The Wal Thornhill Electric Universe April Reader

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Re: The Wal Thornhill Electric Universe April Reader

by Brigit » Fri May 02, 2025 5:27 pm

I am so glad you had a look, BeaChooser! Very pleased you dropped in. Thanks.

I enjoy starting with his publications in 1997 and working forward; it gives a sense of being there, and watching the events of the space age unfold through Electric Universe eyes.

For example, in May, in May 1998 (this month), we'll see that there was so much controversy surrounding Venus' constant lightning at the time. And yet, and yet-- just the other day I watched a presentation about Venus, and there was no mention of the frequency of the lightning in the entire video. Can you imagine? The only homage they paid to lightning on Venus was a small bolt in the occasional artist's concepts/pictures of Venus' surface and atmosphere, and a teeny, tiny little sound of static. Like this-- Bzzzt.

Re: The Wal Thornhill Electric Universe April Reader

by BeAChooser » Thu May 01, 2025 3:58 am

Brigit wrote: Mon Apr 14, 2025 8:19 pm This is another attempt at creating a monthly Wal Thornhill Electric Universe Reader.
Thanks. It will take a while to go through all that. Interesting stuff though.

The Wal Thornhill Electric Universe April Reader

by Brigit » Wed Apr 30, 2025 10:06 pm

2004 April

holoscience.com
"An Open Letter to Closed Minds"
"Electric Dust Devils"

An Open Letter to Closed Minds
Wal Thornhill EU Views April 12th, 2004
  • image: Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal.
"Everything astronomers can see, stretching out to distances of 10 billion light-years, emerged from an infinitesimal speck."
– Martin Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat (2001).

“A widely-accepted foundation stone of scientific logic involves a process of elimination, requiring all available possibilities to be considered with incorrect ideas discarded when they fail to predict experimental results. Just as the police must consider all possible suspects during an investigation, so a scientist must, as a matter of professional responsibility and competence, consider all possible explanations when forming his conclusions. However, some scientists are able to ignore these duties, while the safeguards built into the scientific bureaucracy, supposedly to ensure quality, do not prevent such malpractice but rather enable it.”
– John Hewitt, A Habit of Lies.

The open letter exhibited here is addressed to the scientific community by a leading group of concerned scientists. It questions a core belief – the belief in the so-called big bang theory. So it will be instructive to watch the behavior of that community in response. Already, the first line of defense – censorship – has held. The journal Nature rejected the letter for publication. New Scientist, the more populist magazine, on 22 May 2004 finally published the letter under the title ”Bucking the big bang.” [Note: This news item was temporarily withdrawn while waiting for publication of the final version of the letter. (Link updated July 2018)]
  • “You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature.”
    – Paul C. Lauterbur, winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine, whose seminal paper on magnetic resonance imaging was originally rejected by Nature.
That scathing commentator on errant human behavior, John Ralston Saul, has compared the scientific community to the medieval church. Some of the signatories to the open letter would agree with him. We humans, at least the males it seems, have a penchant for setting up organizations – political, religious, and scientific – that with time become authoritarian, exclusive and dogmatic. Despite this we are led to believe that scientists are somehow trained to be above such human failings. The deception only succeeds because there is no effective investigative reporting of science.

A challenge to orthodoxy tends to be ignored at first. But if it gains popular support, the first move is to discredit and silence the challenger. The protectors of the scientific faith often parade the “scientific method” like a holy icon to warn off evil, heretical spirits. And the demand is made that “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.” However, as Robert Matthews in the New Scientist of 13 March 2004 notes:
  • “Over the years, sociologists and historians have often pointed out the glaring disparity between how science is supposed to work and what really happens. While scientists routinely dismiss these qualms as anecdotal, subjective or plain incomprehensible, the suspicion that there is something wrong with the scientific process itself is well founded. The proof comes from a rigorous mathematical analysis of how evidence alters our belief in a scientific theory.”
“Belief” is the crux of the matter. The usual declaration that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence is merely a smokescreen for the fact that no amount of evidence will change the consensus view until a sufficient number “convert” to a belief in the new theory. Science is therefore a political numbers game based on subjective beliefs. Max Planck was right when he said:
  • “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.”
Matthews continues:
  • “It gets worse. As the evidence accumulates, the two camps will not only fail to reach consensus but actually be driven further apart – propelled by their different views ..And worst of all, there is no prospect of such a consensus unless the two sides can agree about the cause of the data.”
Such a conclusion bodes ill for any attempt to change the status quo. Meanwhile, the big bang theory continues to make extraordinary claims based upon little or no evidence.
  • An Open Letter to the Scientific Community
    (Published in New Scientist, May 22, 2004)

    The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed– inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

    But the big bang theory can’t survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.

    Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory’s explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.

    What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory’s supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centred cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.

    Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesise an evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation, and how the redshift of far-away galaxies increases with distance. They have even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big bang has failed to do.

    Supporters of the big bang theory may retort that these theories do not explain every cosmological observation. But that is scarcely surprising, as their development has been severely hampered by a complete lack of funding. Indeed, such questions and alternatives cannot even now be freely discussed and examined. An open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that “science is the culture of doubt”, in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding.

    Even observations are now interpreted through this biased filter, judged right or wrong depending on whether or not they support the big bang. So discordant data on red shifts, lithium and helium abundances, and galaxy distribution, among other topics, are ignored or ridiculed. This reflects a growing dogmatic mindset that is alien to the spirit of free scientific enquiry.

    Today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies. Funding comes from only a few sources, and all the peer-review committees that control them are dominated by supporters of the big bang. As a result, the dominance of the big bang within the field has become self-sustaining, irrespective of the scientific validity of the theory.

    Giving support only to projects within the big bang framework undermines a fundamental element of the scientific method — the constant testing of theory against observation. Such a restriction makes unbiased discussion and research impossible. To redress this, we urge those agencies that fund work in cosmology to set aside a significant fraction of their funding for investigations into alternative theories and observational contradictions of the big bang. To avoid bias, the peer review committee that allocates such funds could be composed of astronomers and physicists from outside the field of cosmology.

    Allocating funding to investigations into the big bang’s validity, and its alternatives, would allow the scientific process to determine our most accurate model of the history of the universe.
  • Initial signers:
    (Institutions for identification only)

    Halton Arp, Max-Planck-Institute Fur Astrophysik (Germany)
    Andre Koch Torres Assis, State University of Campinas (Brazil)
    Yuri Baryshev, Astronomical Institute, St. Petersburg State University (Russia)
    Ari Brynjolfsson, Applied Radiation Industries (USA)
    Hermann Bondi, Churchill College, Cambridge (UK)
    Timothy Eastman, Plasmas International (USA)
    Chuck Gallo, Superconix, Inc.(USA)
    Thomas Gold, Cornell University (emeritus) (USA)
    Amitabha Ghosh, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (India)
    Walter J. Heikkila, University of Texas at Dallas (USA)
    Michael Ibison, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (USA)
    Thomas Jarboe, Washington University (USA)
    Jerry W. Jensen, ATK Propulsion (USA)
    Menas Kafatos, George Mason University (USA)
    Eric J. Lerner, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (USA)
    Paul Marmet, Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics(retired) (Canada)
    Paola Marziani, Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova (Italy)
    Gregory Meholic, The Aerospace Corporation (USA)
    Jacques Moret-Bailly, Université Dijon (retired) (France)
    Jayant Narlikar, IUCAA(emeritus) and College de France (India,France)
    Marcos Cesar Danhoni Neves, State University of Maringá (Brazil)
    Charles D. Orth, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA)
    R. David Pace, Lyon College (USA)
    Georges Paturel, Observatoire de Lyon (France)
    Jean-Claude Pecker, College de France (France)
    Anthony L. Peratt, Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA)
    Bill Peter, BAE Systems Advanced Technologies (USA)
    David Roscoe, Sheffield University (UK)
    Malabika Roy, George Mason University (USA)
    Sisir Roy, George Mason University (USA)
    Konrad Rudnicki, Jagiellonian University (Poland)
    Domingos S.L. Soares, Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil)
    John L. West, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (USA)
    James F. Woodward, California State University, Fullerton (USA)
What is the Real Problem with Cosmology?
The sentiments expressed in the open letter are welcome. However, I don’t think it will result in any change. The proposal that “the peer review committee that allocates such funds could be composed of astronomers and physicists from outside the field of cosmology,” is a small step in the direction that science generally should be taking. However, many astronomers and physicists outside the field of cosmology believe in the big bang theory or have a vested interest in it. It would be preferable if there were a kind of jury system with educated people from engineering and the humanities as well. Any proposal that could not be explained simply to such an audience would demonstrate that the author did not understand it either. In addition, arguments against a proposal should be admissible from any quarter.

The modern problem with cosmology began with an assumption about the nature of the redshift in the spectrum of faint extragalactic objects, discovered by Edwin Hubble. Hubble wrote:
  • “If the redshifts are a Doppler shift … the observations as they stand lead to the anomaly of a closed universe, curiously small and dense, and, it may be added, suspiciously young. On the other hand, if redshifts are not Doppler effects, these anomalies disappear and the region observed appears as a small, homogeneous, but insignificant portion of a universe extended indefinitely both in space and time.”
    (Royal Astronomical Society Monthly Notices, 17, 506, 1937).

    image: The astronomer Edwin P. Hubble
Hubble’s logical scientific attitude toward the phenomenon of extragalactic redshift is in stark contrast to the illogical and nonsensical opening quotation from the Astronomer Royal. The big bang theory sprang from a theoretical preference for Hubble’s first possibility. Hubble’s brilliant student, Halton Arp, later confirmed that the second possibility was correct. But by then the big bang theory had become dogma. Arp was effectively “excommunicated” for his heresy.
  • image: Lemaitre and Einstein
    caption with image: Abbé Georges Lemaitre, astrophysicist and a monsignor in the Catholic church, with Einstein in 1933.
The medieval church of science now has its own miraculous version of creation, partly because the astronomer who first proposed the Big Bang, Georges Lemaitre, wanted to reconcile the creation of the universe to Genesis. It is reported that after the Belgian detailed his theory, Einstein stood up, applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.” But the great surrealist artist, Salvador Dali, has effectively parodied Einstein’s appreciation of aesthetics. Einstein also said, “When I examined myself and my methods of thought, I came to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” Is it any wonder that big bang cosmology is a fantasy?

Modern astronomers have never understood what the ancients meant when they talked about “creation.” It is clear from comparative religion that creation stories are NOT about the origin of the universe. In fact, our modern view of the concept of “creation” would be incomprehensible to the authors of the religious texts. What they were memorializing was the “re-creation” of a new cosmic order in the skies following apocalyptic chaos.
  • image: Balinese god
    caption with image: We have stared annihilation from heaven in the face and it has deeply scarred us. It fuels our irrational fear of comets and imagined impacts from space. It colors our cosmology as we desperately seek to understand the cosmos in reassuring terms.
So my misgivings about cosmology run much deeper than the theories written in scientific journals. My concern is with human fallibility in observing and interpreting the cosmos. I consider that the human psyche and therefore our cosmological beliefs are deeply affected by the past, which science has chosen not to recognize. It is a past of cosmic catastrophe. Recent genetic research has shown that the entire human race “may have been in such a precarious position that only a few thousand of us may have been alive on the whole face of the Earth at one point in time, that we almost went extinct, that some event was so catastrophic as to nearly cause our species to cease to exist completely.” It is therefore not surprising that ALL religious symbolism relates back to the heavens, the home of the capricious gods of chaos.
  • image: Venus and Athena
This could help explain the tendency for cosmologists to be drawn into a theory that has much in common with the biblical creation story and little to do with science. Ironically, if astronomers took the time to understand the earliest information we have about the heavens we would be closer to seeing the universe clearly for the first time. Observation and experience should come first, not theory. Until we understand our own planet’s history and that of our solar system a lot better we cannot hope to chart the history of the universe. And that, necessarily, will require a wider perspective than the current tunnel vision predominating in astronomy and physics. But first we must understand ourselves.

