Liquid Plasma Photosphere * Ty (Solar) at this post on the Round Sun thread http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&~ linked to the Liquid Plasma Star Model at http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2007/PP-08-12.PDF, which I find to be probably very informative and relevant to Electric Sun discussions. As I understand the LPSM, the photosphere is not a gas, or a gaseous plasma, but a liquid hydrogen plasma, because gases don't boil and don't have distinct surfaces, except perhaps where they contact a liquid or solid, and the density is homogeneous at the density of liquid hydrogen. - So Michael Mozina's model agrees with the liquid plasma, but not with the hydrogen. And Charles Chandler's model agrees with the hydrogen, but not the liquid aspect.
The LPSM says: [L]iquids are essentially incompressible and … their compressibility decreases quite dramatically as pressure is increased. … The liquid plasma model of the Sun is better suited to explain the presence of seismologic activity on the surface of the Sun. … While sparse gases and plasmas are able to sustain longitudinal acoustic waves, they are unable to support transverse seismic waves. Terrestrial seismology is limited to the study of the oceans and the continents. The Earth's atmosphere is much too thin to enable such studies. … The production of a continuous blackbody spectrum is incongruent with an origin from a low density source. … There are numerous arguments supporting a liquid plasma model. These include: (1) the continuous nature of the emission spectrum, (2) the average density of the solar mass, (3) the gentle oblateness of the solar sphere, (4) the presence of a distinct solar surface, (5) the presence of surface ... waves and helioseimology studies, (6) the known existence of hydrogen on Earth in the liquid metallic plasma state at high pressures and temperatures, (7) the existence of solar boiling, and (8) the presence of the corona, transition zone, and chromosphere. In addition, the liquid plasma model provides for the mixing of solar materials, resulting in important evolutionary consequences for the stars. At the same time, the liquid plasma model addresses the issue of coronal heating and helps to resolve the thermodynamic problems in this area.
Photosphere Temperature = 7 MK * The LPSM says the temperature of the photosphere is actually probably about 7 MK, but liquids store energy in ways that aren't currently detectable at distance, so the 6,000K measurement is wrong.
[I]t is hypothesized that the presence of translational and rotation degrees of freedom can cause a liquid to report a much lower temperature than its real temperature, when the laws of thermal emission are utilized to monitor its emission spectrum. … [Solar convection] currents contain translational energy which is not readily available for thermal emission. However, during flares and other eruptions, it is well-known that X-rays can be released from the solar surface. These X-rays reveal brightness temperatures of millions of degrees. In this case, the translational energy of the liquid envelope is being converted to thermal photons in a manner revealing a stored energy bath with temperatures well in excess of 6,000 K. … A liquid photosphere with a temperature of 7.0×10^6 K could be generating photons not at X-ray frequencies, as expected, but rather in the visible range. This occurs because the photosphere has convection. Since most of the energy of the photosphere is tied up in the translational (or rotational) degrees of freedom and its associated convection, it is simply not available for the generation of thermal photons. However, this energy can become available during a solar eruption which reveals that the real temperatures of the solar photosphere are well in excess of 6,000 K. … [T]he idea that radiation pressure is present within the Sun is not in accordance with the known mechanisms of heat transfer within objects. There is no experimental basis on Earth for invoking that an object can strive for internal thermal equilibrium using thermal radiation. Conduction and convection dominate heat transfer within objects. A liquid model is more apt to deal with heat transfer through these two mechanisms, since it provides increased density, facilitating both more efficient conduction and convection. … Photons do not take millions of years to leave the Sun. Rather, they are solely produced and released at the photosphere using a mechanism common to all condensed objects on Earth.
* Doesn't heat consist of infrared photons which would be produced internally?
Thermal Nonequilibrium
- [T]he lack of local thermal equilibrium for the interior of the Sun is consistent with observations of nonequilibrium in the solar corona, where significantly different electronic and ionic temperatures have been detected. Nonequilibrium within the corona may well be a manifestation of the state of the entire star. … The photosphere is clearly not in thermal equilibrium with an enclosure. Furthermore, it possesses convection currents rendering it unsuitable as a candidate in blackbody radiation. … [I]t was improper for Langley to set a temperature of the photosphere at 6,000 K simply because a thermal emission spectrum was present. The proper assignment of a temperature based on thermal arguments depends on the known presence of a perfectly absorbing enclosure, namely a solid graphite box. Langley's use of Planckian arguments to set a temperature for the photosphere constitutes a violation of Kirchhoff's law of thermal emission. The presence of local thermal equilibrium is central to the assignment of any temperature based on thermodynamic arguments.
