Eskimo North

One area that I disagree with many cosmologists is with respect to the importance of magnetic and electrical fields in interstellar space. Our Sun very dramatically affects the Earth through a combination of a stream and occasional bursts of charged particles and magnetic fields entwined within, but I believe these play a part even over much greater distance.

I'm not sure what phenomena you're referring to. Could you be more specific? What on this page, for instance, do you disagree with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_medium

As near as I can tell (again, I am not an astronomer), that page summarizes the current understanding of stellar interactions with space.

There isn't anything in that particular article that I have qualms with.

However; not mentioned in this article, it is generally assumed that gravitational interaction is the only large scale interaction, that electrical and magnetic fields tend to cancel themselves out over great distances and thus are irrelevant. I don't believe this to be the case. Much of the gas in the interstellar medium is ionized, and thus very much affected by electrostatic and magnetic fields, as well as creating and propagating them.

I used to have a real fondness for high voltage and plasma toys; Frankensteins stuff; I still do actually but neither the time nor the money to put into them. But I see much in the universe that resembles small scale plasma structures these devices create, and I believe that is because the same effects are playing out on a larger scale.

I believe electromagnetic forces are particularly relevant as a mechanism for dissipating angular momentum in a collapsing object, but I believe there are other ways they affect the structure and evolution of the universe as well.

The emission of x-rays by particles accelerating into and out of collapsing and exploding massive objects is well-established, and the amount of energy dissipated in this way is easy to calculate based on observation. What makes gravitational energy so interesting is that we cant observe it directly and therefore can't know with any degree of certaintly what it's contribution is. Cosmologists are always going to be more interested "new" problems than those that have yielded good experimantal results... When you get paid as poorly as cosmologists do, you don't feel obligated to work on things that you don't find particularly interesting. Outside of popular science journals I have never seen any attempt to classify the relative importance of different areas of research except as the expression of personal taste. Scientists argue far more about HOW to do things than about WHAT needs to be done.

Yes I know that gravitational energy has been well characterized. However, it doesn't explain how collapsing stars for example lose enough angular momentum to keep collapsing.

You just lost me... Gravitational energy is not well characterized... Did you mean energy dissipation in the form of X-rays is well-characterized? What is the mass of the stars we are talking about now? What is the final outcome of the collapse you are thinking about? Since I have direct access to people who are actively working on these things (and whose standing among their peers cannot be fudged, since we all work together), I can find out what the latest theories are, but only if I can go to them with a well-formed question.

I realized after I posted that, that I had poorly written that. What I really meant to say is the magnitude of gravitational energy is well characterized. For example, if you lift a given mass off the surface of the Earth, you can calculate precisely how much energy required to do so and how much will be released when it is allowed to return to Earth.

The nature of that energy is not so well characterized; a warping of space-time, gravitons, some kind of wave, various push gravity theories; the manifestations of additional dimensions, all of these theories have their proponents; none of them are proven to my satisfaction.

Okay, I understand now. In our (essentially) constant gravity environment there is a well understood amount of energy required to raise a given mass a given distance, and this energy is conserved locally in a way that we can all observe. I know you are well aware of experiments that can be done to generate flowing electric current using the magnetic field of the earth. There are analogous methods for extracting energy from rotating masses independent of their electrical and magnetic fields. This energy flows in the form of gravitational waves. Unfortunately there are no simple experiments that can be done to convince yourself of this. But there is a straightforward "gedanken" experiment that can be done. Imagine the universe at some moment, with gravity at it's steady-state everywhere, and only local effects (like things falling toward the center of the earth. Now imagine what happens if a very large mass is shaken rhythmically somewhere, what might be the effect of it's rapidly changing gravitational force on the "quiet harbor" of the surrounding space?

Well, therein lies the problem, if there are no experiments that prove the theory, then it remains just that, an unproven theory. This is why LIGO producing results would be interesting. Theories predicting gravity waves are just one set of theories, there are many others. Most of the time GR makes good predictions, but not always, just as Newtonian physics made mostly accurate predictions but ultimately failed when velocities approaching the speed of light were involved. GR fails where spinning superconductors are involved. There are also large scale objects that are observable that are hard to reconcile with GR.

I guess my view on things is that existing theories produce useful predictions under most circumstances, but our understanding is still not complete and I hope that additional data will eventually lead to something more consistent with observation.