~Wal Thornhill
https://www.holoscience.com/wp/an-open- ... sed-minds/





Electric Dust Devils
Wal Thornhill EU Views April 25th, 2004
  • ‘.. it may sometimes be that not to know one thing that is wrong could be more important than knowing a hundred things that are right.’
    – Halton Arp, Quasars, Redshifts & Controversies
The electrical character of dust devils and tornadoes is rarely mentioned. In fact, researchers only recently began to examine the electrical nature of dust devils in an effort to understand what is happening on Mars. Mysteries still surround electrical activity in our atmosphere. For example, the Earth has a vertical electric field, in the order of 100 volts per meter in dry air, whose origin is unknown. And scientists do not know what causes the most obvious electrical phenomenon in the atmosphere –’ lightning. See ‘The Balloon goes up over lightning!‘ for a discussion of the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® model of lightning.

However, last week saw another success for the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® model. It’s now official that dust devils on Earth exhibit strong electric fields, in excess of 4,000 volts per meter. They generate magnetic fields as well. The researchers who made the discovery added the qualification ‘”on Earth”‘ because the discovery was a surprise. They cannot be certain that it applies to the dust devils on Mars because their purely mechanical model did not predict the electrical effects found in earthly dust devils. However the tentative connection was made and resulted in the following artist”s impression of what an electrified Martian dust devil might look like.
  • image: Mars dust-devils
    caption with image: The artist seems to have intuitively included a glow discharge near the base of the dust devil. Credit: University of Michigan
In July, 1999, I wrote:
  • ‘The 5 mile high dust devils on Mars and the global Martian dust storms are, I believe, a manifestation of electric discharges on Mars. In the very low atmospheric pressure lightning would be more like a diffuse auroral glow. The problem of generating dust storms on Mars is how to get the particles on the surface to “saltate”, or leave the surface, with such little force in the wind. Electrostatic forces could easily do the job.’
Several years ago, the electrical nature of dust devils and tornadoes was suggested on this website in the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® Synopsis. And a fuller explanation of the electromagnetic effects of a tornadic electric discharge was presented in Sunspot Mysteries. There I wrote:
  • ‘Make no mistake, the Martian dust devils are tornadoes that dwarf their earthly counterpart. It shows that clouds are not required to generate them. They are an atmospheric electric discharge phenomenon.’
More recently I suggested that the Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit, which landed in a dust devil scarred area, suffered electrical interference severe enough to cause computer problems.

Now in a report from Astrobiology Magazine, Dr. William Farrell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says:
  • ‘Dust devils are common on Mars, and NASA is interested in them as well as other phenomena as a possible nuisance or hazard to future human explorers.’ ‘If martian dust devils are highly electrified, as our research suggests, they might give rise to increased discharging or arcing in the low-pressure martian atmosphere, increased dust adhesion to space suits and equipment, and interference with radio communications.’ Farrell is the lead author of the paper about this research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

    ‘Two ingredients, present on both Earth and Mars, are necessary for a dust devil to form: rising air and a source of rotation,” said Dr. Nilton Renno of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., a member of the research team and expert in the fluid dynamics of dust devils. “Wind shear, such as a change in wind direction and speed with altitude, is the source for rotation. Stronger updrafts have the potential to produce stronger dust devils, and larger wind shear produces larger dust devils,” Renno said.
Comment: In the words of Halton Arp, ‘not to know one thing that is wrong could be more important than knowing a hundred things that are right.’ In this case it is the confusion of cause and effect. It is simply assumed that the Earth and its environment in space is electrically neutral. Therefore some energy is required to cause charge to separate and produce the strong electric field in the dust devil. The only energy available is solar radiation and the movement of air (fluid dynamics). However, in an electrified universe charge is already separated on the macroscopic scale and the movement of air in a dust devil is an effect of charge recombination, not a cause of charge separation.
  • "Dust particles become electrified in dust devils, when they rub against each other as they are carried by the winds, transferring positive and negative electric charge the same way you build up static electricity if you shuffle across a carpet. Scientists thought there would not be a high-voltage, large-scale electric field in dust devils, because negatively charged particles would be evenly mixed with positively charged particles, so the overall electric charge in the dust devil would be in balance."
Comment: It is clear from laboratory experiments that different size dust grains can charge to opposite polarities upon collision. However, the electric force between oppositely charged grains would tend to prevent their separation. That is what scientists expected and it explains their surprise when the opposite was found. But it may not be so surprising if we stop treating a dust devil as a fluid dynamics problem and consider it instead as weakly ionized plasma subject to the Earth”s vertical clear-air electric field. In such circumstances the electric field may be strongest (and the electric field reversed) at the base of the dust devil due to the formation of a plasma ‘double layer’ or ‘virtual cathode.’
  • "However, the team’s observations indicate smaller particles become negatively charged, while larger particles become positively charged. Dust devil winds carry the small, negatively charged particles high into the air, while the heavier, positively charged particles remain near the base of the dust devil. This separation of charges produces the large-scale electric field, like the positive and negative terminals on a battery. Since the electrified particles are in motion, and a magnetic field is just the result of moving electric charges, the dust devil also generates a magnetic field."
Comment: The earth and all other bodies in the universe are not isolated and electrically inert. They are intimately connected to and influenced by the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE®. This means that dust devils are not a local event, but are driven like motors by a cosmic current. Dust devils and storm clouds do not act as ‘batteries’ or ‘dynamos’ to provide power to a global atmospheric circuit. As for the magnetic effects of a tornado or dust devil, they will be very strong because the charges are moving at meters per second instead of centimeters per hour, as happens in a current-carrying wire.
  • "If martian dust grains have a variety of sizes and compositions, dust devils on Mars should become electrified the same way as their particles rub against each other, according to the team. Martian dust storms, which can cover the entire planet, are also expected to be strong generators of electric fields. The team hopes to measure a large dust storm on Earth and have instruments to detect atmospheric electric and magnetic fields on future Mars landers."
Comment: In the electrical model of the solar system, all planets must contrive to supply electrons to the positively charged Sun. Mercury probably does it in a similar way to our Moon, through photoelectric and cold-cathode emission. Occasionally the emission may be strong enough at certain ‘hot spots’ to cause the anomalous glows seen on the Moon. The next planet from the Sun, Venus, has an ionosphere entwined in current ‘ropes’ from the solar wind. It causes powerful ‘super bolts’ of lightning to fly between the planet’s ionosphere and the surface. It seems the electric field at Venus’ hot surface is so strong that above a certain altitude the atmosphere hugging the surface glows with a surface discharge known as St. Elmo’s fire. Being dense plasma it reflected the radar signal from the Magellan Orbiter as if the mountains of Venus were plated with metal, much to the puzzlement of planetary scientists.

On Earth we have water clouds to charge up between the ionosphere and the Earth and spare us the super bolts of Venus. Although there are rare reports of ‘bolts from the blue,’ the Earth contrives to discharge in two stages, by lightning from ground to cloud and by glowing jets from the cloud to the ionosphere. The latter stage has only recently been recognized and the flashes given whimsical names like ‘sprites,’ ‘elves’ and ‘gnomes,’ which probably reflects the scientists’ disbelief before they were finally acknowledged. On rare occasions, a powerful lightning bolt strikes directly from the cloud tops to Earth. Such super bolts rip electrons violently from the earth and may form small-scale furrows like those seen on all other solid bodies in the solar system.
  • image: Earth rille
    caption with image: This 40 foot rille was torn out by lightning. The more tortuous path of the narrow lightning stroke can be seen as a groove in the bottom of the trench. Credit: National Geographic, June 1950.
    https://www.holoscience.com/wp/wp-conte ... _rille.jpg
  • image: Schroters Valley
    caption with image: This is a section of a prominent lunar rille, Schröter's Valley, which also shows the tortuous path of the lightning along the floor of the wider trench.
Usually the cloud to ground discharge takes the form of the multiple sparks we call lightning. However, in some parts of the world the lightning switches to the slower discharge of the tornado. Then, instead of the electric charge rushing directly between the ground and the cloud along a thin lightning channel, it is constrained by powerful electromagnetic forces to rotate in a long, thin cylinder or vortex. Measurement of the magnetic field and earth current near touchdown of a tornado shows that it is electrically equivalent to several hundred storm cells. It is this concentrated electrical power in the central vortex that creates damage far in excess of that possible for a simple wind vortex. It also explains the burnt surfaces and objects sometimes found after the passage of a tornado.

The thin dry atmosphere of Mars and the large temperature gradient near the surface is certainly conducive to the formation of dust devils. However, like the other planets, Mars has to supply electrons to the solar discharge. The high electron density above Mars was remarked upon when the first orbiting spacecraft arrived there. Images from Mars landers of a dust laden pink sky were also a surprise. Scientists expected a deep blue-black sky because the atmosphere is about a hundred times thinner than ours and less able to hold dust suspended. In the thin, practically cloudless air of Mars, the dust devils provide the best means of moving electrons from the surface toward the Martian ionosphere. The dust particles, becoming charged, would be suspended in Mars atmospheric electric field to give the pink sky. In other words, Martian dust devils are more akin to tornadoes. Towering up to 8 kilometers into the sky their destructive capability at the surface would be far more powerful than that of a simple spinning wind in Mars” thin air.

When these Martian tornadoes pass over the surface of Mars, they often leave dark, criss-crossing streaks on the land. It is simply assumed that the wind removes bright dust from the terrain, revealing a darker surface underneath. It is possible however, that electrical damage to the surface, and therefore erosion, is being caused by the Martian tornadoes. They certainly pose a much greater risk to landing craft and future visiting astronauts than scientists expect.

Meanwhile there is another example of an electrically damaged body whose surface patterns bear a strong resemblance to those formed by the electric tornadoes on Mars. It is Jupiter’s moon, Europa.
Traveling discharges created giant furrows on Europa reflecting the great strength of those wandering arcs compared to the diffuse discharges on Mars today. The furrows on Europa are not cracks in the ice. They are instead a frozen record of the catastrophic power of Jupiter’s thunderbolt, when unleashed by that electrical powerhouse of a planet.

The ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® model provides a unifying concept for understanding the solar system by simply accepting the overwhelming evidence for the primary role of electricity and the electric force in the mechanism of the cosmos. Future historians will find the science of the 20th century extraordinary for its insistence on a cosmology based on pre-industrial-revolution thinking. Electricity was a mystery then and remains so into the 21st century for astronomers and geologists. Once again, to not know this simple fact is more important than all things they do know.

