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At a recent NASA news conference investigators on the New Horizons mission
to the dwarf planet Pluto announced some astonishing findings.
The moons in the Plutonian system behave in an extremely chaotic manner
that planetary scientists admit is both unexpected and inexplicable.
The term investigators have used to describe the moons' motions is 'pandemonium'.
As New Horizons Co-investigator Mark Showalter recently stated,
"We honestly have not seen anything like this before
and we still don't know what to make of it".
In fact, this is only the latest of numerous
unexpected discoveries in the Plutonian system.
Wal Thornhill explains the significance of these findings for the Electric Universe theory.
It's pandemonium out there!
So, says Mark Showalter a Co-investigator on the New Horizons mission to Pluto,
which made a close fly-by of Pluto in July.
Investigators found the orbits of Pluto's for smallest moons
are even more chaotic than scientists had expected.
"The way I would describe this system is not just chaos but pandemonium",
he said at a news conference on 9 November 2015.
"We honestly have not seen anything like this before, and we still don't know what to make of it".
The new results show that, as the four moons orbit Pluto and it's largest
tidally locked moon Charon, some of them are spinning incredibly fast.
One is spinning backward against it's orbit and some are tilted on their sides.
This is in stark contrast to nearly every other moon in the solar system,
most of which are locked into a more rigid and unmoving orbit around their
parent bodies, making Pluto's smaller moons the wild children of the solar system.
The four smaller moons were only discovered recently between 2005 and 2013.
Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists showed earlier this year (2015)
that the four moons are not tidally locked around Pluto and Charon,
and that the system might be somewhat chaotic.
But, now that more data have come down from New Horizons,
scientists say things in the system are beyond disorganized, and it's unexplainable.
Showalter said during the news conference that scientists expected to see
little wobbles in the orbits of the four moons,
but instead they're seeing extremely rapid rotation.
Hydra, the most distant of Pluto's moons, is spinning once every ten hours
during its 38-day cycle around Pluto, which means it spins 89 times every orbit.
"If Hydra was spinning much faster, material would fly off it's surface
due to the centrifugal force", Showalter said in a statement from NASA.
During the news conference, he said the other moons are rotating more slowly,
but at a rate of six to 10 rotations per orbit around Pluto.
"This is unprecedented, we simply have not seen a satellite system that does this".
In addition to these rapid rotations, Pluto's second closest moon, Nix,
is tilted on axis by 132º, and is rotating backward.
Showalter clarified that it is not impossible to imagine that the moons
would spin so rapidly following a collision with another object.
What is so mysterious is that all four objects are spinning rapidly.
It's difficult to imagine a collision that would affect all four of them.
And, that the gravitational pull of Pluto doesn't appear to have slowed them down, he said.
Typically, the gravity of a parent body would dissipate the planet's rotational motion,
and yet, that's not what we're seeing so that's really the puzzle,
Showalter said at the news conference.
"The question is why [don't they] slow down?
It's not so much why [are they] so fast.
There's clearly something fundamental about the dynamics of the system
that we do not understand", Showalter said in the statement.
Collisions are a favorite excuse of astrophysicists for a wide variety of
puzzling phenomena, varying in scale from galaxies to comets.
That's to be expected from a paradigm based on gravity
as the governing force in the universe,
but with Pluto's moons we see the collision excuse stretched beyond breaking point.
As I said in an earlier Space News about the New Horizons discoveries
of unexpected geology on Pluto and it's moon Charon,
"Forget the soporific 4½ billion year bedtime story -
the solar system has captured bodies in the memory of mankind.
And with this dramatic new picture in mind,
we have the means to really understand Pluto and it's satellites".
In this way, we can simply understand how chaotic motions
imparted to Pluto's four smallest moons in a recent many-bodied capture event
have not had time to be tamed by Pluto.
Additionally, the lobed appearances of Kerberos and Hydra
confirm what I said about Comet 67P in another Space News, and I quote,
"There must be a process that forms the doubled-lobed shape naturally".
