Would magn. pole reversal actually mess up electronic equipment?

A 'BIG bubble' to us, but that bubble is inside a much bigger Universe (as you earlier said) full of bubbles of various sizes.

Knowing our luck, were are probably one of the small bubbles.

Oh, I capitalized your "T" in "The Universe" where I quoted you before, and here, I would say 'beginning of time and space' at least for all of us within it.

--
Indeed.

That's why I labeled it "my favorite hypothesis" instead of "my favorite
theory".

-- Dirk

- Transcendence UK - A UK political party - Occult Talk Show

--
That's exactly the predicament Galileo found himself in when he rejected
the geocentric Ptolemaic system in favor of the heliocentric Copernican
system, the guilt of that heresy only being "pardoned" by the Church
after 360 years!

So, it matters less that a battle is lost rather than the war.

The simulation videos sure are cool.

Aptly termed. Hypercrazy even. That was organized craziness...

The 'older' galaxies are 'out' farther, placing them closer to the 'outer mass' on the other side of our universe's barrier 'shell', making them move faster.

Yes.

You don't necessarily know what the speed of light is any distance from earth. All you know about distant things is the electromagnetic radiation that comes from those places. You don't know that there's any particular reason for light to revert to your local lightspeed. All you can do is look at how that light relates to itself and to local light, and see if you can come up with stories that make sense.

Yes. But maybe for some unknown reason, the orbitals have slowly changed over time and they are getting faster. Maybe a billion years ago the atoms were all a little bit larger and the photons were a little bit redder and so when we see billion-year-old light it's red-shifted compared to more recnet light.

Exactly, maybe back in the olden days atoms were slower.

No, it fits. There might be something else it doesn't fit with, though. There's a whole lot of physics I've never heard of and maybe some of it proves this has to be wrong.

Consider how long the light has to travel to get a measurable redshift. Do you want to keep light traveling that long so you can measure it? You'd need some sort of indirect measure.

Galileo provided a way to make sense out of a whole bunch of things that didn't make sense before. So did Newton. Maybe Einstein did, it's too soon to tell.

That isn't a correct interpretation of the Einstein field equations as applied to Lemaitre universes. The equation and its solutions do include the possibility of acceleration at cosmological distance scales. It wasn't expected to be seen but the observational evidence for it from supernovae and structural analysis of CMB against galaxy statistics suggests that Einsteins biggest mistake may not be a mistake after all.

If it had just been the supernova evidence I would personally have preferred to believe there was something slightly odd about early massive star supernova that prevented them being ideal standard candles. AFAIK That possibility cannot as yet be ruled out.

Big Bang is just a name given to the set of cosmologies which are radically different from the old Steady State models. Your bubble idea is in principle no different to Guth's inflation.

But there need not be anything outside our universe or even any meaning to questions about events happening before the Big Bang.

String theorists and their brane collisions would beg to differ eg.

This is paranoid rubbish. Some of the best minds on the planet are working on ways to model the universe with mathematics and experimentalists are gradually confining their wilder flights of fancy. The challenge is always to find the experiment that breaks the mould.

The mathematics of string theory might ultimately be shown to be correct, but at present the classical GR solutions predictions are as good as it gets. Astrophysics allows our understanding to be tested at energies that are simply not available in terrestrial laboratories.

You cannot reject something until you have something better to put in its place. And if you are going attempt to argue that Big Bang cosmology is wrong you have to understand what it is first.

For every complex problem there is a simple wrong answer. You have found one. It is a well known result of inverse square laws that inside symmetric shells of matter you feel no net effect from them.

The same applies to electromagnetism and gives us Faraday shielding.

Dark matter incidentally was not invented to fix the Big Bang, but to explain the speed that stars move around galaxies. When I was in the field dark matter could easily have included anything non-luminous not a star and now a gas or plasma. This included old-biros, rocks, asteroids, chair legs and sticks of rhubarb. These days the much more sensitive observations constrain most of it to be something more exotic. Some cosmological dark mass may well be hiding in the neutrinos.