Wal Thornhill
https://www.holoscience.com/wp/electric-dust-devils/




The Year 2004
In the year 2004 the Thunderbolts Project website was founded by Dave Talbott. Picture of the Day articles began in July of 2004.
https://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/00archive.htm

The Wal Thornhill Electric Universe April Reader

by Brigit » Wed Apr 30, 2025 9:17 pm

2002 April
Thoth -
holoscience -

The Year 2002
In the year 2002 Wal Thornhill and David Talbott published the monograph, "The Electric Universe."
It was copyrighted in both 2002 and 2008.


2003 April
Thoth Vo7 No3

CONTENTS

THE MYTHS OF THE ANCESTORS . . . . . . . . . Mel Acheson
WOLFE CREEK CRATER . . . . . . . . . . Louis A G Hissink
STARS ESCAPE FROM ASTRONOMICAL ZOO . . . . . . Don Scott
HOW TO SEARCH FOR ALIENS . . . . . . . . . Wal Thornhill

holoscience.com
"SETI – The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence"


SETI – The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Wal Thornhill EU Views April 9th, 2003

“Next we come to a question that everyone, scientist and non-scientist alike, must have asked at some time. What is man’s place in the Universe?”
– The Nature of the Universe, Fred Hoyle.

In March this year 13,000 people from across the U.S converged on Philadelphia for the largest meeting of science educators in the world. Many teachers there remarked that their students are always asking about SETI and astronomy. Kids have a keen interest in astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. What’s out there? Are we alone?

The first question we need to ask before we look for life on other worlds is how did intelligent life come to form on this planet? Are these unique circumstances, or are they common? Which stars are most likely to harbour worlds like ours?

It is a question involving a broad mix of cosmology, mythology, geology and biology. Unfortunately, viewpoints today are polarized into only two choices, both requiring miracles. These choices are the creationist story and the evolutionist story. Subscribers to each camp have dug in for a fight to the death. Each side has quite sound arguments against the dogma of the other. Neither side allows the possibility that the answer may be found in no-man’s land.

Religions have adopted a literal belief that the creation stories of myth explain the origin of the Earth and the universe. However, mythical creation stories required human observers. They have nothing to do with the question of how the Earth began, much less how the universe was formed. Nor are they about how life and intelligent life originated. They are the story of the most recent in a series of cosmic cataclysms that have visited the Earth in its long and chequered career. Those cataclysms are recorded in the tortured strata and buried flora and fauna of the Earth.

Science has adopted its own evolutionary mythology of Earth’s history that largely discounts cosmic cataclysms unless they happened in the remote, unfathomable past (although in recent years there has been a grudging acceptance that the dinosaurs may have been wiped out by a hypothetical asteroid impact). The dogma has been expressed by Dr. Maxine Singer, President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, when she wrote “Evolution is the framework that makes sense of the whole natural world from the formation of atoms, galaxies, stars and planets… “

The religious story gives us no clue about where to look for extraterrestrial life. But the dogma of evolution also limits our thinking about SETI. Success is unlikely if our beliefs about our origin and place in the universe are wrong. This is demonstrated clearly in the following bleak excerpt from New Scientist.
  • Earth was a freak
    New Scientist 29 March 2003
    HAZEL MUIR

    BAD news for people hunting extraterrestrials: the cosy, rocky planets that are essential for supporting life might be rare, cosmological freaks. The only reason we are here is because a nearby star happened to explode next to our young Sun just as the Solar System was forming, claims an applied mathematician. Thomas Clarke at the University of Central Florida in Orlando predicts that the vast majority of planets in the Milky Way are frigid gas giants like Jupiter, with hostile atmospheres and no solid surfaces to walk around on. “On average, a solar system will consist of an extensive rocky asteroid belt and some gas giant planets and moons,” says Clarke. “It’s kind of a dismal conclusion.”

    Astronomers agree that the planets and moons of our Solar System formed in a swirling disc of gas and dust around the Sun. In the outer regions, cold, slushy gases condensed into the giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And in the inner regions, dusty particles melted and stuck together, forming hot blobs of rock that cooled and merged to make Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
    • image: Typical solar system
      caption with image: TYPICAL SOLAR SYSTEM: Debris in the asteroid belt will not form rocky and potentially hospitable planets unless there is an additional heat source.
    But it is not clear why the rock melted – the Sun then was not much hotter than it is now. Astronomers believe that the extra heat may have come from radioactive aluminium-26 that was sprayed out of a star that exploded up to 50 light years away when the planets were forming. Decay products of the isotope, which has a half-life of 720,000 years, have been found in meteorites.

    At last week’s Lunar and Planetary Science conference near Houston, in Texas, Clarke suggested that without the heat from the aluminium, the Earth would not have formed. While asteroid-sized rocks would have aggregated in the inner Solar System, they would not have melted and clumped together to form planets.

    According to Clarke’s calculations, the solid rocks would simply zoom past each other or collide and recoil like snooker balls. Only molten, squidgy rocks would deform and lose energy in a collision, he says, allowing them to stick together and grow.

    Debris in the asteroid belt will not form rocky and potentially hospitable planets unless there is an additional heat source.

    But the chance of a star exploding at just the right time and place is very much against the odds. Stars only explode three or four times a century in our Galaxy. Clarke estimates that the probability of a supernova happening within 50 light years of any new solar system that is busy forming planets is only about 1 in 100. “So only a small fraction of planetary systems would be expected to have terrestrial planets,” says Clarke.
“Trouble comes, however, when what we think to be knowledge is actually no more than illusion. Education then serves to transmit illusions from generation to generation, with the situation getting worse all the time. ..wrong ideas eventually become so deeply entrenched as to become unshakeable dogma.”
– Our Place in the Cosmos – Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe.

The failure of the SETI project to find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence may indicate the Earth is a freak. Or it might indicate that many of the things confidently asserted by scholars like Thomas Clarke are far from the truth. For example, the fact that “astronomers agree that the planets and moons of our Solar System formed in a swirling disc of gas and dust around the Sun,” does not make it so. It is probable that consensus about the so-called “nebular hypothesis” has been achieved simply because no astronomer has come up with a more plausible alternative. Clarke indicates one of the problems – how do you form a planet from a ring of dust stretching clear around the solar system? Astronomers were surprised to find that moonlets in Saturn’s rings on commensurate orbits merely swap orbits without colliding. So the ad hoc proposal making objects like that hot and “squidgy” will not help them to stick together if they never come into contact.

In an ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® there is a far more plausible explanation for the genesis of planets. It has almost biological overtones and is appealing in its simplicity – one measure of a good theory. It explains why gas giants have been found recently in large numbers orbiting their parent star far closer than expected by the nebular hypothesis. But first we must deal with the origin of the parent stars.

ELECTRIC STARS
The ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® model assumes, based on good evidence, that the universe is not electrically neutral. So electric currents flow through the thin plasma of deep space in the form of giant filaments, detectable by their magnetic fields. These cosmic filaments take the form of “twisted pairs,” well known to electrical engineers. Plasma physicists call them “Birkeland currents,” after a pioneering scientist in the field. Observations and experiments support this model. Birkeland currents are ultimately responsible for the formation of stars.

These cosmic electric currents are the most efficient scavengers of dust and gas in space. Matter is squeezed or “pinched” toward the current axis by a strong force that varies inversely with radial distance from the axis. Contrast that with the weak force of gravity, which falls off rapidly with the square of distance. Stars are formed like beads strung along a cosmic power line with their rotation axes aligned along the current filaments. Evidence for that model comes from the alignment of the spin axes of stars with the magnetic field in giant molecular clouds. The effect is rather like the old toy spinning tops, with the helical thread plunger passed through them to impart spin. The strong electromagnetic coupling between the proto-star and its environment is also capable of removing angular momentum during collapse – a severe problem for the gravitational collapse model of stars.
  • image: Centaurus A
    captions with image: The Hubble telescope offers a stunning unprecedented close-up view of a turbulent firestorm of star birth along a nearly edge-on dust disk girdling Centaurus A, the nearest active galaxy to Earth. It shows spectacularly the filamentary nature of molecular clouds from which stars are born.
The ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® model is a major departure from conventional views about how stars shine. It proposes that stars, after they have formed, continue to receive power from galactic Birkeland currents. Eddington wrote in his famous work, The Internal Constitution of the Stars: “In seeking a source of energy other than contraction the first question is whether the energy to be radiated in future is now hidden in the star or whether it is being picked up continuously from outside. Suggestions have been made that the impact of meteoric matter provides the heat, or that there is some subtle radiation traversing space which the star picks up.” It is the second possibility that is true in an ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® model.

But Eddington did not pursue it because he was convinced that a star must collapse under its own gravity unless supported from within by an energy source. That was an incorrect assumption because gravity induces charge separation and electrical repulsion effects within a star – something that Eddington dismissed. The simple fact that a proton weighs almost 2000 times as much as an electron ensures that this will occur. Each hydrogen atom in a star will be distorted by gravity to form a tiny radial electric dipole. The resulting electric field will ensure charge separation inside the star. Free electrons will drift toward the surface and leave behind a positively charged core. (This simple fact exposes the nonsense of collapsed stars – that is, neutron stars and black holes. The phenomena attributed to them are simply explained electrically).

The resulting internal electric forces counterbalance compression due to gravity more or less uniformly throughout the star. As the gadfly British physicist, Dr. Harold Aspden, had the temerity to remark, knowing the volume of a hydrogen atom and the mass of the Sun 19th century physicists could have calculated this. He wrote, “..the mass density within a star is not concentrated into a non-uniform distribution by the force of gravitation. The importance of this to cosmological science cannot be overestimated. It bears upon that question of how a nuclear fusion reaction can be initiated to feed the star’s energy output. It obliges one to consider the prospect of a cold fusion process or to look for other explanations for the stellar energy source.” Precisely! – the simplest of observations about the Sun supports the electric star model. By the way, the problem of short-lived radioactive isotopes is solved by the fact that stellar electric discharges manufacture all of the heavy elements seen in their spectra. A supernova is not required.

Then there is the Sun’s strange atmosphere. Fred Hoyle wrote in 1955, “We should expect on the basis of a straightforward calculation that the Sun would ‘end’ itself in a simple and rather prosaic way; that with increasing height above the photosphere the density of the solar material would decrease quite rapidly, until it became pretty well negligible only two or three thousand kilometres up.” Instead, the planets orbit inside its “huge bloated envelope.”

The Sun’s atmosphere matches that expected from an electric discharge in a very low pressure gas – the solar “wind” accelerating away from the Sun, the million degree temperature of the solar corona above a “cool” photosphere at 6000 degrees, and the magnetic fields that reveal electric currents in space.

Where do planets fit into this picture?
Companion stars and gas giants may be formed in the initial string of stellar “beads.” Or they may be “born” later from a star when electrical stresses cause the expulsion of some of its positively charged core. It is an effective way to increase surface area to relieve electrical stress. A gargantuan stellar “lightning flash,” called a nova, accompanies the birth. The result is generally a close-orbiting binary system and an “expulsion disk” – in contradistinction to an accretion disk. The new companion can be a star or a gas giant. Gas giants may also undergo the same process, albeit less violently, giving birth to their rocky moons and planets. Notably, Saturn still has an ephemeral expulsion disk.

