InkTide Member
  • Member since Jan 9th 2022
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Posts by InkTide

  • Sun more of a puzzle than we (so far) thought.

    Quote from Seatrout

    Been looking at Jupiter with all the reactors all over it wounding if its just a unborn star waiting to reach .....

    I would be willing to bet that most of the doubt around the theory of metallic hydrogen in the gas giants (which I remember and I'm only 24) came from a fear that such a confirmation would vindicate Robitaille's criticisms of the gaseous sun model, as well as his literal advocacy of a liquid metallic hydrogen model of the sun since before gas giant metallic hydrogen became basically undeniable even by the mainstream astrophysics community. There is something of a tension in astronomy between planetary and stellar modelers; the standard stellar evolution model rather pointedly ignores the initial accumulation of gas and dust into a planetary sized object that even the Jeans swindle requires, preferring instead to treat the initiation of the hot core fusion their model requires to avoid the gravitational collapse becoming a singularity as literally the beginning of time, and ignoring all possible things that came before unless there's a spectral anomaly in the isotopes they see, which they then blame on "tainted/heterogeneous pre-stellar dust" basically.


    There are a lot of anomalous spectra (for example, the sun has about one 140th of the Lithium it should according to LambdaCDM; there's also the star that has elements in its spectra we've literally never seen or produced, namely Flerovium 298 or the star that's only 200 light years from us for which they still don't have a consistent modification to their models to make it not look very much like it is ...older than the universe).


    They have also never seen a Population III star, ever. They are also resolutely confident that Population III stars existed. The further back they look in our light bubble, the shorter the timespan that LambdaCDM has to get the Population III stars to form, fuse Big Bang nucleosynthesis hydrogen/helium, and then go supernova to make all the things that we see in the Population II stars so that enough supernovae have happened by the time Population I stars like the sun form that we can have planets with a nonzero percentage of elements heavier than iron (yes the population designation increases in the reverse order they formed, because scientists are weird). JWST is perfect for looking for Population III stars, which is one of the things I am most excited about it - I don't think they'll find any, and LambdaCDM kind of needs them to. I'm fully prepared to eat my words, but only if there is no ambiguity in the detection (i.e. the star has only hydrogen/helium spectral lines).

  • Sun more of a puzzle than we (so far) thought.

    There's also the possibility that Dr. Pierre Marie Robitaille is right, and the sun is not gaseous but condensed matter (as opposed to a giant structureless sphere of ionized hydrogen nucleus gas that can never condense to a non-gaseous structural phase with a real surface because such heresy would break the foundations of astrophysics). Gravitational collapse of a gas in an infinite vacuum still hasn't solved the "Jeans swindle" that allows astronomy to forget entirely about molecular kinetic theory (though recently dark energy has been invoked as a potential 'solution', ignoring the fact that the necessity of dark energy is a direct result of redshift being assumed to correspond exactly with recessional velocity alone, which is an estimation that itself relies on the gaseous plasma sun model... ugh.)

    Quote from Alan Smith

    “It’s amazing that we were so spectacularly wrong about something we should understand really well: the sun,”

    What I personally find amazing is that Robitaille has been saying this literally for decades and every new contradiction the standard solar model encounters somehow changes nothing about the vehement rebuke his criticisms received from the now self-described "spectacularly wrong" mainstream solar physics community. Basically all of modern cosmology is built on the standard solar model - including LambdaCDM - and so is most research in "hot" fusion because stars are assumed to be masses of ionized materials surrounding and obscuring a "hot fusion reactor" buried in their (still somehow gaseous plasma) cores.


    I worry that popsci presenting theory as established fact - and the current establishment as somehow beyond the human trappings that have kept science stagnant on occasion throughout history (cough phlogiston cough) - has turned the standard model of cosmology into the holy scriptures of modern atheism, and any questioning of the foundations upon which LambdaCDM, hallowed be its assumptions, is built is therefore a direct attack on the "antireligious" religious doctrine of atheism that holds itself to be the church of the institutions of science.


    I used to be an atheist. I consider myself agnostic now. Many gods, one god, or zero - it's not the gods or the number that make them dangerous; it's the certainty, and the dogma that certainty will eventually create. There's more than just money on the line for protecting a model of creation that many in science have made a part of their identity, whether they realize they have inadvertently embraced a religion of sorts or not.


    But we can take some comfort in the fact that the standard models seem to be coming apart at the seams, and the truth is always out there whether the funds exist to find it today or not - and JWST may just open its $10 billion eye - which will still function regardless of theorists, because it's a $10 billion engineering project rather than a $10 billion grant for more papers to feed into the research publication profiteering machine - to a universe that LambdaCDM can't explain. I'm very excited for the next decade in astronomical science. I hope Robitaille lives to see his work vindicated or at least not completely ignored and attacked with arguments from authority made by the "spectacularly wrong" establishment - Halton Arp wasn't so lucky, and he still hasn't been disproved (he thought redshift might not be exclusively caused by recessional velocity, and therefore that quasars were not nearly as far away - or as unfathomably large and energetic to explain their brightness at that distance - as is currently believed).

  • What is the current state of LENR?

