The Electric Universe; Why Stephen Hawking is wrong

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.

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.

Fig. 2 Active galaxy M87 in the Virgo Cluster, with its 5000 light-year long electric current along a plasma filament (its "jet"), exhibiting occasional kink instabilities as bright knots. You can see the Faraday dark space, the visible light at the anode, (Bottom, RH) and the cathode, also glowing in the top LH corner. Image credit: Space Telescope Institute, Hubble/NASA

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).

Fig 4. Photo of nearby spiral galaxy NGC 7319 with high red-shift quasar at arrow (below). Credit: NASA/Hubble Space Telescope

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.

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.

Fig. 6 Moving through Jupiter's intense magnetic field creates strong charge separation (voltage differential) and a resulting electrical current in a circuit of some 2 trillion watts power flowing between Io and Jupiter's polar areas.

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.

Fig. 7 The Saturn aurora's reddish color is characteristic of ionized hydrogen plasma. Powered by the Saturnian equivalent of (filamentary) Birkeland currents, streams of charged particles from the interplanetary medium and solar wind interact with the planet's magnetic field and funnel down to the polar regions. Double layers are associated with filamentary currents and current sheets, and their electric fields accelerate ions and electrons. Omage credits: Wiki Commons; J.Trauger (JPL), NASA, Hubble Space Telescope

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)