With such an unconventional scenario, where is the best place to look for extraterrestrial intelligence? The immediate answer is – not near a star like the Sun! Our situation is quite precarious – almost freakish. A small difference in Earth’s orbit or radiation from the Sun could extinguish intelligent life on this planet. Earth is highly unlikely to have supported life for hundreds of millions of years in its present situation. So SETI is mistaken to concentrate its search on Earth-like planets orbiting energetic stars like the Sun.

A more helpful answer is that Earth-like planets and intelligent life are most likely to be found very close to less energetic, dim red stars. That is good news because they are the most numerous in the galaxy. It should be clear that there is no such thing as a “failed star” in an ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® because internal nuclear energy is not the source of their radiance. It is also important to recognize that the term “dwarf” is a misnomer when applied to a dim red star. All red stars will appear much larger than the central physical body because their colour and size is largely due to a spherical anode glow at a great height above the surface. Many satellites will orbit within the glowing shell and diffuse atmosphere of a red star. That is the ideal place for life to take hold. Radiant energy falls equally over the surface of such a satellite, or planet, regardless of orbit, rotation and axial tilt. There are neither seasons nor day and night. And life-giving molecules, including water, will mist down through an atmosphere drawn from their parent star.
  • image: Betelgeuse
    caption with image: The giant red star, Betelgeuse, sports unexpected hot spots. They may be stellar objects within, shining through an enveloping anode glow. The glowing sheath is so huge that if Betelguese replaced our Sun then Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter would be orbiting within it. Astronomers recognize that the plasma envelope of such stars is so tenuous that it would not impede planets in their orbits.
There is a catch however for SETI enthusiasts. Intelligent beings living on a planet in this benign environment would not see a dark, star spangled heaven. If the misty atmosphere cleared sufficiently they might see a diffuse, brighter light from their primary or possibly a nearby binary partner shining through the glowing cocoon that surrounds them. If intelligent beings living on these protected planets have learned to use radio signals, we would not detect them, because the plasma of the anode glow would act as an impenetrable shield against radio signals. Nor would they be able to detect our radio signals, for the same reason. In fact, there would be nothing to suggest the existence of an immense universe beyond the plasma glow that surrounds them. There would be no reason for them to search for extraplanetary intelligence. Unless… they discovered a way to communicate over cosmic distances that does not involve radio signals. In any case, radio signals are far too slow for sensible communication over the gulf of deep space. Having intelligent civilizations electrically “quarantined” inside their stellar wombs would satisfy the so-called “Fermi paradox,” which is the question, “If the universe is teeming with aliens, where is everybody?” We are the freaks who have been given the opportunity to see the immensity of the universe and to live to ask the question.

Our creation myths seem to be a human memory of Earth’s expulsion from the maternal womb. Surely we should mine them for insights into the real history of the Earth and the only intelligent life we know, before letting our imagination run riot. If we appear to be alone it might simply be due to our primitive understanding of the universe, which is leading us to look in the wrong places and maybe with the wrong tools.

I believe that if SETI is to succeed we must challenge our kids with possibilities and questions, not with the overwhelming “illusion of knowledge” that modern science portrays. Because, contrary to the bleak conventional outlook, the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® seems designed to produce intelligent life. The search must ultimately succeed!

Wal Thornhill

The Wal Thornhill Electric Universe April Reader

by Brigit » Wed Apr 30, 2025 6:59 pm

2001 April
Thoth Vo5 No5

CONTENTS
REALLY? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mel Acheson
OF THUNDERGODS AND CELESTIAL MARVELS . . . . . . . . Dave Talbott
PARADIGM PORTRAITS IX: DISTANT SUPERNOVAS . . . . . .Amy Acheson
IO-THE ELECTRIC MOON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Wal Thornhill



IO-THE ELECTRIC MOON
by Wal Thornhill

It is well known that there is an electrical connection between
Jupiter and its inner Galilean moon, Io. However, when plumes of
matter were discovered jetting into space the immediate
interpretation by geologists was that they must be volcanic. The
intense volcanism on Io is explained by the notion of rhythmic 100
meter high tides as it orbits Jupiter with a slight eccentricity.
But such an obvious answer leaves many mysteries. For example,
what makes the lava on Io much hotter than any on Earth? Why are
the plumes filamentary? How do the volcanoes move tens of
kilometres in a few years? Why is the fallout deposited in rings?

New photos from NASA show the ring deposits around old and new
eruptions on Io:
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/files/images/b ... a02588.gif

These oddities make it unlikely that we are looking at volcanoes
or hot lava on Io. So why do NASA scientists leap to weak tidal
effects to explain what is happening on Io's surface when it has
been calculated that the voltage induced across Io is 400 thousand
volts and the observed current flowing in its vicinity is about
one million amperes? (Note that these figures may be an
underestimate because they assume that the Jupiter system is
electrically closed. Evidence [exists] ... that this is not so.)
Part of the answer probably lies in the fact that neither
volcanoes nor lightning are well understood on Earth. Also it is
traditional that geologists are asked to pronounce on such
matters. So it has been easy to suggest that the electrical power
passes around Io rather than into it. Geologists can then ignore
the obvious electrical scarring features on Io but they are then
forced into far-fetched explanations.

There is a little known behaviour of lightning that seems to be at
work on that small moon. That is, lightning's ability to
accelerate material upwards from a surface against the force of
gravity. Of course, lightning on Io is not going to look anything
like earthly lightning because it has no atmosphere to speak of.
It will take the form of a diffuse glow discharge. Plumes have
been seen with no attachment to an identifiable volcanic caldera.
Io glows visibly when eclipsed by Jupiter. Did no one recognize
the obvious electrical activity on Io?

It is clear that Thomas Gold is a scientist that you ignore at
your peril. In the journal, Science, of 30 November, 1979, he
published an article titled "Electric Origin of the Outburst on
Io." The abstract reads in part: "The outbursts on Jupiter's
satellite Io have been described as volcanic eruptions. They may
instead be the result of large electric currents flowing through
hot spots on Io and causing evaporation of surface materials."
Gold made several telling arguments for such an interpretation:

1) for the plume to reach heights of several hundred kilometres it
would require a volatile propellant capable of accelerating
surface material to speeds of 1 kilometre per second.

2) with incessant activity, in a small fraction of geologic time
all of the volatiles would be driven off.

3) heavy sulfur atoms form compounds that are not ideal as a
propellant.

In a 1987 paper in Astrophysics and Space Science, plasma
physicists Peratt and Dessler supported Gold's interpretation and
went into more detail. They explain the jets in terms of a plasma-
arc discharge. The high velocity and parabolic cross-section of
the plumes are derived from laboratory plasma experiments. The
filamentary penumbra and convergence of ejecta into well-defined
rings are characteristic plasma discharge effects that have no
counterpart in volcanoes.

See pictures and more info on Wal Thornhill's website at:
http://www.holoscience.com/news/volcano_io.htm
http://www.holoscience.com/news/flashback.htm

Reports have expressed surprise at the high temperatures measured
at the hot spots on Io. They have been headlined as being the
second hottest objects in the solar system, following the Sun.
Such a result fits the notion of the hot spots being the touchdown
points of electric arcs. The wandering of the hot spots over tens
of kilometres, their preference for the edges of earlier
cratering, the production of circular edged scalloping to give a
fretted appearance, seen to advantage in ... clasp[s] of Io ...,
are all characteristic of electric arc machining but have no
coherent explanation in volcanic terms. ... [T]he brightly
coloured "lava fountains" [seen on press release photos] ... were
painted in by NASA artists. In the original image whatever was
occurring there was too bright for Galileo's camera to register.
If they were hot spots created by electric arcs then it would be
like trying to film an arc welder in action. When we finally get
cameras to Io that can register bright light in fine detail we
will find tiny points of light brighter than the Sun.

Io will be a unique and valuable laboratory to begin to understand
some of the electrical scarring suffered by comets, asteroids,
moons and planets. Ironically, it may also help us to understand
lightning and volcanoes here on Earth. For example, for reasons
unknown to geologists, eruptive activity is greatest on both Io
and the Earth at mid-latitudes. Also it is known that here on
Earth powerful lightning is often associated with volcanic
eruptions. Now, in plasma experiments where a magnetised ball is
placed in a vacuum and subjected to an electric discharge, the
ball has a plasma torus form around the equator - which then
discharges to the mid-latitudes of the ball. Can it be that
volcanoes here on Earth are connected to electrical activity in
space via the lightning above them? Are volcanoes a result of an
underground electrical discharge? Also, lightning and strange
electrical and magnetic effects are often reported to precede and
accompany strong earthquakes. Are earthquakes a different
manifestation of the same phenomena?

~Wal Thornhill
See the home of The Electric Universe at
http://www.holoscience.com
*********************************************************

More in 2001 April

holoscience.com
"Two Spacecraft Watch an Arc Welder on Io"
"Scientists Fail to Unravel Kinks in the Solar Wind"


Scientists Fail to Unravel the Kinks in Solar Waves
Wal Thornhill EU Views April 4th, 2001
  • image: Ulysses
    caption with image: Artist's concept of Ulysses. Photo: ESA
NASA/JPL NEWS RELEASE
March 29, 2001
  • 'Kinks in the Sun’s magnetic field have puzzled scientists since they first started studying the solar wind, and now researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., have found the reason: they are caused by the evolution of a type of magnetic wave called Alfven waves.

    Scientists measured sudden changes in the Sun’s magnetic field with the magnetometer instrument on the Ulysses spacecraft, which is orbiting the Sun’s poles at a distance between Jupiter and Mars. Ulysses has been studying the Sun since 1990 and has just finished studying the south pole of the Sun at solar maximum, a time of great activity.

    “Over the poles of the Sun, we saw abrupt decreases in the magnetic field,” said JPL’s Dr. Bruce Tsurutani, a co-investigator on the magnetometer instrument on Ulysses. “We did not know what they were, because we had never seen anything like it before. Now we know that the disturbance is caused by Alfven waves.”

    Scientists expected to find that either the field magnitude remained the same, though the angle changed, or that the magnitude changed, with no fields threading across the structure, said Tsurutani. Instead, they found that the ends of Alfven waves always have both rotational and tangential characteristics.

    Like the movements of a plucked guitar string, Alfven waves travel down the magnetic fields that emanate from the Sun. Disturbances in the Sun’s magnetic field, which is embedded in the solar wind, travel through space to eventually cause auroras on Earth. The high-energy particles from the solar wind become trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field and come down into the atmosphere near the Earth’s north and south magnetic poles. The highly-charged particles then collide with oxygen and nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere and emit light, forming the aurora.

    Tsurutani also studied polar plumes, long trails from the base of the Sun. The plumes form in the Sun’s polar regions, the upper and lower 30-degree latitude regions, and where these plumes occur, the magnetic field isn’t kinked, but instead forms long, thin, straight tubes. This means that the Alfven waves don’t operate in these regions, though scientists don’t yet know why.

