The Electric Universe Doesn’t begin with a Big
Bang
By Coral
Wynter
There are now
two major theories of the origin of the universe in existence. One is the
official story and the other most likely few have never heard of or even guess
of its existence. The unofficial one is virtually underground, with books, web
pages, blogs and DVDs and active discussion groups, circulating on the
internet. Both are advocated by people with degrees in science, cosmology, physics,
electrical engineering or electronics and a few sprinkling of Nobel prizes in
both camps. The unofficial version is certainly not mystical or shrouded in New
Age spiritualism but based on solid experiment and proven observation. One is
considered legitimate and the other to be advocated by total nutters or madmen.
The official story is based on the Big Bang theory, proposes the existence of Black
Holes, that spits out matter and even a Black Hole having the mass of a billion
Suns as well as advocating a warped 11 dimensional space, and physically impossible
Neutron stars. All of these theories are put forward as it is the only way to
solve the mathematical equations.
In
addition, the official story proposes that 96% of the matter in the universe is
made up of Dark Energy as well as Dark Matter that emits no light and is
invisible. But no one knows the composition of Dark Matter or Dark Energy and
there are no ideas forthcoming on possible candidates. Further, there is no
experimental evidence for the graviton or the Higgs Boson particle, despite all
the billion dollar efforts of the Large Hadron Collider, the cyclotron, built
in Geneva, Switzerland by the European
Organisation for Nuclear Research or CERN. It is still impossible to unify
quantum mechanics with gravity. Gravity waves have still not been detected
after two years and building two 4 kilometre machines underground, one in Louisiana
(USA) and the other in Washington to detect them (LIGO project). Writing
mathematical equations to his very last breath, Albert Einstein died in the
attempt, trying to reconcile gravity with quantum theories.
Those
supporting the unofficial story have been denied publication in peer-reviewed
scientific journals, the life blood of a scientific career. The unofficial
story says there are no Black Holes, there was never a Big Bang and in short
that the Universe is electric, that it is based on electromagnetic forces that
are a trillion, trillion times stronger than the forces of gravity. It
maintains that gravity, a very weak force, cannot explain the formation of galaxies
nor the planets. The official version states that the Universe is 13.7 billion
years old but others have shown that the Universe is structured with vast
ribbons of galaxies that could not have reasonably formed in less than 200
billion years. The Electric Universe can explain many of the gamma ray and
X-ray phenomena, seen in the Hubble telescope, floating in space way above the
Earth with much improved resolution of images of stars and galaxies.
The Electric
Universe also offers a totally different story about the energy of the Sun and
its source. This theory also questions the redshift of the Doppler effect, codified
as Hubble’s Law, which is used to calculate the distance of galaxies from our
own solar system and the actual age of the Universe. It also questions the fact
that the galaxies are accelerating away from us and that this rate is
accelerating, so that in the long run, the sky will be totally dark at night as
the stars have all moved away and the only visible galaxy will be Andromeda. For
this last discovery, a US
born, Australian citizen Brian Schmidt and collaborators in the USA were given the
Nobel Prize in Physics, 2011, once again putting the official stamp on the
unknowable and unseen Dark Matter.
The
unofficial story maintains that the present, accepted theory of the Universe
was derived from Olympian leaps of abstract thinking using mathematics, without
any verification from direct experimentation or observation but accepted simply
because the equations could be solved mathematically. It is also partly a
result of the success of Einstein’s thought experiments. This method is known
as deductive, deducing how the universe must be, ignoring observation and
experimentation. Astronomy has lost its way, ending in a mathematical cul-de-sac.
No wonder the unofficial theory is regarded as heretical, challenging Black
Holes, the sacred Hubble Doppler effect and the Big Bang itself.
They are
not questioning the existence of gravity; simply that it plays a much lesser
and secondary role behind the much larger forces of electromagnetism. Newton’s law of gravity
explains the motions of falling bodies on Earth and placing satellites into
orbit. However inside the nucleus of an atom, Newton’s gravity laws do not work and we have
to resort to the strong and weak nuclear forces. But the strong and weak
nuclear forces do not work in the macroscopic domain. Newton’s laws also fail to explain the way
galaxies rotate because it is outside its domain of validity (6). The very
large distance domain is best described by electromagnetism, using
Maxwell-Lorentz laws.
The
official story is everywhere. I was on a plane going from Chile to Australia
and one of the documentaries available was the origin of the universe and the
Big Bang story, going back to the micro, micro second, or to be exact 10-35 of a second after
the Big Bang when everything was reduced to a singularity, impossible in
physics and the real world but possible using mathematics. Science fiction
writer Terry Pratchett has parodied the Big Bang and the Bible in one of his
books, saying ‘’In the beginning there
was nothing—which exploded.’’ (1) The Big Bang theory has been given a
massive boost by the Catholic Church and religion in general. This is because
the Big Bang fits neatly into a schema where God created the Universe in a Big
Bang. Therefore, end of story; it proves God must exist and there is no need to
talk of what happened before the Big Bang, what precipitated the weird Bang and
who created God in the first place. The Big Bang gives the idea of a Creator a
certain scientific validity. In addition, it adds an apocalyptic view of the
universe, doomed to decay in a final annihilation, a universe hostile to human
endeavour; a very suitable vision for the Catholic Church. We shall all burn in
hell, which might be a singularity, except the believers.
