I disagree. I don't think that we would notice very much change of distant stars and planets as they pass over my hypothetical plane. Most of the superficial changes(relatively speaking) would only take place on the outer crust of planets.
The thread title includes 'Sun erupts'. I'd say that's pretty obvious when it happens.
Don't you see how utterly ad hoc your claims are? You're proposing gravity magically changes but
only for the crust of planets. Why does gravity know only to alter for planets and not stars? How does the galactic plane affect things? You not only provide no evidence or rationale for your claims you are having to be highly irrational in order to accept that your claims are baseless. Gravity doesn't pick and choose what it affects. A kilogram of lead weighs the same as a kilogram of feathers, the only thing which is important is the mass.
On a side note, I think that the tilt of Uranus might also be explained by my idea.
How? Wouldn't all the other planets be affected to? Why would it result in Uranus altering its axis of rotation by a huge amount but still stay in orbit about the Sun?
You are doing the usual crank thing. You come up with some idea and then go hunting for particular things which in some way seem to justify your idea. The problem is you ignore all the things which contradict it. A model of gravity which explains the motion of Uranus perfectly but fails to explain any other planetary orbit is simply wrong. Its easy to come up with models which explain one specific thing. The problem is finding a model which is consistent with
all relevant phenomena.
I did do some research on the matter, but obviously I never went so far as to delve into all the hardcore science.
I take it by 'research' you mean 'Spent an afternoon on Google'...
I'm sorry to have offended you with my ignorance. I was only asking questions, and proposing ideas- just as a student might be encouraged to do in a school environment.
You're doing more than 'proposing ideas', you're proclaiming mass conspiracies in physics pertaining to well known areas of intense research, ie dark matter. Its one thing to say "I don't understand dark matter" and its another to say "It's the product of a global conspiracy". And you weren't even asking any real questions, you just wanted to post your pet theory, irrespective of how much evidence was against it. In a school environment children learn that when experiment contradicts a model then the model is wrong. You're sticking to it.
Also, I don't believe that my idea is necessarily incompatible with known physics.
You believe wrong. Surely you can see that its silly for you to claim your idea is compatible with known physics when you don't know either theoretical models or experimental data.
I was only proposing that some physical effects produced by our galaxy might be new to scientific understanding, especially considering that there is a super-massive black hole in the center of it.
But you're not getting these physical effects from observations, you are simply claiming they exist. If you'd done experiments and found new data then you'd be worth listening to but you aren't doing experiments, you're simply claiming a phenomenon in the galaxy exists. The closest you've gotten to doing relevant observations or data collecting is looking out your window into the night sky.
I never said anything about the sun exploding as it passes the plane.... although I wouldn't rule out massive ejections and flares which might affect our planet.
Still haven't provided a mechanism by which this magically happens. If gravity deviated from expected behaviour as much as you seem to be implying it does we'd see it. Some of the most precise data in science comes from cosmology, such as nanosecond variations in pulsar motion. You're proposing gravity suddenly behaves differently without accounting for the fact we can measure such things and also that you haven't provided a mechanism as to why it occurs.
And I don't think I made any specific claim that the world would turn upside down, but I wouldn't rule that out either.
I would. The 'polar flip' is not a physical flip, it is the slow decay and growth of the Earth's magnetic field over many hundreds thousands of years, each time pointing in a different direction. For the Earth to physical rotate 180 degrees would require such staggering force it'd rip the planet apart. Given we know magnetic pole changes have occured about 3 times every million years for the history of the Earth it means there's no physical flip. That sprouted from people not understanding the difference between the Earth's magnetic pole and its rotational axis.
There is simply no mechanism in the solar system by which the Earth could be turned like that. And even a passing neutron star can be ruled out as it would alter the orbits of the planets long before it got into the solar system itself. Plus it'd take centuries to even get through the solar system. It won't be turning up any time soon.
Science is full of conspiracy when money presents a conflict of interest. For example, the pharmaceutical industry and the health industry in general.
And the business practices of drug companies has anything to do with dark matter in cosmology because....?
There's a big difference between privately funded research and publicly funded research. Work done in universities is generally freely available. Results are only kept private when a private company has funded it and they want to maintain such things as patents. Your example of dark matter is entirely independent of private business, its done in the theoretical physics and astronomy communities.
Just because some people are secretive sometimes doesn't mean everyone is all the time.
As far as physics goes, I imagine that censoring such information would be a lot more difficult to do. So I hope you're right. But it does seem to me that the invention of dark matter would make a perfect decoy, with all the math and theoretical physics involved- that would keep the nerds busy for a while.
No, because the 'nerds' would see through doctored work. You make it sound like the theoretical physics community is handed their experimental data by someone and told to go away and work on it. The 'nerds' do their own experiments and observations and thus can quickly see if someone made up results. Further more they actually understand the physics they work on and don't just mindlessly accept someone else's word for it. If I had the time and the inclination I could get ahold of all the data relating to such things as variations in the CMB, gravitational lensing and the bullet cluster, read through the proposed models for dark matter such as the MSSM and then construct the physical predictions of such models before comparing them to the observational data. Its all freely available and can be checked by anyone who has the time and know-how to do it. And supersymmetry, the leading explanation for dark matter, is something significant numbers of theoretical physicists know a fair bit about.
You seriously underestimate how much bickering and disagreement goes on in the physics community. If someone doctored work again and again to make a claim for the existence of dark matter they would be spotted by peer review. Too many people know the relevant physics. And I count myself as one of them.
As for those scientists who discover the real truth, here's an example of what might happen:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/co.../andrew-lange/
I don't follow what you mean. What 'real truth' are you talking about? Are you implying there's a conspiracy which either drove him to suicide or had him killed? His work, according to the article, was on the CMB power spectrum. There's a perfectly mainstream well accepted area of research. He was hardly 'fighting the man'. And you've got to bear in mind that there are many tens of thousand of physics lecturers in the world and they have the same ups and downs as anyone else. Him killing himself doesn't imply it was to do with his research at all. There's plenty of other things to get upset about in life. So can you provide some explaination as to what your point is?