Eric Lerner's Focus Fusion Device Gets Funded

pln2bz writes "Eric Lerner, author of The Big Bang Never Happened, has received $600k in funding, and a promise of phased payments of $10 million if scientific feasibility can be demonstrated to productize Lerner's focus fusion energy production device. Unlike the Tokamak, focus fusion does not require the plasma to be stable, does not produce significant amounts of dangerous radiation, directly injects electrons into the power grid without the need for turbines and would only cost around $300k to manufacture a generator. Lerner's inspiration for the technology is based upon an interpretation for astrophysical Herbig-Haro jets that agrees with the Electric Universe explanation."

summary

[j1m+5n0w]

It looks like the tech talk is slashdotted, but if memory serves (and I'm not a physicist, so my understanding is fuzzy at best) the idea is that the device (which has some resemblance to a large spark plug) sits in a chamber of has a large electrical current applied and exploits a sequence of unstable states to produce a small ball of plasma where the fusion takes place. The reaction produces X-rays and a directed stream of charged particles. The X-rays are collected by a sort of multilayer onion-like solar panel that converts them to electricity, and the charged particles also get converted directly to electricity. The device can be relatively simple since there's no need for steam turbines. A steady stream of electricity can be produced by repeating the reaction over and over, and storing the output in big capacitors (and part of the resulting energy is used to initiate the next pulse).

Re:Electric universe

[FleaPlus]

Has the electric universe theory made any headway in offering a viable alternative to currently accepted cosmology? Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking.

Nope... as far as I've been able to tell, the electric universe "theory" is still purely in the realm of pseudoscience, being touted by various internet quacks. Of course, many of its proponents also believe that the empirical scientific method is some sort of outdated relic of a bygone era, so I'm not really sure what sort of standard they should be judged by. I'm actually really curious about where CMEF [cmef.eu], the organization which gave Eric Lerner the $600 million in funding, got its money from. Their website doesn't seem to have that info, although it looks like they're trying to raise private funds via the interweb.

not really new but it's interesting

[wizardforce]

the p+B11 reaction [the one described here] forms 3 He nuclei [p+B11=C12 which splits into 3 He4] all the products are charged opening up an extra route of power generation that isn't solely thermal to electrical conversion however the reaction produces about half the energy per reaction of deuterium/tritium reaction and much higher energies to cause significant fusion.

Re:Electric universe

[drerwk]

Your astroid field would be made of Baryonic matter. The current expectation is dark matter is non-baryonic. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon#Baryonic_matter [wikipedia.org]
So dark matter actually does not interact with the photon field.

Re:Electric universe

[Broken Toys]

Dark matter and cosmic inflation may prove to be incorrect theories but to say they're illogical demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of these two theories.

The argument for dark matter, in its simpliest form, states that owing to the gravitational effects we observe in the universe there must be a lot of matter we can't measure. There's nothing "magical" about that.

Re:Electric universe

[mollymoo]

When I was doing my physics degree the big question was: Is dark matter WIMPS or MACHOs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or MAssive Compact Halo Objects). You're talking about MACHOs. Even if we can't see these objects, we do know where they must be, so if it was asteroid fields or dead stars of little black holes we can calculate how much light they would absorb and see the larger ones as they passed in front of stars, even if we couldn't see them individually. There have been many studies looking for them, but no evidence has been found. WIMPS have pretty much won that one. We've not seen any WIMPs either, but MACHOs are well understood so we know exactly what to look for so if it was them we'd expect to have seen the evidence.

All this is assuming dark matter really exists. I'm still still not wholly convinced. Basically all our long-distance measurements of gravity give the wrong answer. Even our longest distance solar-system probes (the Pinoeers) give the wrong answer, though that data isn't really good enough to be wholly convincing. Are all these answers wrong because there is hidden hidden matter (and energy, woo hoo!), or is GR just not a good enough approximation at those scales? Eric Lerner thinks it's all about plasmas.

Re:Electric universe

[Bloater]

Interestingly, the theories that might make this work have very little do to with the electric universe. Eric Lerner was doing some theoretical work looking in more detail at some aspects of cosmological plasma and got some inspiration from it - but we're talking about two separate things.

