Written by Marble on March 25, 2009 at 9:28 PM

I have an interest in AI, physics, astronomy, and am very keen to work out the reality of the spirituality portrayed by Christianity and its roots.

I’ve generally avoided entering heated discussions about evolution because I feel they create a lot of hot air and not much progress. I also think (controversially perhaps) that the inability to question the ‘accepted opinion’ is a very human foible – not limited to people of religion, nor excluding those of higher intellect. I like William Beaty’s page of maverick scientists and thought it interesting you quoted Carl Sagan

… oh wow – just discovered your theological journey article searching for your Carl Sagan quote… [ed note: the quote is here but that theology article led to a side conversation]

Written by Dumb Scientist on March 26, 2009 at 2:37 AM

I like William Beaty’s page of maverick scientists …

Interesting page. Scientists sometimes say that the only way for a new theory to be accepted is for the old scientists to die. I’d like to think that’s a pessimistic viewpoint, though.

Written by Marble on March 26, 2009 at 6:12 AM

Here’s just one place where I think it’s happening today (astronomy). I came across the electric universe theory a few years ago and was majorly impressed. Prior to that I just accepted that the moon’s craters were impacts, that comets were dirty snowballs of melting ice, that the Sun was powered by fusion – but I couldn’t quite comprehend how we got a flat galaxy, flat solar system and flat rings around Saturn via gravity… so I googled for an explanation a few years back and didn’t find anything that really explained it, a year later the question burned again – and that’s when I found that site and one or two others. I was blown away. There were explaining so much more and poking significant holes in the current understanding of astronomy. (I’ll come back to this.)

Actually – around the same time and unrelated to the electric universe – this image / series of images really nailed home to me that I no longer believed the astronomers really knew what they were talking about…

What’s fascinating about this is that the star is believed to be too far away for ‘expanding shell’ to be anything other than a brief flash of light traveling through concentric shells of dust – because if it was dust moving that distance over that period of time would be moving around the speed of light…. i.e. – they say, it can’t be what clearly appears to be an expanding shell of dust due to its high velocity so it must be a light echo.

Now on the original NASA description (which I read some years ago – which now seems to be replaced with the above ones) was a prediction based on the nature of a light echo (which I found no fault with) – it was that the ‘shell’ would appear to contract inward as the light bouncing off the back of the shell finally made it to Earth. Funnily enough – it ain’t happening, and I never expected it to. And it appears NASA have retracted that prediction. So I’ll contend that with mon 838 what you’re seeing actually is what you’re getting. An expanding single shell of dust. And I suspect the dust’s velocity / expansion is slowing, rather than having a constant expansion rate at the speed of light as the light fades. I just tonight discovered the Groucho Marx quote – “Who you gonna believe? Me? Or your lying eyes?” ;)

So basically I believe that it’s the light from the star illuminating the singular dust shell – and it’ll continue to fade as the dust disperses – but that will (continue) to have a different visual affect to that of a true light echo. But the ramifications of that are huge! Either our distance measurements are off (it’s apparently a bit dodgy anyway once parallax runs out), and/or our understanding of the speed of light is in question (I suppose dark matter will bound to the rescue there).

The thing that impresses me the most about the electric universe is that its explanation of a number of plainly visible astronomical phenomena can be physically demonstrated: crater creation (from here), Equatorial Ridges and Saturn’s Rings

I drilled through that site & more like it over a couple of months, and while there are some aspects I’m not sure about / disagree with – I’ve got no doubt that they’ve fired the first shots in the oncoming astronomical revolution ;) My unfinished comment about Carl Sagan was that he is naturally dismissive & derisive of the electrical universe… But there is so much evidence there – plain as day evidence – that it warrants a much deeper look. So the revolution isn’t starting from the top / the high priests of science ;) I think the evidence is so plain though – that it wont take the older generation to drop off…surely… ;)

BTW – here’s a link for an electromagnetically shrunken coin.

Written by Dumb Scientist on March 26, 2009 at 7:35 AM

Here’s just one place where I think it’s happening today (astronomy). I came across the electric universe theory a few years ago and was majorly impressed.

I’ve seen it too, but wasn’t very impressed. I tend to agree with the wikipedia page‘s “comparison to mainstream cosmology.” The main problem is that plasma cosmology introduces lots of new assumptions, and can’t account for nearly as many phenomena as mainstream cosmology. For example…

Prior to that I just accepted that the moon’s craters were impacts,

We’ve seen meteorites causing craters. It’s an established fact. I’m thinking of the craters that have formed on Earth during recorded history, as well as craters that have formed on the moon and been seen by our telescopes (it looks like a single bright flash, not a lightning-like spark), and events such as Shoemaker-Levy 9 which show that comets do strike planets.