    I'm familiar with (and a huge fan of) your work! I don't have your book yet but I plan to order it soon - I'm also already a fan of Gareth's approach to things, and have seen his videos on the structured atomic model. Given that unification of the weak nuclear force and electromagnetic force is possible even under the mainstream "structureless jiggly sphere" nucleus model as the "electroweak" force (though Wikipedia apparently thinks the energy level the unification of the two forces requires is both 100GeV and 246GeV), I find the way your model sees a path to describing the strong nuclear force in electromagnetic terms (by replacing neutrons with a closely bound proton/electron pair, which is basically what free neutrons decay into anyway - neutrinos notwithstanding) to be extremely compelling. The electromagnetic and both nuclear forces joined into a single, "electromagnetonuclear" force would be an incredible step forward in physics, I think, regardless of what nuclear/particle model it uses.


    A little while ago I started work on building a map of decay chains of all isotopes (using proton count as my y axis and neutron count as my x axis, so all isotopes of an element would be a row and each atomic weight a column) because I've never been able to find such a "nuclear alchemy map" so to speak, and it struck me just how completely unstructured and weird the map started to look as I added to it (I'm only up to magnesium so far - I get distracted easily lol) - when I learned that your model predicted the weird "pillars of instability" at atomic weights 5 and 8 that I was seeing, and had been unaware of before trying to map decay chains together, I was hooked.

  • What is the current state of LENR?

    Quote from Alan Smith

    many scientists employed by the large hot fusion program would be out of a job

    I think this is actually the primary reason. The people with the politicians'/business leaders' (i.e. people born to rich families) ears in terms of alternative energy production are those very same hot fusion proponents.


    I'd love to think that hot fusion research is a net positive for all fusion research at any "temperature-equivalent" fuel particle energy level, but the concepts and designs are simply too different for this to be the case. Unfortunately, I think hot fusion would need to be shown to be viable and then implemented widely in order for cold fusion to be reexamined by mainstream science (as a 'new/next frontier,' so to speak - probably by the current groups in the hot fusion space). The sunk cost into hot fusion is enormous, and cold fusion is in the unenviable position of taking flack from hot fusion proponents citing the same ad hominem accusations from the 1990s towards anyone even considering cold fusion research, as well as getting caught in the crossfire of the flak the hot fusion projects get for being 20 years away from energy production for the last 50 years or so.


    I don't think it's malice, I just think academia in general is woefully unequipped to self-correct its past mistakes. Too many tenured professors and too many advisors built their careers in the zeitgeist of their fields to create anything but an institutional need to preserve that zeitgeist in the face of contradiction.


    For an easy way to determine which fields have become ad hoc "desperate dogma defenders", simply check whether or not the field has a 'widely accepted' "standard model" that builds the ad hoc definition into itself (i.e. 'the model changes as a result of new evidence'; what this means in practice is contradictory evidence is simply turned into additional epicycles to add to the model and the broader structure of the model lies unquestioned and unfalsifiable - it's the unfalsifiability that makes the ad hoc reasoning fallacious). A common refrain in these fields is "well what's a better model?", which is logically about as useful as a priest asking an atheist "if God didn't create the universe, where did it come from?" - the response "i don't know" is treated as an admission of the truth of the existing model, despite being the exact statement any honest scientist should be making. It's missing the point of the criticisms of the dogma, because it has no defenses to offer against them.


    I find it rather amusing that physics has managed to get itself into a half-century-long rut by accidentally building two standard models (relativity and quantum mechanics) that disagree with each other. What's extra hilarious is both models are built on foundations of solipsism (rest frames and quantum observers) that they can't seem to shake off without breaking what is generally observed by people - namely relativity of simultaneity and the many worlds interpretation, which is in essence "simultaneity of all possibility". Combining the two gets you relativity of simultaneity of all possibility - all things can happen at all times and no one can tell what happened to anyone but themselves. Meanwhile the philosophers and epistemologists the physicist natural philosophers shoved out of academia because they weren't dogmatically atheist enough look on in frustration as physics runs headlong into creating the most complicated expression of Descarte's "cogito, ergo sum" ever devised - blissfully ignorant of the fact that solipsism as a conclusion about reality has been considered a philosophical dead end for centuries.


    Sorry, I drifted into a rant there.

  • What is the current state of LENR?

    I'm not saying they proved electrons, I'm saying they act as though their theories on electrons prove that electronic technology only exists because they theorized the electron. If you want to push the boundaries of understanding in ways that are economically useful, go to an engineer, not a theorist.


    The stuff an engineer does has to actually work.

  • What is the current state of LENR?

    High energy particle physicists like to trot out the electron as proof that high energy particle physics has potential for massive economic impact.


    In doing so, they take credit for the work of decades of engineers who actually built the things that had economic impact in a delusional belief that technology exists only because they have explained it - despite electromagnetic devices long predating their theories.


    A model of reality you can express on paper still has to match what reality does - the limits of your model don't show you the limits of reality.


    Standard models in physics and astronomy have become dangerously ad hoc, IMO. A standard model is basically ad hoc by definition. I also think there may be a little bit of a fear from physicists, even outside of fears that funding will evaporate, that some of the extraordinarily difficult to learn mathematics they use may have been built on foundations that make it useless. Dogma is human nature, and peer review is not a cure - truth is not a democratic process, nor can it be bought.


    I am absolutely certain of only two things: I exist, and doubt must never concede to certainty - including certainty of one's own doubts.


    Descartes and Socrates might have been on to something. I lament the death of philosophy of science at the hands of the self-interest and ego of academic institutions, but at least I know reality always bends understanding towards itself eventually, not to the consensus of living sunk cost fallacies.