Unfortunately Eric Lerner keeps bringing the cosmological plasma thing up, he somehow got it into his head that associating his current work with that will make him more credible :/

Re:Electric universe

[Geoffrey.landis]

"Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking."

Yep.

Correct. Read the page; it's seriously wack.

Contrasting nicely with "dark matter" and "cosmic inflation" which are mainstream science based mainly on conjecture and magical thinking.

These are not only two completely different things, they are two completely different kinds of things.

Dark mater is an experimental observation. It's not a theory, it's an observation. There are various theories of what dark matter is, or for that matter of what other possibilities might explain the observations, but dark matter itself is an observation that needs to be explained by a theory; it's not a theory.

Cosmic inflation is a theoretical concept which looks like it could explain some observations. It's not accepted as any kind of a confirmed theory yet, but it is well accepted as a candidate for a theory that might, with some additional experimental confirmation, become a reasonable model.

Re:Exactly the right approach.

[seven of five]

Actually it probably won't. JET did, but ITER is just an engineering prototype and proof of concept. It is intended to test the technologies to make a fusion power plant work and be maintainable. The physics is done already.

From what I gather, the physics ain't done for ITER. ITER's another test bed for the physics, to attempt to show that breakeven can be achieved for a tokamak, and be done in a fairly continuous fashion. The plan was, if ITER was successful, to attempt to build a prototype power plant. After that, in, maybe another 30 years, they might build a real power plant.

The thing is, with a useful plant lifetime measured in months, due to neutron damage, the utilities have already said it's not economical and they don't want anything to do with it.

Another project that died for a lack of $200K

[InterGuru]

The Trisops [wikipedia.org] project.

It produced plasma stable structures which were then compressed. If was de-funded before it could be proven ( or disproven ).

Disclaimer: I worked on it.

Re:Electric universe

[frieko]

Please don't confuse Creationism and ID. Creationism is a spiritual belief. ID is a collection of "scientific evidence" invented to "prove" Creationism, and is therefore neither religion or science.

Alternatives are making headways!

[Plasmania]

It is really interesting to know that someone is willing to buy in to Lerner's plan. The rest of plasma physics community world are going to be thrilled by this development. Lately, exciting news concerning discharge based plasma technology are coming rapidly. At Sandia, the refurbised Z machine is up and running, Sandia is teaming up with the Russian to develop some next generation pulse generator using LTD technologies. The Plasma Focus guys in Warsaw are busy in some ICTP Trieste's initiatives on Plasma Focus, even in Singapore and Malaysia, there is a computational symposium on Plasma Focus being held. Not forgetting the Chillean group and also some remnants research groups scattered all over Europe. Definitely, things are not going to be the same. It is also feel good to know that people are looking for alternatives other than the gigantic ITER.

Re:Good technology, bad researcher

[neomalkin]

My wording in the earlier post was a bit strong, I suppose. I compared a mature technology and approach to fusion to one that hasn't really been verified. There just hasn't been much stock put into the plasma focus approach in some time. US and international attention has been focused on magnetic confinement and laser or x-ray inertial confinement. It's been about four years since I've looked at the dense plasma focus as a fusion device, but as I recall the problem is that it takes a beam-cold target approach. It is difficult to reach the temperatures necessary to achieve a significant fusion burn in this way. The plasma cannot be considered thermonuclear, as the neutron distribution is not isotropic - this was one of the bones we had with Mr. Lerner's conclusions, as I recall. There are still a lot of questions about confinement as well. The plasma constrained by its own magnetic fields, so it fits in this sort of odd category between inertial and magnetic confinement. In terms of pulsed fusion, to me the Z-pinch method holds a bit more promise, as we understand a great deal more about how x-rays contribute to confinement and burn. This isn't to say the plasma focus can't achieve fusion - because it certainly is capable of that, and it can be done cheaply, it's just that the work to show that it can scale up has never been completed.

Think critically

[jandersen]

Eric Lerner is described in Wikipedia as "a popular science writer, independent plasma researcher and an advocate of plasma cosmology" - IOW, not actually a scientist, although he may well be knowledgeable; he has a BA in physics.

However, what really makes me think twice about this is the claim that they achieve fusion without any radioactive by-products, "only harmless Helium gas". How does one produce such a precise result in an environment that is "several billion degrees"? At that temperature the atoms will move about a bit, to say the least, and we are not even talking about pure deuterium; there will be highly energetic collisions all over the place, and a large amount of particle radiation will be produced, as far as I can see, and the reactor casing is bound to become radioactive.