Yes, the electric universe page shows pictures of scorch marks that look like craters, but they simply assert that the solar system was more “electrically active” in the past. This might happen on Io (because its proximity to Jupiter opens up a giant EM flux tube) but in any other case I think it’s a solution in search of a problem.

that comets were dirty snowballs of melting ice,

Which has been confirmed by spectroscopic analysis. We can point spectrometers at comets and analyze the spectral fingerprints of the comets, verifying that they’re made of water ice.

that the Sun was powered by fusion

Solar physics is probably one of the most impressively accurate theories ever developed. It accounts for not only the behavior of the Sun, but also explains the light spectra of much larger and much smaller stars, as well as explaining the way stars die.

Here’s an example: as the “electric universe” says, scientists used to be confused by the fact that we could only see 1/3 of the neutrinos expected from the Sun. The particle physicists measuring the neutrino flux kept saying the problem was due to solar physicists- that they’d just gotten their models of the solar interior wrong. The solar physicists stuck by their answer, and eventually we discovered that neutrinos have mass (which surprised the particle physicists) and as a result they “oscillate” between three flavors of neutrinos. Since the particle physicists were only looking for one flavor, they missed the other two.

Solar physics essentially rewrote particle physics, which really impresses me.

– but I couldn’t quite comprehend how we got a flat galaxy, flat solar system and flat rings around Saturn via gravity…

The galaxy is believed to have condensed from a much larger cloud of primordial hydrogen and helium (there’s some evidence that supermassive black holes played a large role in this process). Because the proto-galaxy condensed from something much larger, its moment of inertia reduced dramatically, rather like an ice-skater drawing her arms in to spin faster. This caused the rotation rate of the galaxy to increase around whatever axis the angular momentum pointed originally, which is completely random for each galaxy.

This doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be any spherical-like orbits, just that there are more objects orbiting in the disk that’s perpendicular to the axis of rotation than in any other plane. Here’s the punchline: over billions of years, the objects that aren’t orbiting in the galaxy’s disk have close encounters with the more numerous objects in the disk, and are either flung out of the galaxy or put into more normal orbits. The same process accounts for the fact that all planets in the Solar System orbit in a common plane. (Incidentally, elliptical galaxies look different because they’ve collided with other galaxies “recently,” disrupting the natural flat spiral shape.)

Actually – around the same time and unrelated to the electric universe – this image / series of images really nailed home to me that I no longer believed the astronomers really knew what they were talking about…

What’s fascinating about this is that the star is believed to be too far away for ‘expanding shell’ to be anything other than a brief flash of light traveling through concentric shells of dust – because if it was dust moving that distance over that period of time would be moving around the speed of light…. i.e. – they say, it can’t be what clearly appears to be an expanding shell of dust due to its high velocity so it must be a light echo.

The stars “clearly” rotate around the Earth once every 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds. Anyone who attempts to explain that away as the “rotating Earth” is just trying to get you to disbelieve your lying eyes. If you think that’s silly, keep in mind that some people literally believe it to be true.

Now on the original NASA description (which I read some years ago – which now seems to be replaced with the above ones) was a prediction based on the nature of a light echo (which I found no fault with) – it was that the ‘shell’ would appear to contract inward as the light bouncing off the back of the shell finally made it to Earth. Funnily enough – it ain’t happening, and I never expected it to. And it appears NASA have retracted that prediction.

I’m not privy to these details. I’m also not convinced that there really isn’t any evidence of reflections from the back of the nebula. If you’re really curious, google the principle investigator and ask him if he’d help you understand it. Most scientists like to talk about their work with the general public as long as people ask polite questions in a non-confrontational manner.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say NASA predicted that the reflections from the back would make the nebula appear to shrink and then retracted those predictions because it didn’t happen. I’d like to know the diameter of the nebula, which converted into light travel time would tell us how long we’d have to wait. I’d also like to know the light spectrum, the dust density and the dust size distribution. This would allow me to calculate the scatter of the light, perhaps using Mie theory.

