A picture and essay from the perspective of the Electric Universe.
Aug 4, 2014 Plumes of water vapor from Enceladus are not caused by friction. Saturn’s moons are difficult explain when conventional ideas about the composition and age of the Solar System are considered. They vary in composition, orbital inclination, size, and mass. With 62 moons now identified, and 53 of…
Aug 1, 2014 The comet is currently 544 million kilometers from the Sun. Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) is about one year away from perihelion, or its closest approach to the Sun. As seen in the image above, there is also a “waist” between the two halves of the comet that appears…
Jul 31, 2014 A gravity-only Universe cannot explain certain discrepancies. Ilya Prigogine, from a young age, was concerned that accepted physical theory had a couple of glaring discrepancies from observation: determinism and time symmetry. Most observations are of contingency and irreversibility. No one has yet seen an egg “un-fry”…
Jul 30, 2014 Thomas Short, writing in the 18th century, chronicled the many calamities that decimated mankind over four thousand years. Plagues, earthquakes, drought, pestilence and incredible floods. As you read through Short’s curious book, you are struck by the appearance of bright comets in numbers unmatched by modern…
Jul 29, 2014 Rediscovering F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order has been exciting. Hayek began his inquiry into the foundations of theoretical psychology in 1919 before specializing in economics (and winning a Nobel Prize in that latter field in 1974). He didn’t publish The Sensory Order until 1952, when he…
Jul 28, 2014 Two years ago, I predicted that extinct giant marsupials would be found on Australia’s Mornington Peninsula. Recently, an elephant-sized wombat (the marsupial, Diprotodon) was discovered off Sorrento, Victoria concretized in a limestone beach deposit. But why was I so certain? Along the entire Victorian coastline, from…
Jul 25, 2014 The deserts of the Southwest United States are full of anomalous geography. In a previous Picture of the Day, the giant sandstone tors of Monument Valley, Arizona were mentioned, in passing. Consensus geology considers monolithic structures to be millions of years old, and the result of erosion…
Jul 24, 2014 Cosmologists still have no idea what dark energy is. In 1998, two astronomical research teams independently discovered what is now called “dark energy.” Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Brian Schmidt from the Australian National University projects each led the two teams who…
Jul 23, 2014 More electric biology. A previous Picture of the Day described the way that some single-celled organisms make use of charge exchange in order to drive their flagella. Rather than the conversion of ATP, they move protons along special cellular structures, converting that flow of electric charge…
Jul 22, 2014 Supernovae are what Hannes Alfvén called them: exploding double layers. The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is relatively small, irregular galaxy approximately 168,000 light-years from Earth. The distance is approximate, because different parallax values are obtained when different measuring sticks are used. Within the LMC is an object commonly referred to…