Catholic Church
Science and
scientific knowledge is a great threat to the Catholic Church, which has had to
fight vigorously against the perception as anti-Science. The whole world knows
about Galileo Galilei and how he was forced to recant in 1632. The Catholic
Church even has a web site devoted to this question and how to reply to critics
of their treatment of Galileo. It mentions that Galileo was never tortured,
just confined for the rest of his lifetime at home, with no visitors allowed
and no access to books. In 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for how the Galileo affair
was handled, and issued a declaration acknowledging the errors committed by the
Church tribunal that judged the scientific positions of Galileo.
But two
years previously, in 1990, in a speech delivered at the Sapienza
University of Rome, Cardinal Ratzinger (later to become Pope Benedict XVI) referred to the sentiment of great doubt in
the modern age and justified the church’s treatment of Galileo, saying it was
rational in terms of the church having to consider the social consequences of
those new ideas. Ratzinger even asserted "It would be foolish to construct
an impulsive apologetic on the basis of such views.´´ The Catholic Church never
mentions its treatment of astronomer, Giordano Bruno, an Italian Dominican
friar who first proposed that the planets moved around the Sun. After seven
years imprisonment, where he refused to recant, he was burnt at the stake by
civilian authorities in 1600 after the Roman Inquisition found him guilty of
heresy and pantheism.
The idea of
the Big Bang was first proposed in 1927 by a Belgian Catholic priest, lecturing
at the Catholic University of Louvain, who was also a scientist, Abbe Georges
Lemaitre. Lemaitre proposed the Universe had expanded from an initial point,
which he called the ‘Primeval Atom.’ Lemaitre stated, who else
could have created something out of nothing but God? Fred Hoyle, a British
scientist, who at first laughed at the notion, gave it the common name of the
Big Bang. Even Einstein commented, telling Lemaitre, "Your math is
correct, but your physics is abominable." Another eminent plasma cosmologist Hannes Alfven, said ‘’I was there when
Abbe Georges Lemaitre first proposed this theory," he recalled. ‘’Lemaitre
said in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas
Aquinas' theological dictum of creatio ex
nihilo or creation out of nothing.’’ http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/people/alfven.html. The Vatican has given large sums of
money to astrophysicists who adhere to the official story. The Vatican
Observatory
(Specola Vaticana) is an astronomical research and educational institution
supported by the Holy See. Originally based in Rome, it now has headquarters and laboratory at the summer residence of the Pope in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, and an observatory at the Mount Graham International Observatory in the United States. Dr Guy Consolmango is one of a team of 12
astronomers, all of them Jesuits, working for the Vatican. The group specialises in
galaxy formation and inflationary universes, which is also a key concept of the
Big Bang.
Paul Davies
a well known physicist and popular science writer has attended many conferences
hosted by the Vatican
and has written books, titled ‘’The Mind of God’’, ‘’The Last Three Minutes,’’
‘’God and the New Physics.’’ Paul Davies was awarded the US based
Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, in 1995 worth about AUD$1,000,000 for
showing ‘’extraordinary originality’’ in advancing humankind’s understanding of
God or spirituality. Previous winners included Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mother
Teresa, evangelist Billy Graham and Charles Colson, infamous as the Watergate
burglar in President’s Nixon’s time, who on his release from prison, found God.
Davies maintains that ‘’science offers a surer path to God than religion.’’
Davies succeeded in injecting mysticism and religion into science (2). The
Pontifical Academy of Science, of which Stephen Hawking used to be a member, kept
the senior cardinals and the Pope up-to-date with the latest scientific
developments. Even Stephen Hawkins for a long time bought into the God stuff,
but has now changed his thinking talking about many universes or parallel
universes, operating at the same time. Perhaps he can sniff that the wind is
changing direction.
![http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Specola1.jpg](file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CMICROS%7E1%5CCONFIG%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_image002.jpg)
Fig 1. Vatican Observatory Telescope in Castel Gandolfo. The stone engraving says ‘God the
Creator, Let us adore Him.’
Marxism
Why should
Marxists be interested in the origin of the Universe anyway? Well, it is an
important topic. How did the universe start or did it start? Where is it going,
if we survive the present looming and much more immediate environmental and
capitalist crisis on Earth? Could life evolve on other planets? Could other
intelligent life eventually communicate with us? How long do we really have? Marx
and Engels expressed the view that the universe was infinite, that it has
always existed, that order evolves out of chaos and that it is always evolving
and will continue to evolve with no limits imposed, and that it had no
beginning and no end (3). They also surmised that if life ended on Earth, it
would begin on other planets by similar mechanisms. They were writing at the very
beginning of the scientific discoveries, when it was still thought that the
universe was wrapped up in an aether, through which light travelled. Dividing
up the tasks, Engels took on the study of science and nature to explain its
relation to philosophy and dialectics, while Marx concentrated on the economic
questions and societal implications but they were never in disagreement over
either project, fully collaborating to the end. Engels was never able to finish
his major work ‘’The Dialectics of Nature’’ as he was busy editing Marx’s
‘’Capital’’ after his untimely death.
In the
short term, I guess it doesn’t really matter as we have so many problems, we
have to solve here and now, if we are to survive as a race. But a better
understanding of where we came from and our relative place in the Universe
might give us the extra motivation to fight for a better world here on Earth,
for all life forms, including our precious animals and plants. In addition, it
would give us the tools to fight religious, false, idealist, superficial and spiritualist
answers. Most people take up religion partly because they are too scared of
dying and facing their mortality, many charlatans taking advantage of their
vulnerability.