    “Ulysses was able to find that the Sun’s polar plumes stretch out past the orbit of Mars and maybe farther,” said Tsurutani. “What’s fascinating is how these plumes can be so thin and so long at the same time.” A plume could be 100 times wider than it is long (sic). The European Space Agency’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) noted these polar plumes in 1996.'
Comment:
  • image: Galactic strings
    caption with image: Example of the "long thin straight tubes" and "kinked" surrounding filaments that define the Birkeland currents flowing into the center of our galaxy.
What is fascinating is that astrophysicists cannot “see” what they are looking at because of the dogma that electric currents cannot flow in space and the Sun cannot be electrically charged. The thin, straight tubes are diagnostic of Birkeland currents. Birkeland currents also have an outer twisted filament or rope-like form taken by electric current flowing in plasma. The Alfven waves are therefore more likely to be the structure of the magnetic field associated with Birkeland currents. Otherwise there is some unspecified activity required beneath the Sun’s surface to excite the Alfven waves, or “pluck the guitar string” as it is colorfully described. Unfortunately this “explanation” follows a well-established tradition of ascribing every weird feature of the Sun to poorly defined activity hidden from view inside the Sun. It is what is known as “pathological science” – a term coined by a pioneer of plasma physics and Nobel Laureate, Irving Langmuir.

The report goes on…
  • "Alfven waves are named for Hannes Alfven, a Swede who in 1942 discovered the waves, for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize."
Comment:

Alfven must be spinning in his grave to see the continued misuse of his work by astrophysicists. In 1970 he used the occasion of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in unprecedented fashion to admonish them for treating plasma in a way he had subsequently shown to be mistaken. He said, “The cosmical plasma physics …is to some extent the playground of theoreticians who have never seen a plasma in a laboratory. Many of them still believe in formulas we know from laboratory experiments to be wrong. The astrophysical …crisis has not yet come.” We are still waiting…

Tsurutani discussed his findings this week at the European Geophysical Society’s 26th annual meeting, joined by his colleagues on the study, Dr. Carlos Galvan, Dr. John Arballo, Dr. Regina Sakurai and Dr. Daniel Winterhalter, from the Space Plasma Physics Element at JPL, Dr. Bimla Buti University of New Delhi and Dr. Gurbax Lakhina, director of the Mumbai Geomagnetic Observatory, Bombay, India.

Ulysses, launched in 1990, is a joint venture of NASA and the European Space Agency. JPL manages Ulysses for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL is managed by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena for NASA.
https://www.holoscience.com/wp/scientis ... lar-waves/

"Two Spacecraft Watch An Arc Welder on Io"
https://www.holoscience.com/wp/two-spac ... der-on-io/




The Year 2001
The Electric Universe Conference, "Intersect 2001: Electricity, Cosmology, and Human History," was held in Laughlin, NV in July of 2001. Speakers included Dave Talbott, Don Scott, Anis Scott, Rupert Sheldrake, Wal Thornhill, Cj Ransom, Michael Armstrong, Ted Holdren and Mel Acheson.

The Wal Thornhill Electric Universe April Reader

by Brigit » Wed Apr 30, 2025 6:12 pm

2000 April
Thoth Vo4 No7:
"The Impact of Pseudoscience" by Wal Thornhill and Mel Acheson
This also appears on Holoscience on March 17, 2000.

Thoth Vo4 No8 and holoscience.com:
"Science Heading for a Big Bang"



“Science Heading for a BIG BANG”
April 27th, 2000 Wal Thornhill EU Views
  • image: Plasma galaxy diagram
Forget the glossy astronomy books and magazines – the Big Bang is pure fiction. The discoveries that prove it will also bring about the end of science-as-we-know-it. Of course, many books and articles have been published recently heralding the end of science – meaning there is little left to learn. The truth is the opposite. Much of what we think we know “ain’t so”. As always, unlearning it will give us more trouble than learning something new.

The belief of scientists in their cleverly concocted creation story, the Big Bang, has become so entrenched and over-hyped that it is difficult to imagine an effective face-saving strategy when the news leaks out that it is nonsense. And let there be no doubt about it, the hard science to prove the case against the Big Bang has been done by an astronomer who is uniquely well placed for the task.
  • image: Halton Arp
His name is Halton Arp, known for his classic work in “Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies”. When he began to announce findings nearly 30 years ago that contradicted orthodox cosmology he was refused telescope time and publication in the standard journals. In frustration he published two books, the first in 1987 titled “Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies”, and more recently “Seeing Red”. “Redshift” is the term used to describe the shift in frequency of spectral lines toward the red end of the spectrum. It’s known to occur when an object is speeding away from us. Edwin Hubble discovered that the luminosity of a galaxy is related to its redshift: the fainter the galaxy, the higher the redshift. He suggested one interpretation of this data is that the greater the redshift (and therefore, the velocity), the farther away the galaxy. Thus, the expanding universe was born. But he was careful not to assume that this was the only possible interpretation of the redshift data. Others since have thrown scientific caution to the winds and used Hubble’s hypothesis as a rubbery yardstick with which to measure the size and age of the universe. Arp avoided this unscientific approach and made discoveries that are unequalled in the history of astronomy.

Many peculiar galaxies turn out to be what are known as active galaxies. They are often seen to have thin jets of matter firing from their cores, and bridges of matter or radio lobes connecting them with nearby objects. Arp noticed that quasars are clustered in the sky with active galaxies far too often to be a coincidence. Quasars are faint starlike objects whose spectra are highly redshifted. The Big Bang view is that their redshifts are due to the expansion of the universe and the doppler effect as the quasars race away from us at a good fraction of light speed. A high redshift equates in that model to great distance so they should have no association with much closer galaxies. Yet Arp showed that some quasars are connected by bridges or jets of matter to active galaxies. Since the advent of orbiting x-ray telescopes these bridges are becoming abundantly clear.

But now we come to the results of Arp’s work that will shake the foundations of modern physics. He found that quasars lined up on either side of active galaxies as if they are spat out at regular intervals from the galactic cores, above and below the plane of the galaxy. He then found that the redshifts of these quasars fall back toward normal levels and increase in brightness the further they are from the parent galaxy. In other words, the redshift is a measure of the age of the quasar. Also, the quasars slow down as if they are increasing in mass.

Even more shocking was Arp’s discovery that quasar redshifts are quantised! IF SCIENCE WORKED AS ADVERTISED, THIS SHOULD BE BANNER HEADLINE NEWS! This raises the specter that our highly prized physics is way off the beam; that we do not understand such fundamental concepts as mass and gravity, nor the real meaning of quantum theory. So our university libraries and bookshops are crammed with science fiction. Nothing short of the biggest conceptual revolution in history will redress the situation. But universities are not in the business of fostering revolutions and the media seems incapable of exposing their nonsense. Based on his experiences Arp wrote, “Investigative journalism so far as science is concerned is dead in the water.” He believes that with such a broken-down way of doing and reporting science, breakthroughs must come from individuals outside academia.

It is happening. The signs of revolution have been around for decades. But with their backs turned to us and absorbed in their computer screens, those who have derailed science are oblivious to the “Big Bang” that is about to occur. As David Stove, the noted Australian philosopher, wrote in Anything Goes: “Everyone dislikes a sudden loud noise, but it is worse still if you are half asleep at the time.” We can expect a bad-tempered reaction when it occurs.

The famous mathematician Johann von Neumann seemed to intuit the problem at the heart of the mathematical physics approach when he wrote: “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” Meanwhile a growing number of independent thinkers have noted that physics lost any remaining connection with reality with the advent of relativity theories and quantum mechanics. Paradoxically, the way forward is to return to classical physics which is based on immutable standards and causality. The equations of modern science are merely descriptive and not causal explanations. The same equations may apply to many different causes. Relativity introduces “rubbery” rather than immutable standards. Mass, length and time change with velocities and observers. As the philosopher Michael Miller [dead link 2021] puts it:

“If a measuring standard varies who-knows-how, then the quantities measured by means of it vary who-knows-how, and the equations connecting those quantities mean who-knows-what. This is precisely the bog in which relativists have mired themselves; their doctrine of curved space is symptomatic. …Generations of science students have tried to make sense of curved space, and succeeded only in warping their minds.”

As with past revolutions, the seeds are already sown. A good scientist would be alert, without prejudice, to wider future possibilities. Unfortunately, academia teaches and encourages prejudice and a narrow focus. Arp goes so far as to compare the dogmatism of astronomy unfavorably to that of the medieval church. It is the mission of HOLOSCIENCE to look at the BIG PICTURE and find the promising ideas that could form the new science of this new millennium. Arp’s observational work on intrinsic redshift is already a cornerstone for a new cosmology. It depicts a smaller, stable cosmos as part of an infinite, eternal universe. It has almost biological overtones when it traces families of galaxies with quasars being the galactic children in various stages of adolescence.

There are two key elements required to explain the dynamics of quasar formation and quantization of redshift. An article featured in the March-April issue of American Scientist drops the first shoe. It demonstrates (again) that plasma physics holds the key to understanding stars and galaxies and the inexplicable (in gravitational terms) ejection of vast gobs of matter at colossal speeds.
  • image: Prominences. Plasma lab prominence and solar prominence
Experiment shows that a powerful electric current in a magnetic field can create a solar coronal mass ejection event (CME). And since magnetic fields are caused by electric currents, the prime mover is electric discharge phenomena in a plasma. From personal experience, electric discharges in plasmas are not a part of the curriculum for astrophysicists. Cosmology should be the realm of plasma physicists and electrical engineers.
  • image: m82
    caption with image: The red and blue arrows show the observed magnetic field directions and the white dashed curves outline the magnetic bubble structure. The long white arrows depict the direction of the wind from the center of the galaxy. Photo: JAC
  • image: Plasma galaxy diagram
    caption with image: Electric current (yellow lines) flows along the magnetic field lines - which conforms closely to the image of M82

Another recent example: British astronomers have discovered a “magnetic bubble” around one of Arp’s favorite galaxies, M82. Notice that astrophysicists always deal with effects (winds, magnetism) and not causes (electric currents). The diagram of M82 is almost identical to that of the plasma physicist, Eric Lerner, in his book “The Big Bang Never Happened”, published in 1992.

In that book, a simple, highly compact and efficient ejection engine is described – the plasma focus.
  • image: Plasma Focus Device with copper outer electrode, brass inner electrode, capacitor bank, air gap switch, discharge direction, and beam of X-rays and particles
It can explain simply the episodic ejection of quasars from the centers of active galaxies. In an ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® infinitely heavy objects are not needed to offset the infinitely weak force of gravity when explaining high-energy outbursts. Black holes and neutron stars simply do not exist. The electrical nature of matter prevents the formation of super-massive objects.
  • image: Ralph Sansbury
The second shoe is dropped heavily by the physicist Ralph Sansbury who has been using his own resources to experiment with laser light and show that there are near-instantaneous electric forces that can account for light, magnetism and gravity. In other words, the electric force is fundamental and all others are derived from it – even the nuclear force. The quantum nature of matter interactions are then seen in a classical sense to be due to electrostatic resonances operating at near-infinite speed between sub-particles that constitute electrons, protons and neutrons. Causality is reinstated in physics. IF SCIENCE WORKED AS ADVERTISED, THIS SHOULD BE BANNER HEADLINE NEWS! (And Ralph wouldn’t be working alone in his basement). In the view of HOLOSCIENCE, this is the only model that can sensibly explain Arp’s galaxy-wide quantum jumps in redshift.

The argument goes like this: a quasar is ejected from a galactic nucleus by the plasma focus effect as an electron-deficient plasmoid (electrons are trapped in the focus longer than the much heavier protons). Now, the phenomenon of mass is due to the energy conserving elastic response of charged particles to external electric forces. If gravity is an electric force, inertial and gravitational mass will always be identical. So, because the electric polarization of stars in the quasar is low at first, the mass of protons and neutrons will be lower than in the parent galaxy.