This has all the hallmarks of a bogus project that has succceeded in milking some funding out of some gullible soul - in this case CMEF, a Swedish startup.

Once you get the suspicion that this is yet another bogus project, you begin to see signs all over the place: superficially it looks as if they have got some government grant in the US, that Eric Lerner is a scientist, and that the company is some well-established research-company (a search for "Lawrenceville Plasma Physics" on Wikipedia redirects to the article about "Eric Lerner") - IOW, the announcement is deceptive; if this was real, they wouldn't need to deceive.

And then of course there is the claim that "electrons are injected directly into the powergrid" based on some cosmological phenomenon, that is not yet well understood scientifically. In a Superman comic, perhaps, but not in real life. This is simply a flight of fantasy, unbound by the boring, mundane routine of real scientific research.

Re:Nonsense

[famebait]

Besides, what dope thinks fusion causes dangerous radiation to begin with?

Are you saying you have a realistic design that doesn't?

Re:Electric universe

[Maury Markowitz]

If it can't "feel" the electromagnetic force, which is 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity, how can it "feel" gravity?
[snip]
How can it be, that modern, supposedly educated, "mainstream" cosmologists ignore the much powerful force of electricity in the operation of the universe? How can it be that modern cosmology tries to explain the operation of the entire universe by the operation of the weakest force of nature?

Yeah, those silly scientists, what a bunch of dummies!

Oh wait, right... since EM is the strongest long-range force, and the universe is ~13 billion years old, all free charges would have already neutralized _because_ the force is so strong. It's so much stronger than gravity, in fact, that it would have neutralized as soon as it cooled off enough for atoms to form, and gravity would be unable to stop it.

Maury

Re:Electric universe is wackier than string theory

[mhall119]

Radio astronomers have mapped the interstellar hydrogen filaments by using longer wavelength receivers. The dense thicket formed by those filaments produces a perfect fog of microwave radiation - as if we were located inside a microwave oven. Instead of the Cosmic Microwave Background, it is the Interstellar Microwave Background. That makes sense of the fact that the CMB is too smooth to account for the lumpiness of galaxies and galactic clusters in the universe.

By their explanation, the radiation levels would not be uniform in every direction, but instead would have peaks and valleys depending on the density of the interstellar gasses. The Big Bang model predicts a uniform distribution of radiation in every direction, regardless of the presence or lack of galaxies, and the observed data matches those predictions. Sounds like this guy doesn't understand black body radiation as well as he should.

Re: Distance Revision & Dark Matter?

[mollymoo]

Even if we re-estimate the size, the shape of the rotation curve (how fast things are moving relative vs distance from galactic centre) is still wrong, if we assume most of the stuff is visible (emits or absorbs light). Irrespective of our estimates of the size and distance of galaxies, the observed rotation curve means one of: a) GR is wrong. b) There's a hell of a lot of stuff we can't see (a lot more than we can see) and it's distributed differently (in a halo around galaxies). c) Forces other than gravity play a much larger part than current consensus theories suggest. The shape of galactic rotation curves was the original evidence for dark matter.

Re:Electric universe

[Abcd1234]

No-one has yet observed any dark matter, so it is just still a theory.

They haven't? Weird, because I'm pretty sure the Bullet Cluster [wikipedia.org] is pretty damn close to direct observation of dark matter. Heck, in the wake of the BC results, even the MOND folks have had to admit that there must be at least *some* dark matter out there.

Re:Exactly the right approach.

[TallDave]

Bussard's Polywell approach is pretty promising, and is being funded by the Navy at the moment under a contract that finishes up in August. There's lots of discussion of the concept here:

http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php [talk-polywell.org]

There's some talk that an attempt to build a Polywell reactor similar in power to ITER might be funded if current experiments go well. It would cost about 1/100th of what ITER would.

Re:Electric universe

[susano_otter]

I agree, and it's got to be better than some of the things the US Army has invested millions of dollars in, like the "gay bomb".

Except that the US Army didn't invest millions of dollars in any such thing. What it did invest maybe thousands of dollars in was a brainstorming session on variety of possible chemical weapons. What they got were essentially the meeting minutes of that brainstorming session. That document indicates that, among other things, a chemical aphrodisiac was considered.