The unofficial group is
totally on the margins. The two groups do not talk to each other, do not go to
each other’s conferences and do not publish in the same journals. How could
astrophysics get to this point? It is a very dismal state of affairs where two
contrasting points of view cannot be debated in an open, friendly, respectful
manner. The exchanges on the internet are vitriolic and poisonous, one naming a
recent post, ‘’A blind man in a dark room, looking for a Black hole,’’ followed
by a picture of total blackness. One group of scientists are pushed out into
the cold, silenced, ignored, maligned and ostracised, with very little funding while
a tiny few have access to billions of dollars to pursue their research. However
it is probably the deeply embedded interests of officially sanctioned
scientists, who control the peer-reviewed publications, that have the strongest
influence in distributing the vast research funds, rather than religion. There
are enormous vested interests supporting the present Big Bang theory. A lot of
mathematical academics have staked their careers on it, including famous
figures, Stephen Hawking, George Gamow, Brian Greene, Paul Davies, Alan Guth,
Sir Martin Rees, John Wheeler who invented Black Holes and thousands of lesser
known mathematicians. It is much easier to play around with complex
mathematical equations, which can’t be understood by the 99.9% of the
population then to make direct observations of the universe and to understand the
complex relationships of plasma, electric charge and magnetism. In his 1991 book ´´The Big Bang Never Happened,’’ Eric J. Lerner was the first to alert the general public to the crisis in astrophysics (4). He linked the appalling state of cosmology to the dwindling research funds for science in the USA because of the exorbitant cost of the Vietnam War and the downturn of the Apollo projects run by NASA. Theoretical cosmologists needed no funding at all, just pen and paper, manipulating equations, running programs all day on desk top computers. It was research on the cheap. The massive growth of the theoretical side created a bias against the collection of observational data. Lerner also thought that science and society inevitably influence each other through events occurring in the general society. He wrote ‘’the faltering universe of the Big Bang became a metaphor for the faltering economy—both equally inevitable processes, beyond the control of mere mortals.’’ More importantly, the collapse of the Soviet Union no longer made advances in space exploration necessary for propaganda purposes, to prove capitalism could achieve a consumer utopia for the masses better than communism ever would.
It is not clear to me why NASA has bought into the Big Bang since a lack of understanding of the electrical nature of the sky puts all their launches at risk. It is possible that a plasma discharge bought down the shuttle Colombia in 2003, with the loss of all seven astronauts on board. A solar storm reached the Earth at the same time and an amateur photographer had a photo, but the possibility was disregarded by NASA blaming the engineers. NASA has an annual budget of US$15 billion, and has stated openly that they simply will not fund any cosmological research that is adverse to the Big Bang, which for them has assumed a religious conviction. More than anything, this situation is an indictment of the peer-review scientific publication system, which will automatically fail to promote new hypotheses as the entrenched editors and reviewers have invested their careers on the old outmoded ideas. The situation is so drastic that a letter from cosmology dissidents was finally accepted in the New Scientist in 22 May 2004, complaining bitterly about the bias and discrimination. It was signed by noted astronomers, Herman Bondi, Thomas Gold, Eric J Lerner as well as another 218 astronomers at various institutions around the world and 187 independent researchers http://www.cosmologystatement.org/. The letter said in part
‘’in cosmology today, doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding. Even observations are now interpreted through this biased filter, judged right or wrong depending on whether or not they support the big bang. So discordant data on red shifts, lithium and helium abundances, and galaxy distribution, among other topics, are ignored or ridiculed. This reflects a growing dogmatic mindset that is alien to the spirit of free scientific inquiry. Today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies. Funding comes from only a few sources, and all the peer-review committees that control them are dominated by supporters of the big bang. As a result, the dominance of the big bang within the field has become self-sustaining, irrespective of the scientific validity of the theory.’’
The Electric Universe
I will
concentrate on explaining as far as I can, the Electric Universe, mainly
because it has had so little exposure to the general public. I will try to keep
the information simple so that non-scientists can follow it. My information has
come from a number of web sites principally http://www.thunderbolts.info
and two books ‘’The Electric Sky’’ by Donald Scott (5) and ‘’The Electric
Universe’’ by Wallace Thornhill and David Talbot (6). I will refer to those
adhering to the official story as astrophysicists and the unofficial story as
plasma cosmologists. The three pioneers of plasma cosmology are Kristian Birkeland,
Irving Langmuir and Hannes Alfven.
Basically
the Electric Universe states that electrical forces have to be taken into
account when studying the cosmos. That 99% of the visible universe is charged
due to the loss of electrons from atoms, leaving positively charged ions and
negatively charged electrons. A molecular cloud of very cold gas and dust can
be ionized by nearby radiating stars or cosmic rays, with the resulting ions
and electrons taking on organized plasma characteristics. This leaves a very
thin smattering of material throughout virtually empty space. In outer space,
there is perhaps one particle per cubic centimetre (1 p/cc), compared to 1013
p/cc in Earth’s atmosphere. This mixture of neutral and charged matter is
called plasma, and it is suffused with electromagnetic fields. The proportion
of ions is quantified by the degree of ionization. The degree of ionization of
a plasma can vary from less than 0.01% up to 100%, but plasma behaviour will
occur across this entire range due to the presence of the charged particles and
the charge separation typical of plasma behaviour throughout the entirety of
interstellar space. The first person to use the term plasma to describe ionised
gases was Irving Langmuir.
