[MENTION=2589]Clete[/MENTION], the EU stuff you post is the worst sort of crank nonsense. Even Wake Brown makes a small attempt to supply some physical principles and calculations in a few areas of his Hydroplates book, but the EU folks don't even do that. There is nothing quantitative, so there is nothing to test and no way to claim that it is better in any way than actual physics. There is nothing that even pretends to be any sort of science, so what would you like me to address?
Tell you what, why don't you identify the single best claim that you think can offer the raw material for a debate, because for the life of me I can't see anything with any promise.
So what part of EU would you like to talk about?
If you cannot discuss something on a conceptual basis, you don't understand it at all.
These people make claims that serve as premises for arguments. Arguments can be refuted in one of only two ways. You can demonstrate that one or more of the premises are false or you can show that the form of argument itself is fallacious.
A primary claim of the EU is that the "gravity is king" assumption is wrong and that the electromagnetic force plays a significant role in cosmological processes. This claim is used almost universally as a primary premise to almost everything else they say.
Someone like you might say, "Everywhere in the universe that you care to look, whenever you have a positive charge, you also have a negative charge, weather it's in plasmas, condensed matter or degenerate matter. The effect of this is that when you sum the positive charge field and the negative charge field, they cancel out at distances very near the source."
This is another claim. This claim is one of, if not the primary premise behind the entire "gravity is king" cosmological paradigm. You would need to guard against presupposing that this claim is fact unless and until you could establish it as such, otherwise, your arguments would be begging the question. Even so, it isn't fallacious to bring it up in such a debate and make every effort to establish it as fact. Successfully doing to would likely falsify the Electric Universe Theory.
The EU proponent would respond to this claim by saying, "A common misconception. Cosmic plasma is not electrically neutral, it is quasi-neutral, which means that it tends towards neutrality. This is why the solar wind is not held by the Sun's gravitation field, and accelerates towards the heliopause, and why it forms the heliospheric current sheet, carrying a billion amps.
Even the immense gravitational field of a black hole can not hold its surrounding plasma, and forms astrophysical jets (which are actually non-neutral, ie. they are charged particle beams), that can extend 5000 light-years (M87's jet).
Yes, space plasmas are neutral overall, but quasi-neutraliity means that charge imbalances occur, over light-years, as demonstrated by jets."
Indeed, all of these videos have been essentially aimed at debunking the idea that plasma is always uniformly neutrally charged. What's more is that it doesn't use technical jargon and mathematical theory to do so. It uses mainstream science's own observations and data to show that there is at least some reason to believe that electromagnetism is a bigger deal than previous thought. My own suspicion is that most of what the EU theorizes will be shown to be wrong but that mainstream science will eventually be forced to rethink the idea that electromagnetism is mostly a non-entity in the realm of cosmological science and admit that gravity and collisions just don't cut it as explanations for many of the things we see in the universe. In short, my feeling is that while the universe isn't electric, it is far more electrical than currently believed by mainstream science.
In any case, you don't need detailed, quantitative, mathematical predictions to evaluate these ideas in a forum of this nature. Sure, if you wanted to do a hard scientific analysis then, yes, you'd have to get out your hypersensitive equipment and take details measurements and crunch the numbers with your TI 89 but this is not Cornell University or the Lick Observatory. This is a layman's discussion forum where people who mostly qualify basically as hacks come to discuss stuff with other hacks based primarily on information they glean from Wikipedia.com and Sky and Telescope magazine. There is real science happening within the EU community at places like
The Safire Project and elsewhere but in the context of this thread, that's entirely irrelevant. These videos are the EU's own self-proclaimed best arguments. Debunk them on their own terms just as you'd do if engaged in such a debate with a neighbor on a Friday night on your back porch with a cigar in one hand and a Silver Bullet in the other.
Clete
