<blockquote>"The intellectual hubris of big bang theorists is shocking when we find that science cannot explain the simplest phenomena associated with matter. Mass, gravity, magnetism, and light are a mystery. We have equations that describe what happens when a charged particle is accelerated; you drop something from a height; a current passes down a wire; and light strikes a surface. But mathematical descriptions do not constitute a physical explanation.
Meanwhile, the last century has seen great progress in understanding the phenomena of electricity in vacuum tubes, arc lamps, arc welders, industrial electric discharge machining and ultra high-energy experiments at Los Alamos National Laboratories and Sandia Laboratories. Electrical engineers were the first to see striking parallels with astronomical phenomena, beginning with the Earth’s aurorae.
The Norwegian, Kristian Birkeland, in the early 1900s set up an electromagnetic observatory inside the Arctic circle. He associated the magnetic effects of aurorae with electric currents flowing between the Sun and the Earth. His electrical “Terrella” or “little Earth” experiments were able to reproduce the features of aurorae, sunspots, comets, etc. The BIG LESSON from the Terella experiments is that they required
EXTERNAL ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATED SOME DISTANCE AWAY. In recent years his name has been applied to the electric currents discovered in space—“
Birkeland currents.”
- Wal Thornhill,
The Simple Electric Universe, 06 September 2009</blockquote>