier today (~7 hours ago) on this thread and it, too, disappeared. Possibly the problem is NOT related to including a URL in a post.

Possibly the problem was related to that word in the fifth line, of the first paragraph, with the omitted vowel.

Btw: ND, nice story! It seems that flying through space is not just "do your job and shut up". Sometimes it can be funny, too!

www facepalm org

On a related note, recently PhysOrg.com reported on a new approach to quantum gravity, which included this interesting note: "Petr Ho?ava at Lawrence Berkeley Lab proposed …. a model for quantum gravity that has received widespread interest, in no small part because it is one of the few models that could be experimentally tested." The article goes on to say: "Lu et al.'s paper is an important contribution to testing the Ho?ava model and shows that a good deal of work remains to understand its full implications." The article itself (with a link to a free 4 page paper on the theory) can be found here: http://www.physorg.com/news170333445.html .

I am curious how the more mathematically inclined readers here at UT think about this new(er) proposal and just how viable it may be

"Gee what else could it have been" indeed.

I tried to post it earlier and it appears to not have gone through. Spamm filtering? 3rd attempt. I'm leaving out the URLs which I'll post if this goes through.

Try converting the 'offending' URL into a TinyURL version, then post that modified link.

N.B. Post only one link at a time, otherwise it will get held up in "comment awaiting moderation" like, er… forever!

Regarding ElroyJetson's comments in the UFO thread:
"Schirra was the first to use the santa claus code, I believe, when he encountered more than one craft following along with his Mercury module while in orbit."

So I looked googled for "Schirra santa claus" and came up with the following page:

link 1.

Basically Schirra was playing a practical joke! He very seriously reported to Houston that he was seeing a large command module with eight smaller ones to get people's attention. Well here's what was said:

" "We have an object, looks like a satellite going from north to south, probably in polar orbit…. Looks like he might be going to re-enter soon…. You just might let me pick up that thing…. I see a command module and eight smaller modules in front. The pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit."

Then ground controllers heard the strains, both familiar and otherworldly, of "Jingle Bells," played on a harmonica backed byâwhat else?âminiature sleigh bells."

He was on Gemini 6 on an in orbit rendevouz mission with Gemini 7. Guess who was on Gemini 7? Jim Lovell!

So what's more plausible, Lovell referring back to the Gemini mission when he was on Apollo 8, or alien spacecraft?

Google++

According to the following page, Schirra was quite the practical joker:

link 2.

Any thoughts on this ElroyJetson?

Sorry to hear that but I think you would have found Nereid, DrFlimmer and a few others reasonable people to discuss science with.

buhbye

WTF did I do to deserve all the namecalling and accusations?

Anyone supporting plasma cosmology or radical electric universe mumbo-jumbo in any form is a total jackass.

Clear enough?

WTF did I do to deserve all the namecalling and accusations?

You mentioned PC. And since we had some very upsetting debates with other people talking about that, many here get upset right when they see it. This name-calling is not specifically meant for you, everyone calling PC a viable alternative to GR will face such insults. That does not mean that I support such a behaviour – I think it's bad and leads to nowhere.

By now GR has passed all the tests without a flaw. Indeed, a non-detection of gravitational waves would be a major flaw and one would have to consider alternatives. But two things need to be taken into account here:

1) Double-pulsars (I think the Hulse-Taylor-pulsar is one) do behave as if they were sending out gravitational waves. They circle each other just like GR predicts. This is, of course, only very indirect evidence for GW, but it is evidence nontheless.

2) Viable alternatives to GR. I'm sorry. But everything I have seen of PC tells me that PC does not belong to such alternatives. Most things I have seen rely on outdated data and simulations (from 1995 or earlier). The WMAP data strongly supports "mainstream" cosmology. I don't know how PC accounts for the CMB and its fluctuations. Everytime I asked about this topic I got strange answers like hydrogen in the Milky Way or even the Heliopause. Sorry, but this is ridiculous.
There are other examples in PC/EU which are at least weired.
There are, of course, other things where PC/EU-arguments seem to be reasonable. Sometimes it's a tough task to actually find the problem, which can arouse in very different topics.
The most fundamental thing that has never been answered by our "PC/EU-friends" is the simple questions of the power source. In order to keep a plasma running you need a power source. Otherwise it will cool off with the time and finally all the atoms will recombine and that's it – no more plasma (that was happening when the CMB was created). They only came up with the counter-question "what powers the BigBang, something out of nothing" and similar things. The answer is simple: They normally had very few, if at all, grasps of quantum mechanics.
For the very beginning of the universe we need a theory of quantum gravity, which science still lacks. This is also the reason why scientists know that GR is not the whole answer. GR is incompatible with quantum mechanics. That is a problem.
So, yes, we need an "alternative" to GR, but it must be a quantum mechanical theory and not something like PC.