Forbidden by Gauss's theorem. Doesn't work.

So called tired light theories. Tested and found wanting. Ned Wrights cosmology FAQ deals with some of your misconceptions but you would be better off with a modern graduate text like Peacock if you have the necessary mathematics to read it and understand the arguments.

Photons travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. They may lose a bit of energy climbing out of a gravitational potential well - see Mossbauer effect which can be easily demonstrated on Earth. eg

But it isn't enough to explain quasars.

You have this exactly backwards. When entering a medium with a slower speed of propagation the continuity condition at the boundary requires that in the slower medium the wavelength is shorter.

Dirac considered the possibility that the fundamental constants of nature were variable on the cosmological timescale. No satisfactory evidence of this has ever been found. Neutral hydrogen appears to emit at 21cm everywhere we can detect it and the same for Lyman alpha which is visible at great distances.

And that latter observation is simply down to the expansion of the intervening space. You can get a long way with handwaving arguments, but if you want to understand modern cosmology you really need to get one of the introductory graduate texts. Otherwise you are simply arguing against strawmen of your own construction.

Not a chance. The atomic clock tests on airplanes is done and is exactly consistent with the predictions of GR as are the GPS satellites which would not have worked if GR was wrong.

You have to show that the idea actually works and predicts answers that the prevailing theory cannot get correct. To do this you actually need to understand the current theories and supporting observations in some detail and not some tabloid journalists half baked interpretation.

This might be better off in sci.astro, but unfortunately that group attracts every conceivable nutter and raving loon with a new theory of everything. Most of them type all in capitals too. There are a also few good guys there who might point you towards other references that would help you refine your ideas.

Regards, Martin Brown

Gauss's theorem says you are wrong.

They don't recede at constant velocity. Work is being done moving the masses away from each other against gravity and they slow down. In the limit the barely open universe just halts when it gets to infinity.

Dark matter was invented a long time ago to explain the observed motion of stars in galaxies. There simply is not enough luminous mass in the stars and nebulae to allow the velocities seen in the outer spiral arms

- something else is providing additional gravity. NB The earth counts as dark matter as do any asteroids, black holes and other non-luminous material. But that still isn't enough so there has to be something else heavy and not interacting electromagnetically that comes into play at galactic scales. Neutrinos may be a part but again still not enough.

Dark energy was originally invented to allow the Einstein field equations to model a Steady State universe. It fell out of favour when the Big Bang cosmologies defeated Steady State. Now it has become a possibility again that it is non-zero although small. The observed acceleration is a relatively small correction at very high Z.

But we see it symmetrical in all directions. Spherical symmetry and Gauss's law means you cannot feel the external shells of material inside.

But the observed acceleration is uniform in all the directions we can see.

You need to think a lot more carefully about the various length scales involved. It is no surprise that local cluster galaxies are gravitationally bound and some are moving towards each other.

It might be clear to you but if you are using a term already used in the literature with another meaning entirely it isn't a wise choice.

Whatever is out there is so far away that its gravitational influence has not yet had time to reach us. GR has certain game rules.

Regards, Martin Brown

This is not so. You can indeed reject something if you see that it is wrong, before you find something better to put in its place. In fact it is helpful to reject wrong ideas when you find out they are wrong, rather than wait for a better alternative to show up first.

People who refuse to give up provably wrong ideas because they don't have better ones yet are like women who stay with abusive men because they don't have a better man yet.

But I haven't yet seen any definitive proof that all the Big Bang cosmologies are wrong. Or if I have seen such proof I didn't understand it. And it might easily turn out that some of the Big Bang cosmologies are correct as far as they go, but leave out some important facts which account for anything they currently get wrong. There's a lot I don't know about the topic, but to me it looks like it's too soon to say they must be rejected.