Consequently electron orbits within quasar atoms will have lower energy – light from them will be redshifted. Luminosity will also be lower due to the lack of charge-carrying electrons. Electrons streaming after the quasar create an x-ray jet and vast radio-lobes. Such electron jets are seen clearly in images from the orbiting Chandra X-Ray telescope.
  • image: Centaurus A
    caption with image: The active galaxy Centaurus A showing bright x-ray knots in its jet. An X-ray image of Centaurus A taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory has been superimposed over an optical view of the galaxy taken by the 4-meter reflector at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
As electrons arrive at the quasar, the luminosity increases at first and mass and redshift undergo quantum jumps to new resonant states across the quasar or galaxy.

From a NASA news report issued on April 19:

“The distance record for a quasar has been broken yet again. At the present time, no other object in the universe has been found to be more distant than the above speck. The recently discovered quasar has been clocked at redshift 5.82. The exact relation between redshift and distance remains presently unknown, although surely higher redshifts do mean greater distance. The above quasar is likely billions of light-years away and so is seen when the universe was younger than one billion years old, less than a tenth of its present age. Like all quasars, this object is probably a large black hole in the center of a distant galaxy.” Blah, blah….

Has NASA suddenly become uncharacteristically coy about the meaning of the redshift? The use of the word “surely” implies a question mark.

It is usual in academia to ignore and ostracize a dissenter in the hope he will give up. But Arp is not a quitter, he is a big hitter. If ostracism fails then scientists rewrite history as if they really knew it all along. The first step in that process is to equivocate in scientific reports to allow a new interpretation to be introduced retrospectively. Watch carefully!

Wal Thornhill

Credits: Photograph of Ralph Sansbury: Wal Thornhill.

https://www.holoscience.com/wp/science- ... -big-bang/


The year 2000
The Electric Universe Conference was held in Portland in September; guest speakers included Tony Peratt and Halton Arp. Tony Peratt presented work showing the likeness between high energy plasma discharge formations and petroglyphs around the world. "It was a conference to remember."
Also, Cj Ransom and Wal Thornhill published "Plasma Generated Craters and Spherules" in the IEEE in 2000.

In 2004 Wal Thornhill wrote of Anthony Peratt's paper:
  • "In December 2003, one of the most important scientific papers ever published appeared in IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PLASMA SCIENCE, VOL. 31, NO.6. It is titled Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current, Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity, by Anthony L. Peratt, Fellow, IEEE.

    You may be forgiven if you missed it. Hidden behind the usual unexciting academic title is a bombshell for science. It provides definitive evidence for the electrical nature of the Earth and the solar system. But the biggest surprise for geologists and astronomers is that modern prehistoric humans witnessed in the heavens a cosmic scale electrical discharge involving the Earth. How can we be so certain? The author is an authority on the behavior of the most powerful electrical discharges unleashed by man. Such discharges develop instabilities (the kind of thing that has defied all attempts at producing hot fusion power). Plasma physicists know them as ‘Peratt instabilities.’ The importance of these Peratt instabilities for our forensic investigation is that they evolve through extremely complex and distinctive shapes. Globally, prehistoric man preserved those forms on rock in the form of petroglyphs, like still frames from a movie. The petroglyphs show a highly unusual event ‘ a cosmic electrical catastrophe. And because the instabilities are three dimensional, it is possible to determine their location in the sky through the perspective depicted. The discharge was polar, hence the ‘aurora’ in the title."

The Wal Thornhill Electric Universe April Reader

by Brigit » Wed Apr 30, 2025 5:32 pm

1999 April
Thoth Vo3 No7

This issue carried several discussions between Wal Thornhill and Bob Grubaugh, James Conway, Karen Josephson, Barry Cornett, and Dave Davis:

"Gravity/Electric Discussion"
"What to Do!"
"Mars Northern Icecap"
"The Outer Planets"
"Plasma Questions"
"Saturnian Biosphere"

MARS' NORTHERN ICECAP
Kronia discussion

Kip Farr wrote:

I was rereading the December 12 issue of Science News, where it
talks about Mars' northern icecap. App, the cap is much larger
than the southern, though smaller than expected. In addition to
wondering where the oceans went, scientists are confused as to
how water from the poles could have traveled to the equator as
evidenced by the channels "crisscrossing" the equator. Is this
possible evidence of Mars' position in the ancient alignment,
that is, larger northern icecap (water ice) and water running
towards the equator? Any thoughts?

Wal Thornhill responds:
Most of the channels crisscrossing the equator were not formed by
the action of water. They are almost without exception electrical
plasma arc scars of one form or another.

James Conway asks:
What is the minimum mass of an object needed to produce such
scars if the bodies have a near miss.

Wal Thornhill replies:
It would have to be a large body to have sufficient charge
available to cause the damage seen on Mars. Juergens made some
rough order of magnitude calculations of the charge transferred
to the Moon from Mars to cause craters like Aristarchus. Whatever
hit Mars was orders of magnitude greater. Some scholars have
proposed a general formula relating charge to mass ratio for
cosmic bodies. Guesstimating the energy required to remove
million cubic kilometres of Mars surface would give you the
charge transferred from the marauding object. Then you would have
to make assumptions about the proportion of the total charge
transferred from that object which in turn would give you the
mass. A bit of a pointless exercise in my opinion given the
number of guesses involved. Still, it's a whole lot better than
stellar evolution theory!

The concept of a "near-miss" has to be looked at carefully in the
context of an electrical solar system. The distance required to
do electrical damage is determined by the sizes of the respective
plasma sheaths (magnetospheres in conventional speak). They may
be 10's of times the radius of the planets involved.
----------------------------------------------

THE OUTER PLANETS
by Wal Thornhill, Karen Josephson

The planets do intercept some of the galactic energy on its way
to the Sun. (But not much on the outward journey from the Sun).
Neptune exhibits strange variations in albedo, inversely related
to the solar cycle. Whether that is a direct electrical glow in
the ionosphere or some other albedo effect in the atmosphere is
not clear. In the Electric Universe, the most tangible evidence
of electrical energy input to the planets is in their weather
systems. Neptune for example has wind speeds up to almost 1500
mph! It also exhibits spots which I think are sudden releases of
energy from the encircling plasmoid (radiation belt) via plasma
discharges into the ionosphere. I would expect therefore that
changes in albedo would be tied to the solar cycle since that, in
turn, reflects the passage of the solar system across the cosmic
power conduits: the galactic Birkeland current threads.

Neptune's moon exhibits "geyser" activity which indicates
electric discharges are impinging on that moon, just like
Jupiter's moon, Io. (Would you believe it? - the greenhouse
effect was invoked to explain Triton's geyser activity!) It is
also covered with double-ridges, like Europa.

The next closest outer planet, Uranus, exhibits a phenomenon
termed "electroglow" in its upper atmosphere. No one could
explain where the electrons got their energy from. "Hot" protons
with energies up to 500MeV were found. Also, the warmest point on
the planet was its north pole which had been in darkness for 40
years when Voyager 2 shot past. This offers a clue as to how the
Earth might have had a uniform global climate during the
Saturnian era, since most of the energy appearing in the
atmospheres of these outer planets is toward the infra-red and
ultraviolet ends of the spectrum. Dwardu has written on the
subject of the purple light of that era.

It is the plasmoid that fundamentally drives planetary weather
systems. It is evident that the weather models used on Earth are
missing something important since they don't work for any other
planet. Even the Sun has weather! - which strengthens my
conviction that it is a common electrical phenomena.

Karen Josephson asks:
A recent reply by Wal to Harold included the following:

"It is the plasmoid that fundamentally drives planetary
weather systems. It is evident that the weather models used on
Earth are missing something important since they don't work for
any other planet. Even the Sun has weather! - which strengthens
my conviction that it is a common electrical phenomena."

By this passage I infer that meteorologists are missing the
electromagnetic effects in their weather models ....

Wal replies:
Not so much electromagnetic effects, but pure electric current
effects. The evidence for such electric currents is in auroral
displays and the diffuse glow discharges high above lightning
storms and cyclones.

Karen wrote:
-----I was wondering if surface color could be influencing the
reflectivity of these planets. I remember reading that we on
Earth were lucky that the darker (color-wise) side of the moon
was facing toward us, rather than the much lighter colored
opposite side, because our nights would be much brighter, even on
nights when the moon wasn't full.

Wal replies:
The outer planets, being gas giants, the probability is that
changes in clouds or dark spots will alter their albedo. However,
Uranus and Neptune have had changes in brightness of up to 20%
measured! ... That seems more likely to be an electrical
phenomena caused by changes in their ionospheres - which in turn
relates to electrical input to those planets.

Karen continues:
The same source claimed that the night would be bright enough to
read a book in if there wasn't so much dust blacking out the glow
from the center of our galaxy. Is this true?? Would that dust
change any of the effects of the of the electric universe??

Wal:
Yes it does. Dust tends to remove electrons from a plasma.
Juergens observed that the difference between Population I and II
stars in the galaxy could be explained by the deficiency of
electrons where dust is prevalent.

----------------------------------------------

In late 1999, the Holoscience website was launched. There may have been a 1999 Electric Universe Conference, and there was an SIS Silver Jubilee Conference in London which he may or may not have attended.

The Wal Thornhill Electric Universe April Reader

by Brigit » Wed Apr 30, 2025 5:11 pm

1997 April
Thoth Vo1 No 7-10
In place of Wal Thornhill's article,the April issues of Thoth in 1997 republished several papers by Ralph Juergens:

THE ELECTRICAL SUN: RECONCILING CELESTIAL
MECHANICS AND VELIKOVSKIANISM (Part 1,2)..........Ralph Juergens

THOTH V1-09
THE MYTH OF THE UNIVERSAL MONARCH (3)............David Talbott
THE ELECTRICAL SUN: RECONCILING CELESTIAL
MECHANICS AND VELIKOVSKIANISM (Part 3)..........Ralph Juergens

THOTH V1-10
SATURN: THE ANCIENT SUN GOD.........................David Talbott
THE ELECTRICAL SUN (Part 4)........................Ralph Juergens
SCHOLARS IN DESPERATION...............................Earl Milton
Book Review of "Stephen Jay Gould and Immanuel Velikovsky:
Essays in the Continuing Velikovsky Affair"

These Ralph Juergens articles can be posted on Electric Universe - Resources.

The Electric Universe conference in January 1997 was held in Portland.


1998 April
Thoth Vo2 No7
"The Great Red Spot"


THE GREAT RED SPOT: COMMENTARY
By Wal Thornhill

The Economist runs some very good science stories. Here's one for April 4th:
  • Jupiter

    The Great Red Hurricane

    THE Great Red Spot of Jupiter has been a puzzle since 1664, when Robert
    Hooke first glimpsed it in his telescope. Those who have since contemplated
    its baleful stare have wondered, reasonably enough, why it is so great (its
    length is one-and-a-half times the diameter of the earth); why it is red;
    and why it has been there so long.

    Nowadays, these are questions not for astronomers but for meteorologists.
    Jupiter's weather is more exciting than earth's - with wind speeds up to
    540kph (335mph), storms that last for decades and at least three sorts of
    rain - but its atmosphere is thought to work in basically the same way.
    Results presented this week by Fred Taylor of Oxford University, during a
    conference at the University of St. Andrews, support that view. The red spot
    is not so much a spot as a giant sprinkler, and hence not unlike an earthly
    hurricane.