This is my position after 4 years of studying physics and after 8 month of debating about PC/EU/PU.

I've tried to be amicable and reasonable, but in just two days I've been called a fool, flake, druggie, joke, ignorant jackass, and now the "good cops" want to suck me into more abuse?

Get bent.

So, ElroyJetson. Would you mind telling us where you see advantages of PU/PC/EU over "mainstream" science? Maybe we can talk about that and then see where it leads?
I belong to those who want to discuss the topics and discuss them resonable.

Ignoring and insulting leads to nowhere. In either way it always seems that there are no arguments, which is obviously wrong.
So come on, everybody, calm down – and those who want to debate (I hope Elroy, you want to, too!), let's go.

If you had paid attention to the discussions with Anaconda you referred to there was a deep and serious discussion on the science behind PC/EU. You seem to be ignoring this. There has been some nasty stuff thrown about too, no doubt but DrFlimmer, Nereid, Jon Hanford, Lawrence B. Crowell and others engaged or tried to engage Anaconda on the sicence behind PC/EU and the serious and real issue that they saw lacking.

The fact that Anaconda completely lacks any understand of the science he thinks is going on in PC/EU (note he did not originate these ideas) and voracously attacking astronomers with no clue as to how how science is done did not help these discussions. And in several points he was, frankly, dishonest. He quite often demonstrated his ignorance of the science he was discussing. Anaconda was not innocent of throwing insults himself.

You find PC/EU credible, care to explain? What's your scientific background? You seem to be silent on this.

I would like to know, for sure, whether you have turned down my offer (or not); your last comment is somewhat ambiguous.

Here it is again:

are you interested in having a civil, science-based conversation on what you state "appears [to you] to be quite plausible" ("the plasma cosmology part"); specifically, "an idea that seems to be a credible alternative to GR"?

Specifically, a conversation about how one goes about testing ideas which purport to include the largest-scale structures, features, and events in their domains of applicability (i.e. cosmology).

For avoidance of doubt, I am not asking you about your willingness (or otherwise) to engage in a conversation with anyone else; nor am I asking about conversations about any other topic.

then I do hope he ("Elroy" is, AFAIK, a male given name)

She. Elroy is my 10yr. olds middle name, after his grandfather, and I loved the Jetsons as a kid.

Ignorant jackass? Nazi comparisons? You people aren't interested in civil discussion, you're mostly just rude and paranoid. Step back and listen to yourselves sometime.

Oh, well, have fun with your little clique.

solrey would throw out his past academic credentials in science and math but we never saw it demonstrated in any of his posts. I think the last time he was here Nereid had challenged him full out in science.

oof. Nazi comparison wasn't really that necessary.

As for Anaconda being baited… baiting really is the EU way, they bait and troll forums and hope for controversy…. DRAMA… *popcorn* … and hope some readers will move with them back to Thunderbollocks forums and be treated 'nicely', and be given a "complete education" … Calling Anaconda a victim is similar to calling Adolf Hitler a victim.

This forum is still free – you just have to type in a user name and password. Not exactly arduous. And seriously, you cannot have failed to notice how much the level of the discussion has picked up since this was enacted. It has had the sole effect of keeping the creeps on a leash.

And cummon – ElroyJetson has to be either Anaconda or Oils. Notice just how many times he said in one post "well I wasn't even interested in EU, until you all came along with your sensible arguments and debunked it, so then I got curious, researched it for five seconds and it sounds awesome so now I'm going to argue passionately for it on every thread from now on because Einstein was the real crank you cranks."

Yeah – we get it. You weren't into crayon-physics before, but you've seen the light and now you think it's the duck's nuts. Good luck with challenging the oppressive mainstream. One day somebody will realise what a 'reasonable theory' EU actually is though. Maybe the best way for that to happen is to not put any substance behind the theory and instead argue passionately for it on internet forums, all the while decrying 'mainstream science', and how science 'lost it's way' back during the time of Pythagoras. It's proved to be a winning recipe on this site before.