* Is thermal nonequilibrium due to electric discharges that produce localized heat?
Nuclear Reactions
- [I]n the liquid plasma model, nuclear reactions are free to occur throughout the solar body, as a result of the nearly uniform solar density. … The liquid state can maintain the nuclei involved in nuclear reactions in close proximity with constant mixing, thereby providing a significant advantage in achieving efficient nuclear burning. Conversely, within a solid core, the flow of reacting nuclei is greatly hindered. … As a result, the composition of the photosphere becomes an important indicator of the composition of the entire star, since convection now acts to equilibrate the entire solar interior.
* Would electric discharges produce the nuclear reactions? Would they be feasible in a liquid plasma hydrogen star? See Radioactive Decay below.
Solar Structures
- It is noteworthy that when hydrogen is shock-compressed, and thereby submitted to extreme pressures (>140 GPa) and temperatures (3000 K), it is able to [What?] under pressure ionization. In so doing, hydrogen assumes a liquid metallic state, as revealed by its greatly increased conductivity. … As a result, metallic hydrogen should be able to assume a variety of lattice structures, with varying interatomic distances, in a manner which depends primarily on temperature and pressure. It is likely that future extensions of these findings to liquid metallic hydrogen will enable the calculation of various possible structures within the liquid phase itself. This may be important in helping us understand the nature of Sunspots and stellar luminosities, particularly when magnetic field effects are added to the problem.
* Could solar moss also be such a lattice structure?
Star Formation
- What if stellar formation is initiated not by gravitational collapse, but rather by the slow condensation and growth of a star? Star formation would be initiated in extremely cold matter, wherein two atoms first make van der Waals contact. Given the low temperatures, if their combined kinetic energy is not sufficient to overcome the force associated with the van der Waals attraction, a two-atom system is created. A third atom would then join the first two and so on, until a larger and larger mass is created. The latent heat of condensation could be dissipated by radiative emission. … Hydrogen would be converted to a liquid metal plasma, when a critical value for the mass and pressure is achieved. This would correspond to a mass on the order of the Jovian planets (since they are currently theorized to be liquid metal plasmas). As the forces of gravity begin to dominate, the mass of the star would grow until the internal pressure and temperatures become high enough to provoke nuclear ignition and the birth of a new star. A significant advantage of this approach is that stellar formation takes place at low temperatures. Cold hydrogen is permitted to condense and ignition occurs only once a given stellar mass is reached.
* What is the nature of van der Walls attraction? Would electric discharges help this model of star formation?
Increasing Radioactive Decay Rates
- Creationscience.com said: Beta decay rates can increase dramatically when atoms are stripped of all their electrons. In 1999, Germany's Dr. Fritz Bosch showed that, for the rhenium atom, this decreases its half-life more than a billionfold—from 42 billion years to 33 years. The more electrons removed, the more rapidly neutrons expel electrons (beta decay) and become protons. This effect was previously unknown, because only electrically neutral atoms had been used in measuring half-lives. … Neutrons in a nucleus rarely decay, but free neutrons (those outside a nucleus) decay with a half-life of about 14.7 minutes! Why should a neutron surrounded by protons and electrons often have a half-life of millions of years, but, when isolated, have a half-life of minutes? This is similar to what Fritz Bosch discovered: stripping electrons from atoms accelerates [radioactive?] decay, sometimes a billionfold. Again, for reasons that are not fully understood, the electrical environment in and around nuclei dramatically affects their stability and radioactivity. … Since February 2000, thousands of sophisticated experiments at the Proton-21 Electrodynamics Research Laboratory (Kiev, Ukraine) have demonstrated nuclear combustion and have produced traces of all known chemical elements and their stable isotopes. In those experiments, a brief (10^-8 second), 50,000 volt, electron flow, at relativistic speeds, self-focuses (Z-pinches) inside a hemispherical electrode target, typically 0.5 mm in diameter. For the most part, the relative abundance of chemical elements produced corresponds to what is found in the earth's crust. … At electrical breakdown, the energies in the surging electrons were thousands of times greater than 10–19 MeV, so for weeks after the flood began, bremsstrahlung radiation produced a sea of neutrons throughout the crust. Subterranean water absorbed many of these neutrons, converting normal hydrogen (1H) into heavy hydrogen (2H, called deuterium) and normal oxygen (16O) into 18O. … The Ukrainian experiments … show that a high-energy, Z-pinched beam of electrons inside a solid produces superheavy elements that quickly fission into different elements that are typical of those in earth's crust. Fusion and fission occur simultaneously, each contributing to the other—and to rapid decay.
