(Electric Universe) 'Gravity is an exhausted and bankrupt concept. A higher, more comprehensive foundation is needed.'
Posted by ProjectC
<blockquote><font color="#bd934f">“The conformist propensity of social institutions is not the only reason that erroneous theories persevere. However, once embedded within a culture, ideas exhibit an uncanny inertia, as if obeying Newton’s law to keep on going forever until acted upon by an external force.” —Henry Zemel.</blockquote>
'The inertia of institutional specialization infects modern science and education ... It was Dr. Alex Dessler in 1967 who discovered the electric currents in space that Birkeland had predicted.'
<blockquote>'In a keynote address at the Marshall Space Flight Center in March 1986, Hannes Alfvén complained that the most used textbooks in astrophysics do not treat important concepts like double layers, critical velocity, pinch effects and circuits. "Students using these [astrophysics] textbooks remain essentially ignorant of even the existence of these [concepts], in spite of the fact that some of them have been well known for half a century. The conclusion is that astrophysics is too important to be left in the hands of the astrophysicists. The billion-dollar telescope data must be treated by scientists who are familiar with laboratory and magnetospheric physics and circuit theory, and of course with modern plasma theory."
Twenty years later, this has not been done. The inertia of institutional specialization infects modern science and education. Astrophysicists with inappropriate and narrow training remain in control. Meanwhile the puzzles facing the space sciences multiply by the day and falsifiable predictions (the best test of a good theory) are rare—and even more rarely successful. This contrasts starkly with the Electric Universe model, which recognizes Alfvén's pioneering insights and has many successful predictions to its credit, including this one on Saturn.
The imagery of Saturn's south polar hot spot is now sufficiently detailed to require more explanation than was given in my earlier news items. The electrical model of Saturn has the planet participating as a minor cathode in the solar circuit. Birkeland showed experimentally how Saturn's enigmatic rings could be the result of an electric discharge to a magnetized sphere, representing the planet, and acting as the cathode.
<blockquote>
>> From Kristian Birkeland's series, 'The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition 1902-1903,' Volume 1: On the Cause of Magnetic Storms and The Origin of Terrestrial Magnetism, published in 1908.</blockquote>
After 100 years Birkeland's simple electrically driven model is unmentioned in astrophysics textbooks! It is a disturbing illustration that astrophysics has no interest in experimental evidence that doesn't fit the dogma of an electrically inert universe. For this and other reasons, history will view the 20th century as a dark age of science. It is perhaps unfortunate that burgeoning technology has masked the stagnation in fundamental science.
It was Dr. Alex Dessler in 1967 who discovered the electric currents in space that Birkeland had predicted. He suggested that the transverse magnetic field components found in the Earth's magnetosphere and auroras indicated electric currents essentially parallel to the magnetic field lines. Dessler called them 'Birkeland currents,' a term which is now generally accepted and sometimes generalized to mean all currents flowing parallel to the ambient magnetic field.
<blockquote>
>> This figure shows the forces between two adjacent Birkeland current filaments following auroral magnetic field lines. The parallel components of current are long-range attractive, while the counter-parallel azimuthal currents are short-range repulsive. These forces cause the currents to form sheets, filaments, or 'magnetic ropes' and they can be found far from the source region. A projection of the current-induced magnetic fields is shown above the graph.
Credit: A. L. Peratt, Physics of the Plasma Universe, p. 112.</blockquote>
- Wal Thornhill, The 'Spiral Galaxy' at Saturn's Pole, 20 November 2006</blockquote>
'If, as we will claim, the causes of most of the observed phenomena of modern astronomy are electrical in nature, do you need a degree in electrical engineering before you can understand them? Indeed not. The average informed person can understand and make rational judgments about these ideas.'
<blockquote><font color="#bd934f">“A revolution is beginning in astronomy and cosmology that will rival the one set off by Copernicus and Galileo.”