I suspect what’s happening here is that the light isn’t as strongly scattered backwards as it is in the forward direction. So the echo from the front part of the nebula is brighter than the reflection of the back part of the nebula because the light from the back part of the nebula has to be reflected nearly 180 degrees. I can’t be sure without devoting a lot of time to this problem that I don’t have, though.

Also, scattered light from the back of the nebula would be scattered again on its way to us as it passes through the front part of the nebula, so that complicates the interpretation somewhat.

So I’ll contend that with mon 838 what you’re seeing actually is what you’re getting. An expanding single shell of dust. And I suspect the dust’s velocity / expansion is slowing , rather than having a constant expansion rate at the speed of light as the light fades. I just tonight discovered the Groucho Marx quote – “Who you gonna believe? Me? Or your lying eyes?” ;)

So basically I believe that it’s the light from the star illuminating the singular dust shell – and it’ll continue to fade as the dust disperses – but that will (continue) to have a different visual affect to that of a true light echo. But the ramifications of that are huge! Either our distance measurements are off (it’s apparently a bit dodgy anyway once parallax runs out), and/or our understanding of the speed of light is in question (I suppose dark matter will bound to the rescue there).

Your explanation opens up a giant can of worms. We have an enormous amount of evidence that the galaxy is ~100,000 LY across, that Andromeda is ~2,000,000 LY away, and that lightspeed is 299,792,458 m/s. You’re trying to solve a really tiny mystery, but in the process you’re going to have to explain a lot of astronomical observations.

I don’t have time to fully describe the last century of astronomy, but I’ll note that our distance measurements are based on (in order of increasing distance) parallax, Cepheid variables, type 1A supernova, and redshift measurements. This is a good overview.

It’s true that we’re constantly recalibrating these “standard candles” and that all science is subject to change from new information. The problem is that our observations place rigorously defined error bars on those distances. I wouldn’t be surprised if these measurements are off by 10-20% because the error bars really are that big.

But if this echo is anything but light, you’re talking about a HUGE change in these distance measurements, or the speed of light. This kind of change would require you to explain all the measurements made by telescopes all over the world for the last century. I hope you like tilting against windmills…

Also, dark matter wouldn’t have anything to do with this. Dark matter was originally an hypothesis that explained the anomalous velocity rotation curves within galaxies and the unusually high orbital velocities of entire galaxies in superclusters. But it’s been experimentally verified by the Bullet cluster. In addition, the WMAP results are inexplicable without a certain amount of non-baryonic dark matter and something bizarre called dark energy.

Dark matter/energy are ridiculously complicated topics, but they’re not simply “fudge factors” that scientists throw at phenomena they don’t understand.

Equatorial Ridges

Interesting coincidence: I recently met a scientist– Emily Dahlberg– at last December’s AGU Fall Meeting who was studying the Iapetus ridge. She presented three theories and cast serious doubt on all of them. We really don’t know why the ridge exists, but I read that page and don’t see how plasma cosmology has a better explanation for all the various mysteries of the ridge.

Saturn’s Rings

As far as I can tell, the Cassini probe has been discovering new rings and gaps in the ring system, and they don’t seem to be having trouble describing them with standard gravitational physics. It’s weird physics- moons can actually push rings away with their gravity (counterintuitive, has to do with rotating coordinate systems), but it’s all comprehensible with enough math.

BTW – here’s a link for an electromagnetically shrunken coin.

Yes, electromagnetism is a very powerful force. It’s 10³⁶ times more powerful than gravity, in fact. So I can understand its appeal in terms of explaining the universe. Maybe we’ve even underestimated the importance of interstellar plasma interactions. Who knows?

It’s true that both gravity and electromagnetism have infinite range and can cross empty space (the electric universe site claims that scientists don’t acknowledge that electromagnetic forces can cross empty space, but I have yet to meet a physicist who’s that ignorant). The sweeping claims made by plasma cosmology are ignored by mainstream physicists because electric charges come in two types which tend to attract each other and cancel out. Gravitational mass only comes in positive quantities, so it never cancels out.

As a result, the universe’s large scale structure is dominated by gravitational interactions. Galaxies form because of gravity, and random collisions between objects form the flat disk shape. Stars collapse because of gravity until they become hot enough to fuse hydrogen, then remain stabilized by gravity until it ultimately ends when nuclear fuel runs out, etc.

Written by Marble on March 26, 2009 at 10:22 AM

Yeah – I’ll admit I’ve never bothered with trying to distinguish between the electric universe & the plasma cosmology – I figured they were largely on the same track.

