How old are the stars?

I believe that Hannes Alfvén was ignored, not discarded; I am not aware of any peer reviewed papers that "discard" Alfvén (perhaps you can show otherwise). On the contrary, I am aware of many papers by Alfvén whose content has been subsequently corroborated.

I disagree. It is up to yourself to find a fact or two that supports your statement, not for me to try and guess what you were thinking from the stated papers.

And just to be pedantic, I suspect that the Electric Universe is quite happy with everything we "know" about cosmology (ie. observation data), it just disagrees with some of the interpretation (opinion).

"Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone's problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor."
- Dr. Impossible

And just to be pedantic, I suspect that the Electric Universe is quite happy with everything we "know" about cosmology (ie. observation data), it just disagrees with some of the interpretation (opinion).
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Well we do indeed live in a wonderful universe with all kind of surprises waiting to be found such as the large black holes that seem to be in the center of almost all galaxies including our and dark matter/dark energy and even a force that seem a million times or so weaker then gravity that had slightly change the paths of our long range space probes.

In view of all the above crack theories with no backing created by a civil engineer of all things seem to be in the far out fringe right next to cold fusion and the Dean Drive. I wonder if the supports of this theory could even write out Maxwell Equations or for that matter the civil engineer who created this theory have such a foundation as the last time I look civil engineers are not normally grounded in such subjects.

Hate to tell you this but almost all scientists would be delighted if a new theory of the universe and stellar working would seem to have any likelihood of being worthwhile and sadly this one surely does not at least on the surface have any worth at all to it.

Why the fringe nuts need to go to the fringe when the real universe and it workings are so wonderful had always been a mystery to me.

A short added comment I would had been very happy it the Dean Drive or cold fusion or a million other claims from the far fringe had any evidence that they had any relations with the real working of the universe and from history I seem not to be alone in this.

Labs all over the world drop everything and try to repeat the claims of cold fusion once the news broke even those the people claiming to make the break through did not go the normal route for such a discovery and held a general press conference instead nor was their background a good fit for someone likely to come up with such a discovery.

Dean Drive was also look at even those it broke Newton laws and only rejected when it inventor could not have it pass a simple pendulum test.

No one that I am aware of would not be delighted if some fringe theory would turn out to be useful in our understanding of the universe however if you wish to bring fore a theory that break known laws and our current understanding of how the universe work it is your job to bring solid reasons to the table for not rejecting it not the other way around.

It always sounds nice to say that all the facts are the same, just the interpretation differs. It makes it sound like every theory is equal because interpretations are just "opinions". But it's really a specious argument because we all recognize that not every theory is equally reasonable. The tooth fairy didn't really put the quarter under the pillow, even though the quarter is there anyway.

Logic seem not to be a friend to a great many of the posters on this newsgroup in a great many areas.

I accept that.

Ouch, an ad hominem, and still no examples of where the EU might be wrong.

One of the criticisms of current cosmological theory, is that it does not rely on "real" phenomena, and requires ad hoc theories to support it. As you know, the Big Bang singularity, dark matter, black holes, and neutron stars, are all inferred with not one shred of evidence of their existance from the laboratory, whereas plasma cosmology can explain some of the observational evidence with standard laboratory plasma physics.

I am annoyed as I type a long reply and then the ISP went away for a moment at Denny and I lost it.

Let see any theory can be hammer to “explain” a small element of the universe if you pound hard enough at it but if it does not fit into the overall framework of our current understanding and other theories that cover the same area does indeed fit into the overall framework there is by Occum razor no reason to give it any great weight.

Now in your posting you are claiming it would seem that the big bang and the singularly are in any question! Give me a break with the mapping that we had been doing of late of the microwave background we can even see the shape of the universe no that long after the singularly!

Having all the mass of the universe collapsed to a point would be the mother of all black holes; nothing would ever "bang" its way out of that. That is, if there actually were such a thing as a "black hole".....

I merely pointed out that singularities have never been "seen" in the laboratory. I also suspect that there is no such mathematical function that transforms a singularity into something with shape. I also believe that if a mathematician introduced a singularity into their workings, it would be deemed wrong.

Hmm a lot of things had not been seen in a lab such as the heart of any star so what?

In any case, see below for simple examples of functions that are common and contain singularities and can in fact be plotted and therefore produce shapes for that matter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_singularity
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In mathematics, a singularity is in general a point at which a given mathematical object is not defined, or a point of an exceptional set where it fails to be well-behaved in some particular way, such as differentiability. See Singularity theory for general discussion of the geometric theory, which only covers some aspects.

For example, the function f(x)=1/x


on the real line has a singularity at x = 0, where it seems to "explode" to ±∞ and is not defined. The function g(x) = |x| (see absolute value) also has a singularity at x = 0, since it is not differentiable there. Similarly, the graph defined by y2 = x also has a singularity at (0,0), this time because it has a "corner" (vertical tangent) at that point.

The algebraic set defined by y2 = x2 in the (x, y) coordinate system has a singularity (singular point) at (0, 0) because it does not admit a tangent there.
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By the way for my own information are you also a supporter of ID theory?

That is, if there actually were such a thing as a "black hole".....
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Gungasnake you do not even understand what a black hole is do you?

All a black hole happen to be is a simple grouping of enough matter, any type of matter, that the gravity field is so strong that the escape velocity is greater then the speed of light.

V=(2GM/r)^1/2

Black holes come into being when v>= to the speed of light.