—Don Scott</font>
A new book I recommend highly for the new year is Don Scott’s The ELECTRIC SKY. It is an important book because it encourages informed people to “demand reasonable answers to reasonable questions” from space scientists. It is easy to be intimidated by the flood of bizarre claims from astrophysicists and cosmologists and become “convinced that nonsense is ruling the world.” The ELECTRIC SKY offers a refreshing, practical alternative. This work is not “fringe” science. It is based on the work of Nobel Prize winners whose work has been selectively and incorrectly applied by theoretical astrophysicists. When viewed from a practical electrical engineering standpoint, the fog of misconceptions and misinformation clears and a new vision of the universe appears.
The ELECTRIC SKY should appeal to the informed reader. It is based upon sound electrical engineering principles and confirmed by experiment. The ELECTRIC SKY argues that the universe is utterly different from what we have been taught to believe. With this new electrical circuit diagram the universe is transformed. As Bryan Appleyard writes, “If all that we have been doing has merely been an effective series of extrapolations on a series of assumptions that we now know to be flawed, then perhaps the truth of the world is far more radically different from anything which we have yet allowed ourselves to dream.”
...
<font color="#bd934f">It’s Time to Decide
The main thrust of this book is that the time is ripe for informed people from outside astrophysics to evaluate what the astrophysical theoreticians have been telling us.
If, as we will claim, the causes of most of the observed phenomena of modern astronomy are electrical in nature, do you need a degree in electrical engineering before you can understand them? Indeed not. The average informed person can understand and make rational judgments about these ideas. All it requires is the time and patience to read and to think logically and critically about the issues. Some basic facts and a few new concepts will suffice. So the main goal of this work is to convince you, the reader, that you really do have both the capability and responsibility to make informed, critical judgments about the pronouncements of established scientists. A careful reading of these pages will enable you to make an informed assessment of this new plasma-based alternative cosmology.
Interested plasma scientists and electrical engineers have been thrashing out the various hypotheses of Plasma Cosmology in their conferences and publications. So far, most astrophysicists have completely ignored them. Instead of engaging in further futile attempts to persuade the astrophysical community to seriously consider these new ideas, a growing band of plasma scientists, engineers, and a few brave cosmologists and astronomers are simply bypassing them. A paradigm based on electric plasma, which does not find new discoveries to be enigmatic and puzzling but instead to be predictable and consistent, is slowly but surely gaining ground. But it may well be that general acceptance of these new ideas will have to wait until the present occupants of the astrophysics power structure have retired from the scene. </font>
- Wal Thornhill, The Electric Sky—Interview with the author, 24 December 2006</blockquote>
'The experimental evidence for the electrical nature of galaxies has been available for many decades now. But who has heard anything about it?'
<blockquote><font color="#bd934f">"One fact that strikes everyone is the spiral shape of some nebulae; it is encountered much too often for us to believe that it is due to chance. It is easy to understand how incomplete any theory of cosmogony which ignores this fact must be. None of the theories accounts for it satisfactorily, and the explanation I myself once gave, in a kind of toy theory, is no better than the others. Consequently, we come up against a big question mark." — Henri Poincaré, at the conclusion of the preface to his book, Hypothèses Cosmogoniques.
"Space is filled with a network of currents which transfer energy and momentum over large or very large distances. The currents often pinch to filamentary or surface currents. The latter are likely to give space, as also interstellar and intergalactic space, a cellular structure." —Hannes Alfvén.</font>
In an Electric Universe x-ray and radio astronomies are very important; x-ray because it reveals discharge activity that produces x-rays; and radio because it traces the cosmic power transmission lines in deep space through the polarization of radio waves from electrons spiralling in a magnetic field — known as ‘synchrotron radiation.’
...
...there is a model of spiral galaxy formation that has long been demonstrated by laboratory experiment and "particle in cell” (PIC) simulations on a supercomputer. But instead of using stars, gas and dust as the particles, subject to Newton’s laws, the particles are charged and respond to the laws of electromagnetism. This seems like an obvious approach when we know that more than 99.9 percent of the visible universe is in the form of plasma. Plasma is a gas influenced by the presence of charged atoms and electrons. Plasma responds to electromagnetic forces that exceed the strength of gravity to the extent that gravity can usually be safely ignored. This simple fact alone suggests why gravitational models of galaxies must fail.
