zlacker

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, crank science. Opening up the linked document, the DOI fails to resolve, the paper investigates pH variations in urine during tide cycles, and also skimming over it doesn't appear to make a single prediction. This is at best unfalsifiable, and a "break with the scientific community" is an accurate assessment.

The physics of tides is largely well-understood, and the moon and sun provide the primary forcing. Accurate tide tables are regularly computed the world over, with measurements regularly made. Without even looking at measurements, the shipping industry demands accurate tide forecasts for navigating efficiently. The claim that "tidal phenomena are... primarily electromagnetic" requires some serious evidence to back it up, with calculates to boot, rather than invoking mysticism that tides are "beyond us". Many things are beyond our current scientific understanding, and that is humbling, but tides are quite well understood.

>>typica+(OP)
I would not dismiss this as crank science so quickly, first and foremost because it's not claiming to be science, not theoretically at least. It's observation of likely correlation. Also I would not say tides are "quite well understood" because it's misleading. I'd say sufficiently understood so that models are precise enough to be useful, but they're still an approximation to a few cm. For now water levels, costal geography, terrain, and weather seem to be the main parameters they attribute to the small variations observed, but who can say there aren't more parameters to take into account? Also what doesn't help in having a "well understood" feeling is that you can find different explanation of the bulges on either side of the earth.

I don't have the scientific knowledge to assess all this. I'm not even sure how to understand properly the questions Jeanne Rousseau asks saying newtonian physics can't answer. What I hear however are competent people observing small variation in the properties of water and living systems that seems to be related to cosmic phenomenon, including moon phases. Variations we can also find in the atmosphere/ionosphere with more recent measurements of their ionic polarities. Adding to that are all the new discoveries that link weather phenomenon to electromagnetic influences from the sun, with water significantly influencing the electromagnetic properties of the atmosphere. Finally more people question the true molecular structure of water, as H2O seems to be a crude simplification over a dynamic mixture of isotopes and ions.

Overall the tidal theory is not a done deal, we only have approximate models, and this topic can be discussed for years to come. That's probably why she was told the tides is a phenomenon that is beyond us.