* Would such fusion and fission be likely in the LPSM as well?
CharlesChandler
Re: Liquid Hydrogen Plasma Star Model
Robitaille's model is quite useful, in terms of both concepts and information. I agree that the Sun is much more dense at the surface than the standard model asserts. But the LPSM has the entire Sun as liquid hydrogen, and I can't get there. The main reason is that helioseismology detects two distinct boundaries within the Sun, one at .27 and the other at .7 of the solar radius. If it was all hydrogen, there wouldn't be anything to cause the helioseismic shadows that we see at these depths. That's why I'm going with heavier elements inside the Sun (hydrogen & helium in the convective zone, iron & nickel in the radiative zone, and platinum & osmium in the core). This produces the same 1.41 g/cm3, while also setting up distinct differences in density that will produce the helioseismic boundaries. But like the LPSM, I have hydrogen at a high density running all of the way up to 4,000 km below the limb, and much thinner plasma in the granular layer.
Lloyd
Re: Liquid Hydrogen Plasma Star Model
* I hate when I write a thread headline that doesn't get much of any response, especially on such a seemingly major find. I wish the dummies who designed this forum would give us the freedom to change our opening headlines.
Goldminer
Re: Liquid Hydrogen Plasma Star Model
Lloyd wrote: * I hate when I write a thread headline that doesn't get much of any response, especially on such a seemingly major find. I wish the dummies who designed this forum would give us the freedom to change our opening headlines.
Instead of name calling, why don't you politely ask one of the moderators to change the heading. Moderators have tremendous power you know; almost like God! Of course, now that you have offended them, I hate to think of your fate! Try the PM button in the user control panel.
Solar
Re: Liquid Hydrogen Plasma Star Model
Charles:
Firstly, I also like aspects of your solar model and, like Mozina's site, have read your website a few times. I'm also rather large on electrostatics being involved and the potential for phase transitions which speaks to other 'states' of matter possibly being present below what can be thus far seen as regards the Sun.
Have you given consideration, owing the concept of supercritical fluids (I actually prefer "condensates"), to the possibility that the sun exhibits the quality of having a layer of 'super currents' along the lines of the BCS theory of Superconductivity?
I simply don't get how all of these elements and forces can become 'centralized' without some, if not several, forms of phase-transitions occurring. Your model shows this gravitationally stratified but electrostically governed 'layering' which I find interesting because it requires several DL's. For me, the idea of phase-transitions was formed from reading the works of Harold Aspden which you seem to have incorporated with your use of Feyman's "like-likes-like" approach. Here is Aspden's take which led me to the conclusion that phase-transitions would seem to be a natural consequence although Aspden doesn't say this. As a result I keep an eye on "condensed matter physics" and the concept of potential mixtures forming DL electrostatically governed 'condensed matter stellar colloids' as opposed to hard and fast 'layering':
The Sun's Energy Source Firstly, though the sun is almost wholly composed of hydrogen atoms which no doubt have the relevant equilibrium mix of protons and deuterons, I do not see 'cold fusion' as a process that heats the sun. My book makes it clear that hot fusion requiring a core temperature of a hundred million degrees is out of the question. It is impossible because the sun is ionized which means that its gravitation, almost wholly that between protons which account for most of the sun's mass, must set up a positive electric charge in the sun that precludes its compaction. I was pleased, after my book was published, to be informed by the U.S. publishers of a book by Donald E. Scott entitled The Electric Sky bearing the caption A Challenge to the Myths of Modern Astronomy that I was not alone in having recognized this fact. However, I was somewhat perplexed when finalizing this account on 3rd May 2007 upon reading in the U.K. newpaper, The Times an obituary of Professor Carl Friedrich Weizsacher, which declared that:
'He was best known for his solution to the fundamental problem of astrophysics: how stars can radiate immense amounts of energy for billions of years. In 1938 he suggested that the energy comes from a chain of nuclear fusion reactions that is possible because of the high temperatures and pressures found in the dense central cores of stars.'