<blockquote>
>> The plasma universe may be eternal and infinite, directly contradicting the Big bang model. In this picture, swirling streams of electrons and ions form filaments that span vast regions of space. Where pairs of these filaments interact the particles gain energy and at narrow “pinch” regions produce the entire range of galaxy types as well as the full spectrum of cosmic electromagnetic radiation. Thus galaxies must lie along filaments, as they are observed to do on a large scale. The bulk of the filaments are optically invisible from a distance, much like the related Birkeland currents that reach from the Sun and cause auroras on Earth. —Credit: A. Peratt, Plasma Cosmology, 1992. </blockquote>
...
It is very disturbing that the public accepts this blatant baloney without question. If scientists were forced to defend their statements in a court of law under the rules of evidence, most of the misbegotten ideas that make up modern science would never have survived. Physics would have remained in the classical hands of the experimentalists and the engineers who have to make things work. Countless billions of dollars could have been saved in misdirected and pointless experiments.
The experimental evidence for the electrical nature of galaxies has been available for many decades now. But who has heard anything about it? The lack of debate demonstrates the power of institutionalized science to maintain the “uncanny inertia” of the “erroneous theories” they have introduced into our culture. We have given scientists that power by trusting them more than our commonsense.
Having discovered electric power we find it indispensable. We also find that Nature does things with exquisite economy. So the commonsense question is simply, “would Nature choose the weakest force in the universe —gravity — to form and light the countless magnificent galaxies?” I don’t think so!
- Wal Thornhill, Electric Galaxies, 20 May 2008</blockquote>
'...Gravity is an exhausted and bankrupt concept. A higher, more comprehensive foundation is needed. The technologies of gravity have lifted us to a viewpoint that's bigger than gravity, and we need new ideas and new tools to make sense of the new vistas.'
<blockquote>'Ptolemy drew a picture of what the universe looked like from the Earth. Copernicus described how it looked from the Sun. Newton depicted the view from gravity. Notice that the terms "Earth", "Sun", and "gravity" are not "something out there" but are concepts that make sense of or create meaning from a selection of observations. Gravity, for example, made sense of falling apples and revolving planets. The other viewpoints "saw" no connection between apples and planets. Definitions changed: The observations once considered important in the term "planet" were replaced with other observations. New mathematical techniques were developed which would have seemed nonsensical to people occupying the old viewpoints. The resulting view of the "gravity universe" was that of isolated "billiard balls" occasionally perturbing each other. This replaced the old views of a system of nested spheres or an assembly of epicycles.
Now the "Electric Universe" is a different viewpoint. Notice, for example, that its definition of "plasma" is not the conventional one of "ionized gas". That latter definition jumps to the conclusion that you can understand something about plasma by falling back on what you know about ideal gases and thermal ionization. The ideal gas law is an important insight in the conventional view, but it becomes a blindfold in the electric view, preventing you from seeing what's before your eyes. Rather, "plasma" is an emergent (i.e., higher-level or statistical-level) orderliness of complex electrical forces: such properties as filamentation, long-range attraction and short-range repulsion, braiding, characteristic velocities, formation and decay of plasmoids, and identity of properties at different scales.
The mathematical shorthand that was developed for articulating the gravity view and for using the technologies based on it doesn't work for the plasma view. A new mathematics -and new technologies- will need to be invented.
The view of the universe from a plasma vantage point is one of persistently interacting aggregates with wide-spread resonance effects: a "driven" universe rather than one rolling to a stop.
So the definitions are different, the facts are different, the math is different, the theories are different: The universe looks different because the plasma physicist is standing in a different conceptual location from the gravity physicist. And although the content of each paradigm can't be compared with the other, the respective viewpoints can be compared.
...
Newton was unaware of plasma. Today his disciples spend years in training learning when and how to shut their eyes to it. It's not just the Big Bang, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics that are in trouble but the foundation of them all: Gravity is an exhausted and bankrupt concept. A higher, more comprehensive foundation is needed. The technologies of gravity have lifted us to a viewpoint that's bigger than gravity, and we need new ideas and new tools to make sense of the new vistas.'
