But there are so many flaws with the standard model, too, right? There is almost daily an article about something that astronomers are "perplexed" about and can't make sense of it.
I am not necessarily a proponent of the EU theory, but I see how it makes very elegant predictions and has a framework that "makes sense". Of course there is a lot of criticism against this model (as it should be in science), but it's not like they aren't aware of this or are ignoring it: https://www.everythingselectric.com/electric-universe-debunked/
I think this whole debate actually reveals more about the process of how we learn as a human species about our world. And as it has been pointed out science in specific is rarely a linear progressive path towards more understanding. Instead, it seems to evolve in scientific revolutions in which established ideas and theories have to be fundamentally revised according with new empirical evidence.
There are issues with the standard model of cosmology, for sure. However, when you account for the issues and compare with what is correctly predicted, it is the best setup on the market. On many aspects, it makes very precise predictions that can be compared with very precise data: it works. In addition, this is the simplest model. So a lot of great predictions from a few basic principles and some free parameters.
On the other hand, from my understanding, the electric universe does not make really any quantitative prediction. The page you linked actually goes in that direction: only words, videos, no quantitative statement. I would like to see one of the proponent using the theory to quantitatively derive its signature. This has never been done. For that reasons, most scientists simoly discards it. When something does not work, it does not work and one should move on. It is good to try things, but it is also good to move on when they do not work.
Personally, I have more interests in theories of modified gravity at large scales (that are now in quite big troubles after the discovery of the gravitational waves by the way, but they can still resist in some ways).
This is what a lot of people would want to see. Although there is work in that area. For example, a paper by Donald Scott "Birkeland Currents and Dark Matter":
http://www.ptep-online.com/2018/PP-53-01.PDF
I guess what fascinates a lot of people, myself included is especially the qualitative aspect of the theory. And I think one should not dismiss a theory purely on methodological grounds. It is a new way of looking at human history (mythology) as well as the space that surrounds us. Of course we don't have to throw the gravitational model out of the window, as it works very well in describing e.g. the movements of planets in our solar system as well as many other things. But there are other phenomena like comets which very strongly support the basic ideas of the EU model. It has made many predictions about them which have been proven to be very accurate and they would seem to point to the electrical nature of the universe at large.
The paper you mentioned provide an explanation for the motion of the star velocity profile. But what about the structure of the galaxies, the cosmic microwave background, gravitational lensing, etc. Dark matter does much more than that.
If one wants to change a paradigm, it is better to propose something that does at least as good as the paradigm one aims at changing. This is not the case here.
Now back to the paper that I quickly read (I won't spend too much time on this, sorry... see above). They explain the velocity curves by currents. But they don't provide any potential source for those currents. So not only the model is not as good in trying to explain all observations, but it has some big problems....
To come back to the second part of your comment. It is nice to understand qualitatively what is going on. Sure. But at the end of the day, one needs to work out the maths and see whether data and theory agree. Science is not qualitative.
I think a lot of people working in the departments of social sciences, history, linguistics, philosophy, or even medicine would disagree with that statement. Science at its core is about finding truth and learning about our world with a system that removes human biases as best as possible (at least to my understanding). As such the perhaps currently dominant method of the natural sciences is yet one example of how to achieve this.
Thanks for looking over the paper at all, really appreciate it.
Which is something that the standard cosmology completely failed at. Only with the invention of dark matter as an ad hoc hypothesis could the orthodox model be salvaged. That is, astrophysicists postulated the existence of "fairy dust" for which there is zero empirical evidence to fit the empirical data (the motion of the star velocity profile) to their theories. But in science this should clearly be turned around: theories should adapt to observations.
Worse even, dark matter can never really be falsified which is an essential component within the framework of critical rationalism and will therefore continue to be patched up by more ad hoc hypotheses when scientists should perhaps be asking themselves a more fundamental question: is our main theory (the gravity only model) still correct?
Actually, just to pick out the first one "the structure of galaxies" the EU model does a really great job in predicting it. There is also the curious (at east for mainstream astrophysics) phenomenon of stars forming along "like beads on a string" for which the EU has a very elegant answer.
Ha! and for standard cosmology it could be said: "give me one miracle (the big bang) and I'll explain the rest" :) True, we don't currently know the source of these galactic currents, but we clearly know so little about the universe at the moment that it would be a miracle if we'd have an answer for this already.
Ok I rephrase myself: I discuss "hard" sciences only here... Those must be quantitative.
I disagree with this statement. If you take Newtonian mechanics and the observation of visible matter, we have a disagreement. There are two ways out: either one modifies gravity at large scales (those are the MOND theories) or we add up some invisible component to matter (this is dark matter).
Each option succeeds more or less in explaining other things without changing anything. How can you claim this fails at doing anything? This is ignoring both predictions and data. Taking the dark matter paradigm, one explains the velocity curves by introducing dark matter, and as a result, we get the CMB, galaxy formation, and so on for free. For now, the dark matter paradigm is the one that is the greatest success, without ruling out MOND.
This statement is incorrect. Dark matter models can be falsified. One takes one specific model and get a variety of predictions that can be confronted to data. Many dark matter models have hence already been ruled out. It is just a matter of testing all possibilities, and this takes time. What is actually missing is a direct observation of dark matter, which is why many experiments are focusing on that. We may get there one day, or not. Who knows?
This by the way contrast with the EU theory that does not predict anything new. In this sense, this is not even a "theory" in the definition of the term.
To go back to the paper you mentioned, one relies on some huge currents to explain the velocity curves. Great. But what next? Show me quantitatively how those currents do as good as any other paradigm. I have not seen anything. Moreover, while I can live with dark matter or MOND, I cannot feel comfortable with huge currents populating the entire universe...
To finish this topic: I do not know any EU paper to have been published in any reasonable journal. This means this setup has never passed the peer-review bar. A potential reason may be that the EU setup ignores a lot of things that have been tested to the highest level (and there are many).
To conclude, mainstream science is not closed to new ideas. Several of them appear regularly. Those new ideas must however pass a few tests to be accepted. This has never been the case for the EU theory.
Thanks for having this discussion and conveying your viewpoint (that made a coupe of things more clear for me as well).
Like I said I am not necessarily an EU theory/model proponent as I do realize there are quite a few problems there as well. Perhaps let me just go into one more point:
Within the sociology of science I think it has been rather clearly demonstrated that science is not an objective undertaking. Human biases play a role here which not only calls into question the idea that "hard sciences" can offer insights into an objective reality (independent from the observer), but it also looks at the way how institutionalized science (unconsciously) creates and upholds paradigms and legitimized world views. This is also why I am skeptical of claims regarding the peer-review system. To quote P.M. Robitaille
I always like to discuss, even of controversial topics as this one, provided the discussion is polite. It is unfortunately quite rare when one enters this slope.
Well. This is quite a very general statement and while it may be correct in some cases, it may also be wrong in other cases. For instance, in particle physics, we have independent open-access journals that are not held by big editors and where the peer review system is also publicly available. How could we make it more transparent than that? But again, this is one case and we should not generalise. I just wanted to show with one example that nothing is either black or white.
Any finding needs to be replicated. This is the essence of the scientific method. However, the lack of independent validation should not be a reason not to publish a work (if no obvious fault is found).