Maybe my answer fell short by not suggesting, as an example to apply in the thought experiment, the tidal forces of the moon upon the earth. The fact that the gradient in this case is due to the target spinning, and not the source, is immaterial. The point to bring away is that gravitational gradients are associated with real work, and that thermodynamics apply as they do to other phenomena in the same reference frame. In the relativistic regimes that apply within and around ultra-dense matter, there is little that is familiar or that behaves familiarly, so even when it's well understood, those of us who can't fathom the math required to describe it are going to have to accept that "we don't get it" without qualifying it with "therefore I doubt it".

Before I am willing to consider a theory useful, I require that it be consistent with observation. It's one of my quirky personality traits that annoy a lot of people who prefer to treat science like a religion and take things on faith. I'm much more concerned that they agree with observation than I am concerned about their mathematical self-consistency or there lack thereof; or their elegance or lack thereof. I want a theory to first describe accurately what we have already observed, and then to make testable predictions that lead to further observation that then agrees with those predictions.

Let's look even at some very mundane things; thermodynamics for example, the idea of entropy; really is only valid in a closed system. Of coarse if you believe the big bang, the universe as a whole is a closed system, I don't, but for the sake of argument, let's assume that it is. The universe that we see around us is quite ordered, the orbits of planets have an orderly relationship in terms of their distance from their parent star for example. The stars have predictable orbits within their galaxies. There is a visible structure to the way the galaxies are positioned in space, not just randomly strewn about. Life, is an extremely complex but ordered system.

Where did all that order come from? Big bangers would say the universe was wound up by the big bang and has been winding down ever since, but arguably there is far more information and order in the universe today than there was hypothetical seconds after the hypothetical big bang. Now if we don't have a closed universe, and I don't believe that we do, then this ceases to be a problem.

Big bang theory says that the first galaxies were small and irregular, and the larger spiral galaxies familiar today resulted from the accretion of smaller galaxies. When I saw the first deep field Hubble photographs, I was almost convinced. As illogical as everything relating to big-bang theory seemed, the visual evidence seemed to be overwhelming. But then I had a flash of insight. Hubble you see, can only see in the optical and near infrared, it can not see in the far infrared or the millimeter wavelengths where the optical emissions of very high red-shift galaxies have been shifted to by the time that light reaches us. Thus when Hubble is looking at very distant high red-shift galaxies, it's looking at the extreme UV regions of those galaxies only, the regions with dense new star formation. So naturally, those galaxies appear small and irregular.

Images from UV and X-ray telescopes of local galaxies convinced me of this because they appeared just like those in the Hubble deep field images. Then Spitzer took pictures of the distant galaxies in the deep infrared, and lo and behold there were large spiral galaxies and in general a mix looking very much like what we see locally. There were in fact spirals discovered that were estimated to be less than a billion years from the big bang that were larger than the Milky Way which is a sizable galaxy as galaxies go. It was estimated that at least one of these large spirals had a rotational period of several billion years. It had achieved remarkable symmetry for something that had only been around for one third of a rotation. If galaxies had already grown to the size of the Milky Way and beyond in the first billion years of galactic evolution, then we ought to have bunches of super huge galaxies 12 billion years later; but we don't, we have essentially the same mix.

Then there is the metals conundrum. Big bang theory assumes the universe was primarily hydrogen, a lesser amount of helium, and just a tiny amount of lithium, and that was it; all heavier elements forged in supernova over the eons. Early measurements seemed to confirm this; distant galaxies, to the degree which spectroscopic data could be obtained, seemed to indicate a metal poor population of stars; just what the big bang model would predict. But then later I came to understand that these early measurements were comparing apples to oranges, they were not comparing the same regions of the galaxies and there is very large differences in metallicies between the central bulge of a spiral galaxy and the galactic arms; so the differences were due not to age, but to the different parts of the galaxies compared. When like regions are compared, the metallicy, most of this variability in metallicy disappears.

Quasars; we don't see many of them in local galaxies; so must be an indicator of galactic evolution right? What an interesting indicator they are, because while they are assumed to be the active center of early galaxies, their redshift in many cases is different than that of their host galaxies, sometimes considerably different. Statistical analysis showed that it wasn't just a chance alignments of galaxies and quasars creating the appearance of quasars with different redshifts than their host galaxies, there were far too many.

This one's still open to debate, but redshift itself appears to be quantized, then a supposedly more accurate survey found that no, it wasn't; then another survey that followed up on that one found redshift to be quantized, so I don't know, jury still out on that one as far as I am concerned; but if true either there has to be a mechanism besides Doppler shift responsible for a portion of the redshift; and I believe that to be the case, or the velocities at which other galaxies are receding are quantized.

These are just a few examples of things about existing theories, particular with respect to the big bang, that I find problematic. To be honest though, sometimes I think the Hindu's have it right and we're just making it all up as we go along anyway.