- Mel Acheson, GRAVITY vs PLASMA, 3 November 1999</blockquote>
'The inertia of institutional specialization infects modern science and education ... It was Dr. Alex Dessler in 1967 who discovered the electric currents in space that Birkeland had predicted.'
<blockquote>'In a keynote address at the Marshall Space Flight Center in March 1986, Hannes Alfvén complained that the most used textbooks in astrophysics do not treat important concepts like double layers, critical velocity, pinch effects and circuits. "Students using these [astrophysics] textbooks remain essentially ignorant of even the existence of these [concepts], in spite of the fact that some of them have been well known for half a century. The conclusion is that astrophysics is too important to be left in the hands of the astrophysicists. The billion-dollar telescope data must be treated by scientists who are familiar with laboratory and magnetospheric physics and circuit theory, and of course with modern plasma theory."
Twenty years later, this has not been done. The inertia of institutional specialization infects modern science and education. Astrophysicists with inappropriate and narrow training remain in control. Meanwhile the puzzles facing the space sciences multiply by the day and falsifiable predictions (the best test of a good theory) are rare—and even more rarely successful. This contrasts starkly with the Electric Universe model, which recognizes Alfvén's pioneering insights and has many successful predictions to its credit, including this one on Saturn.
The imagery of Saturn's south polar hot spot is now sufficiently detailed to require more explanation than was given in my earlier news items. The electrical model of Saturn has the planet participating as a minor cathode in the solar circuit. Birkeland showed experimentally how Saturn's enigmatic rings could be the result of an electric discharge to a magnetized sphere, representing the planet, and acting as the cathode.
<blockquote>
>> From Kristian Birkeland's series, 'The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition 1902-1903,' Volume 1: On the Cause of Magnetic Storms and The Origin of Terrestrial Magnetism, published in 1908.</blockquote>
After 100 years Birkeland's simple electrically driven model is unmentioned in astrophysics textbooks! It is a disturbing illustration that astrophysics has no interest in experimental evidence that doesn't fit the dogma of an electrically inert universe. For this and other reasons, history will view the 20th century as a dark age of science. It is perhaps unfortunate that burgeoning technology has masked the stagnation in fundamental science.
It was Dr. Alex Dessler in 1967 who discovered the electric currents in space that Birkeland had predicted. He suggested that the transverse magnetic field components found in the Earth's magnetosphere and auroras indicated electric currents essentially parallel to the magnetic field lines. Dessler called them 'Birkeland currents,' a term which is now generally accepted and sometimes generalized to mean all currents flowing parallel to the ambient magnetic field.
<blockquote>
>> This figure shows the forces between two adjacent Birkeland current filaments following auroral magnetic field lines. The parallel components of current are long-range attractive, while the counter-parallel azimuthal currents are short-range repulsive. These forces cause the currents to form sheets, filaments, or 'magnetic ropes' and they can be found far from the source region. A projection of the current-induced magnetic fields is shown above the graph.
Credit: A. L. Peratt, Physics of the Plasma Universe, p. 112.</blockquote>
- Wal Thornhill, The 'Spiral Galaxy' at Saturn's Pole, 20 November 2006</blockquote>
'If, as we will claim, the causes of most of the observed phenomena of modern astronomy are electrical in nature, do you need a degree in electrical engineering before you can understand them? Indeed not. The average informed person can understand and make rational judgments about these ideas.'
<blockquote><font color="#bd934f">“A revolution is beginning in astronomy and cosmology that will rival the one set off by Copernicus and Galileo.”
—Don Scott</font>
A new book I recommend highly for the new year is Don Scott’s The ELECTRIC SKY. It is an important book because it encourages informed people to “demand reasonable answers to reasonable questions” from space scientists. It is easy to be intimidated by the flood of bizarre claims from astrophysicists and cosmologists and become “convinced that nonsense is ruling the world.” The ELECTRIC SKY offers a refreshing, practical alternative. This work is not “fringe” science. It is based on the work of Nobel Prize winners whose work has been selectively and incorrectly applied by theoretical astrophysicists. When viewed from a practical electrical engineering standpoint, the fog of misconceptions and misinformation clears and a new vision of the universe appears.
