What takes place in thunderstorms on Earth is most likely a smaller version of large scale phenomena.
- Stephen Smith,
Electrical Accumulators, December 31, 2013
“We know that there have been more than 30 reversals of the earth’s magnetic field in the last 10 million years. Associated wandering of the magnetic poles would have resulted in periods when the aurora was seen much more frequently at mid-latitudes than is the case today. Consequently, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Stone Age man gazed with concern at flickering auroral lights and perhaps recorded them in his art.”'..in 1976, the American physicist, George Siscoe, figured that the earliest depictions of aurorae might be found in the ‘macaronis’ or serpentine meanders painted on rocks and cave walls: “The most dramatic example of this possibility is to be found on the ceiling of the cave of Rouffignac in France, where lines drawn in the red clay ceiling resemble the folded curtain patterns of the aurora.” Although it may seem puzzling that Cro-Magnon people would have preoccupied themselves with a natural phenomenon that rarely occurs at their latitude, conditions are bound to have been different in the past:
“We know that there have been more than 30 reversals of the earth’s magnetic field in the last 10 million years. Associated wandering of the magnetic poles would have resulted in periods when the aurora was seen much more frequently at mid-latitudes than is the case today. Consequently, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Stone Age man gazed with concern at flickering auroral lights and perhaps recorded them in his art.”
This view is endorsed by members of NASA’s THEMIS team, who concluded from this type of rock art that aurorae “have influenced the course of history, religion, and art” from prehistoric times. Other specialists on the polar lights have also speculated “that a great deal of the very ancient engravings which have been found in several grottos along the Mediterranean Sea are in fact pictorial representations of the northern light.”
Moving beyond speculation, a recent comparison with the observed behaviour of high-energy-density plasmas in laboratory, in space and according to particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations suggests that not only some of the French and Spanish cave paintings of the Cro-Magnon era may include auroral motifs, but also the worldwide impressions on rock, typically exposed to the open air, that proliferated from the end of the Palaeolithic and throughout the Neolithic period, roughly from 11,000 BCE to 3,000 BCE, though in many places continuing into later periods. Rupestral art as a whole appears as one monolithic witness to the possibility that awe-inspiring plasma filaments painted their characteristic nonfigurative images in the firmament first.'
- Rens Van Der Sluijs,
Go Figure! January 20, 2014
'Finally, the tendency to rate models higher than data may have been reinforced by the massive effect of the devastating First World War (1914-1918) on collective psychology. In its most general form, this effect entailed a retreat from accurate and detailed observation of reality, often whimsical, into the relative safety of abstraction and distortion. In art, this trend is seen in such movements as modernism, expressionism, Dadaism, surrealism, futurism, cubism and Bauhaus, continued after the Second World War (1939-1945) by the likes of pop art, minimalism, and abstract expressionalism – all of which shared an aggressive contempt for naturalistic painting, sculpture or writing. While the wars’ influence on art is widely discussed and recognised, perhaps the trauma affected science similarly – encouraging an escape from testable facts, coupled with an embrace of the magical, unthreatening world of numbers and unobservable entities, a world in which regularity, predictability and uniformity could be postulated with impunity and any form of large-scale destruction simply denied. Thus, the great military conflicts of the 20th century seem to have further motivated a retreat away from factual observation into unfettered abstraction and mathematics among scientists and artists alike.''..that the great English electrical experimentalist Sir William Crookes (1832-1919) was much involved in spiritualism and séances, subscribing to the Theosophical Society and serving as a president of the Society for Psychical Research during the 1890s and of the Ghost Club from 1907 to 1912, may inadvertently have had a dilatory effect on the study of “radiant matter” and the solution he expected it to promise of “the greatest scientific problems of the future”. Ditto for his compatriot Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge (1851-1940), who dedicated much of his career to the study of electromagnetism, but studied the afterlife and psychical phenomena just as ardently, likewise joining the Ghost Club and serving as a president of the Society for Psychical Research from 1901 to 1903 and again in 1932. Passing no judgment on the pursuit of spirituality itself, one suspects that the manner in which it was sometimes conducted or burgeoning materialistic prejudice may have sufficed for some to condemn it altogether – discrediting speculative electromagnetical theories en passant.
