A picture and essay from the perspective of the Electric Universe.
Original Post February 5, 2015 More electric biology. When Bob Ballard found the Titanic in 1985, he and his crew were shocked by how much rust was present on the ill-fated ship. Long “rusticles” were seen hanging from the hull like great mossy streamers. The rusticles were subsequently found to…
Original Post January 21, 2015 “The Book of Nature” is a metaphor. In science, metaphors are usually passed over as mere embellishments of language. The metaphor is expanded into “the Book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics,” and then scientists turn away from embellishments and get…
Original Post January 16, 2015 Another epistemological tour de force. Probable, Possible, my black hen, She lays eggs in the Relative When. She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now Because she’s unable to postulate how. — The Space Child’s Mother Goose By Frederick Winsor People don’t pay much attention…
Left: Bone pendant from Saint-Marcel (Argenton-Sur-Creuse, Indre, France) Right: Bone pendant from the Grotte Des Espélugues (Lourdes, Hautes-Pyrénées, France) Original Post January 6, 2015 Reproduced above are images of two engraved pendants made of reindeer bone, from prehistoric sites in France. Both objects are attributed to the Magdalenian culture, which subsisted…
Original Post January 1, 2015 By what physical mechanism do planets and moons orbit around their larger hosts? Before Newton’s theory of gravity burst onto the scene, the so-called ‘vortex theory’ of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), first proposed in the 1630s, was much in vogue. Invoking experimental analogues…
Original Post December 22, 2014 The melting of the glacial ice sheets in North America, Europe and elsewhere was a stochastic process. Long periods of slow melting alternated with bursts of accelerated melting. Between the Late Glacial Maximum and the early Holocene, global sea level rose by 100 to…
Original Post December 9, 2014 Many fast, high energy phenomena could be due to something astronomers do not expect. Some things are familiar, even though they are not easily explained. The aurorae at each of Earth’s poles are familiar to most people, although the way they form is not completely…
Original Post October 17, 2014 The Crab Nebula is surprisingly energetic. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected several unidentified sources of intense gamma-ray emissions that are not seen in any other frequencies. NASA launched the telescope on June 11, 2008. Its primary mission is to detect high frequency…
Original Post October 7, 2014 Ionic rain from Saturn’s rings. Saturn’s plasmasphere is an electrical environment, causing everything from dark-mode plasma discharges to lightning bolts that flash across the ring plane. When Cassini entered orbit around the giant planet, mission specialists were shocked to discover lightning of immense power, up to a million times more powerful…
Original Post October 1, 2014 Pulsars are more like oscillating circuits. On July 4, 1054 CE, Chinese astrologers saw a “guest star” near Zeta Tauri in the constellation Taurus. They record that it was bright enough to shine in daylight, but lasted only about a year before fading out….