The ELECTRIC SKY should appeal to the informed reader. It is based upon sound electrical engineering principles and confirmed by experiment. The ELECTRIC SKY argues that the universe is utterly different from what we have been taught to believe. With this new electrical circuit diagram the universe is transformed. As Bryan Appleyard writes, “If all that we have been doing has merely been an effective series of extrapolations on a series of assumptions that we now know to be flawed, then perhaps the truth of the world is far more radically different from anything which we have yet allowed ourselves to dream.”
...
<font color="#bd934f">It’s Time to Decide
The main thrust of this book is that the time is ripe for informed people from outside astrophysics to evaluate what the astrophysical theoreticians have been telling us.
If, as we will claim, the causes of most of the observed phenomena of modern astronomy are electrical in nature, do you need a degree in electrical engineering before you can understand them? Indeed not. The average informed person can understand and make rational judgments about these ideas. All it requires is the time and patience to read and to think logically and critically about the issues. Some basic facts and a few new concepts will suffice. So the main goal of this work is to convince you, the reader, that you really do have both the capability and responsibility to make informed, critical judgments about the pronouncements of established scientists. A careful reading of these pages will enable you to make an informed assessment of this new plasma-based alternative cosmology.
Interested plasma scientists and electrical engineers have been thrashing out the various hypotheses of Plasma Cosmology in their conferences and publications. So far, most astrophysicists have completely ignored them. Instead of engaging in further futile attempts to persuade the astrophysical community to seriously consider these new ideas, a growing band of plasma scientists, engineers, and a few brave cosmologists and astronomers are simply bypassing them. A paradigm based on electric plasma, which does not find new discoveries to be enigmatic and puzzling but instead to be predictable and consistent, is slowly but surely gaining ground. But it may well be that general acceptance of these new ideas will have to wait until the present occupants of the astrophysics power structure have retired from the scene. </font>
- Wal Thornhill, The Electric Sky—Interview with the author, 24 December 2006</blockquote>
'The experimental evidence for the electrical nature of galaxies has been available for many decades now. But who has heard anything about it?'
<blockquote><font color="#bd934f">"One fact that strikes everyone is the spiral shape of some nebulae; it is encountered much too often for us to believe that it is due to chance. It is easy to understand how incomplete any theory of cosmogony which ignores this fact must be. None of the theories accounts for it satisfactorily, and the explanation I myself once gave, in a kind of toy theory, is no better than the others. Consequently, we come up against a big question mark." — Henri Poincaré, at the conclusion of the preface to his book, Hypothèses Cosmogoniques.
"Space is filled with a network of currents which transfer energy and momentum over large or very large distances. The currents often pinch to filamentary or surface currents. The latter are likely to give space, as also interstellar and intergalactic space, a cellular structure." —Hannes Alfvén.</font>
In an Electric Universe x-ray and radio astronomies are very important; x-ray because it reveals discharge activity that produces x-rays; and radio because it traces the cosmic power transmission lines in deep space through the polarization of radio waves from electrons spiralling in a magnetic field — known as ‘synchrotron radiation.’
...
...there is a model of spiral galaxy formation that has long been demonstrated by laboratory experiment and "particle in cell” (PIC) simulations on a supercomputer. But instead of using stars, gas and dust as the particles, subject to Newton’s laws, the particles are charged and respond to the laws of electromagnetism. This seems like an obvious approach when we know that more than 99.9 percent of the visible universe is in the form of plasma. Plasma is a gas influenced by the presence of charged atoms and electrons. Plasma responds to electromagnetic forces that exceed the strength of gravity to the extent that gravity can usually be safely ignored. This simple fact alone suggests why gravitational models of galaxies must fail.
