A debate about comets

1. Have you read Tipler's "The Physics of Christianity"? I think you might find more accommodation with him if you did.

2. You state that your career led you into space plasma physics so I have a question (that probably can't be reasonably answered in short-form, and perhaps you've already addressed it elsewhere): what do you think of plasma cosmology? Legitimate avenue of inquiry or crank-bait?

I hadn't realized that Tipler wrote another book. The Immortality book was depressing, in the sense that Tipler went the route of Whitehead instead of Faraday, but perhaps his later book is an improvement.

The only plasma cosmology that I am familiar with was written by Hannes Alfven back in the 60's, and wasn't all that radical. Especially when you consider that Alfven is the only Nobel prize winner in the field of space physics. The novelty was telling cosmologists that they had missed a lot of physics by ignoring plasmas. And despite the passage of 50 years, it is still true, judging by the scathing review I received from my astrophysics proposal 12 years ago.

If you have a different reference you might refer me to, I'd be happy to look at it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cosmology

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=plasma%20cosmology &tag=opera-20&index=blended&link%5Fcode=qs

Yes, I know, it's Wikipedia, but it's a reasonable jumping-off point for further study, should you be so inclined. (There are also a number of books on it at Amazon, but the couple I've read seem to approach the topic with an almost religious zeal and, naturally, there isn't a whole lot of peer-reviewed material out there.)

That said, it strikes me mostly as crank-bait since the proponents of it, from what I've read above and beyond the Wiki page, are militantly anti-Big Bang. (And I mean it: these guys, if you dare engage a lot of them in reasoned discussion, sound like hardcore Darwinists when you mention the Big Bang, and their books cannot simply explicate the theory but have to, at every opportunity, slam Big Bag cosmology--it almost comes across as pathological.)

I'm not sure what all the excitement about plasma cosmology is based on. Alfven, who invented the field of MHD plasma, had lots of controversial ideas about the influence of plasmas on stars, galaxy and planet formation. Some of his ideas have worked out, some didn't. At the time, he tried to buttress the standard theory of cosmology of the time, "steady state", against the attacks of creationists and their 3-degree blackbody radiation data.
It wasn't all that surprising, seeing as Sir Fred Hoyle also didn't want to let go of steady state either, and Alfven was probably a more flagrant materialist than Hoyle.
But like many of Alfven's ideas, this one didn't pan out, though elements of it have been incorporated in everyone else's theories. Frankly, I think Alfven and Hoyle's biggest contribution was deflating other people's arrogance. But they were wrong about cosmology.