Letters to the Editor: China, Post Offices, and The Electric Universe

Hi, I'm Louise, Motherboard's Editorial Fellow. I'm happily writing to you this morning while eating an everything bagel, which brings me to the guy who impersonates a bagel on Tinder, with whom I chatted this week.

Bagelman reminds me of why the internet has always amazed me: it gives us endless opportunities to toy with our own identities, and to become part of wonderful, obsessive communities concerned with just about everything imaginable.

Thank you for being part of ours. This week, we looked at how to think about bots, and checked in on the failed attempt to crowdfund a sex toy revolution. All the while, we reported on Apple's ongoing scruff with the FBI, and wrote about the controversy over the alleged development of a new search engine brewing at the Wikimedia foundation.

Most importantly, we read your letters. Here are our favorites.

RE: The People Who Believe Electricity Rules the Universe

Dear Ms. Scoles:

While I am in general agreement with your presentation of the mindset / beliefs of the Electric Universe enthusiasts, their description of cometary phenomena -- complete with verified / verifiable predictions -- does seem to comport with a great deal of recent observational data. Indeed, as compared to the established Whipple "dirty snowball" model of solar heating and outgassing, the electric discharge model of cometary behavior would seem to have a lot to recommend it. A good, concise statement of the "electric discharge" model of comets with an overview of the evidence supporting this view can be found at: Electric Comets Re-write Space Science

Although I have some qualms about many of their tenets -- nuclear fusion in stars, for example, doesn't exist and planets like Venus are spat out by Jupiter and periodically go careening around the Solar System, only to settle into almost perfectly circular orbits! -- they do seem to be doing "good science" in terms of making detailed predictions about cometary phenomena and then comparing the predictive accuracy of the two theories. The EU model of cometary behavior, in particular, covers everything from the unexpected presence of X-ray emission to the curious surface ablation seen in recent spacecraft imagery, not to mention the close resemblance of cometary jets and shells* (which provide the classic visual aspect of comets) to electric arc discharge phenomena.

*A valuable resource in thinking about this problem is the NASA publication, Atlas of Cometary Forms: Structures Near the Nucleus (NASA SP 198, 1969). This book, as advertised, is a compendium of drawings and photographs of the complex outgassing phenomena of comets. If nothing else, the pictures are simply beautiful to look at. Long out of print, this book does turn up occasionally on eBay and on Amazon and can probably be found in most university libraries.

Actually, the kind of electrical interaction between comets and the solar EM/plasma field seems not in the least "controversial" -- just straight forward, well established physics of the kind that Birkeland was writing about over one hundred years ago Comets: Kristian Birkeland's theory - (The Plasma Universe Wikipedia-like Encyclopedia) -- but this approach to thinking about comets never became "popular" or part of mainstream science.

Some Earlier Mainstream Support for the EU Model of Cometary Behavior

In Sky & Telescope (Vol. XIX, No. 2, Dec. 1959, pp. 74-78), for example, the noted astronomer, Dr. Otto Struve discusses the strange, tail-shedding behavior of Comet Morehose 1908 III and some of the problems with current theory of that era. Even more interesting, at the very end of the article (in the last paragraph), he suggests that (electro)magnetic effects associated with comets are "not fully appreciated" and -- most telling of all --

"Probably the alternative theory of H. Alfven (summarized by Wurm in Handbuch der Physik, 52, 509, 1959) should be explored in greater detail."

Now Prof. Struve was no "fringe scientist" or crackpot. Indeed, he was one of the most respected astronomers of the day, and anything that appeared in Sky & Telescope (published in conjunction with the Harvard College Observatory) was as establishment as it gets. Although I have not yet taken the time to do this, it would be very interesting to see what else Dr. Struve had to say about Alfven and his work in the context of astronomy.

But Can the EU Alternative Model of Comets Get a Fair Hearing?

The problem, of course, is that the overall EU theory -- complete with its wandering, spat out planets and plasma discharge-powered stars -- is so provocative that nobody wants to take it seriously, even if the part of it that deals with cometary behavior may indeed offer a better explanation of some observed phenomena than the standard model does. It would be nice, or so it seems to me, if some legitimate cometary researchers could "decouple" this potentially useful part of EU analysis from its larger body of fringe science theory and apply it -- as Thornhill, et al., would advocate -- to advance our theoretical knowledge of comets and possibly make better predictions about their behavior. In short, to do the normal work of science.

Yours sincerely,

Milt Hays, Jr.

Jacksonville, FL

RE: Being Wrong About Fundamental Physics Is Pretty Exciting Too

Re: your 2-21-2016 article on the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment. You said, in part: "… but results from a different lab, this one collecting data on anti-neutrino detections in Japan, remind us of the other side of things: being wrong. What the Japanese results indicate is …"

The Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant and the Ling Ao NPP are both located in China. None of the collaborating institutions listed in the paper are located in Japan, and none of the researchers has a Japanese name. All of the anti-neutrino detecting stations are located in China. The final paragraph of the paper is a thank you note to the governments and universities of China, and also to US, European, Russian, and South American universities and team members. No Japanese universities, government organizations, or collaborators are mentioned.

In short, the experiment was a Chinese Experiment, and a collaboration of numerous Chinese Universities, with some collaborators from the US, Europe, and South America.

I realize that the difference between Japanese and Chinese may not seem important, and is sometimes confusing, especially since the Nobel Prize for physics in 2015 went to a Japanese researcher for discovering that neutrinos have mass. But a quick check of the paper, the authors or the institutions involved would have shown you that it was China, not Japan, conducting this experiment.

Please issue a correction, and try to verify the countries involved the next time you are covering asian activities.

Thanks.

Jack Strahan

Hi Jack,

Thanks for catching that one for us. We really appreciate when readers let us know when we didn't get something quite right. The story has since been updated, and we regret the error.

-Louise

RE: Why Is the Post Office Still a Thing?

Apparently when writing this article no research was done. The only reason the post office is "losing ' money is the government mandate to prefund future retiree health benefits far above and beyond the level of sanity and any other company in the world. If congress would stay out of trying to manage the post office then they would break even or show a profit. Ask the congress where the prefunded non tax dollars are. As for Saturday delivery, all the polls taken were around larger cities where most people escape on the weekends to get away from the hassle of a busy life. The rural areas still depend on delivery of medicines and other needed materials and information.

-James R Daughetee, Somerset, KY

RE: Three Big Mysteries of Human Evolution We Still Don't Understand

you are not alone in this, but please learn the correct forms for scientific names if you are going to write science articles. It is Homo sapiens and it should be underlined or in italics (not allowed here). Homo is ALWAYS capitalized…sapiens is not. There are other conventions as well.

Thanks! Steve E

Hi Steve,

Good point. We've fixed the error. Thanks for pointing it out.

-Louise

That's it for this week. If you want to share your thoughts with us, we'd love to read them. You can contact us here.