Thank you! I'll look at the FAQ first and maybe teach myself the graduate level course later.

Is there an argument that they are red-shifted an inappropriate amount?

I can imagine that the 21 cm and the Lyman alpha ought to be in some particular theoretical proportion, and an acceleration redshift would change them in some other proportion, and if you can measure them carefully enough you might see whether the result fits one of the two different predictions. Of course it might not fit either one.

To kill the hypothesis it's necessary to have strong evidence against it, not just that there is no evidence for it.

This is where my "paranoid" argument comes in. To create an acceptable alternative hypothesis you must understand the current theory in great detail. That limits the pool of possible alternative thinkers to a fraction of the people who have done that intensive study.

This is sort of inevitable. You have developed a complex language to describe the complexities you have observed. It's difficult to communicate about the topic without that language, and if an amateur comes up with his own ideas and his own language to describe them, it's completely understandable that you wouldn't want to take the time to follow his work.

This is why so many advances in science come from people in other scientific specialties, who find a way to extend their work to gobble up your field. They have the credentials and the power base. If they can explain your stuff but you can't explain theirs, then they are clearly the winners.

It ought to be enough that it actually works and predicts most of the answers that the prevailing theory does get right. The more alternative approaches we have that work, the better. We can judge which of them are easier to learn etc when we actually watch people learning them. And the interplay among them encourages new experiments.

But somehow we collectively tend to prefer a single approach, and keep it until after some other approach both explains more and also gets hyped better. Maybe that's because students want to learn the one true way, and not be bothered with multiple approaches. Less overhead to teach one way and ignore the others.

The observations, yes. Getting a deep understanding of the current theories might be too limiting. Those theories are likely to stifle creativity and tell people what questions they should be asking.

So as a trivial example, evolutionary geneticists had a sense of what questions to ask. But Stephen Jay Gould was a paleontologist who didn't know much about genetics, and he asked a completely different question. He observed that the fossil record showed long periods of mostly stasis separated by intense bursts of change that could show up in the fossil record, and he asked why and how the sudden bursts could happen. The geneticists had mostly not thought to ask that because it didn't fit their thinking. Because he already had a base in paleontology and he was very good at hype, he was able to build a long career off that topic. But it should be clear that he was not actually asking the right question. The question is not how the sudden bursts happen, but why is it that we observe so much stasis. And this also is a question that cannot be answered by genetics but instead has its roots in ecology. There's probably room for an ecologist who's good at hype to build a career off that.

Now that the "flame wars" seem to have died out, I'd like to explore the above a bit.

I've done a bit of looking for laboratory evidence that *any* oil has biotic precursors. The Fischer-Tropsch process used by Germany in WWII to produce Synthetic Gasoline from CO, Hydrogen and catalysts is well known. But the results are impossible to achieve *outside* of a laboratory, and the "ingredients" are not biotic compounds. Other than this, there seems to be a lot of theoretical rambling not too far removed from hand waving. I would be interested in links to actual experiments that started with biotic materials and ended up with any or all the compound(s) that are also found in petroleum.

In contrast, there seems to be a fair amount of theoretical and lab activity in taking carbonates (limestone, marble etc.) and subjecting them to intense heat and pressure in the presence of water and Iron oxide (as a catalyst). The outcomes contain all of the compunds usually found in petroleum. Unfortunately, almost all this work is in Russian. Here is a US site that links to many of the Russian works and also to an impressive (to me) English language experiment re carbonates-to-oil.

All the best,

Bill Miller

I'm not an expert in any of this. My own background leads me to think in terms of biological transformations that are hard to study in the lab.