This is a
very different situation to what we find on Earth, where we only have to deal
with matter in the form of solid, liquid or gases. Earth is a cool stable and almost
neutral planetary environment but this is a rare situation in the cosmos. Both Newton and Einstein lived
in the 0.001 % of the universe that is not plasma, at the bottom of the
atmosphere of a rocky planet. So they could not be expected to understand
plasma in 1687 and 1905, respectively. Plasma is generally an unknown entity on
Earth. However flames, fire, neon lights, electric arc welding and lightning
are all examples of a plasma. Any time electric charges move, they generate
magnetic fields. Without moving electric charges, magnetic fields cannot exist.
Because of this moving electric current in space, a magnetic field is produced.
The astrophysicists always refer to this material as a gas, instead of its
proper name, a plasma. This is very confusing as a plasma never acts as a gas
and doesn’t obey Boyle’s laws for gases.
Magnetic
fields around the Earth and the Sun are recognised by the official story but
deny their origin in plasma or electric currents, saying electrons will move at
the speed of light to short-circuit any electric differential. If charged
particles are moving, however, they are accompanied by magnetic fields and this
changes
the magnetic configuration. Changes in a magnetic field in turn create electric
fields and thereby affect currents themselves, so fields that start with moving
particles represent very complex interactions, feedback loops and messy
mathematics. In the Big Bang theory, moving electrical charges and its effects causing
magnetism have been totally left out of the picture. Changes in the direction
of the Earth’s magnetic field, for instance, cannot be explained by the
official theory. More than 200 polar reversers have taken place in the last 65
million years here on Earth and at least 4 have occurred in the last 4 million
years. About 700,000 years ago, the north magnetic pole was located in the
Antarctic and vice versa. We are in the process of a weakening of Earth’s
magnetic field, which will eventually end in a new reversal (2).
The Big
Bang is based on two assumptions that a) that gravity alone determines the structure
and movement of stars and galaxies and b) the redshift of objects in space
indicate are a true reflection of their distance and that objects are receding.
Dark matter and dark energy had to be invented and added to the official story
as the movement of stars, galaxies and supergalaxies cannot be explained by the
forces of gravity, as it is far too weak. Dark energy is supposed to be akin to
gravity that has a repulsive force but up till now, it does not represent any
known physical force. Dark matter is invisible and therefore totally
unknowable.
The electric
theory is partly based on the pioneering work of Norwegian scientist, Kristian
Birkeland, in 1902-10. He was the first person to propose that electric
currents come from the Sun, flow into the Earth’s upper atmosphere and cause
the auroras. These currents pass through and excite the plasma high above the
Earth’s atmosphere to such a degree that it becomes visible, that it glows. He
built a magnetised metal sphere, suspended in a vacuum and generated electrical
discharges to the sphere, he called a Terrella. He was able to reproduce aurora-type
display, analogues of planetary rings, sunspots and other effects seen in the
cosmos. He risked his own life and those of his assistants, measuring the electric
field under auroras in the bleak 24-hour winter darkness and howling winds of
the Arctic snowfields.
Birkeland
showed that electric currents flow preferentially along filaments shaped by
current-induced magnetic fields. The filaments form a twisted rope but are
insulated from each other by the short-range magnetic, repulsive force. This
causes them to rotate faster and faster around each other, a plasma vortex.
These twisted current pairs produce an alignment of current flow along the
magnetic field, and is called a Birkeland Current. The behaviour of plasma can
be scaled up to any orders of magnitude, that is, small-scale examples of
plasma in the laboratory which produce the observable results can be scaled up
to the dimensions necessary to explain plasma behaviour in space. The
similarity between these experiments and the observable Universe are
extraordinary and can be seen be seen in the following photos.
![http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/M87-jet-annotated-small1.jpg](file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CMICROS%7E1%5CCONFIG%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_image006.jpg)
Whether
plasma is visible to the human eye is determined by three different steady-state
operating modes, Dark Current Mode, Normal Glow Mode and Arc Mode (5). The
Earth’s ionosphere sheath is in a ring of plasma but the strength of the electric
current is very low and does not glow. In Normal Glow Mode the strength of the
electric current in the plasma is significant. Its brightness will depend on
two things, the intensity of the current and the density of the plasma. The
color depends on what gas is being ionized. Examples are auroras, emission
nebulae and comet tails. The sun’s corona is also a plasma in the Glow Mode. In
the Arc Mode, the strength of the electric current in the plasma is very high.
The plasma radiates brilliantly over a wide spectrum of frequencies. Examples
are lightning, the Sun’s looping prominences and the filaments in sunspots. Almost
all space is occupied by plasma, mostly in the Dark Current mode.
The
electric field or the Coulomb force between an electron and a proton is 1039
more powerful than gravitational attraction between the two. In addition,
gravity falls off inversely to the square of the distance, whereas electricity
decreases only linearly with the distance between the forces. Therefore
Birkeland currents are far more effective than gravity for organising very thin
gases and dust into stars and galaxies. To get an idea of the huge distances
involved, imagine the Sun and its nearest star Proxima Centauri, over 4.2 light
years away (40 x 1012kms), being the size of just two dust particles
(0.25mm). On this same scale as the dust particles, they would be over 6.4 km
away so that it is easy to understand that the gravitational attraction is miniscule
and that they would never randomly bump into each other.
Probes have
found that space contains atoms, dust, ions and electrons. Although the density
of matter in space is very low, it is not zero. In space, gravity only becomes
significant in those places where the electromagnetic forces are shielded or
neutralized. As early as 1937, Hannes Alfven, proposed that our galaxy, the
Milky Way contains a large spiral, magnetic field and that charged particles
move in spiral orbits within it, owing to forces exerted within the field. Plasma
physicists can trace the evolution of observed galactic forms from basic
electromagnetic principles, that can be repeated by experiments on Earth in the
laboratory. Alfven’s student, Anthony Peratt showed in the laboratory that
electric forces can organize spiral galaxies, why they form in strings and why
they rotate, without resorting to a massive Black Hole in the centre of the
galaxy. Thus galaxies are not simply collections of stars but are made up
mainly of plasma.
