Believing is not Seeing
So yeah, so this is a common phrase 'seeing is believing'
but actually what I plan to do is kind of invert this a little bit and...
...here it is...
and talk about instead
about how beliefs get in the way.
And I'm gonna be focused on, in the next 18 minutes, about
how our beliefs impact what we think we see
and the almost infinite capability of really smart people to fool themselves.
Now before I went in doing what I'm doing now
before I went to science, I actually went to fine arts college
and one of the first things we learned in drawing class
was drawing what you see, not what you think you see.
This is maybe not one of my best works but
it kind of shows where we start from as kids
drawing what we think the world should look like.
This is, of course, by da Vinci who saw the world very clearly around him,
perhaps better than anybody before or since.
We often talk about the similarity between art and science
and I think one of the key areas where they're similar is
this conscious effort we need to make to,
to get past, to break through our preconceptions and really, really see.
Now in cosmology and astrophysics and planetary science,
we have a list of beliefs that have evolved and trenched as dogma
that have shaped and driven our collective abstracted view
of what the universe looks around us.
And while these beliefs and dogmas persist,
they impose an intervening filter on what we think we see.
It's a bit like a View-Master of belief, it sort of gets in the way.
And one of the beliefs I'm going to focus on here in my examples is;
this belief, this dogmatic view that the dynamics of stellar bodies
is completely dominated by gravitational and mechanical forces.
That planets and moons and asteroids move through a vacuum,
isolated and electrically disconnected from each other.
This dogma really keeps us from the possibility
that planetary bodies are charged relative to their surrounding space
and that we should expect to see electric currents
flowing between space and the planetary surfaces.
So the examples I'm going give, are examples of energetic surface events
on planets and moons
that in each case are clearly and in accepted ways associated with electrical events
and attributes.
But in each case, the predominant model continues to be
a gravitational mechanical view.
So let's begin, let's look at Mars.
There's, Mars has a continuing fascination and probably no point in history
have we had more new data about what's happening on the surface of Mars.
But what are we seeing?
It was a big surprise when we got there, we saw dust devils.
I mean, how is it in a atmosphere that's 1% as dense of that as Earth
that this rarefied atmosphere can form and maintain these coherent columns of dust?
How is that possible?
Well, actually a clue about dust devils on Mars
came when NASA and university researchers working in the Arizona desert,
discovered unexpectedly high electric fields around these dust devils.
In one example that I read about in their paper,
the electric field around a 7 meter wide dust devil was,
well actually exceeded the measuring capability
of their sensor which is 10,000 volts per meter.
Now in the talk we saw this morning from Michael,
the fair weather electric field is somewhere around 100 V/m.
If it gets up to 2,000 V/m, you're in serious danger of getting hit by lightning.
So, the researchers concluded that a 10 meterish dust devil would produce
an electric field in the range of 10,000 V/m.
Now, that actually exceeds the breakdown potential of the Martian atmosphere.
So that electric field on Mars would be expected to be associated with
various kinds of electric discharge
like arcing between a dust and your spacesuit and your vehicle.
Now keep in mind that the dominant model here is that the electric fields,
these unexpectedly large electric fields are a byproduct of the dust devil.
That is, the saltation is the agitation of the dust and
the dust grains banging together, it's a mechanical thing produced this
charge separation that creates this massive electric field.
This is an example of a Martian dust devil looking down on it.
It's 70 meters across. It's 20 kilometers high.
You see that the vortex is very well organized along its entire length.
Interesting, you know what the electric field is associated with this thing.
This is a video that I found, of a Martian dust devil.
What I was impressed by when I reviewed the various videos of Martian dust devil.
How bright the dust devil is at the base
and it makes me think of what Wal showed this morning
about these electrical volcanoes
about how they get discharges towards the base
and they're bright along the sides and sort of dark in the middle.
This picture is part of a larger image
from the thermal emission imaging system from the Mars Odyssey mission
and this shows energetic vortexes propelling dust into the Martian atmosphere.
This is along the south polar cap of Mars.