One can but wonder how Weizsacher had measured the pressure and temperature at the centre of a star, if he was not just basing such presumption concerning pressure and temperature on the assumption that they were necessary to trigger a fusion reaction. Surely here is a 'myth' of modern astronomy, given the fact mentioned on page 148 of my book CREATION: The Physical Truth, the reference to the suggestion by J. H. Jeans in the journal Nature at page 101 of 2 June, 1904, as later elaborated in his book EOS: Or the Wider Aspects of Cosmogony published by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, Ltd. in 1928. Jeans declared that it was the mutual annihilation of protons and electrons that accounted for the sun's energy and the whole of that 1929 book was devoted to that subject. I will just quote here a passage from page 28 of that book:
'The temperatures in the interior of stars are higher still, and although we cannot measure them directly we can calculate them with very fair precision. The temperature at the centre of the sun is found to be in the neighbourhood of 50,000,000 degrees, and this is a fairly average temperature for the stars in general.'
It was only one page later that Jeans declared that 'at the centres of most of the stars nearly all, or perhaps quite all, of the electrons must have broken loose from their parent atoms, leaving the stellar matter almost or quite pulverized into its constituent nuclei and electrons'. So, why did Jeans not then realise that those positively charged nuclei carried the mass that accounted for most of the sun's gravity force and so must have caused those atomic nuclei to set up a mutually repulsive electric field that would preclude further compaction and so then implied a uniform pressure and temperature within the sun? It is, indeed, quite shocking that physics has got itself in so confused a state concerning the sun's energy and what could become our future energy resource. It is especially shocking when we consider that the book by Jeans was in its third reprint in January 1929 and was an account of the Trueman Wood Lecture delivered in U.K. before the Royal Society of Arts on 7th March, 1928. Yet we are told in 2007 that Weizsacher in 1938 'is best known for his solution to the fundamental problem of astrophysics, how stars, like the sun, radiate immense amounts of energy' thanks to nuclear fusion of its atoms. – "Physics with Aspden"
This is why I subsequently found Robitaille's model interesting overall "the sun is ionized which means that its gravitation, almost wholly that between protons which account for most of the sun's mass, must set up a positive electric charge in the sun that precludes its compaction." H. Aspden
I don't see how phase-transitions can be avoided in such a scenario.
Also, I don't put much stock in "Heliosiesmology":
The accuracy of the Born approximation for magnetic perturbations has been tested by Gizon, Hanasoge & Birch (2006) using the exact solution for waves impacting a mag- netic cylinder in an otherwise uniform medium. For a one kilogauss magnetic field, the Born approximation would ap- pear to be valid except close to the solar surface (the first few 100 km). The assumption of small perturbations breaks down in active region sub-photospheres. At this point a treatment of the strong perturbation regime is needed, a ma- jor topic of current research. A very good account of the types of problems encountered in the magnetoseismology of active regions is provided in this volume by Cally (2007) using an extension of ray theory to magnetoacoustic waves.
Also, I don't put much stock in "Heliosiesmology": -Solar
Helioseismology utilizes waves that propagate throughout the Sun to measure, for the first time, the invisible internal structure and dynamics of a star. There are millions of distinct, resonating, sound waves, seen by the doppler shifting of light emitted at the Sun's surface. The periods of these waves depend on their propagation speeds and the depths of their resonant cavities, and the large number of resonant modes, with different cavities, allows us to construct extremely narrow probes of the temperature, chemical composition, and motions from just below the surface down to the very core of the Sun. ... Convolution by the PSF is included./quote]
Comparison of oscillation periods, predicted from solar models, with observations is expected to produce an accurate measurement of the helium abundance of the Sun; this will place bounds on cosmological models of the early universe, and may help clarify the solar neutrino deficit. At present, we can only guess at the nature of stellar convection. For stars like the Sun, essentially all of the energy released by fusion in the core is brought to the surface by convection currents whose large cells cannot be seen at the surface. However, these cells should perturb the oscillation periods in a distinctive way that will enable us to not only detect them but also to measure their properties. We similarly have no knowledge, from observations of flows at the solar surface, of how the rotation changes with depth and latitude in the interior, although rapid rotation would alter the evolutionary history of the Sun and similar stars. Rotation imparts a clear signature - a splitting - to the oscillation periods, and the first, albeit crude, measurements of the variation of this crucial stellar attribute throughout the interior convincingly demonstrated the power of helioseismology. We do not even have a firm grasp of the origins in the solar interior of the most easily seen of all solar features,sunspots, which are closely associated with solar activity and solar-terrestrial effects. Once again, helioseismology should detect the influence of these cool, magnetic islands in the otherwise horizontally homogeneous Sun.