Fig. 3 The Veil Nebula, NGC 6960,
with its gauzy, glowing filamentary plasma currents and current sheets spanning
the light years. Image credit: T.A. Rector, University
of Alaska, Anchorage, and Kitt Peak WIYN 0.9m
telescope/NOAO/AURA/NSF
The hero of
this story is Hannes Alfven, Swedish Nobel prize winner, who died in 1995, aged
86 years. He was the founder of the modern field of plasma physics, the study
of electrical discharges in low pressure gases. It’s ironic that Alfven
received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1970 for the wrong theory, which he
tried to repudiate, during his acceptance speech. Now the astrophysicists use
this wrong theory on magnetism to justify their work. Alfven firmly believed
that ‘’astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we
must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively
more remote and uncertain epochs.’’ Thus the scientific method must be embedded
in observation in the laboratory, space probes and the Hubble telescopes in the
sky, leading to theories derived from observation, not beginning with abstract theory
and pure mathematics, inventing weird and impossible objects to account for
anomalies.
As well
Alfven was a politically engaged scientist, a rare breed. He ran foul of the
Swedish government in the 1960s when he defeated their plan to build nuclear
reactors, pointing out the infeasibility as well as huge, technical errors. He
was threatened with loss of research funding and he had to partially move his
research to the US
to survive. An interesting aside is that he wrote a political scientific satire
called ‘’The Great Computer’’ under a pseudonym about the takeover of the
planet by computers. As Lerner says, ‘’Alfven used it as a vehicle not only to
ridicule the growing infatuation of government and business with the then novel
power of the computer but to pillory a large part of the Swedish establishment.
In the novel, Alfven made it clear, it was the greed of the corporate leaders,
the short-sightedness of the government bureaucrats and the power hunger of the
politicians that led to the future, he wryly outlines, as a utopia-- for the
computers.’’ (2) We still face that problem today, on a global scale.
Double Layer
Another
property of plasma physics we need to understand is its ability to isolate one
section of itself from another. The isolating wall is made up of two closely
spaced layers one with a positive charge and the other with a negative charge.
This is called a double layer and was discovered by Langmuir in the 1920s (5).
If there is a significant voltage difference between the two locations, within
a plasma, then a double layer will form between them. This effect makes it
difficult to insert voltage sensitive probes into a plasma, as the double layer
will surround it and isolate it from the plasma. Thus a space probe cannot
measure voltage directly but the electric field can be measured. The Sun’s
plasma sheath protects the solar system as a whole from the enveloping galactic
plasma. The entire voltage difference between the Sun’s own plasma sheath and
its galactic environment occurs across the sheath of the heliosphere, the outer
boundary of the Sun’s plasmasphere at 1.3 x 1010 km, a little bit
further than the distance to Pluto at 5.9 x 109 km.
Langmuir
was a brilliant chemist and physicist, inventing the argon filled incandescent
light bulb, seeding of clouds to produce rain, the chemistry of monolayers and
the valence structure of atoms to explain the mechanism of chemical reactions. In
another aside, for those who enjoy science fiction, according to author Kurt Vonnegut, Langmuir was the inspiration for his
fictional scientist Dr. Felix Hoenikker in the novel Cat's Cradle. Dr Hoenikker’s invention of ice-nine, caused everything to freeze over and eventually destroyed the world. Vonnegut's
brother, Bernard had worked with Langmuir. Perhaps
the similarity to Dr Hoenikker is a little harsh.
Now stars
can actually divide into two, something akin to mitosis in biology, due to a
shift in the double layer, which can also explain a nova (visible light) eruption.
As Wal Thornhill writes, ‘’Internal
electrostatic forces prevent stars from collapsing gravitationally and
occasionally cause them to give birth by electrical fissioning to form companion
stars and gas giant planets. Sudden brightening or a nova outburst marks such
an event. That elucidates why stars commonly have partners and why most of the
giant planets so far detected closely orbit their parent star’’ (5). Some
61% of the 60 nearest stars to Earth are components of a double or triple star
system. If the incoming electric current increases so that the velocity of the
ions and electrons in the plasmas exceeds the value of the thermal velocity, it
can set up a double layer. The double layer may move down into the star. If the
current density increases to a very high value, the double layer may explode,
splitting the star into two or more parts in order to reduce the electrical
stresses. The splitting provides an increase in the total surface area and a
reduced level of current density, with reduced stress. The splitting may be
very unequal, so that the smaller one may even have such as low current density
as to drop it to a ‘’brown dwarf’’ or even a giant gas planet. There are four
such gas giants in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. An
example of this fission process, is the binary pair called Y Cygni. This is a
pair of giant stars that orbit each other in a period of a mere 3 days. Each
star is 8 million kms in diameter and 5000 times brighter and 17 times the mass
of our Sun. The stars are only 19.3 million kms apart. A similar history can explain
the star FG Sagittae, which became a binary pair in our lifetime, with a corresponding
change in brightness (5).
What is wrong with the Redshift and Distance
Calculation?
