Goodness me, one small change in one theory dealing with one body can have some widespread consequeces!
This relatively short bunch of words neatly sums up pages and reams of careful reasoning.
Electrical theories date back to the 1800s, before “electricity” became taboo in astronomy. They were well-founded on observations and on the proven laws of electromagnetism. In the last few decades, they have been refined to the point where they expected the findings that were so hard on the fashionable theory:
Comets are electrical discharges in the thin plasma that permeates the solar system. Because they spend most of their time far from the Sun, their rocky nuclei are in equilibrium with the voltage at that distance. But as they accelerate in toward the Sun, their voltage is increasingly out of equilibrium with the voltage and increasing density of the solar plasma. A plasma sheath forms around them—the coma and tail. And filamentary currents—jets—between the sheath and the nucleus erode, particle by powdery particle, the circular depressions with terraced walls that are typical of electrical discharge machining. As the discharge channels move across the surface of the comet, they burn it black.
If it were only a matter of explaining with plasma discharges the jets and the blackened rocky surfaces and the powder-fine dust and the terraced depressions, there might not be so much blinkered stubbornness. But modern astronomical theories have been worked into an interlocking web of explanation. Each theory supports, and is in turn supported by, nearly every other theory. If one theory frays, if one loose thread is pulled, the entire fabric will unravel.
An electrified comet requires an electrified Sun. The Sun is the focus of the electric field that causes the comet to discharge. For the Sun to maintain its electric field, it (and all stars) must be the focus of another electric discharge within an electrified galaxy. And electrified galaxies, with their magnetic fields and x-ray emissions and ejections of quasars, must be connected in larger circuits that render meaningless such fancies of cosmology as the Big Bang theory.
If you pull one electrified comet out of the well-knit structure of accepted theories, the entire garment will become unacceptable. Either the universe is an agglomeration of isolated, gravitating, non-electrical bodies, or else it is a network of bodies connected by and interacting through electrical circuits. Either the universe is a gravity universe or it is an Electric Universe.
And comets are the loose thread.
So... it looks very much like it comes down to all or nothing, either way.
This make change much harder; one can’t really hope to get away with one small change that makes theory fit observation, because the implication is that big masses of theory must change to fit theory with observation, which in turn means that many, many people who are realiant on the more obsolete views are going to be upset and defending them from personal and political interests rather than being open to scientific or reasonable premises.
Instead of science versus error, it really becomes politics versus politics — a frustratingly common and human outcome.
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