Nowhere is it even remotely suggested that a "gay bomb" was seriously considered for development, approved for funding, or even prototyped on spec.

Re:This seems far more interesting. . .

[TallDave]

"In particular Bussard claimed that the monoenergetic velocity distribution in the plasma was periodically restored without input of energy."

Ion upscattering was addressed pretty conclusively by Chacon here:

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PHPAEN000007000011004547000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes [aip.org]

"In spherical Penning fusion devices, a spherical cloud of electrons, confined in a Penning-like trap, creates the ion-confining electrostatic well. Fusion energy gains for these systems have been calculated in optimistic conditions (i.e., spherically uniform electrostatic well, no collisional ion-electron interactions, single ion species) using a bounce-averaged Fokkerâ"Planck (BAFP) model. Results show that steady-state distributions in which the Maxwellian ion population is dominant correspond to lowest ion recirculation powers (and hence highest fusion energy gains). It is also shown that realistic parabolic-like wells result in better energy gains than square wells, particularly at large well depths (>100 kV). Operating regimes with fusion power to ion input power ratios (Q-value) >100 have been identified."

Here was Bussard's take:

"Ions spend less than 1/1000 of their lifetime in the dense, high energy but low cross-section core region, and the ratio of Coulomb energy exchange cross-section to fusion crosssection is much less than this, thus thermalization (Maxwellianization) can not occur during a single pass of ions through the core. While some up- and down- scattering does occur in such a single pass, this is so small that edge region collisionality (where the ions are dense and âoecoldâoe) anneals this out at each pass through the system, thus avoiding buildup of energy spreading in the ion population (Ref. 14). Both populations operate in non-LTE modes throughout their lifetime in the system. This is an inherent feature of these centrally-convergent, ion-focussing, driven, dynamic systems, and one not found (or even possible) in conventional magnetic confinement fusion devices."

You don't necessarily need to add energy to reorder a system, if reordering puts things back to their lowest energies. Consider some balls lined up at the bottom of a V-shaped well. You disorder them, they bounce around in the V but reorder at the bottom of the well again because that's their lowest energy point. It required energy to disorder them, but no additional energy was added to reorder them.

Re:Electric universe

[RockDoctor]

Do you know why your inner ear has those three little bones that are so important to hearing? It has them because those were the jaw bones of reptiles, and they just happened to be in basically the right place that they were a few gamma-rays away from being detached.

So... reptiles can't hear?

That's not what the poster said, and nor is it what he (or standard evolutionary theory) meant.

It's an observational fact that most reptiles today (birds excepted) don't have terribly good hearing, and often augment their hearing by laying their skulls along the ground. The physics are analogous to the oft-seen techniques of placing your ear to a railway line to try to hear a train coming from some distance away, or putting a screwdriver to the valve gear of a pump as a crude stethoscope. So, it is thought that primitive reptiles, including the ancestors of mammals, dinosaurs (including birds), snakes, lizards, turtles and other modern reptiles, all listened to the outside world with their skulls laying on the ground. As jaw structures changed in some animals, this freed-up some lower-jaw bones to continue their hearing function separate from their tooth-support function. And that is how mammals ended up with what are (developmentally) jaw bones or gill arches in their ears.

But then again, since ears and pretty much every other skull bone not involved in the braincase are developmentally gill structures, is it any surprise to find jaw bones (gill structures) intimately associated with other gill structures.

(I'm sure you know much of this already, but letting the lies of creationists go unchallenged is one way of letting them continue to pollute the minds of otherwise intelligent people.)

Re:Electric universe

[spun]

Oh please. Scientists DO NOT ignore the electrical force. How can you say that? Scientists are not some cabal dedicated to preserving sacred theories, if anything, each scientist wants to make a name for himself, and if they can overturn prior theories, they will be remembered for all time. But they have to prove themselves, and bluster and bullshit won't cut it.

As for your question regarding electromagnetism, I'm astounded by your ignorance. Does a magnetic field affect neutral particles? No? Even though gravity does? Impossible, right? I mean, matter is matter, and it has to be effected by all four forces, right? Photons 'feel' all four forces, right?