A very
common element in space is hydrogen. If you look at the spectrum of ordinary light
shone through hydrogen, it will show a signature spectrum, specific to hydrogen
that has features at regular intervals. If the same pattern of intervals is
seen in an observed spectrum from a distant source, say a star or a galaxy, but
occurring at shifted wavelengths, it can also be identified as hydrogen but it
is said to be red-shifted. The dimmer the galaxy is, the more its light is shifted
toward the red end of the spectrum. Redshift (and blueshift) may be characterized
by the relative difference between the observed and emitted wavelengths (or
frequency) of an object. In astronomy, it is customary to refer to this change
using a dimensionless quantity, as a redshift of z. Because of Edwin
Hubble’s work in 1929, the inference was drawn that a red shift implies
distance, that there was a linear relationship and that the distance of the
galaxy could be measured. He based the actual distance on Henrietta Leavitt's
formulation of the period-luminosity relationship (for which she received no credit
in her lifetime). No one questioned the possibility that a galaxy may just be dimmer
and relatively closer to earth. The assumption that the star is moving away
from us to explain the redshift was based on the well-known Doppler effect in
sound waves, the pitch of a train whistle decreasing as it moves away. Thus the
explanation that redshift implies recessional velocity became dogma in
astronomy.
Hubble to
his credit pointed out that contrary to Lemaitre's ideas, the red shift was
probably not due to the Doppler effect. One of the main objections Hubble had
to the Big Bang theory came from his study of the brightness of certain stars.
He maintained that if stars were receding at the rate indicated by their red
shift, their brightness should seem diminished. He observed that there was no
such diminishing of brightness. While Hubble was alive and of sound mind, he had
grave doubts about the Big Bang theory. He saw that the only evidence directly
supporting it was the observed red shift. But Hubble began losing his memory in
the early 1950s and was never able to show the cause of the red shift. After
his death at 63 years, most scientists gradually accepted that Hubble's red
shift was caused by the Doppler effect. Another influential figure in this
drama, was Milton La Salle Humason, who began working at the Mount Wilson
Observatory as a mule driver and janitor in the early 1900's during the time
that Edwin Hubble did his research (http://photontheory.com/bigbang.html). Finally Humason advanced to become secretary of the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories. Until his death
on June 18, 1972, Humason continued to support the big bang theory over all
other accounts of creation. Supporters of the big-bang theory had easy access
to the observational instruments controlled by Humason, while opponents of the Big
Bang did not.
US scientist,
Halton Arp was Hubble’s student and won many prizes in astronomy, including the
Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award for the 1966 publication of his ‘’Atlas
of Peculiar Galaxies,’’ which examined 338 unusual galaxies in order to study
their evolution. Detailed information can be obtained from his web site http://www.haltonarp.com. He
has several galaxies named after him such as Arp 220, one of the brightest redshift
galaxies. While compiling the catalogue he found that many Quasi-stellar objects,
(QSO) which had very high redshift values were physically associated with
galaxies with low redshift values. He found a quasar in the galaxy NGC 7319. with
a z value of 2.114 whereas the
galaxy where this quasar is attached, has only a red shift of z equal to 0.0225. He realised the QSO
object is actually a quasar, close to the core of the galaxy, silhouetted in
front of the opaque plasma clouds with a jet extending from the core to the
quasar (Fig. 4).
![http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/graphics/images/2004/spiralgalaxy.new.gif](file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CMICROS%7E1%5CCONFIG%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_image010.jpg)
A quasar is a compact star that emits
incredibly high levels of electromagnetic radiation, including light. The
amount of energy emitted by a quasar, dwarfs even the brightest stars and there
are over 60,000 known quasars. Arp believes the quasar was being ejected from
the active galactic nuclei. Arp argued that the redshift was not due to Hubble
expansion or physical movement of the objects, but must have a non-cosmological or "intrinsic" origin. It is very possible
that light moving through space continuously shifts toward a less energetic
state--red shift. Even Carl Sagan was candid enough to write in 1980 in his
book, Cosmos, ``There is nevertheless a
nagging suspicion among some astronomers that all may not be right with the deduction
from the redshift of galaxies via the Doppler effect that the universe is expanding.
The astronomer Halton Arp has found enigmatic and disturbing cases where a
galaxy and a quasar or a pair of galaxies, that are in apparent physical
association have very different red shifts… If Arp is right, the exotic
mechanisms proposed to explain the energy source of distant quasars, supernova
chain reactions, supermassive black holes and the like—would prove unnecessary.
Quasars need not then be very distant.’’
Arp has shown that faint,
highly-red-shifted objects, like quasars, are intrinsically faint because of
their young age and it has nothing to do with their distance from Earth.
Quasars are ‘born’ episodically from the nucleus of active galaxies. They
initially move very fast along the spin axis away from their parent. As they
mature they grow brighter and slow down, as if gaining in mass. Finally they
evolve into companion galaxies. The decreasing quasar redshift occurs in
discrete steps which points to a process whereby protons and electrons go
through a number of small, quantized increases in mass as the electrical stress
and power density within the quasar increases. The charge required comes via an
electrical ‘umbilical cord,’ in the form of the parent galaxies’ nuclear jet. So
they play an important role in the creation of new galaxies. Arp realised that
the standard model of astronomy is totally wrong, based on these observations. The
redshift is now thought to be due to photons of light interacting, or
colliding, with the electrons in the plasma of intergalactic space and thus
losing energy. The more interactions they make, the more energy they lose and
the lower their frequency becomes. As the frequency reduces the wavelength
increases and thus the photons are redshifted, utilising the Mossbauer effect http://www.lyndonashmore.com/.Arp was denied time on the Palomar telescope for questioning the redshift assumptions, and forced to move to Germany after being a staff astronomer for 29 years. He still has trouble getting papers published in American referred journals. According to the standard theory, quasars are thought to be powered by supermassive rotating black holes at their center of all galaxies and are billions of light years away.