Any time there's an exothermic chemical reaction involving chemicals that could adsorb to a bacterial cell, there's the possibility that there are bacteria which use that reaction for their own energy. In practice the bacteria that use the reactions that release the most energy will tend to dominate, and if there are enough of them to support something that eats bacteria, then the slow-growing bacteria may get eaten faster than they can reproduce. So bacteria that slowly convert carbohydrates to hydrocarbons and water might survive well in lignite beds where they grow slowly but nothing else grows faster. And bacteria that slowly convert linear hydrocarbons to polycyclic hydrocarbons and methane might survive there. Etc. But it's hard to study such things in the lab, because if you study bacteria that have a doubling time of a few months then your grant is likely to run out before you get results. Beijerinck lucked out occasionally with that sort of thing when he found some bacteria that normally grew very slowly, that could actually grow fast when he gave them the chance. But you can't depend on that.

So anywhere you get carbon and hydrogen in a form that could have less energy, some water, and you also get a little nitrogen, sulfur and phosphates, and an adequate temperature, you might get bacteria growing and changing things.

When there is extra oxygen they oxidise whatever provides the most energy. Iron or sulfur if those are available, and carbon. When there is no extra oxygen but extra sulfur they make sulfides. There's a little less energy in polycyclics and methane than there is in alkanes.

So if you have organics trapped underground at a depth where bacteria can grow, it makes sense that they'd produce many of the things in petroleum, and those things would head upward if they could, and some of them would get trapped before they reached the surface. Methane that came from lower levels and also methane produced near the petroleum/water interface would tend to push petroleum out of the trap. Methane would also leave the trap both at the bottom and through whatever joints let it through.

As a handwaving exercise it makes perfect sense that some of the oil would have a biological origin -- if there are biological materials that oil could be made from, oil will be made from them. Places that get too hot for bacteria might possibly create oil inorganically.

Petrogeologists who find oil can usually point to a source strata that they think supplied biological carbon. That isn't proof, of course. Also they use that thinking when they look for oil so it's all biased samples.

If you figure that the amount of methane etc that has been produced must have been far more than the amount that gets trapped, it would require a very different sort of seafloor in the old days. Much of the seafloor must have been anaerobic, and there would be a thick rain of dead stuff falling onto it. Modern oceans appear to produce less than a millimeter of sediment per thousand years. If that was the original source for the oil, we are no longer making very much of it. Presumably for some reason the oceans in those days were very productive while now they are comparatively dead.

I looked over the link you provided. It sounds like the alternative idea is to create hydrocarbons using the earth's heat as an energy source. The carbon would come from, say, CaCO3 while the hydrogen would come from H2O. I can imagine that this could happen, but to get one CH4 this way you would have 1 Ca and 7 O left over. The oxygen would need to be sequestered somehow because if it left the mantle with the CH4 then the CH4 would be oxidised as soon as it reached bacteria that were ready for it -- which typically happens at the surface, where there is oxygen.

Their argument is that oil must have been produced at high temperature and pressure, higher than the supposed biological sources could have, because that's the only way to create molecules bigger than ethane. But they are clearly wrong because bacteria easily produce molecules bigger than ethane at temperatures not much above the boiling point of water, and others consume them at room temperature when they have oxygen.

I like their argument that most of the oil may have been produced this way. It does not require such a peculiar ocean in the pennsylvanian etc. But most of the abiogenic oil created over the last 200 million years would have escaped the various geological traps and been metabolised over the last 200 million years. Only the fraction that was trapped underground would be available now. Perhaps there are deeper traps than anyone has looked for? Maybe. Perhaps the existing oilfields and particularly methane fields might recharge faster than expected? That's nice but likely not enough to provide even enough fuel for another big war.

Different political domains have often maintained scientific establishments that disagreed over fundamentals. I noticed giant disagreements between american/british and french authorities over important ideas in evolution, paleoanthropology and archeology, for example. Nobody seemed to think they needed to resolve the differences, they just ignored each other. Each side seemed to consider the other's theories as not worth refuting. This sort of thing happens a whole lot and does not require special explanation.