No. You have an incredibly poor understanding of basic physics, and any skepticism you have regarding current physics theories could easily be cleared up with some basic college level courses.

Electric Universe proponents are not a bunch of brave rebels fighting against the evil "government funded" scientific oligarchy. They are nut cases who do not understand basic physics, and therefore can not even argue against it correctly.

Scientists do not deny that electrical fields are important in cosmology, rather, they understand them much better than EU idiots. Scientists do deny the basic, and incredibly moronic premise of EU theory, namely that stars are electromagnetic rather than nuclear phenomenon.

Re:Electric universe is wackier than string theory

[Rei]

That's the cosmic microwave background radiation that they're trying to explain, not the structure of the cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropy. A "dense fog" doesn't cut it.

Re:Electric universe

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not, but then this is not about particles, but about objects of huge numbers of particles.

Your argument sounds like this: "Yeah, but what if I had a whole bunch of neutrons? I bet if you had enough, they'd have a net charge." Clearly not the case. As for plasmas themselves, the principle of superposition illustrates that no matter how many neutral constituents you add up, you still have a neutral object.

All objects as a whole can and do carry charge which gives rise to electric fields between objects with different net charge.

But the charge neutralization provided by a pervasive space plasma prevents them from maintaining a charge imbalance!

Of course, photons and other neutral PARTICLES don't "feel" the electric fields, but any charged particle, atom, asteroid, planet, star, galaxy etc. can and would thus be influenced by the electric force.

But there is no potential difference among those objects. Even if imagine that an (say) a comet has some different charge than the sun, a) the total electrostatic force exerted on the comet by the sun is small next to the gravitational force exerted on the comet by the sun, b) there is no mechanism to give rise to such a charge imbalance, and c) the charge imbalance felt by the sun and comet would be felt much more strongly by the charge carriers in the solar wind, and they would neutralize. You could save (a) with an enormous potential difference, which is what Don Scott tries to do, but there is no evidence that this is the case nor that other implications are the case. As I said, there's no mechanism for it in the first place. There's no escaping (c), and no evidence that the effect even comes up.

Most current cosmological models ignore the electric force.

This is because electromagnetism doesn't affect mechanics at cosmological distance scales. In turn, this is because the dimension of the plasmas in question scales much faster than the dimension of their characteristic charge imbalance.

This is why fictitious, never observed constructs such as dark matter and energy are invented, in order to explain the data coming from modern instruments.

No. Those concepts are quite different and are inferred from different (i.e. non-circular) observations. The universe appears to behave as if there is more mass in it than we can see, and furthermore that that mass is non-baryonic.

By the way: "fictitious, never observed constructs" is pure rhetorical bullshit, and you should know it. Give it a rest.

If the electric force is included WITH gravity, these constructs are no longer needed to give a reasonable interpretation of the observed data.

Have you done these calculations? Thornhill likes to point out that he's been working on it for 40 years or something like that, and he has never produced any such calculations. Neither has Don Scott, nor any of the others in the EU camp. They've produced a lot of hand-waving and words though, and flatly deny all analysis that illustrates why the EU idea isn't actually what's going on in the universe.

The "deep impact" probe to comet Tempel 1 on July 3 2005 showed a definite bright flash of an electric arc, before the second flash of the actual impact.

No, it didn't. Thornhill would love you to believe this (he might even believe it himself), but that analysis was just more EU spin. The results of the mission, including all X-ray production and spectroscopy, were both predicted by the "normal" understanding and confirmed in subsequent analysis. You never hear Thornhill or Talbott or any of those guys talk about those aspects. To hear them tell it, anyone could see they were right and establishment science was wrong just by looking out the window when the experiment was conducted.

Re:Exactly the right approach.

[Anonymous Coward]

It explains that the sun is not a thermo-nuclear fusion device. If the sun were heated from the inside out, its corona would not be three million degrees and the surface only 6000 or so. We know that heat always flows from the hotter region to the cooler area.

No; it's energy that flows away from the part it is released, not heat. A more subtle and powerful way of understanding this is the concept of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics.

How is it that a 6000 degree solar surface manages to produce 2 to 3 million degrees of heat from a 6000 degree source?

Answer: it's because the energy density decreases the farther one examines away from the photosphere. It works just like anyone would expect, but this seems lost on Don Scott.

