A picture and essay from the perspective of the Electric Universe.
Original Post February 5, 2014 The “Little Ice Age” impact on Europe was sudden and ferocious. Using its weapons of plague, famine and (perhaps controversially) earthquake, the so-called “Little Ice age” reduced the population of Europe by around 30 to 50 percent. The virulence and death toll of the 1348…
Original Post January 30, 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…
Original Post January 23, 2014 The proverbial ‘golden age’ is a classic case study in the difference between local and global themes in mythology. It was the German ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) who first introduced a systematic distinction between universal ‘elementary ideas’ (Elementargedanke) and culture-specific ‘folk ideas’ (Volksgedanke) in…
Original Post January 17, 2014 The chaos of Brownian motion produces the high temperature we see in the solar corona. Of all the ideas offered up as being an explanation of the extreme temperature (more than 2 million Kelvin) measured in the lower corona of our Sun, the simplest is…
Original Post January 9, 2014 NGC 4666 is one of the younger additions to the Virgo cluster of galaxies. It has also apparently given birth to another generation. The galaxy lies eight degrees south of M49, the great-grandmother of the Virgo cluster. Whether NGC 4666 is the daughter of…
Original Post January 1, 2014 Did Helena Blavatsky and Sir William Crookes inadvertently help to discredit early theories of electromagnetism in the cosmos? Long before the Space Age, theories of a fourth, ‘radiant’ state of matter and electromagnetic explanations of the polar aurora, the zodiacal light, comets, the sun…
Original Post December 31, 2013 What takes place in thunderstorms on Earth is most likely a smaller version of large scale phenomena. “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…
Original Post December 24, 2013 A second generation of stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 stopped evolving. Perhaps they’re waiting for a better theory. The idea that stars evolve is one of those unjustifiable preconceptions with which observations are interpreted and understood. With that idea for ink, astronomers…
Original Post December 13, 2013 Between Bali and its neighbouring island, Lombok, is a slim ten mile sea channel. The channel is the start of the thousands-mile-long Wallace line. It is not only a dividing geological etching beneath the sea, it is also a biological division. On one side of…
Original Post December 5, 2013 Modern instruments enable astronomers to look at the universe in wavelengths of light beyond human biological limitations. Astronomers are surprised that the x-ray and radio images are different from what they expected. Although they’re looking in a different light, they’re still seeing—trying to understand—with the same concepts…