Russian petroleum geologists and US petroleum geologists have both been successful at finding oil. The americans sometimes factor in potential biological sources for oil when they are deciding where to drill. They figure that a dome that has no plausible biological source is a less likely choice than one which does have a source. If the russians don't figure that in, it would make some difference but maybe not a large difference.

It would be interesting if the russian theories turned out correct. It might or might not have much practical significance.

Sorry for all the handwaving. I don't have any definitive data.

Here is a better link to the experiment itself:

Understood. *If* a biotic process exists and is s l o w enough, then not only might the grant run out, but also the sands in the researcher's great hourglass!

Yeah. Kinda like the drunk that was looking for a dropped quarter under the street light rather than in the dark alley where he dropped it. If, by chance the quarter rolled out of the alley and under the light, then for the rest of his life he'd look for quarters where the light was better.

I've seen some figures indicating that CO2 was at least 10X as plentiful during the Triassic (3000 ppm) than today. That alone would seem to account for a *much* more active accumulation of carbonate-bearing detritus than what we see today. (Although if atmospheric CO2 continues to increase, then we should expect to see an acceleration in aquatic detritus "fall" as more available Carbon is trapped in shells and bones. )

BTW Saturn's moon, Titan seems to be "awash" with liquid hydrocarbons. It stretches credibilty that this petrochemical accumulation might also be biotic-caused.

Correct.

Please take a look at the link above. It shows what happens to the "extra" Calcium and Oxygen that you have postulated.

That's only correct is the process is as you suggest -- with extra bits left over.

No. The arguent is that there is s dirth of eveidence that significant amounts of big molecules *are* sourced biotically. And there is laboratory evidence supporting the idea that abiotic petroleum *can* be made.

It also raises a question that is more philosophical than physical/chemical.

*If* big "organic-like" molecules *can* be made using an abiotic process, then we would seem to have a ready source of life-precursor materials.

Significant amounts of hand waving are allowed and expected in any reply to this!

.>But

That's OK. You are honest enough to say so.

Bill

[snip]

And therein lies the economic basis for quite a bit of controversy. If there are abiogenic sources for petroleum and one group or company gets the jump on discovering these resources, big money is involved. It would behoove them to deny the possibility of such resources ("Nothing to see here. Move along now.") until such time as they can tie up the rights to such resources.

--
Paul Hovnanian  paul@hovnanian.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Have gnu, will travel.

Bill Miller wrote:

Your other link gave a link to that.

Though the paper you linked to says that it won't happen without great pressure and temperature, and maybe a sudden drop in temperature but not pressure is also required.

They have often found oil that way. They ought to do a statistical analysis and notice how the times they have drilled with "better" sources versus "worse" sources to get some idea how much difference that has made to results. Of course, they can't be sure about how good the sources actually are, so this will not say how much their sources really affect the results, but if they find that the predictions of oil sources don't have much effect on their results then they should give them lower weight or maybe no weight when choosing where to drill next.

Unfortunately how they choose where to drill is mostly proprietary information so we can't very well tell how they actually make those decisions. Although perhaps if the information about where they actually drilled and some estimate of their results is public we could try to reverse-engineer it.

At any rate, starting from two entirely different theories about how the oil got there, both approaches have found a lot of oil.

The more CO2 in the oceans, the less of the carbonate reaches the bottom

-- the small stuff gets dissolved as it sinks. A higher proportion of silica exoskeletons would reach the bottom, along with lots of organics. That might give us enough biological stuff to make oil from. Old oceans would be very different from today's oceans. For that matter, 10X CO2 in the air would not be very good for human beings. Let's hope that such times don't return before we go extinct.

The key fact there would be that Titan has so much of the stuff. If they have lots of life then the life could rearrange things, in the same way that it's claimed our high-oxygen atmosphere came from life. But Titan would have to have the precursors regardless of the details of what arranged them.

