A picture and essay from the perspective of the Electric Universe.
Aug 25, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. In a paper published in 1904, the Swedish physicist and chemist Svante August Arrhenius (1859-1927) maintained that radiation pressure accounts for comets’ tails and the build-up of negative charges on “the atmospheres of celestial bodies,…
Aug 24, 2016 In space, spheres and filaments predominate. Approximately 22,000 light-years away in the constellation of Musca, NGC 4833 orbits the Milky Way, along with at least 150 of its cousins. Globular clusters are thought to contain some of the oldest stars, so astronomers believe that they can…
Aug 23, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. Up to this point, the electron had not yet been discovered. Around 1879, the French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1908) reasoned that “solar spots are cavities by which hydrogen and other substances escape from the…
Aug 22, 2016 Space structures exhibit electromagnetic behavior. “In order to understand the phenomena in a certain plasma region, it is necessary to map not only the magnetic but also the electric field and the electric currents. Space is filled with a network of currents which transfer energy and…
Aug 19, 2016 Regions of space more than 500 million light-years in diameter are said to reveal dark energy influences. “I have always 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…
Aug 18, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. The ideas of the Irish-English physicist Osborne Reynolds (1842-1912) marked a further intellectual milestone. In a few little-known articles dated to 1870 and 1871, he suggested that cometary tails are not appendages ‘evaporated’ from…
Aug 17, 2016 Don’t stop looking. The Finder’s Fallacy is the downside of the “Eureka!” of discovery. Searching for a needle of explanation in the haystack of data is exhausting, frustrating, often disappointing. Finally to have found a needle, a theory that “works”, is cause for celebration. But the…
Aug 16, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. Might the solar corona not just resemble, but actually facilitate the terrestrial aurora? The German baron Carl Ludwig von Reichenbach (1788-1869) professed as much when he posited, in 1851, that the earth’s magnetic field is…
Aug 15, 2016 Do crustal blocks slide around? According to planetary scientists, plate tectonic activity on Mars is similar to what happens on Earth. Studies undertaken by the University of California Los Angeles suggest that: “Mars is at a primitive stage of plate tectonics. It gives us a glimpse…
Aug 12, 2016 Saturn generates electricity. Saturn is quite large compared to Earth; its mean equatorial diameter is about 121,000 kilometers. However, Saturn rotates so fast (10 hours, 34 minutes) that its polar diameter is 108,700 kilometers. The difference is caused by “flattening” as angular momentum pushes the low-density…