If the sun were energized by fusion we should be able to measure a commensurate number of neutrinos coming from the sun. The problem is that we don't see even a tiny fraction of the neutrinos that should be observed.

But we do observe the correct number of neutrinos. We know this from theory and experiment. If you're referring to Scott's "rejoinder", I'd like to point out that the only way he can claim we don't observe the necessary number is by denying that we can know anything about the sun without going there, in situ. The neutrino oscillation theory was supported by the neutrino observations, and then further supported by yet more subtle observations of the nature of the oscillation itself.

If you think 1/3 is a "tiny fraction", that's just rhetoric and doesn't do anything intellectually to increase the weight of the argument. If by "tiny fraction" you are referring to the fact that our instruments only detect a small fraction of the neutrinos that pass through it, that's just complaining about the instruments' lack of sensitivity. You should know better.

So far, we have only been able to make bombs that produce a surplus of energy for a very brief amount of time. If the sun and all the stars were run by fusion, they could not produce a stable flow of energy over time.

Non-sequitur. Just because we are having difficulty controlling the process does not mean that the process is unstable. If we had a heap of hydrogen that weighed 10^30kg all confined to a single sun-sized area, we would have no trouble making a stable fusion reaction lasting about 10 billion years. If we divided it up into 2 or 3 (maybe 4) balls, we could have that many dimmer fusion reactions that would last at perhaps hundreds of billions of years. Fusion is the most stable reaction in nature. Electrostatic discharge is chaotic, and looks all the more so in comparison to fusion.

It is very humbling to realize that we don't REALLY know what makes the sun shine, any more than the ancients knew.

It is more humbling to realize that though we do know what goes on in the hearts of stars, there's still more about the universe that we don't know. ("Ancients"? They didn't have spectroscopy, hydrogen bombs, quantum mechanics, particle accelerators, helioseismology, space probes, or even mathematics depending on your definition of "ancients". We do, and we've figured out how the stars work.)

We have theorized a better, more powerful fuel than a giant wood or coal fire, but there is evidence that this is no more correct than what the ancients thought.

No, there is only the imagination of the EU proponents; not evidence. You don't get to come up with a theory (that doesn't work) and then call that evidence against what everyone else thinks; that's not how science works or what it is.

There is evidence that our sun, as all stars are are the focal points of immense, invisible electric currents flowing through galactic and intergalactic space.

In the same spirit, there is "evidence" that the sun is a giant coal fire in the sky, or instead that it is a huge ball of plasma

Re:Electric universe

[Anonymous Coward]

The dark matter did not interact, simply because it doesn't exist. There is nothing physically observable and the fictional dark matter "didn't interact" because nothing cannot interact with something.

That's begging the question. You would never convince anyone who believed that God created the universe by saying "God couldn't have created the universe, because God doesn't exist." That's just rhetorical bullshit.

If present cosmological models accepted the existence of electrical interactions between the large structures of the Universe, then there would be no need to postulate dark matter in order to explain the observed motions of the galaxies and the stars within them.

That's the second time you've made that claim, and it's still wrong. Read through your replies and either address the issues they raise or be quiet and think until you can.

Many of the so called "mysterious" objects in space, detected in recent decades, such as quasars, energetic jets, and other highly energetic phenomena, fit the idea that powerful electric currents and the attendant magnetic forces are at work in ADDITION to the much weaker force of gravity.

No, they don't. There are lots of independent properties of these objects that point toward the "standard" ideas and away from the EU ideas (such as pulsars and black holes, for example).

I've noticed that you seem to take every opportunity to stay "gravity is weak, electromagnetism is strong". Who do you think measured the relative strengths you quote? These things are well-understood, and there isn't any difficulty fitting them into modern cosmology. Saying these things 2 of every 3 posts doesn't drive the point home; it illustrates your lack of knowledge on the matter and underscores the weakness of your overall argument.

Why postulate exotic gravitationally derived phenomena occurring in the depths of space, to account for the data we observe[?]

We do not have a 2*10^30kg ball of hydrogen to play with in a lab; those behave in ways that "lab size" plasmas do not. Same for solar-mass nuclei and multi-solar-mass clouds of gas and dust light years across. Those things can compress under gravity until they fit within their Schwarzschild radius.