Hardly magic or anything that anyone with any understanding of physic could give the statement "if there is such a thing as a black hole".

Suggest you put down your bible and open a physic book instead.

Black Holes and the Big Bang are not the same thing. It's unfortunate that some scientists and the mainstream media have casually referred to both of them as "singularities" when they are VERY different things.

Black Holes are gravitational singularities defined within spacetime. But the Big Bang was an event which preceded spacetime and which gave rise to spacetime as a function of its evolution.

Nature itself is a perfectly valid laboratory, in many ways the ultimate laboratory. And everything in human experience is "inferred" at some level through our trust in our senses. The rings of Saturn are inferred from the light they reflect and from the fact that we trust our eyes and our telescopes. So the fact that something is derived from inference in no way invalidates it.

Neutron stars are inferred from observations and from our understanding of atomic physics and gravitation. Black Holes are deduced using the same process, and their existence explains our observations. Dark Matter and Dark Energy are derived from the intersection of Big Bang theory and observable evidence. They are proposed conditions used to explain certain observed facts in relation to the base theory.

The Big Bang (at varying levels of detail) is simply the best theory currently available which merges observable facts with known physics. It isn't perfect, but it's more accurate than any other theory in its match to observable evidence over a broad range of knowledge and observation.

The theory of the big bang seem as solid as anything in science can be on it face.

http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/CosmologyEssays/The_Cosmic_Microwave_Background.html


The Cosmic Microwave Background
The Basic Idea
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is an almost-uniform background of radio waves that fill the universe. The CMB is, in effect, the leftover heat of the Big Bang itself - it was released when the universe became cool enough to become transparent to light and other electromagnetic radiation, 100,000 years after its birth. At this time, the universe was filled with a hot, ionized gas. This gas was almost completely uniform, but did have slight deviations - spots that were slightly (1 part in 100,000) more or less dense. The slight changes in the intensity of the CMB across the sky (deviations of only than 1 part in 100,000) give us a map of the early universe. The picture below such a map, measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a space-based microwave telescope for studying the CMB. By studying this map, astrophysicists have learned an enormous amount about the evolution and composition of the universe.


A Bit More Detail
The study of the CMB is an extremely rich subject which has revolutionized the study of cosmology. It's impossible to do it justice here - for more detail, see cosmology texts and the web references at the bottom of this page.
Why microwaves?
When the CMB was initially emitted it was not in the form of microwaves at all, but mostly visible and ultraviolet light. Over the past few billion years, the expansion of the universe has redshifted this radiation toward longer and longer wavelengths, until today it appears in the microwave band.
Why is it lumpy?
In its early days, the universe was extremely smooth and homogenous... but not quite perfectly so. At the time the CMB was released, for example, its density was constant to about 1 part in 100,000. It is believed this smoothness comes about because of inflation, a time of extremely rapid expansion in the first 10-34 seconds of so of the universe's existence. This rapid expansion smoothed out any lumpiness the universe may have initially had, but quantum mechanical fluctuations introduced new ones - tiny fluctuations of density at all length scales. These tiny fluctuations have grown with time due to gravity (slightly denser regions attract more stuff to become denser yet), eventually providing the seeds for the galaxies and galaxy clusters we see today.

This lumpiness affects the CMB largely because of gravitational redshifting. Radiation emitted from a dense spot in the sky has to fight against a bit of extra gravity as it heads toward our detectors. When it leaves that gravity well, the radiation will be a little less energetic than radiation emitted from a less-dense region, so that spot of the sky will appear to be a little colder. A map of the apparent temperature of the CMB across the sky thus gives you a map of the density of matter in the early universe.
How do we learn about dark matter from the CMB?
Most of the cosmological information we get from the CMB is found by studying its power spectrum, a plot of the amount of fluctuation in the CMB temperature spectrum at different angular scales on the sky. The upper plot at right shows measurements of the power spectrum as of 2003 - large angular scales are at the left of the plot, while smaller sky features contribute to the right of the plot.

The shape of this power spectrum is determined by oscillations in the hot gas of the early universe, and the resonant frequencies and amplitudes of these oscillations (which "notes" the universe likes to play!) are determined by its composition. Since we know the physics of hot gases very well, we can compute the properties of the oscillating gas by studying the positions and relative sizes of these peaks. The position of the first peak, for example, tells us about the curvature of the universe (and hence how much total stuff there is in it), while the ratio of heights between the first and second peaks tells us how much of the matter is baryonic (ordinary matter). In practice, there are many variables that affect all parts of the power spectrum, and detailed computer simulations (the red curve in the plot) are used to sort it all out.
Is there more to do with the CMB?
In the next decade or so, many new CMB experiments are planned. The Planck satellite is expected to study the CMB in even greater detail than WMAP was capable of. The main focus will be on measuring the polarization of the CMB, an early measurement of which is described in the lower part of the plot at right. Studying the polarization (particularly the "B-mode" portion) will give us new windows onto the physics of the early universe, perhaps even letting us learn about some of the details of inflation itself.

For more details, see pages by Wayne Hu and Martin White, particularly their recent Scientific American article.


Jeff Filippini, UC Berkeley Cosmology Group (August 2005)
Main Page

No, the Universe is an observatory, not a laboratory. That's why we can't easily test, for example, whether black holes exist, and have to rely on inferences.

But I agree that science considers the Bang as the best theory currently available.

Your house may be as solid a house as you can get (you may even have the test results to show it).

But it says nothing about my house.

Well that comment of your seem fairly sense free.