Since the Sun is a ball of hot gas, its interior transmits sound very well. It is generally believed that convection near the surface gives rise to vigorous turbulent flows that produce a broad spectrum of random acoustical noise (Goldreich and Kumar 1990). The dominant part of this noise is in the subaudible range with periods in a two-octave span centered on five minutes.
In contrast to the pulsations found in most traditional variable stars, they are essentially non-radial oscillations
.
The rafts of assumptions and convolutions of calculations don't inspire a high degree of confidence in the conclusions, do they ?
wot's this?
CharlesChandler
Re: Liquid Hydrogen Plasma Star Model
Solar wrote: I also like aspects of your solar model and, like Mozina's site, have read your website a few times.
Please let me know any comments and criticisms you might have. This ain't a spectator sport, ya know! The work that I've done in solitude, though necessary, has moved at a snail's pace, but the learned criticisms that I've received have advanced my work at the speed of lightning. From this and other endeavors I've become convinced that online collaboration is an unbelievable force multiplier, and it would be simply ludicrous to overlook this potential, especially when considering a project as big as solar theory. So I'm getting ready to put out a general call for criticisms. A lot of people know that I'm working on a model, but few know how detailed it is, and realize the significance. Somewhere in the pursuit of an understanding of something, a framework emerges that gets everything to make sense. Usually when you "think" that this has happened, the next new fact doesn't make sense, and the framework has failed. But when it's been a while since any new information caused any problems, you start looking even harder for problems. If you still can't find any, after assimilating a lot more information, eventually you start thinking that the model is succeeding beyond chance. If there was a fundamental problem with the framework, it just never would have been able to assimilate that much information. Well, I think I'm approaching that point. I've test-crashed a lot of theories, some of them right here on thunderbolts, as you've seen. But the charged double-layer model is starting to look like the successful condidate. So now begins the most tedious and the most open-ended aspect of the endeavor: to go over more and more literature to see where each piece fits into the model. This is where collaboration is unbelievably valuable, as everybody is already familiar with some aspect of the literature, and can easily suggest where it might fit it, if they are also familiar with the model in question.
And this is the right time to be doing this work. The Electric Universe is, indeed, approaching a "tipping point." The holes in the standard model are becoming blatantly obvious to more and more people, and they're looking for alternatives. If past experience is any guide, people will come here first, as we are the leading alternative. But there are problems in the existing electric theory of the Sun. Juergens thought that the Sun was the anode, and the heliosphere was the cathode, and that a flow of electrons into the Sun was the source of the energy. But the predictions of that model never matched up with any observations. If there was a flow of electrons into the Sun, it would get pinched into a discrete channel, and the footpoint would be the brightest spot in the sky. Yet such a footpoint has never been observed. So really, Juergens' model was "just" an alternative to the mainstream, and equally as problematic. Yet with the Sun as the cathode, and the heliosphere as the anode, everything makes sense, and you can just keep cramming more and more info into that framework, and the "cash value" just keeps increasing.
The signficance of the timing is that if most people are adhering to the mainstream view, and some are branching off and looking for an alternative, and if you come up with an epiphany, you can get some of those people to move into your camp. But if there is a large exodus from the mainstream, the alternatives get scrutized much more closely, and if there are fatal flaws, people will move on, still in search of the answer. In fact, there have been open-minded people who have looked at the Electric Universe literature, and dismissed it for lack of specifics. If a LOT of people start taking a much more critical look at the Electric Sun model, we can expect the "tipping point" to do us no favors at all. Rather, it will shine a spotlight on our weaknesses, and we'll get dismissed once and for all as incapable of offering a better solution. And again, if experience is any guide, it will be a long time before the general public will reconsider that we're on the right track. So I don't think that the existing Electric Sun model, based on what Juergens did, is ready for a "tipping point." It needs to be updated with new, more accurate information, which shows that Juergens was right in being the first to say that an electric current is the primary source of solar power, but we now know that the Sun is the cathode, and here is the huge volume of data that fits neatly into that framework. Then we'll be ready to host a much bigger party.