Wikiquote – Most astrophysicists accept dark matter as a real phenomenon and a vital ingredient in structure formation, which cannot be explained by appeal to electromagnetic processes

Obviously most astrophysics agreeing, a fact does not make – and a citation is required for ‘cannot be explained’.

See this link for an electrical simulation of spiral galaxy formation. Of course I haven’t deconstructed his mathematical model or attempted to reproduce it in my microwave – so I’m going to have to take it on face value.

But if this echo is anything but light, you’re talking about a HUGE change in these distance measurements, or the speed of light. This kind of change would require you to explain all the measurements made by telescopes all over the world for the last century. I hope you like tilting against windmills…

If the speed of light dramatically changes outside our solar system… then why wouldn’t our observations still be consistent with what we have – how would we know / not know if light travels much faster or slower between the stars & systems? And how many light years across are those huge galaxies – yet we seem to see both arms practically identical (well my very basic observation – I don’t know if there’s any research to indicate that the stars on the far side of the galaxies are ‘younger’ or if the arms are skewed to allow for the distant light taking longer to reach us etc).

Solar physics is probably one of the most impressively accurate theories ever developed. It accounts for not only the behavior of the Sun, but also explains the light spectra of much larger and much smaller stars, as well as explaining the way stars die.

I’m not sure it’s that good. And I don’t think history bears out your assertion. Solar physics is probably one of the most impressively modified theories that changes on a regular basis. The Sun only became a fusion powered entity when we discovered fusion for instance. And I believe stars have only recently been shown to consist mostly hydrogen & helium (apart from the core in older/larger stars), and that the spectrometer readings of elements present are due to the extreme heat effectively bouncing electrons through the orbital shells of the hydrogen. (If I’m correctly recalling the 2006 astronomy 162 podcast of lectures I’ve listened to recently.) Stars are changing brightness, size, colour too rapidly for the current theory. The corona is too hot. When was dark matter & energy ‘discovered’? Weren’t the insides of the galaxies meant to spin faster? This is largely how astonomy works these days – either ignore the evidence that doesn’t fit the model, or change the model to refit the evidence – the latter of which is fine – but if the model’s not making predictions… I think your model is kinda worthless – falsifiability or something isn’t it?.. ;P

We’ve seen meteorites causing craters. It’s an established fact. I’m thinking of the craters that have formed on Earth during recorded history, as well as craters that have formed on the moon and been seen by our telescopes (it looks like a single bright flash, not a lightning-like spark), and events such as Shoemaker-Levy 9 which show that comets do strike planets.

Yes, the electric universe page shows pictures of scorch marks that look like craters, but they simply assert that the solar system was more “electrically active” in the past. I can maybe see this being true on Io (because its proximity to Jupiter opens up a giant EM flux tube) but in any other case I think it’s a solution in search of a problem.

I’m not disputing that physical impacts occur – but perhaps you can point me to some images or descriptions of craters caused by such impacts? Why are the impact craters (say on the moon for arguments sake), pretty much perfectly circular? Unless some sort of atomic type explosion is invoked upon impact – I can’t see how the pretty much all the impacts on the moon would be perpendicular to the moon’s surface, considering that the moon has such a weak gravity well, because I figure a lot of those large craters caused by large / fast moving meteorites that should really spread themselves along the moon’s surface in the direction the meteorite was travelling. And then you have to explain the flat bottoms and ridge walls – which the electrical machining can clearly demonstrate (and the little peak in the middle occasionally – which probably rules out an explosion BTW).

Which has been confirmed by spectroscopic analysis. We can point spectrometers at comets and analyze the spectral fingerprints of the comets, verifying that they’re made of water ice.

You’re studying for a PhD right – I’ll forgive you for not being up on it all ;)

Here’s an example: as the “electric universe” says, scientists used to be confused by the fact that we could only see 1/3 of the neutrinos expected from the Sun.

So if we can’t get comet dust right… how much more so exotic particles – don’t we only detect 1 a day or something – as a flash of light in a large water container miles underground? (I’m just filling in space here cause I’m having trouble finding the EU’s rebuttal.)