I don't see that it does. They said they used marble instead of graphite because it's more oxidised and of lower chemical potential, to make the experiment more "conservative". I don't see anything there about what happened to the Ca or O. Maybe make highly alkaline calcium hydroxide, to use the Ca and 2O and maybe one H? Make 5 or so hydrogen peroxides? Oxidise the iron further? I was thinking in terms of carbonates from the sea bottom getting subducted to a depth they could turn to hydrocarbons, but maybe before that point the oxygen would already get separated out. Anyway, they aren't obliged to have every detail worked out. It's plausible something like this could happen, even though I don't see exactly how it would go.

They calculated energy levels for various hydrocarbons assuming there was sufficient hydrogen to turn it all into methane and no oxygen. Would the energy levels of oxygen-containing compounds matter? It looks to me like their analysis is incomplete to describe the experiment they did.

They argue that these molecules could not be produced at low temperatures or pressures.

That's already done. There are multiple ways to get organic molecules.

They say that nothing but methane and some ethane can be produced at less than, say, 30 atmospheres and 1000 K. However, all living things produce linear alkanes with up to 28 or so carbons, that each have a carboxyl group on one end. The carboxyl group makes them easy to add to (and subtract from), and it has some other useful properties. These fatty acids are necessary for cell membranes, which each cell has pretty much of.

When cells burn stuff for energy using oxygen, the final products tend to be CO2 and H2O because they can get a lot of energy that way, enough to work at getting rid of the CO2. When they operate anaerobically, they get far less energy and they have to excrete their waste products against a gradient of those waste products. So when the external concentration of one waste product gets too high, then it makes sense to make a different waste product even if they don't get as much energy from that reaction. So for example, bacteria etc that grow on glucose without extra oxygen tend to make a variety of products. Lactic acid, ethanol, butyric acid, etc. They tend to make all the profitable waste products they can, in the ratio that gives them the maximum energy after accounting for the cost of excretion. Making petroleum would be similar. They'd juggle the oxygen atoms to the places they could do the most good, and juggle the hydrogens likewise. Also any excess sulfur. I'd hypothesise (without any real evidence, the evidence might be there but I haven't looked) that such bacteria would clip off the oxygen-carrying carboxyl groups to use them, leaving the less-useful aliphatic chains "for later". (The assumption is that they're using biological debris, which would include lots of fatty acids.) The bacteria would be mostly living in the brine, perhaps adsorbed to rocks, and the oil would rise into its own layer and so reduce the gradient problem.

So, you have a fatty acid with a CO2H on one end. If you somehow stripped the O2 off you could put 3H on the bare C and 3H on the O2H. You can get

6H by taking 3 methane molecules and adding them to the fatty acid first. Do you get more energy by making two H2O than you lose by combining 3 CH4? I think so, provided there's plenty of methane available. But of course the devil is in the details. This isn't the usual way to add to a fatty acid. The usual way is to add an acetyl group in 4 steps, and the acetyl group can come from anywhere -- for example, from glucose.

You could have lots of biological products that don't wind up in the oil, if they precipitate out easily or are heavy. Have such things been found at the bottom of the brine below an oilfield? Of course there doesn't have to be any bottom....

I find either approach sort of plausible. Or a combination. If you get abiogenic methane (with less pressure and heat than they propose) then you could get bacteria producing oil from it provided they find a way to make a profit doing that. And whether they can do that depends on what other compounds are present. There's some methane in the water that comes out of hydrothermal vents and some animals metabolise it, though a quick look gives me the impression that sulfides and ammonia might be more important. This methane probably isn't biogenic, unless we count organisms in the seawater that get sucked in and heated etc to maybe abiogenicly get turned into methane etc.

Again, sorry for all the handwaving but it's all I've got.

I heard recently that German scientists had found a way to convert kitty cats into diesel fuel. Does that count?

That depends on what a kitty cat is.

That would be quite on topic too, as long as that laboratory equipment or some of the data processing was programmed in Forth.