![http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Galaxy-evolution-550x706.jpg](file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CMICROS%7E1%5CCONFIG%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_image012.jpg)
Fig 4. Arp's galactic 'family tree' showing birth of quasars with
high-redshift (z) which decreases stepwise as they age and eventually form
companion galaxies and progenitors of galactic clusters. The new companion
galaxy has an initial z=2, then 1, then 0.6, then 0.3 and finally 0.061.
The Sun
It is
commonly thought from theories by Fred Hoyle and George Gamov that the energy
of the sun is produced by the continuous conversion of hydrogen into helium by
a fusion reaction, deep in the interior of the Sun and is carried to the
surface by radiation and convection, which is supposed to take 100,000 to
200,000 years. When all the hydrogen is converted to helium, after a total time
of 9.5 billion years, then our Sun will collapse and the Earth will be consumed
by the explosion. We are supposed to have just another 4.5 billion years left
on Earth. It is often repeated that all the heavier metals we find on Earth
were initially formed inside a star, much like our Sun, so that all the
elements in our bodies were initially forged in a star. But after 80 years of
experimentation, no sustained controlled fusion reaction has ever been experimentally
performed in a physics laboratory. In addition in the conversion of hydrogen to
helium, there must be an ejection of electron type neutrinos. The measurement
of neutrinos coming out of the Sun are only one third of the predicted value, a
continual embarrassment to solar astronomers. The official model gives no
explanation for the existence of the corona, the plasmasphere or the solar
wind.
Instead in
the Electric Universe, the Sun is dominated by electrical and magnetic
properties, implying that the Sun possesses a massive positive electric charge.
The Sun is a ball of plasma. The Sun is charged positively by a gravitationally
induced flow of electrons towards the surface and electrical repulsion will
prevent collapse, not the conversion of hydrogen into helium. The Sun because
of its size receives charge from cosmic currents that exist in our arm of the
Milky Way Galaxy.
Stars can be thought of as
giant spheres of slow-motion lightning. It is this simple hypothesis that best
matches observational evidence. Any fusion takes place on the surface of an
electric star and not “deep in its core.” Molecular oxygen can be created in
electrically intense outer layers of a star. The primary indicator for a star’s
behaviour is the current density at its surface. Current flow from the solar
wind can be observed at planets with magnetic fields which have polar “cusps”
or “holes” that guide charged particles down to and through the body, creating
auroral displays in the upper atmosphere. Thus the charged particles from the
Sun are responsible for the auroras in both the Southern and Northern
hemispheres.
Fig. 5 Aurora, photographed by L.
Zimmerman, Fairbanks, Alaska. Image courtesy spaceweather.com,
Aurora PhotoGallery
Ralph
Jurgens, a civil engineer, who died in 1979, proposed a model of the Sun where it
has a high voltage anode imbedded in galactic plasma of lower voltage. ’In the electric model the Sun beneath the
photosphere is simply a cool body not at a temperature of a million degrees.
The magnetic field of a sunspot is due to a strong field aligned current
punching a hole through the photospheric plasma. This produces a Birkeland
Current. The solar flares behave like lightning and are due to the
electrification of the Sun’s atmosphere, analogous to electrification of storm
clouds on Earth.´´ Juergens was the first to describe the electric
discharge of the Sun in the 1970s and some day, maybe his genius will be
recognised.
The key
variable that determines the apparent size, brightness and color of a star is
electrical stress. The Sun is immersed in an extremely low density plasma so
those atoms which can be excited to emit visible light are those very close to
the Sun in the corona. The corona is heated to 2 million degrees where oxygen
atoms are ionized but lying above a vastly cooler surface. We also see bright
and ionized tornados, thousands of kilometres high and flecked with lightning,
that provides the heat and visible light of the Sun. There also exists a
virtual cathode, an invisible cellular boundary at the limit of the Sun’s
electrical influence. The Sun’s virtual cathode was found by Voyager I
beginning about 100 times further from the Sun than the Earth.
This also
means that the universe is connected through these voltage difference and
electrical phenomena. A charged body in plasma forms a bubble or sheath around
it to provide a smooth transition between the differing electric potentials of the
two plasma regions, due to the formation of the double layer. The Sun’s plasma
sheath is what the official model calls the heliosphere boundary. The current
is carried throughout the solar system by a relatively low density of
ionization, where the planets orbit. The sun is simply exhibiting the plasma
glow discharge of a positively charged body in space in the same way as a glow
discharge tube (Fig.2). The weak electric field causes the acceleration of the
solar wind in the inner solar system and a slow drift of electrons toward the
Sun. The weak but constant electric field explains the steady deceleration of the
Pioneer spacecraft which become negatively charged in space. Recently a
satellite above the Earth’s pole detected electrons streaming from the Earth
toward the Sun as you would predict from the positively charged Sun. Hydrogen
to helium fusion does not exist and cannot explain the reverse of the temperature
gradient on the Sun.
This means
that the Sun can continue forever as long as it has a positive electric charge,
created by galactic currents. However there is down side to this. Conditions in
a star can change very quickly. The future of our Sun is not quite so certain
and we may not have 4.5 billion years left. We cannot know whether or when the
Birkeland current powering our sun will experience a surge or blackout and
there is no light. This could be the reason in ancient Mayan society, hundreds
of thousands of their most beautiful youths and maidens were sacrificed by
having their hearts torn out by the priests to ensure that the Sun came up.