Secondly, the rise of quantum mechanics during the early 20th century, involving household names such as Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein, may have diverted attention away from electromagnetic studies. The attention span of scientists being finite, perhaps the more traditional subjects of electricity and magnetism simply lost their appeal when quantum physics entered the scene – especially after Einstein made his
entrée.
Thirdly, the 19th century saw a resurgence of uniformitarian thought in geology, biology and palaeontology, producing secondary ripples in astronomy and anthropology. Whereas gravity naturally acts as a stable, highly predictable force, the almost unfathomable complexity of plasma behaviour is better accommodated on a catastrophist mindset. Natural philosophers who are happy to speculate on cometary impacts, changes in planetary orbits or punctuated equilibria in evolution will be more adequately prepared for the non-linear, chaotic regime that is so common in energetic plasmas or the volatility of coronal mass ejections, planetary magnetotails, comets and stellar flares. For those who believed that natura non facit saltus, the seeming capriciousness intrinsic to electromagnetic systems – hard to tame with mathematics – may have been a hard pill to swallow, best buried swiftly under a fossil-free sediment of dogmatic orthodoxy.
Fourthly, whereas the electromagnetic theories of Birkeland’s day were ensconced in an empirical foundation of practical observation and experimentation, the 19th century gradually ushered in a marked preference for theory over practice, for mathematical calculations over direct observations. This development may have been an inexorable accompaniment of the revival of uniformitarianism, with which it shares an aversion to rare extreme events which are hard to locate in observational records, replicate or model mathematically. The seeds for the shift may have been sown in 1838, when the German mathematician and physicist Johann Carl Friedrich Gauß (1777-1855) mathematically modelled the earth’s magnetic field by means of spherical harmonics but, in the words of science-historian Gillian Turner, “seemed curiously uninterested” in “what actually caused this magnetism”:
“Being at heart a mathematician, he was motivated more by the analytical description offered by the new mathematical methods than by the need for a physical explanation of the phenomenon. … Curiously, nearly twenty years after Ørsted’s discovery that a magnetic field could be the result of an electric current, Gauss stuck steadfastly to the idea of permanent magnetism.”
A similar attitude showed in 1860, when the vacant directorship of Cambridge Observatory was not given to Richard Carrington (1826-1875), a talented and experienced observer, but to John Couch Adams (1819-1892), who solved astronomical problems using mathematics only. This love of unfettered mathematical derivation, ins Blaue hinein, has characterised astrophysics ever since. In 1892, the Irish mathematical physicist Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) – the same who in 1900 overweeningly announced that “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now” – rejected Carrington’s evidence for a relation between sunspots and aurorae on the slender basis of mathematics. And the English mathematician and geophysicist Sydney Chapman (1888-1970) famously refused to observe Alfvén’s replication of Birkeland’s terrella experiment when he was given the opportunity to do so. As Alfvén reflected:
“… he flatly refused to go down into the basement and see it … It was beneath his dignity as a mathematician to look at a piece of laboratory apparatus!”
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) astutely diagnosed the problem in 1934:
“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.”
Finally, the tendency to rate models higher than data may have been reinforced by the massive effect of the devastating First World War (1914-1918) on collective psychology. In its most general form, this effect entailed a retreat from accurate and detailed observation of reality, often whimsical, into the relative safety of abstraction and distortion. In art, this trend is seen in such movements as modernism, expressionism, Dadaism, surrealism, futurism, cubism and Bauhaus, continued after the Second World War (1939-1945) by the likes of pop art, minimalism, and abstract expressionalism – all of which shared an aggressive contempt for naturalistic painting, sculpture or writing. While the wars’ influence on art is widely discussed and recognised, perhaps the trauma affected science similarly – encouraging an escape from testable facts, coupled with an embrace of the magical, unthreatening world of numbers and unobservable entities, a world in which regularity, predictability and uniformity could be postulated with impunity and any form of large-scale destruction simply denied. Thus, the great military conflicts of the 20th century seem to have further motivated a retreat away from factual observation into unfettered abstraction and mathematics among scientists and artists alike.