Wal Thornhill for some time, has predicted that electric currents
flowing between space and the surface of Mars
would drive these electric vortexes, power the dust devils
and power these kinds of global wide spread storms.
What we're talking about here is the electrical modification of the Martian surface
through individual dust devils moving making dark trails
across the Martian landscape, which is something we see,
to these kinds of widespread storms.
But where does the energy come from, how does it happen?
Well, electric theory would predict that electric charge is accumulated
and stored in a planetary capacitor which is the ionosphere.
This has the potential for planet-altering events
when the atmosphere finally breaks down and massive discharge events occur.
So what we're talking about is electrical energy storage in this atmospheric capacitor
that directly communicates to the surface of Mars through electrical vortexes.
It's the electric field that drives the vortexes
and results in these planet-wide dust storms.
So we would expect to see
massive aggregations of energetic vortexes driving dust storms.
We would expect to see high-altitude, high velocity winds.
But this is what we believe.
So you go onto the NASA website, you do a search on Mars dust devils
and this is the a picture that you see.
So we're talking about a gravitational mechanical model.
Solar heating of the surface causes hot air to rise,
gravitation puts in place convection currents,
horizontal wind comes in, dips the thing up on its end,
and the whirling air pulls the dust and dust grains up
and their saltation and agitation creates the charge separation
resulting in these massive electric fields.
Oh, a few problems with this model.
First of all, it's hard to imagine how solar radiation on the Martian surface
would produce the kind of energy required to drive those electric fields.
It's hard to imagine how the rarefied atmosphere
could actually lift the dust grains up in this whirling
wind, actually do the agitation, the mechanical work,
to create these electric fields.
And how do you get this model to work for these huge aggregation for vortexes
that drive dust so high up into the atmosphere.
Especially when, once the dust storm starts it's kind of self-limiting
because the solar radiation can't get to the surface to keep it driving.
So I would propose here we've got sort of a View-Master effect at work.
But fair enough, let's go look at even more energetic events
on fairly well-documented moon of Jupiter, Io.
So, it's a beautiful picture.
Io orbits close into Jupiter,
inducing something of like about 400,000 volts cross the planetary diameter,
something like a mega-million- ampere current flowing through Io.
This tremendous current flows through the,
flows across the magnetic field into the electrical environment of Jupiter.
It's been accepted for some time that Io is in an electric circuit with Jupiter.
It's well known; it's well accepted.
Well, what do we see?
Well, this is a really famous 5 frame sequence of a 330 km high plume
above the Tvashtar Catena.
What you see is a fairly regular symmetrical umbrella shape.
If you look more closely, you see braids and filaments and knots
making up this umbrella-shaped plume.
Now when these things were first observed,
the model that was proposed was a gravitational, sort of a mechanical model
that is volcanic.
But actually very early on, about 1979, the astrophysicist Tommy Gold
proposed an electrical approach.
He said, these energetic phenomena that we're observing
maybe aren't volcanic but instead it says milliampere current
creating electric arc discharge
where the current concentrates at certain points in the Io crust.
This idea was advanced by Dessler and Peratt in '88
when they likened the plumes to what you observe with this kind of plasma focus device.
And you get the same sort of shape as you would see in those plumes of Io.
Now, there are certain kinds of predictions that fall out in an electrical model.
First of all, the hot spots associated with these plumes should be too hot to be lava.
Second of all, you should see these hot spots concentrated along crater walls.
Wal has predicted that because cathode jets, which is what we're looking at,
would favor those sharp crater walls.
You would expect to see UV emission
which is something that you would get with arc discharge but not with lava.
And these cathode jets would move, they would migrate across the surface
because they're not associated with a physical volcanic vent.
Well, this is a regional scale,
the first regional scale thermal image of NIMS, the device looking at Io.
The upper left-hand arrow is Thor, which is the biggest plume observed up to that point.
You can see the black pixels in the center of Thor
where the pixels are saturated because it's too hot.
And indeed, it was found that some of these hot spots around the caldera exceeded 2,000º C,
in excess of what would expect with lava and we're actually probably hotter
but we couldn't tell because we couldn't measure it.
