[flatline]

He claims that: all modern physicists are intellectually dishonest; Einstein only conducted thought experiments and GR is therefore unsubstantiated; the author is being persecuted for harboring unpopular ideas. I am not a physicist but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which seems lacking here.

[adw]

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html to thread! Falls foul of - at least - points 16, 18 and 24. (Could anyone find any falsifiable predictions, for that matter?)

On a more serious note, the quality of scientific debate on Hacker News is really, really low. Part of it is this community's insistence on contrariness – which comes out in a bunch of weird ways, global warming denialism probably the most prominent – but part of it is a really unattractive arrogant streak which refuses to accept that some issues are just complex. Kind of a Dunning-Kruger effect, really.

(I have no solutions, but it's worth noting).

[kens]

Yes debate quality seems to have dropped. A few years ago HN comments would put a scientific article in perspective and add important insights. Now there are tons of comments with questions at a Physics 101 or Bio 101 or Astro 101 level.

(At least that's how it appears to me.)

[Florin_Andrei]

This forum is growing. The discussion quality is bound to decrease. It's mathematically mandatory.

Happened to every online community I've seen in the last decade.

[juiceandjuice]

While I mostly agree about the contrarian nature of many HN posters, there are more than a few very qualified scientists on HN from varied backgrounds, probably at a higher percentage than any other general online community that I can think of.

[phyllotaxis]

Flatline, read the site. Read the links. I would never spam this site with wacked out bullshit. Look past personality here and read the science of plasma and electricity explaining, repeatedly, many questions that the popular hypotheses simply don't, at least not without creating mathematically abstract "things" that "must be there, except we can't see them, or measure them, or even prove via experiment that they exist. Dark matter and energy, for example. The plasma explainations DO address these things, and to my critical eyes, very compellingly. Just give it your time, and be objectively critical.

[RainFlutter]

The dude thinks neutron stars and black holes are unfindable pseudoscience. You could legitimately claim that there are better ways to interpret the evidence for those phenomena, but claiming that there is no evidence only demonstrates how confused he is about the field.

This site doesn't get past a first-pass bullshit filter, which is why nobody's investing any more of their time on it.

Do you understand how many people come up with "theories" out of left field in exactly this fashion?

[Florin_Andrei]

Oh, the dreaded Black Hole Denialist. It's not a new phenomenon.

Too bad only a few forums allow you to ignore certain members.

[phyllotaxis]

People like Galileo? Einstein? Maxwell? Crick? Pasteur?

I apologize for offending sensibilies here. For those that are actually intellectually curious, I ask you to read the data. Read the data. Read the data. THEN make up your mind.

[Symmetry]

Every advance in science comes from people who challenge conventional wisdom, but the vast majority of people who challenge conventional wisdom end up being wrong.

I did read some of the page, but gave up after it was clear that he thought his "Electric Sky" hypothesis was an alternative to general relativity. It might very well be one could construct a credible argument in some areas, but look at the wikipedia page for tests of General Relativity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity

A new theory can't just provide an alternative to one of those phenomenon or a handful. It must make the same prediction in every single case where General Relativity has been tested and proven right - and then it has to make new predictions where General Relativity will fail. That is the standard by which General Relativity replaced Newton, and by which we would test this if it had any hope of providing a replacement.

It is certainly true that cosmologists are accumulating puzzles and I expect that sooner or later we'll get a new theory that can resolve them. But this theory can't even explain the old puzzles that brought down Newton.

[phyllotaxis]

Look, I've been reading the same science you have been for 25 years. I have excitedly followed every development from Hawkings discovery of black holes to Feynmans physics work to all the various string theory, dark matter, red-shift big-bang, etc...

I've been reading the same things as you have. I believed them too, as far as one can without any hard evidence. Even the people in this line of work tell you they have ideas, but few facts. When I found this, it seemed to actually answer, in a lab, no less, some things that common astrophysics can not explain. And it does it coherently, in a methodology that can be observed in a lab. I love science as much as you guys do, and I think you ought to at least acquaint yourself with the plasma sciences, as they are amazingly explanatory of observed interactions both here and in deep space.

I'm not playing zealot here. Take the info as you will. But when I see a scientific explanation that stands up to scientific-method scrutiny, I believe it deserves to be considered in relation to other hypotheses that claim to explain events in a conflicting way.

[Symmetry]

You mention that you think EU stands up to scientific-method scrutiny. I was looking through the site and I wasn't able to find any examples of a place where EU makes a correct quantitative prediction about some phenomenon where conventional cosmology is unable to?

Also, how would you use EU to quantitatively predict how the orbits of planets diverge from what Kepler's laws would predict, or how the time measurements aboard GPS satellites diverge from clocks on the ground? Or was the page you linked to wrong in claiming that EU disprove's Einstein's relativity?

[phyllotaxis]

I'm writing from a phone, unable to write with any depth. See this list of papers written on the topic

http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/papers.html