It was this neurotic mindset of a uniformitarian, gravitational, mathematical and non-spiritual cosmology, paralysing the sciences as well as the humanities, that was confronted in the 1950s by a Jewish-Russian maverick scholar who fell foul of the entire academic community, remained a persona non grata for the remainder of his life and continues to be reviled whenever his name is uttered within the halls of academia. Perhaps the time has come to revisit the potential of electromagnetic cosmologies – and transform it into current thought.
- Rens Van Der Sluijs,
Currents of Thought, January 1, 2014
'..they completely ignore the role of electricity in space and contend for purely mechanistic and chemical interactions.''Is it a coincidence that hurricanes Katrina and Rita occurred on either side of the second largest X-flare ever recorded?
In 1997, Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Fris-Christensen published “Variation of Cosmic Ray Flux and Global Cloud Coverage – a Missing Link in Solar–Climate Relationships” in which they argue for the Sun’s mediating influence on Earth’s climate. Essentially, the greater the number of high-energy ions that enter our magnetic field, the greater will be the cloud cover.
When the Sun enters a quiet phase in its 22 year cycle, more charged particles are able to reach Earth because the solar magnetic field is not strong enough to deflect them. As they encounter our watery atmosphere, they cause clouds to form. Similar to an old-fashioned cloud chamber, when fast moving ions fly through a region of high humidity a track of condensation appears. It was those threads of tiny droplets that were once used to monitor subatomic particles produced by linear accelerators or “atom-smashers.”
Mike Lockwood and Claus Fröhlich issued a paper in 2007 that contradicted any idea of a heliocentric influence on cloud cover. Although they acknowledge that it might have had a small effect in the past, they assert that humanity’s industrial activity is so great that it overshadows a solar connection. Of course, they completely ignore the role of electricity in space and contend for purely mechanistic and chemical interactions.'
- Stephen Smith,
Solar Bursts, January 28, 2014
'It seems almost as if ‘speculation’ (which, be it remembered, is merely another word for thinking) had become so discredited among psychologists that it has to be done by outsiders who have no professional reputation to lose.” ''Rediscovering F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order has been exciting.
Hayek began his inquiry into the foundations of theoretical psychology in 1919 before specializing in economics (and winning a Nobel Prize in that latter field in 1974). He didn’t publish The Sensory Order until 1952, when he found “with considerable surprise” that theoretical psychology “remained pretty much in the same state in which it had been” 30 years before. He attributed this stasis to “the prevalence during this period of an all too exclusively empirical approach and of an excessive contempt for ‘speculation’.
It seems almost as if ‘speculation’ (which, be it remembered, is merely another word for thinking) had become so discredited among psychologists that it has to be done by outsiders who have no professional reputation to lose.” (Preface, p. vi, 1976 paperback reprint by University of Chicago Press.) Hayek presents the fundamental problem with which psychology is concerned to be explaining the existence of and differences between the sensory order of our minds and the physical or objective order as delineated by the various sciences. It’s the distinction between things as related to us and things as related to each other.'
- Mel Acheson,
Rediscovering F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order has been exciting, Jan 28, 2014
Context'Therefore it is clear that the Electric Sun model straightforwardly predicts the existence of the observed temperature profile and demonstrates how it occurs. If there were no temperature discontinuity, this would pose a problem for the Electric Sun hypothesis.'
- Donald Scott,
Why the Lower Corona of the Sun Is Hotter Than the Photosphere, January 17, 2014
(The Electric Universe) - SAFIRE: Understanding the Electric Sun Models'..E-coli and its fellows are driven by
electric motors.'
- Stephen Smith,
Flagellar Motors, December 26, 2013