    Dr Taylor and his colleagues have been analysing infra-red pictures taken by
    the spacecraft Galileo (owned by NASA, America's space agency), which is
    currently touring Jupiter and its moons. In the process they have made other
    intriguing discoveries. In 1995 Galileo dropped a probe into the Jovian
    clouds which beamed information about its environs back to the
    spacecraft. It found hardly any water clouds, raising the question whether
    Jupiter had been formed out of the same stuff as the sun and other planets.
    Dr Taylor's analysis lays this worry to rest. There is water on Jupiter but,
    as on earth, it is spread about unevenly. The probe simply hit a dry patch.

    The pictures also reveal that, as expected, Jupiter's main layer of cloud is
    composed of ammonia. But above it is a thick smog, made of organic compounds
    broken up by the sunlight. Below the ammonia is another devilish blanket, of
    ammonia combined with hydrogen sulphide, and there may be water clouds
    beneath that.

    Somehow this reeking cake of an atmosphere holds the key to Jupiter's ornate
    swirls, bands and spots. A planet's weather is driven by heat moving from
    one part of the atmosphere to another, among other things. On earth, a lot
    of the heat gets transported by water. In evaporating, water absorbs heat
    and carries it upwards; on condensing, into clouds and rain, it lets the
    heat out. On Jupiter, the fact that other substances can do this too
    leads to more layers of cloud and more complicated weather.

    Such as the red spot. The new infra-red images from Galileo show that it is
    not a deep vortex of cloud as previously thought. Instead its top is a
    tangle of spiral arms. The gaps in between them reveal a large, fairly clear
    area below. And the spot is slightly raised near the middle.

    Dr Taylor thinks this means that the red spot is actually a relatively
    narrow, spinning column of material rising from the depths and being sprayed
    out over the ammonia clouds. At its edges, the material falls back down.
    Besides that, however, the mysteries persist. More data remain to be
    analysed. Dr Taylor hopes they will give some clues as to what the substance
    is (i.e., why the spot is red) and why the column is not in the very centre
    of the spot. As for the spot's extraordinary lifetime, that is probably due
    to its size. But since Galileo cannot look into the past, the question of
    how a hurricane big enough to last for over three centuries got started will
    be harder to answer.
    .................................................................
Wal Thornhill comments:

It is very interesting to note the structure in the Great Red Spot - "a
tangle of spiral arms". A short time ago I posted the view that the GRS is
the site of a continual diffuse discharge from the ionosphere into Jupiter's
atmosphere. A tangle of spiral arms could have been predicted on this basis
if the electric currents flowing into the vortex were made manifest by some
electrical action on Jupiter's atmospheric gases. Once again, the red
colouration could be partly due to low-energy nuclear
transformations of gases in the spiral arms.

Wal Thornhill (previous post):

I would even hazard a guess that the Great Red Spot (GRS) on Jupiter is, for
reasons as yet unknown, the continual focus of a powerful ionospheric
discharge. I deduce this from an example of the same effect on a much
smaller scale on Earth in the reported glow discharge seen from space above
tornadic storms on Earth. It would be of interest to know if Jupiter's
ionosphere is the site of diffuse electrical discharges above the GRS.

In the recent issue of Earth, Moon and Planets 73: 1996, pp. 167-179, there
is a paper titled "Solar-Planetary Cycles in Jupiter's Great Red Spot
Darkness".

The conclusion of the paper states: "The jovian GRS darkness or visibility
varies systematically in various modes. The main cycles of variation are
approximately 33 years, 13-15 yr., 11 yr., 9 yr., and 3 yr. ... The obtained
cycles are the result of combined effects of several agents of varying
intensity - the solar activity expressed by the sunspot numbers and flares,
as well as solar-planetary interactions and internal jovian phenomena. ...
The effect of solar activity on darkness (of the GRS), for previous solar
cycles, is also reinforced from earlier works on atmospheric activity and
relative intensity of the GRS."

Correlations of GRS darkness with solar activity and planetary alignments is
the kind of effect I would expect if the GRS is an electrical discharge
phenomenon.

The work currently uses data up until 1976 and is being extended with later
data which might have better resolution of short term changes in the GRS. I
expect correlations with solar activity to be more striking when this is
done.

Wal Thornhill
----------------------------------------------

The Wal Thornhill Electric Universe April Reader

by Brigit » Mon Apr 14, 2025 8:53 pm

Just a few of the video presentations in April 2020:

Special Feature: ORIGIN OF THE SAFIRE SUN
It was in 2013 that The SAFIRE Project began. Watch as Ben Ged Low presents the path of this historical experiment of the Electric Sun model from its origins to the present. After years of research, SAFIRE has emerged as a ‘Transformative Technology’ which doesn’t produce toxic waste, isn’t antithetical to life, nor does it bankrupt an existing system or put humans out of work.

For more information please visit…
• aureon.ca

How Electric Currents Heat Saturn's Atmosphere | Space News
The Thunderbolts Project
30,051 views Apr 14, 2020

For many years, one of the “great mysteries” in planetary science has been the high temperatures in the upper atmospheres of gas giant planets. The apparent anomaly cannot be explained due to simple solar heating given the planets’ tremendous distance from the Sun.

Recently, a team of scientists reported that they have an answer: Electric currents trigger aurorae, which then produce the anomalous heating. In this episode, we explain why this development is yet another confirmation where predictions based on the Electric Universe model are found to be more accurate than those of institutionalized science and its standard model of cosmology.

Donald E. Scott: Electric Sun & the Mystery of "Hot" Solar Wind | Space News
The Thunderbolts Project
33,604 views Apr 22, 2020
One of the enduring mysteries in solar physics is the unexpectedly hot temperature of the solar wind as it extends away from the Sun. Recently, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison performed a study to try to find an answer to the puzzle. And their search led them to the field of plasma physics.

The lead author of the study explains, "There is a fundamental dynamical phenomenon that says that particles whose velocity is not well aligned with the magnetic field lines are not able to move into a region of a strong magnetic field. Such returning electrons are reflected so that they stream away from the sun, but again they cannot escape because of the attractive electric force of the sun.”

At first glance, such language might seem resonant with the Electric Sun model, first proposed by engineer Ralph Juergens, and later developed and in some respects modified by Donald E. Scott, PhD, and physicist Wal Thornhill. However, the University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists propose that a theoretical magnetic process is the mechanism behind the mysterious solar wind heating.

In this episode, we asked retired professor of electrical engineering Dr. Donald Scott for an Electric Sun explanation of the aforementioned phenomenon.

The Wal Thornhill Electric Universe April Reader

by Brigit » Mon Apr 14, 2025 8:35 pm

PotDs written by Stephen Smith, Mel Acheson, and others were always a wonderful way to begin the day. Here are some first lines and titles from the April 2020 PotDs.

Ring in the New
"Shockwave". Fractal by Stephen Smith. April 30, 2020 Science depends on novel ideas. "A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers." --- Plato It is commonly believed that science "stands on the shoulders of giants”. In other words, new theories are based on those inherited from older ...

Truth or Fashion
"Ghosts of the Past". Fractal by Stephen Smith. April 29, 2020 If currently fashionable theories are Ultimate Truth (or at least smart ideas) and myth was stupid superstition, where is the dividing line? Was Ptolemy stupid and Newton smart? But General Relativity is not just an improved version of Newton's ...

Cold-Hearted
Part of the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372). Credit: Hubble Space Telescope, NASA/JPL April 28, 2020 Dust at a temperature near absolute zero shows up as red and orange in this image of the Carina Nebula. NGC 3372 is a large, bright nebulosity in the constellation Carina, located between 6500 and ...

Electricity Snakes Through the Universe
The Serpens molecular cloud. Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/V. Roccatagliata (U. München, Germany)/ April 27, 2020 Neutron stars do not exist. A few years ago, the space-based observatory, XMM-Newton reported that high-velocity particles in orbit around Serpens X-1 appeared to indicate Einsteinian relativistic effects. The observation of spectral lines from “hot iron atoms” ...

Toil and Trouble
Supernova remnant N132D. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA. April 24, 2020 A bubble of X-rays generated by an electric discharge through dusty plasma. In images from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, a stellar explosion is thought to create a spherical shockwave that is traveling through the surrounding interstellar dust at extremely high velocity ...

DAVINCI Visits Venus
Radar perspective of Maat Mons on Venus from the Magellan mission. Credit: NASA/JPL. April 23, 2020 A new mission to study the second planet. The European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission is now over. Launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on November 9, 2005 the spacecraft entered orbit around Venus ...

How Cold Is It?
Artist rendering of Europa's putative lakes. (Britney Schmidt/Dead Pixel FX/Univ. of Texas at Austin). April 22, 2020 "So cold that if the thermometer had been an inch longer we’d all have frozen to death."--- Samuel Clemens The Galileo spacecraft was launched on October 18, 1989 from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, ...

Sun Sparks
The Sun in reverse light. Image credit: Alan Friedman. April 21, 2020 The Sun is not a ball of (con)fusion. “In a low density plasma, localized space charge regions may build up large potential drops over distances of the order of some tens of the Debye lengths. Such regions have ...

X-Rated
Saturn in X-ray and visible light. Credit: X-ray: NASA/U. Hamburg/J.Ness et al; Optical: NASA/STScI. April 20, 2020 A visit to Saturn might require not only a spacesuit, but one that is armored against hard radiation. Not all light frequencies are harmless. Everyone knows that looking directly into an arc welder ...

It’s How Far Away?
The Hubble Space Telescope Ultra-Deep Field. Click to enlarge. April 17, 2020 In an Electric Universe, the answer is not what is commonly presented in science journals. Astronomers are fitted with spectacles that can see distances only in terms of redshift when dealing with celestial bodies father away than a ...

Electromagnetic Stars
A composite image of SGR 1900+14 from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Blue represents 8-micron infrared light, green is 16-micron light and red is 24-micron light. April 16, 2020 What are magnetars? As conventional understanding suggests, neutron stars are created when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycles ...

Jumping For Joy
"Peculiar galaxy" Arp 273. April 15, 2020 Halton Christian "Chip" Arp (March 21, 1927 – December 28, 2013) When our son was 2 and 3 and 4, he liked to climb up on high objects-the table, the refrigerator, the roof-and jump into our arms. When we weren't available to "play ...

Alpha, Beta, Gamma
The gamma-ray sky constructed from 6.5 years of 1–6.5 GeV data from the Fermi-LAT telescope. Colors indicate the strength of the gamma-ray emission, from low (black) to high (yellow). Credit: Fermi-LAT. April 14, 2020 Gamma-rays from electric particle accelerators in space. Gamma-rays are the highest energy wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum, ...

Strands of Fire
Highest resolution image of the Sun to date. Credit: University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) and NASA. April 13, 2020 More proof that the Sun is an electric star. One of the goals for the Picture of the Day is to demonstrate how Electric Universe theory about plasma discharge behavior is ...

Dust Buster
The Crab Nebula in visible light (left), and far-infrared (right). Warm dust (green/blue) and cooler dust (yellow/orange) are visible. Credit: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/PACS/MESS (Far-IR); NASA/ESA/STScI (Visible). April 10, 2020 Most interplanetary dust is thought to be "recycled". In other words, it is the material out of which the Solar System was made ...