I then presented the electric discharge in dusty plasma as a tested prototype mechanism.
It doesn't seem to matter how many successful predictions,
or simple coherent explanations, the Electric Universe concept offers
for all of the surprises attending the old way of thinking - nothing changes.
Why is that so? The discoveries by the New Horizons mission expose the
problems in the way science is taught, which affects the way it is practiced.
The spectacular success of the New Horizons mission is down to the advances in
engineering and technology during the 20th century, meanwhile
astronomy remains basically in the 'gas light and horse and buggy era'.
The result is surprises everywhere astronomers look.
Current theories are non-predictive and have become so complex and adjustable as to
be unfalsifiable - they have failed - they should be classed as 'failed hypotheses'.
Of course, this won't happen because students today are
fed a century old creation myth about the universe,
and the history of science is sterilized and distorted to fit the myth.
No time is given to study the real history,
and consider the dissidents and alternatives that were discarded.
So, when we hear again and again from scientists presenting new discoveries
that "it's back to the drawing board", there are no fundamentally
challenging new concepts like the Electric Universe to call on.
Without a more complete conceptual map, alternative possibilities are unavailable.
The drawing board remains practically untouched, excuses are dreamt up
to ask for more funding and problems are quickly forgotten.
Of course, this behaviour is not necessarily deliberate
because science education has failed them.
Under these circumstances, science doesn't even progress,
as someone said, "funeral by funeral, it stops".
History shows that it can be stopped for centuries.
The education of scientists must take into account human behavior.
The educational psychologist Dr. Harry Lyndon has introduced with colleagues,
a process called the Conceptual Mediation Program (or CMP) to successfully
address cognitive behavior in the teaching of science, mathematics and physics.
On the final year high school science examination results,
CMP students outperform both the school and state norms.
From one of the CMP papers, I quote "The primary goal of science educators
involves helping young people to acquire scientific knowledge with greater facility,
to achieve a deeper level of understanding in their studies,
and for these understandings to be lasting.
It has been established that a universal problem in schooling concerns
the fact that science learning is evidently difficult for most students.
A general conclusion is that even students who are successful in examinations
are unable to retain and apply scientific concepts".
CMP learning procedures enhance personal awareness
of learning strategies, and thinking about thinking.
The learner is actively encouraged to
a) form accurate verbal discriminations - something that is notably lacking in science;
b) talk oneself through a sequence by which one source of knowledge replaces another;
and c) maintain a level of vigilance and self-monitoring,
at least until new knowledge is fixed in place to a degree of satisfaction.
Involvement of students in the clash of ideas is highly motivating.
In a study at the University of California, Berkeley,
three groups of students were given the same task to come up with creative
ideas to reduce traffic congestion in the San Francisco Bay Area.
As Matthew Syed writes, "The first group were instructed to brainstorm.
They were warned not to criticize each other or point out the difficulties
in each other's suggestions - blockages were bad, negative feedback a sin.
The second group was given no guidelines at all -
they were allowed to come up with ideas in any way they thought best.
But the third group were actively encouraged to point out the flaws in each other's ideas.
The results were remarkable. The group with the 'dissent and criticize' guidelines
generated 25% more ideas than those who were brainstorming, or who had no instructions.
Just as striking, when individuals were later asked to come up
with more solutions for the traffic problem, those with the dissent
guidelines generated twice as many new ideas as the brainstormers.
Further studies have shown that those who dissent rather than brainstorm
produced not just more ideas, but more productive and imaginative ideas.
These findings argue against 'think tanks' and large science organizations
comprised chiefly of peers, and in science publishing peer
review denies and stifles dissent, and slows progress.
The unexplainable 'pandemonium' of Pluto's moons will not be understood without
conceptual mediation where the researchers actively participate in thinking about
their thinking, comparing their old ways with a new way of conceptualizing the problems.
As Syed says, "Progress is often driven, not by the
accumulation of small steps, but by dramatic leaps".
Of course, we might expect 'pandemonium' right here on Earth when it is realized
how badly our global monoculture of modern science has botched things up.
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