Solar wrote: Have you given consideration, owing the concept of supercritical fluids (I actually prefer "condensates"), to the possibility that the sun exhibits the quality of having a layer of 'super currents' along the lines of the BCS theory of Superconductivity?
I really haven't. I'm assuming that the temps inside the Sun are nominally 6000 K, except where excessive pressure has created compressive ionization that has removed all of the degrees of freedom, in which case all of the thermal energy has been converted to electrostatic potential, and the "temperature" (if measured by atomic motion) is actually absoluate zero. This might be the case in the core. The elements in the core are osmium & platinum, which are excellent conductors anyway. But dropping them down to absolute zero doesn't really make them superconductors per se, if electrons aren't allowed in, due to the pressure.
Here I'm neglecting electron degeneracy, and other ad hoc quantum mechanics constructs, which are sometimes invoked to evade the tough problems in stellar theory that I'm addressing. Since such behaviors have never been demonstrated in the laboratory, and since particle physicists are quite sure that the Coulomb barrier is real, and electrons don't just get squashed in there along with the protons to conveniently eliminate the compressive ionization that is so problematic for the standard stellar model, I don't include such constructs anywhere in my model.
Solar wrote: For me, the idea of phase-transitions was formed from reading the works of Harold Aspden which you seem to have incorporated with your use of Feyman's "like-likes-like" approach.
Getting turned onto Aspden's work was the turning point for me, but I diverge from his work, and Robitaille's, in that I reject the "single density" model. It's not that I don't acknowledge the Coulomb barrier. It's that there is another way of solving the problem (i.e., with heavier elements and mass separation, per the work of Oliver Manuel et al.), and this solves a problem in the "single density" model. The problem is that the hydrostatics won't work with everything being liquid hydrogen. At the top, the density gradient necessarily ramps up, from nothing, to the density of liquid hydrogen, and thereafter the density flat-lines, due to the Coulomb barrier. But that ramp-up takes about 100 Mm to complete, given the force of gravity from the Sun's mass, and that first 100 Mm amounts to 37% of the Sun's volume. With that much of the volume not yet up to the target density of 1.41 g/cm3, you're never going to make up the difference unless you have heavier elements. That's when I started looking heavily at Manuel's work. And that's when I found that a mass-separated model provides alternating layers of positive and negative charges, and the E-field between them adds the force necessary to complete the organization of the star. The thing that bugged me the most when I first started studying solar theory is the density of the photosphere. No hydrostatic model can explain that. The atmosphere of the Sun should be like the atmosphere of the Earth, accumulating pressure with depth. It shouldn't start out displaying the behaviors of a liquid, if it's 6000 K hydrogen plasma. So I became convinced early on that the photosphere had to be ionized, and that it was clinging tightly to an underlying opposite charge. But figuring out what might be maintaining such a charge separation, in the near-perfect conductivity of 6000 K plasma, had me stumped, until I learned about compressive ionization, which can indeed maintain charge separations even in a perfect conductor. At that point, it became possible to strip away all of the assumptions, and start thinking in a fully mechanistic way, from the particle level on up. And then everything started to fall into place.
The work that I've done in solitude, though necessary, has moved at a snail's pace, but the learned criticisms that I've received have advanced my work at the speed of lightning. From this and other endeavors I've become convinced that online collaboration is an unbelievable force multiplier, and it would be simply ludicrous to overlook this potential, especially when considering a project as big as solar theory. So I'm getting ready to put out a general call for criticisms. A lot of people know that I'm working on a model, but few know how detailed it is, and realize the significance. Somewhere in the pursuit of an understanding of something, a framework emerges that gets everything to make sense. Usually when you "think" that this has happened, the next new fact doesn't make sense, and the framework has failed. But when it's been a while since any new information caused any problems, you start looking even harder for problems. If you still can't find any, after assimilating a lot more information, eventually you start thinking that the model is succeeding beyond chance. If there was a fundamental problem with the framework, it just never would have been able to assimilate that much information. Well, I think I'm approaching that point. I've test-crashed a lot of theories, some of them right here on thunderbolts, as you've seen. But the charged double-layer model is starting to look like the successful condidate. So now begins the most tedious and the most open-ended aspect of the endeavor: to go over more and more literature to see where each piece fits into the model. This is where collaboration is unbelievably valuable, as everybody is already familiar with some aspect of the literature, and can easily suggest where it might fit it, if they are also familiar with the model in question.
