07/04/2005 - The truth about oil, the truth about "new" planets, the truth about black holes (maybe :)) and our solar system special

Oil Reserves Are Increasing

by George Crispin (http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/crispin8.html)
by George Crispin

Eugene Island is an underwater mountain located about 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1973 oil was struck and off-shore platform Eugene 330 erected. The field began production at 15,000 barrels a day, then gradually fell off, as is normal, to 4,000 barrels a day in 1989, Then came the surprise; it reversed itself and increased production to 13,000 barrels a day. Probable reserves have been increased to 400 million barrels from 60 million. The field appears to be filling from below and the crude coming up today is from a geological age different from the original crude, which leads to the speculation that the world has limitless supplies of petroleum.

This really interested some scientists. Thomas Gold, astronomer and professor emeritus of Cornell held for years that oil is actually renewable primordial syrup continually manufactured by the earth under ultra hot conditions and tremendous pressures. This substance migrates upward picking up bacteria that attack it making it appear to have an organic origin, i.e., come from dinosaurs and vegetation. As best I have found so far Russian scientists support his position, at least that petroleum is of primordial origin. There is now plenty of evidence around proving the presence of methane in our universe. It is easy to see it as a part of the formation of the earth. Under the right conditions of temperature and pressure, it converts to more complex hydrocarbons.

Roger Andersen, an oceanographer and executive director of Columbia’s Energy Research Center proposed studying the behavior of this reservoir. The underwater landscape around Eugene Island is weird, cut with faults and fissures that belch gas and oil. The field is operated by PennzEnergy Co. Andersen proposed to study the action of the sea bottom around the mountain and the field at its top and persuaded the U S Dept of Energy to ante up ten million which was matched by a consortium of oil giants including Chevron, Exxon, and Tex Corp. This work began about the time 3-D seismic technology was introduced to oil exploration. Anderson was able to stack 3D images resulting in a 4D image that showed the reservoir in 3 spatial dimensions and enabled researchers to track the movement of oil. Their most stunning find was a deep fault at a bottom corner of the computer scan that showed oil literally gushing in. "We could see the stream," says Andersen. "It wasn’t even debated that it was happening."

Work continued for five years until funds ran out and they were unable to continue. With the world having 40 years of proven reserves in hand it is difficult to interest the major oil producers in much exploration, let alone something done merely for research, and so far from the current accepted theory of a fossil origin for oil.

Similar occurrences have been seen at other Gulf Of Mexico fields, at the Cook Inlet oil field, at oil fields in Uzbekistan, and it is possible this accounts for the longevity of the Saudi Arabian fields where few new finds have been made, yet reserves have doubled while the fields have been exploited mercilessly for 50 years.

Not only can the doom and gloomers not show us running out of the natural resources we recycle, but now there appears to be good odds of a limitless supply of petroleum working its way up to where we can capture it.

A caveat: Gold’s theory is not yet accepted by all scientists, probably all the more reason to trust it.

April 6, 2005

George Crispin

Many of us, including Ron Samec, were suspicious of the exoplanet discoveries (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4408187.stm) when they started a decade ago. The problem is that the feeble Doppler motions claimed are swamped by the much noiser random and vibrational motions. The claim was that powerful computer techniques could sort out the feeble signal. What impressed us was the fact that the discoverers of first one, and then two, planets realized that the inferred orbits ought to produce eclipses as the relatively large planets transited in front of their parent stars. Observations revealed the depth and duration of eclipses pretty much as expected from the orbits. Since Ron and I do this kind of work with eclipsing binary stars, where both bodies eclipsing are stars, not a star and a planet, we immediately believed that at least these two exoplanets were real.

This seems to confirm the technique, so most of the other 130 exoplanets probably are real too.

Having said that, the recent announcement of images obtained for two systems was not quite correct. After reading deeper, what I found was that there was a small increase in light after the planets were eclipsed by the parent star. This is not a direct image, but the reverse of where the planet eclipsed the star. These discoveries were made in the infrared where the difference in intensity is not as great as in the visible.

I realize why many creationists are nervous about such discoveries

- this leads to speculations about the possibility of life elsewhere and suggests that the earth is not unique. This is propoganda. Even if the universe is filled with earth-like planets, life doesn't arrive spontaneously - it must be created. Even more, the exoplanets discovered are strange and defy explanation. They are far too massive and far too close to their parent stars. In our solar system, large planets are far from the sun, not close, and all theories of solar system formation suggest such an outcome. So instead of confirming the theory of planet formation, these discoveries do just the opposite. We ought to welcome these discoveries.

Danny

Danny R. Faulkner
a stellar astronomer
drfaulkn@gwm.sc.edu

From http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050328/full/050328-8.html

Ashby

Published online: 31 March 2005; | doi:10.1038/news050328-8
Black holes 'do not exist'
Philip Ball

These mysterious objects are dark-energy stars, physicist claims.

Black holes are staples of science fiction and many think astronomers have observed them indirectly. But according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these awesome breaches in space-time do not and indeed cannot exist.

Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange 'dark energy' that is driving the Universe's accelerating expansion.

George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain dark energy. "It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist," he claims.

Black holes are one of the most celebrated predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the warping of space-time caused by massive objects. The theory suggests that a sufficiently massive star, when it dies, will collapse under its own gravity to a single point.

But Einstein didn't believe in black holes, Chapline argues. "Unfortunately", he adds, "he couldn't articulate why." At the root of the problem is the other revolutionary theory of twentieth-century physics, which Einstein also helped to formulate: quantum mechanics.

In general relativity, there is no such thing as a 'universal time' that makes clocks tick at the same rate everywhere. Instead, gravity makes clocks run at different rates in different places. But quantum mechanics, which describes physical phenomena at infinitesimally small scales, is meaningful only if time is universal; if not, its equations make no sense.

This problem is particularly pressing at the boundary, or event horizon, of a black hole. To a far-off observer, time seems to stand still here. A spacecraft falling into a black hole would seem, to someone watching it from afar, to be stuck forever at the event horizon, although the astronauts in the spacecraft would feel as if they were continuing to fall. "General relativity predicts that nothing happens at the event horizon," says Chapline.

Quantum transitions

However, as long ago as 1975 quantum physicists argued that strange things do happen at an event horizon: matter governed by quantum laws becomes hypersensitive to slight disturbances. "The result was quickly forgotten," says Chapline, "because it didn't agree with the prediction of general relativity. But actually, it was absolutely correct."

This strange behaviour, he says, is the signature of a 'quantum phase transition' of space-time. Chapline argues that a star doesn't simply collapse to form a black hole; instead, the space-time inside it becomes filled with dark energy and this has some intriguing gravitational effects.

Outside the 'surface' of a dark-energy star, it behaves much like a black hole, producing a strong gravitational tug. But inside, the 'negative' gravity of dark energy may cause matter to bounce back out again.

If the dark-energy star is big enough, Chapline predicts, any electrons bounced out will have been converted to positrons, which then annihilate other electrons in a burst of high-energy radiation. Chapline says that this could explain the radiation observed from the centre of our galaxy, previously interpreted as the signature of a huge black hole.

He also thinks that the Universe could be filled with 'primordial' dark-energy stars. These are formed not by stellar collapse but by fluctuations of space-time itself, like blobs of liquid condensing spontaneously out of a cooling gas. These, he suggests, could be stuff that has the same gravitational effect as normal matter, but cannot be seen: the elusive substance known as dark matter.

References
Chapline G. Arxiv, http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503200 (2005).