- In the minds of many critics, nothing
is more confounding than the language of the scientific press release.
Although generally bereft of heavily "technical" wording, the
concepts and explanations in these releases have grown increasingly weird.
The weirdness is accentuated when scientists, in an attempt to make their
theories "understandable" to the layperson, draw analogies between
space and observable "real world" phenomena.
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- One example of an inappropriate analogy
creating embarrassment was astronomers' interpretation of Herbig Haro objects --
stellar jets (or "jetted stars") sometimes referred to as a "cosmic
tornado." Scientists envisioned stars creating collimated jets, blasting
material TRILLIONS of miles into space at 100-kilometers per second. The
analogy they drew in their interpretation was "giant lawn sprinklers"
whirling in space! (Of course, this explanation contradicts not only simple
observation and experiment, but also general gravitational theory. Gravity-only
models of the twentieth century never anticipated narrow jets of ANYTHING
streaming away from stellar bodies. (See A Tornado in Space,
- http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060210hhtornado.htm)
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- When it comes to weird language and bizarre
analogies, it doesn't get any weirder than the language of "dark matter."
In a recent press release, "How to Bake a Galaxy," NASA/JPL compares
galaxy formation to bread baking in an oven. "Start with lots and
lots of dark matter, then stir in gas. Let the mixture sit for a while,
and a galaxy should rise up out of the batter."
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- The report goes on to cite a recent study
from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope "refining what is known"
about dark matter, the so-called "essential ingredient of galaxies."
In the language of NASA scientists, dark matter's role in galaxy formation
is comparable to the role of yeast in bread baking. An absence of enough
dark matter means no loaf, e.g. no galaxy. But for the analogy to hold,
bread would have to consist almost entirely of yeast.
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- Study co-author Dr. Jason Surace of NASA's
Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena
says of this "baking" process, "Dark matter has gravity,
so it pulls in more and more dark matter in addition to 'normal gas'...We
know that the gas eventually condenses into the stars that make up galaxies,
but the Spitzer study suggests that this doesn't happen until the dark
matter has reached a critical mass."
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- To Electric Universe proponents -- specialists
such as electrical engineers and plasma physicists -- this kind of statement
illustrates the severity of the 21st century crisis in cosmology. What
astronomers envision as inert gas is actually ionized, radiating plasma,
laced with electric (Birkeland) currents. As discussed for the past 2 years
on the pages of Thunderbolts.info, electrified plasma is an unequaled force
at organizing galactic structure. Computer models of two current filaments
interacting in a plasma have, in fact, reproduced fine details of spiral
galaxies. The gravitational schools, on the other hand, must rely on invisible
matter, arbitrarily placed wherever it is needed to make their models "work."
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- The NASA report also features the fundamental
error of interpreting an object's redshift as a reliable indicator of its
age and its distance from the observer. The report states, "(Dr. Duncan)
Farrah and his colleagues used data from the Spitzer Wide-area Infrared
Extragalactic survey to study hundreds of distant objects, called Ultra
Luminous Infra Red Galaxies (ULIRGs), located billions of light-years away.
These young galaxies are incredibly bright and filled with lots of dusty
star-formation activity."
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- Astronomer Halton Arp, et al., have studied
these objects (given the acronym ULIRGs) extensively. Arp says that the
acronym should really stand for Under Luminous Infra Red Galaxies, because
they are nearby, young and faint; nearby because they appear to have been
ejected from those galaxies (and hence have a high intrinsic redshift,
which astronomers misinterpret as distance), and faint because they have
not matured enough to shine with the power of "adult" galaxies.
They are "young" in the sense of "not as old as the galaxies
from which they were ejected." This is an entirely different concept
than the Big Bang "young", which means existing at a time shortly
after the big bang event.
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- The scientists' interpretation of the
galaxies' redshift in the NASA study seems to feature a contradiction.
The study's authors "noticed something weird. For every galaxy they
studied, no matter how far away, there seemed to be surrounding dark matter
clumps of about the same size."
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- But in the next paragraph, study co-author
Surace says, "'Similar galaxies in our nearby universe form in a completely
different way, so what we are learning applies to a different epoch in
our universe, far back in cosmic time.'"
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- Logic dictates that the statement "no
matter how far away" contradicts the comment that "similar galaxies...nearby...form
in a completely different way." If "how far away" is of
"no matter," then nearby galaxies should not be "completely
different." In a plasma universe, "nearby" includes both
old and new young galaxies (and of course, no dark matter) so there's no
"different science" operating at different epochs. There is electromagnetism
and plasma at all epochs and distances.
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- And the embarrassing analogies do not
end with "bread baking" and "whirling lawn sprinklers"
in space. Farrah stated of dark matter's supposed "attractive"
powers, "You might think that galaxies are just distributed randomly
across the sky, like throwing a handful of sand onto the floor. But they
are not, and the reason might be that the dark matter clumps around young
galaxies are attracting each other like glue."
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- Thunderbolts.info editor Mel Acheson
neatly summed up the illogic of this reasoning when he stated, "Glue
attracts? Perhaps it's a special astronomical glue with extra gravity added.
In my experience, glue sticks, much like astronomers' bond to obsolete
theories."
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