And I’m not saying the Sun doesn’t have fusion reactions – it’s just that they’re not the main power source. If the fusion reaction in the center was the source of heat then why is the corona (the outer most atmosphere) orders of magnitude hotter than the Sun’s surface (photosphere). How does the heat get to the corona and stay there without moving back? They’re speculating of course – but as far as I’m aware – there’s no demonstrable mechanism. But an arc discharge where the energy is coming from the outside I perceive as a less problematic explanation. Combine that with a radial field flattening the solar system due to the incoming energy feeding the Sun – then it does tie in nicely – even if I don’t know what I’m talking about ;)

As far as I can tell, the Cassini probe as been discovering new rings and gaps in the ring system, and they don’t seem to be having trouble describing them with standard gravitational physics. It’s weird physics- moons can actually push rings away with their gravity (counterintuitive, has to do with rotating coordinate systems), but it’s all comprehensible with enough math.

I’ll take the simpler model – which is electrical repulsion. Tends to push things like that. And you have those IO plumes remember…so there’s no doubt there’s significant electrical charge available. What’s more is that the ring reforms too. Gravity just doesn’t do that – I don’t care how much math you throw at it ;) And that wouldn’t be similar math to the one that has the bug-hole paradox in it? Or the barn-pole one? I’m sorry but paradoxes particularly like those tell me there’s something wrong somewhere… (in the model – not reality … *plugs ears so doesn’t have to enter philosphical debates on reality*).

Your explanation opens up a giant can of worms.

But if you don’t ask the questions, people generally don’t start to think of the answers… and they just keep accepting the high priests (peer reviewed) version of reality ;)

Sometimes the devil is in the details.

Your explanation opens up a giant can of worms.

Revolutions are messy affairs….

It’s true that both gravity and electromagnetism have infinite range and can cross empty space (the electric universe site claims that scientists don’t acknowledge that electromagnetism can cross empty space, but I have yet to meet a physicist who’s that ignorant). But the sweeping claims made by plasma cosmology are ignored by mainstream physicists because electric charges come in two types, and they tend to attract each other and cancel out. Gravitational mass only comes in positive quantities, so it never cancels out.

Apparently plasma effects scale really well (electric machining micro craters to craters on the moon – I know at this point you may not accept that – or planetary Lichtenberg figures perhaps but I’m dying here due to lack of sleep…). And plasma doesn’t just ‘cancel out’ charges – see the Birkeland currents / plasma sheaths for starters. Of course you could ask what powers the super galactic currents – but well – apart from super cluster currents etc – I suppose we could equally ask what kicked off the big bang.

Here’s the 3 legs of the stool that I think make it very difficult to upturn the current theories

You need billions of years for:

1. Evolution
2. Gravitationally based solar system stability
3. Geological weathering through water & wind

That ties biology, geology & astrophysics. The weight against saying such & such an event happened in a much shorter time frame in one field is caused by the other two. However, in my opinion (iamadumbnonscientist) all 3 fields could be reduced to a shorter timespan through the electric universe concepts & creation/ID. Of course I may have to create an anti gravity drive, disprove the constancy of light and build an AI to argue on my behalf before anyone will listen to me….but even then I’m not so sure ;)

Written by Dumb Scientist on March 26, 2009 at 9:53 PM

If the speed of light dramatically changes outside our solar system… then why wouldn’t our observations still be consistent with what we have – how would we know / not know if light travels much faster or slower between the stars & systems?

First, the problem of varying physical “constants” has been examined in detail here (see section 3). There’s weak evidence that some physical constants were different in the past, but young Earth creationism requires a much larger change than the evidence supports. In this context “much larger” means millions of times too large.

Second, if the speed of light is different outside of our solar system, there must be a boundary layer (abrupt or gradual) between the region in our solar system with a low speed of light and the outside universe where the speed of light is higher. In either case, this is the definition of a lens. You’re basically saying we live in a glass marble (or glass ellipsoid, or glass ballerina figurine). Look at a glass marble in the Sun sometime- the boundary layer between air and glass bends light and focuses it. This interface bends the light because the speed of light is 33% slower in glass than in air.

Even if the boundary layer is gradual, that’s the same as the case of the Earth’s atmosphere: light travels around 0.03% slower in air than vacuum, and this change occurs gradually as the air gets thicker towards the ground. This allows people standing on top of a mountain to see over their geometrically defined horizon because the light bends down towards them. It’s also part of the reason the moon turns red during lunar eclipses (the moon is in the Earth’s shadow, but it’s being lit up by the refracted light of all the sunrises and sunsets in the world).