<blockquote>
>> The plasma universe may be eternal and infinite, directly contradicting the Big bang model. In this picture, swirling streams of electrons and ions form filaments that span vast regions of space. Where pairs of these filaments interact the particles gain energy and at narrow “pinch” regions produce the entire range of galaxy types as well as the full spectrum of cosmic electromagnetic radiation. Thus galaxies must lie along filaments, as they are observed to do on a large scale. The bulk of the filaments are optically invisible from a distance, much like the related Birkeland currents that reach from the Sun and cause auroras on Earth. —Credit: A. Peratt, Plasma Cosmology, 1992. </blockquote>
...
It is very disturbing that the public accepts this blatant baloney without question. If scientists were forced to defend their statements in a court of law under the rules of evidence, most of the misbegotten ideas that make up modern science would never have survived. Physics would have remained in the classical hands of the experimentalists and the engineers who have to make things work. Countless billions of dollars could have been saved in misdirected and pointless experiments.
The experimental evidence for the electrical nature of galaxies has been available for many decades now. But who has heard anything about it? The lack of debate demonstrates the power of institutionalized science to maintain the “uncanny inertia” of the “erroneous theories” they have introduced into our culture. We have given scientists that power by trusting them more than our commonsense.
Having discovered electric power we find it indispensable. We also find that Nature does things with exquisite economy. So the commonsense question is simply, “would Nature choose the weakest force in the universe —gravity — to form and light the countless magnificent galaxies?” I don’t think so!
- Wal Thornhill, Electric Galaxies, 20 May 2008</blockquote>
'...Gravity is an exhausted and bankrupt concept. A higher, more comprehensive foundation is needed. The technologies of gravity have lifted us to a viewpoint that's bigger than gravity, and we need new ideas and new tools to make sense of the new vistas.'
<blockquote>'Ptolemy drew a picture of what the universe looked like from the Earth. Copernicus described how it looked from the Sun. Newton depicted the view from gravity. Notice that the terms "Earth", "Sun", and "gravity" are not "something out there" but are concepts that make sense of or create meaning from a selection of observations. Gravity, for example, made sense of falling apples and revolving planets. The other viewpoints "saw" no connection between apples and planets. Definitions changed: The observations once considered important in the term "planet" were replaced with other observations. New mathematical techniques were developed which would have seemed nonsensical to people occupying the old viewpoints. The resulting view of the "gravity universe" was that of isolated "billiard balls" occasionally perturbing each other. This replaced the old views of a system of nested spheres or an assembly of epicycles.
Now the "Electric Universe" is a different viewpoint. Notice, for example, that its definition of "plasma" is not the conventional one of "ionized gas". That latter definition jumps to the conclusion that you can understand something about plasma by falling back on what you know about ideal gases and thermal ionization. The ideal gas law is an important insight in the conventional view, but it becomes a blindfold in the electric view, preventing you from seeing what's before your eyes. Rather, "plasma" is an emergent (i.e., higher-level or statistical-level) orderliness of complex electrical forces: such properties as filamentation, long-range attraction and short-range repulsion, braiding, characteristic velocities, formation and decay of plasmoids, and identity of properties at different scales.
The mathematical shorthand that was developed for articulating the gravity view and for using the technologies based on it doesn't work for the plasma view. A new mathematics -and new technologies- will need to be invented.
The view of the universe from a plasma vantage point is one of persistently interacting aggregates with wide-spread resonance effects: a "driven" universe rather than one rolling to a stop.
So the definitions are different, the facts are different, the math is different, the theories are different: The universe looks different because the plasma physicist is standing in a different conceptual location from the gravity physicist. And although the content of each paradigm can't be compared with the other, the respective viewpoints can be compared.
...
Newton was unaware of plasma. Today his disciples spend years in training learning when and how to shut their eyes to it. It's not just the Big Bang, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics that are in trouble but the foundation of them all: Gravity is an exhausted and bankrupt concept. A higher, more comprehensive foundation is needed. The technologies of gravity have lifted us to a viewpoint that's bigger than gravity, and we need new ideas and new tools to make sense of the new vistas.'
- Mel Acheson, GRAVITY vs PLASMA, 3 November 1999</blockquote>