Wild speculation on my part.
The Planets
Similarly all
the planets in the solar system are charged bodies, as well as the moons,
comets and asteroids. Each planet is surrounded by its own plasma, called a
plasmasphere. A double layer separates the plasmasphere from the solar plasma.
Venus and Saturn’s moon Titan have little or no magnetic field but do have a
large plasma sphere. Thus a magnetosphere is not interchangeable with a
plasmasphere. All four of the large moons of Jupiter lie within its
plasmasphere. They are therefore electrically connected to the planet. Io the
inner most of these four moons, is presently experiencing electric discharges
from Jupiter (Fig. 6). The famous volcanos on Io cannot be volcanos as we know
them, as they move around over many miles. But electric arc discharges have a
tendency to wander so that the ‘’volcano’’ on Io should be regarded as an
electric arc and offers astronomers here on Earth the opportunity of studying electric
plasma discharges. A 2008 press release from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced
that Jupiter’s rings are electrically charged. The ions flow in an electric
circuit to and from Jupiter to Io. When NASA launched New Horizons on a mission
to study Pluto and Charon, the “plumes” of Tvashtar, the gigantic volcano on
Io, were found to be filamentary in structure, with indications that they are
actually corona arc discharges from the electric “hot spots” linking the moon
with Jupiter.
On another
matter, Jupiter has at least 63 moons and five of the smaller moons of Jupiter
rotate in the opposite direction to Jupiter. Clearly this means the moons could
not have formed from the same ‘’accretion disc’’ as proposed by the official
theory as their angular momentums should all be in the same direction. A
similar situation applies with Neptune and its
moon Triton.
Saturn should be considered
more like star than a planet. Saturn emits more energy than it receives: 2.3
times more, so it is being powered by another source. There is good evidence
that Saturn once existed as an independent body from the Sun http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/tag/saturn/. As
such, it would have received more energy in the recent past, its power source
having since been usurped by the Sun. The plasmasphere of Saturn is an electrical
environment, causing everything from dark-mode plasma discharges, to gigantic
lighting bolts that flash across the ring plane (Fig. 7). When the Cassini-Huygens
spacecraft got close enough to finally start observing Saturn, lightning of
immense power, up to a million times more powerful than anything on Earth, was
discovered. Planets with magnetic fields can capture ionized particles to form
a giant electrified magnetosphere. Enceladus, a small moon that orbits within
Saturn’s ring plane, causes Saturn’s magnetosphere to bend. The effect is due
to a flow of electric charge that occurs when particles from Enceladus interact
with the magnetosphere of Saturn. Thus a demonstrable electrical effect is
occurring between Saturn and Enceladus.
The “Cosmic
Microwave Background Radiation” (CMB) is also used as evidence to support the
Big Bang even though this has absolutely nothing to do with the Big Bang. The
CMB is just the temperature of the observable universe. To new initiates, all
this new information and reinterpretation of data may seem extraordinary and at
times bizarre, but I urge you to look at the web sites and read the books. Even
if you are not convinced at least remain sceptical of the Big Bang proponents
as the full story is not being told.
Actually
the Electric Universe fits very neatly into the main thesis of Marxist philosophy
of dialectical materialism. That is that matter is always in motion, always
changing, according to its own specific laws. Matter can’t be formed out of
nothing but is always undergoing transformation and evolving. The Big Bang
theory never did fit into this general philosophy. Many Marxists had alarm
bells ringing over the Big Bang theory even before the electric universe was
proposed. There is a lot more information available than I have been unable to
convey in a small space. There are detailed explanations why the official stories
of the Red Giants, Neutron stars, Supernovae, White Dwarfs, asteroids,
particularly the comets, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which classifies
stars according to temperature and cosmic rays are all wrong. The Electric
Universe can explain many aspects that defy explanation by the official theory
and more importantly can make predictions.
Today’s
astrophysicists are like the Catholic cardinals of the Dark Ages, refusing to
look through Galileo’s telescope. Their dishonest distortions and cavalier dismissal
of the problems surrounding the theory of the Big Bang cannot continue for much
longer. Very soon there will be an avalanche of information and data destroying
the Big Bang hypothesis along with Black Holes, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, the
Hubble constant, the age of the universe, accelerating galaxies and much more. There
will be a paradigm shift in cosmology, on the scale of Galileo’s gigantean
struggle with the Catholic Church, coming our way soon. A lot of now famous astrophysicists,
especially mathematicians will end up with egg on their face and an awful lot
of reputations will end up in the rubbish bin of history. Until we know better
it is wiser to treat the Universe as infinite, continually evolving, with no
beginning and no end and definitely no God as the creator. As they say, ‘’in
the beginning was the plasma.’’
REFERENCES
1) Terry
Pratchett in ‘’Lords and Ladies’’
2) Alan
Woods and Ted Grant, ‘’Reason in Revolt, Marxist Philosophy and Modern
Science’’ Wellred Publications, London,
(1995)
3) Engels
in The Dialectics of Nature
4) Eric J
Lerner ‘’The Big Bang Never Happened; A startling refutation of the dominant
theory of the Origin of the Universe’’ Simon and Schuster of Australia, Sydney (1992)
5) Donald E
Scott ‘’The Electric Sky; A challenge to the Myths of Modern Astronomy’’
Publishing, Portland Oregon. (2006)
6) Wallace
Thornhill and David Talbot ‘’The Electric Universe´´ Mikamar Publishing, Portland Oregon.
(2007)