A picture and essay from the perspective of the Electric Universe.
August 27, 2012 That many a thunderstone earned the sobriquet by virtue of its exposure during a thunderstorm strikes one as correct to a degree. Intellectual lassitude perfuses the attempts of those who blamed the conception of the thunderstone on sheer stupidity or, one notch up, a rebarbative belief that…
August 24, 2012 The thunderstone is familiar from the folklore of virtually every culture, but plays no ‘roll’ in the serious sciences. In the eyes of most, the proposition that thunderbolts deposit rocks is an asinine artefact of superstitious belief – an antiquated theme that epitomises an infant stage in…
August 23, 2012 Heliophysicists acknowledge the role of plasma in solar eruptions but miss important aspects of its behavior. In Bengal to move at all Is seldom, if ever, done, But mad dogs and Englishmen Go out in the midday sun. — Noël Coward According to a recent press release, the…
August 22, 2012 Astronomers continue to ignore electricity in space, opting for outdated ideas about gravity and heat. Recently, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that our own Milky Way galaxy is expelling enormous jets of gamma rays from a putative supermassive black hole residing in its nucleus….
August 21, 2012 The Dawn spacecraft will arrive at Ceres in August of 2015 Ceres is the largest asteroid in the Solar System. The most recent measurement from the Hubble Space Telescope puts it at approximately 975 kilometers in mean diameter. It is so large that it is roughly spherical,…
Aug 20, 2012 It twists like a Birkeland Current; it’s stringy like a Birkeland Current; it’s dense like a Birkeland Current; but Everyone Knows (if they want to pursue a career in astronomy) that There is No Such Thing as Electricity in Space. The press release for this new…
Aug 17, 2012 Brian Schmidt et al. authored the paper Formation of the Black Hole in Nova Scorpii, The Astrophysical Journal, 567:491-502, 2002 March 1. Editor’s note: Many Picture of the Day articles have been written about the problems with so-called ‘black holes.’ This paper by Stephen J. Crothers addresses the…
Aug 16, 2012 Recent X-class solar flares have ignited the polar lights. An electrically active magnetotail (or plasma tail) extends for millions of kilometers from Earth. Charged particles from the Sun, otherwise known as the solar wind, together with ions generated by the Earth, gather in a plasma sheet inside the…
Aug 15, 2012 Even the lonely monuments left behind have a story to tell. Chavín de Huantar, in the Peruvian Andes, is one of many civilisations to have preceded the mighty Inca empire. The occupants of the ruins have no name; lacking a script, their cultural identity is…
Aug 14, 2012 Why are animals used so widely in coats of arms? The familiar red dragon of Wales and the double-headed eagle of the House of Habsburg exemplify a widespread and familiar practice to embed animal figures in heraldic devices, both in the Old and New Worlds, but…