If light really is faster outside our solar system, that boundary layer would have experimentally measurable consequences:

• The sky would look weird— some regions would be totally dark, and the “fixed” stars would shift in queasy patterns as the Earth revolved around the Sun.
• Depending on the geometry of the boundary layer, at least one focal point would exist where electromagnetic radiation across the frequency spectrum are concentrated. All those frequencies would have to be focused to the same point because our local measurements reveal all EM radiation to travel at the same speed in our vacuum, and remote measurements of extra-galactic events reveal the same thing to within the limits of experimental uncertainty. This means that the boundary layer you’re proposing can’t have any chromatic aberration. So the solar system would have “death zones” that would be subjected to extreme radiation whenever a “local” supernova exploded… and I haven’t seen evidence for anything like this.
• An abrupt boundary layer would result in total internal reflection. If the boundary layer is spherical, sufficiently large and centered on the Sun, the Sun’s light wouldn’t be totally reflected, but depending on the boundary’s size the light reflected from Jupiter and Saturn (along with their radio emissions) would bounce around the solar system.

Transmission coefficients are also dependent on the relative speeds of light in both regions, and generally not the same for different frequencies. The boundary would have to be almost perfectly clear across all observed frequencies to account for its invisibility, which means it has to have some kind of idealized anti-reflective coating.

And how many light years across are those huge galaxies – yet we seem to see both arms practically identical (well my very basic observation – I don’t know if there’s any research to indicate that the stars on the far side of the galaxies are ‘younger’ or if the arms are skewed to allow for the distant light taking longer to reach us etc).

Cool! Some new evidence indicates that the Milky Way is about twice as big massive as I thought it was. The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) “networked” many telescopes together to form a telescope with unprecedented angular resolution, and imaged star-producing clusters on the opposite side of the galaxy in radio waves twice- once in January and once in June to obtain parallax measurements. Also, their density vs. distance measurements suggest that the Milky Way has 4 arms, not 2 as previously believed.

I guess that some medium-distance standard candles need to be revised again, by a factor of at most 2. Nope. My bad. That’s a larger error than I would’ve expected off the top of my head (note that I’m a physicist, not an astronomer). Anyway, I found that just now and thought it was both informative and relevant.

To answer your question, pretty much all galaxies are about the same size mass as ours or slightly smaller lighter. It used to be odd that Andromeda seemed so much larger heavier than our galaxy, but the VLBA showed that this was because, paradoxically, it’s harder to study our own galaxy than it is to study galaxies millions of light years away. And in Andromeda’s case, the disk is nearly edge-on, so the near stars appear 200,000 ~141,000 years younger than the farther ones. But since most stars live for billions of years this isn’t noticeable. Stars the size of our Sun live for 5-10 billion years, smaller stars like red dwarfs last tens of billions of years and larger stars can shine so brightly that they exhaust their fuel in mere millions of years. So the 200,000 ~141,000 years it takes for light to cross the galaxy is a small percentage of the lifetimes of all but the largest stars, which are being born all the time so they don’t have a uniform age anyway.

The Sun only became a fusion powered entity when we discovered fusion for instance.

So… you’re saying it’s surprising we didn’t realize that the Sun was fusion powered before fusion was discovered in the 1930s? (I consider Bethe’s and Chandrasekhar’s works in 1939 to mark the dawn of modern solar physics.)

And I believe stars have only recently been shown to consist mostly hydrogen & helium (apart from the core in older/larger stars)

That depends on your definition of “recently.” Helium and hydrogen were found to dominate the Sun’s spectrum in 1868. So it wasn’t surprising when fusion-based stellar models developed in the 1930s didn’t allow for large percentages of other elements. Otherwise fusion would be harder to start, causing the minimum size of a viable star to be higher than we’ve observed.

… and that the spectrometer readings of elements present are due to the extreme heat effectively bouncing electrons through the orbital shells of the hydrogen.

I don’t understand this point. What elements are you talking about? I’d be interested to see if there’s some way for spectroscopic “fingerprints” to be mistaken for something else (which is what I think you’re saying) but the predicted signatures have extremely narrow peaks in the frequency domain, and thermal motion usually just results in Doppler broadening…

(If I’m correctly recalling the 2006 astronomy 162 podcast of lectures I’ve listened to recently.) Stars are changing brightness, size, colour too rapidly for the current theory.

I think it’s likely that steady-state predictions are simpler than predictions of the transition states. In other words, it’s easy to predict the temperature and neutrino flux from fusion in a stable star, but transitions and oscillations are harder to describe. At least, that’s been my experience in a different field of physics…