...there are simpler explanations which can be tested in the any high voltage lab.

There are simpler effects we can observe in laboratory conditions, but they do not "explain" what we observe in space. Maybe when you ask an electrical engineer about astrophysics, all he knows to talk about is electricity, and this problem is compounded if he's wrong, and it's compounded further if he doesn't understand the physics illustrating why, and compounded still further if he doesn't understand how science actually works (that is, why it works).

To illustrate this problem, look at what you said about "testing" what's going on in space by doing stuff in a lab on Earth's surface. Scott claims that we can conclude that certain effects seen in distant space match electromagnetic effects we observe in a lab. He also claims that we cannot know what is happening in the core of the sun without going there (see his "rebuttal" about the stellar neutrino problem). Which is it? Can we or can we not make inferences about things in space based on everything we know?

That's without regard to the fact that there are reasons to believe that certain explanations we have dreamed up are not those responsible for what's happening in space. From reading the EU stuff, I'm uncertain how great a role each of the following plays:
1) dilettantes are simply unfamiliar with the breadth and depth of observations supporting the standard ideas and disconfirming their own speculations
2) the inability of the dilettantes to apply mathematics and scientific thought correctly to understand the standard solutions, or to solve the problems in the first place
3) the unwillingness of the dile

Re:Electric universe

[Anonymous Coward]

However current cosmology essentially ignores the role of the electrical interaction of matter in the workings of the large scale universe.

It does not ignore electromagnetism, because it cannot afford to. The only thing we have work with is the light we receive from them and our mathematical extrapolation from what we can observe about Nature.

I think that the EU theories offer plausible, simple explanations for the otherwise needed exotic and convoluted mathematical contortions of much of present day cosmology.

It doesn't. I'm sorry for that, but Nature is under no obligation to be easy to understand or pleasing if we do understand. What you think as convoluted is elegant and simple to another beholder.

I cannot understand WHY there is such a resistance to also considering the electrical nature of matter in trying to come up with simpler models.

Part of it seems to be that you take Scott/Thornhill/etc. as reliable reporters of how modern cosmology works; they don't understand it either. It might be because they are unable to do so, haven't bothered, or just didn't like it. Working astronomers/astrophysicists/etc. object to their claims because the claims are wrong; not because there is a conspiracy or because they don't understand the claims or are stupid or anything like that.

We have made large scale fusion happen right here on earth. It's called the H-bomb.

Hydrogen bombs are not "large-scale" in any astronomical sense. They are not efficient because confinement is so brief, and they release only a tiny portion of the energy they might release if they were really efficient. It's a reasonable amount of energy you might talk about releasing from a reactor in a controlled way, but even then it's not "large-scale".

We know the components, energies and particles involved and produced by fusion.

There are many known fusion processes and venues. Some happen in stars, some happen in large stars but not small ones, some happen in hydrogen bombs, some happen in one kind of (as-yet unprofitable) fusion reactors, some happen in another kind of fusion reactor. They have different processes and occur under different physical circumstances.

We have made, in effect miniature H-bombs via inertial confinement experiments involving the firing of powerful lasers at the constituents needed for fusion.

In the sense that fusion was involved in both, they are similar, but otherwise that's not an apt analogy.

We know from experiments, not mathematical theories, exactly what is produced and how much from the fusion reaction. We ought to see these fusion products, if indeed the sun is really a large fusion device.

*and* we expect the same kind of fusion in the sun, *and* our neutrino detector is sensitive enough, *and* I arbitrarily disallow the use of any theory that illustrates what the results actually mean and so on.

Since we do NOT see these products...

But we do, in fact, detect results which were predicted by the idea of stellar fusion. Don Scott is not a reliable source for mainstream astrophysics.

...there is a very large question as to whether the sun REALLY is powered by thermonuclear fusion.

Hardly. A stellar-mass ball of hydrogen gets very hot at the center (because the gravity piles up) so that fusion occurs whether we have a sufficient neutrino detector or not.

That combined with the measured fact that the solar corona is so much hotter than the surface sheds further doubt on the theory that the sun is powered by fusion happening deep within.

I already addressed this in an earlier response, so I'll just expand here. The energy density at the corona is lower at the corona than at the photosphere, and at the photosphere than at the core, which is as we would expect. There's no way to put a stellar-ma