This is another thermal image showing these hot spots organized along a cratera wall.
Note how evenly spaced they are which is something you would actually expect to see
with cathode jets who tend to evenly space themselves.
UV image.
Upper right hand corner you see Pele in UV
while it's emitting a plume, and it's a UV hotspot.
And the ... of course
is the fact that while the plume at Prometheus has been observed to actually move around
and it's moved about 80 km since the late 70's.
So here we have, okay,
Io is known to be associated in an electric circuit with Jupiter.
There was an actual electrical explanation put forward,
right at the beginning in the late 70's, that this was an electrical event
through electric arc discharge.
We have a whole series of observations that are contrary to volcanic model
but certainly fit with an electrical view of things. And what do we believe?
Well, once again you do a search on the NASA website
for the explanatory model for this thing.
Is volcanic, it's completely gravitational, mechanical.
You've got a silicate lava interior,
it erupts through cracks in this silicate crust,
convection current gets set- up in the sulfur ocean,
this is seeped up over billions of years,
the convection current rips a hole in the sulfur crust
you get hot flows coming out, evaporates the sulfide,
sulfur snow, and you get a plume.
What's interesting is they've drawn the plume, the shape that they observed,
but this model in no way predicts the plume should have that shape.
So, we definitely have the view-master going here
and, in imposing what they observe on something that doesn't really explain what they observe.
Okay well, let's now look at one more moon,
and this is actually, small frozen moon around Saturn, Enceladus.
Small, it's about 500 km across, it's frozen and for such a tiny small frozen moon
you wouldn't expect much going on but actually it's been full of surprises.
First of all, it's a lot hotter in the south pole than really should have been. About
10 times more thermal output, about 15.8 gigawatt.
So 10x more than we expected.
So what's happening there?
We also see that, that thermal energy is concentrated along these fissures
called Tiger Stripes, along the South Pole.
And when you look at those Tiger Stripes more closely,
you see these jets being emitted from those fissures,
look a lot like cathode jets.
But more than that they're really energetic.
I mean, these things are jetting this water, water particles, water vapor,
thousands of kilometers into space.
They look a bit like cathode arcs and you start getting used to seeing what they look like.
They're evenly spaced, as you might expect as well.
Now, where's the electrical current?
Well, in 2008 Cassini detected unexpectedly high proton densities around the moon
and also measured a field- line electron beam.
It was thought that this should create an auroral footprint on Saturn
and a few weeks later Cassini actually imaged an auroral footprint
of Enceladus on the northern Saturn hemisphere.
In 2009, a group of Cassini scientists detected signals that were consistent
with a magnetic filament going from Enceladus to the upper Saturn atmosphere.
So clearly there is an electric circuit here.
So that is an electric circuit, there's things that look like cathode jets
and what do we believe? When we're going to NASA website, you've got the same sort of story,
it's a mechanical model, it's geysers.
This is actually on the Astronomy Picture of the Day.
Well it's not an astronomy picture,
it's an artist's conception of a scientific misconception that this is geysers.
And it's the same sort of model. You have internal heating,
there's no explanation why it's ten times what it should be
through tidal and radioactive heating.
You've got some sub-crust ocean convection currents,
ripping the vent in the ice crust and those vents happen to be,
happen to be shaped like perfect kinds of cylinders
so that you can jet a coherent and collimated jet of water, ice particles and so on.
So yeah, we're back in the View-Master territory again.
So I haven't added any new information
about these energetic events on Mars and these moons.
My fascination is more about this dogmatic adherence
to a gravitational and mechanically dominated universe and,
and what I'm impressed about is the,
again, the infinite capability of really smart people to fool themselves.
And these are literally rocket scientists, I mean, this is NASA, right?
So what I'm learning from this and what I've learned from the work I do,
is that it's the really intelligent, the really smart ones come up with the best View-Masters
through the most sophisticated, complicated and they present the most beautiful images.
What we have to do is keep batting away the view-master
and get people to really see.
That's all, thank you.