Plasma Filaments
NGC 4696 reveals a cloud of plasma (red) around voids 10,000 light years across (blue). Green dots are the infrared emissions from star clusters on the outer edges of the galaxy. April 9, 2020 Plasma is electrically ionized. In plasmas, thermal and other energy sources strip electrons from atomic nuclei ...

Jet Engines
3C 279 jet structure in April 2017. The observing epochs, arrays, and wavelengths are noted at each panel. Credit: J.Y. Kim (MPIfR), Boston University Blazar Program (VLBA and GMVA), and Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. April 8, 2020 Another relativistic jet attributed to a black hole. “A professional tends to interpret ...

Star Formation and the Electric Universe
ALMA views of IRAS 04368+2557. April 7, 2020 According to a recent press release, astronomers detected a warped dust ring around a presumed protoplanetary disk in the Taurus Molecular Cloud, located about 450 light years away. A previous Picture of the Day discussed the warped ring of material surrounding the ...

Star Spanner
Galaxies imaged by Herschel. Credit: ESA/Herschel/HRS-SAG2 and HeViCS Key Programmes/L. Cortese (Swinburne University) April 6, 2020 Birkeland currents move along galactic pathways. The European Space Agency launched the Herschel Space Observatory on May 14, 2009. One of Herschels more unique observations was a putative cloud of water vapor around a ...

Fiery Goddess
Relative sizes of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Credit: NASA/ESA. April 3, 2020 Venus leaves astrophysicists with many unanswered questions. 1. What force drives the atmospheric movement?2. How does the atmosphere circulate?3. What are the clouds in the lower atmosphere made of?4. Was there ever any water in the atmosphere?5 ...

Loop the Loop
Spiral galaxy NGC 5907. Looping stellar streams are conventionally thought to result from "collisions" with minor galaxies. Credit: R. J. Gabany in collaboration with Martínez-Delgado et al. (2010). April 2, 2020 Stellar streams are known to plasma physicists as Birkeland currents. Birkeland current filaments at every scale thread through the ...

Electric God
New data from NASA's Juno spacecraft at Jupiter reveals a more chaotic magnetic field around the gas giant than expected, including a "blue spot" of magnetic south near the planet's equator. (Image credit: Bloxham, Jeremy; Moore, Kimberly (2018)/Figshare (CC BY 4.0)) April 1, 2020 Zeus forges his lightning bolts. Jupiter ...

The Wal Thornhill Electric Universe April Reader

by Brigit » Mon Apr 14, 2025 8:19 pm

This is another attempt at creating a monthly Wal Thornhill Electric Universe Reader. The purpose is to create a syllabus for continuous study of Electric Universe publications throughout the year. The idea is to collect all April publications in one thread, and so on for each month. There are many advantages to approaching the voluminous papers in this way.

I begin this month with an article Wal Thornhill published in April of 2020 in "The Secular Heretic":
https://web.archive.org/web/20200505055 ... se-heresy/
The Secular Heretic -- Astronomy, Chemistry, Heresies, Metaphysics, Science


The Electric Universe Heresy
written by Wallace Thornhill
April 20, 2020

  • In this groundbreaking paper Wal Thornhill introduces a new Theory of Everything: The Electric Universe. Set aside everything you think you know about all things great and small because the ideas presented here overturn it all. Was there a big bang? Not likely. Einstein’s Relativity? Doesn’t hold up. Is the Sun a thermonuclear fusion reactor which will eventually run out of fuel and burn out? Nope. Are there black holes? No such thing. What about dark matter and dark energy? Forget about that nonsense and start learning about the science of the 21st century. “. . .the Electric Universe is the only coherent cosmology that has correctly predicted and explained discoveries in the space age.” For example, Thornhill specifically predicted the unexpected results of the Deep Impact mission to comet Tempel 1 in October 2001, almost four years before the event. He was alone in successfully predicting what would be seen beneath the clouds of Saturn’s moon Titan.
  • image: Globes exchanging electrical discharge in an Electric Universe

The Electric Sun Experiment
In 1972 an article in an obscure journal caught my eye. It was written by engineer Ralph Juergens from Flagstaff, Arizona. He wrote:

"I can find no way to state this diplomatically, so let me be blunt: The modern astrophysical concept that ascribes the sun’s energy to thermonuclear reactions deep in the solar interior is contradicted by nearly every observable aspect of the sun."1
~Ralph Juergens

By attending to all of the most obvious features seen on the Sun, the photospheric granules, spicules, sunspots, chromosphere and corona, Juergens produced a detailed engineer’s model of an electrically powered Sun that seemed to account logically and simply for all the phenomena. The fixed belief that stars are isolated bodies in space, demanding internal thermonuclear energy to power them for billions of years, has resulted in untold waste in astrophysics and nuclear energy research.

In 2012 experienced Canadian engineer Montgomery Childs proposed an experiment to be done independently to test Juergens’ electric sun model. He said he could “find no disparities” in the model, which is unusual. Looking at the night sky, the process had to be simple and well-controlled. Otherwise the sky would look like the fourth of July. So was born the SAFIRE (Stellar Atmospheric Function in Regulation Experiment) Project. As the name might suggest, it was designed to mimic the critical features of the Sun and its plasma environment in a continuous and easily controlled way. Meanwhile the thermonuclear Sun model remains theoretical and unpredictive. Attempts to produce fusion energy like the Sun on Earth have got nowhere. The field of fusion energy is chronically unstable and unproductive.

In 2019 at the Electric Universe UK conference at Bath University, the SAFIRE experiment was declared a success. The SAFIRE team did a number of high-energy experiments, which met predictions such as transmutation of elements and extremely high energy levels, but also showed the potential for remediation of radioactive waste. The Sun’s energy is produced right before our eyes by electrical energy from the galaxy producing benign nuclear energy in the Sun’s atmosphere. Sunspots are dark simply because the body of the Sun is cooler beneath the photosphere! And as uncommon sense suggests, all bright stars continually produce heavy elements, albeit in their atmospheres! So the recent discovery by ESA’s Cluster mission of highly ionised iron atoms in the solar wind is not a surprise.2
  • image: SAFIRE
    caption with image: The SAFIRE sun confirms the Electric Universe hypothesis that the Sun (and all stars for that matter) are not thermonuclear phenomena after all, but in fact fundamentally electrical in nature. Based on cutting-edge research, the SAFIRE team is developing a new, clean energy, nuclear-plasma reactor, which will not only be able to produce clean energy, but is expected to be able to clean up nuclear waste.
The Electric Universe
The Electric Universe returns to the highly successful classical method of doing science in the 19th century. It adheres to the principles of physics and aims at simplification, in stark distinction to the explosion of imaginary particles and unexplained forces of the last century. For example, the Electric Universe has a single force operating in the universe—the electric force. Magnetism, gravity and the nuclear force are various effects produced by charged, orbitally structured protons and electrons in response to an applied electric force. All matter in the universe is connected by the electric force. And since the electric force can be either attractive or repulsive, there is a balance possible between the force of cohesion and the force that keeps things apart. The universe is in balance. The electric force is instantaneous, which is essential for coherence and stability of orbital systems on all scales. Time is universal. This real-time connectedness of the Electric Universe allows us to understand ourselves and our place in the universe more clearly. We are not isolated and alone in this ‘conscious’ universe of unknown age and extent. We are all subtly connected to each other, the Earth and the Electric Universe.

Electric universe cosmology is both simple and elegant. It could begin to be taught in primary school. Its history is inspiring. In the mid-1800s to early-1900s Kristian Birkeland was performing his electrical ‘little Earth,’ or Terrella, experiments in Norway, and Gauss and Weber were discovering the electrical structure of matter. Weber predicted the orbital structure of the atom, based on his generalized electrodynamic law, about 40 years before J. J. Thomson discovered the electron and produced his ‘plum pudding’ model of the atom. Later, Ernest Rutherford discovered its heavy nucleus and Neils Bohr produced an orbital structure. More than a century later, physicists have still not learned the lesson and have a structureless ‘plum pudding’ model of subatomic particles, filled with fanciful quarks that “wink in to and out of existence!”

Today, physicists labour under misconceptions about the nature of matter and the concepts of space and time; the relationship between matter, mass and gravity; the real nature of stars and galaxies; and the size and age of the universe. So, when astrophysicists turn to particle physicists to solve their intractable problems and particle physicists use it as an excuse for squandering billions of dollars on nonsensical particle experiments, few will admit that both fields are in crisis. It truly is the blind leading the blind. Their mysteries are of their own making.

How has this situation arisen? In the 20th century, technologists perfected wireless communication and computers and got man into space while fundamental science dug itself deeper into its own black hole of complication, illogicality and pseudo-science. The principal cause has been the usurping, since Einstein, of natural philosophy and physics by mathematicians. Einstein, perhaps to his credit, remained skeptical about his contribution.3 Meanwhile, it served the egos of his followers to consecrate his work and treat dissent as blasphemy. Future historians of science will judge the last century harshly. School children in future will know the answer to the basic question, What is the principal force of the universe? as certainly as they presently know the answer to the question, What is the shape of the Earth? They will tell you that gravity itself is a type of electric force. It is an Electric Universe.



Big Nothing Cosmology
Presently, the big bang picture is illogical, incoherent and hope-less. We are led to believe that we are isolated by the immensity of time and space on an atom of rock, circling a dust mote of a star. We got here by a miraculous creation ex nihilo event, followed by a random process of explosions, collisions and accretions (and this in an expanding universe). We are told that life itself is the result of a meaningless sequence of random events. None of these processes are understood. This hasn’t stopped the mathematicians. Until there is a simple, testable theory that can explain the natural spiral shape of galaxies without invoking unseen matter or strange forces, scientists cannot claim they understand gravity or that gravity rules the universe.

The twin pillars of big bang cosmology—Einstein’s theories of relativity and quantum theory—are incompatible, so we cannot use them as a foundation for a real model of the universe. We must discard so-called modern physics and return to the classical physics of a century ago. This, perhaps, is the greatest hurdle—to discard our training and prejudices and approach the problem with a beginner’s mind.

Clearly, to provide a sensible alternative theory we must address the problems with our present understanding of both extremes of scale, the subatomic and galactic. This paper outlines the conceptual possibilities as simply as possible under a number of headings in an attempt to correct our seriously distorted view of the universe.

The Origin of Mass in the Electrical Structure of Matter
The something absolutely fundamental that is missing in our explanation of gravity and quantum behavior is the electrical structure of matter. Here we are not talking about atoms. We must go down one more level and propose that all subatomic particles, particularly the electron and proton, are orbital systems (like atoms) of smaller electric charges of opposite polarity that sum to the charge on that particle. This orbital model was an indispensible insight of the great German physicist Wilhelm Weber in the middle of the 19th century.

Neutrons do not exist as stable particles in atoms (see later). They are a transient coupling of an electron and proton formed to avoid the powerful electric forces in atomic nuclei and active galactic nuclei—an essential requirement in building heavy elements and giving birth to quasars and new companion galaxies from active galactic nuclei.

The electron is not a fundamental, point-like particle. It must have structure to have angular momentum and a preferred magnetic orientation, known as ‘spin.’ There must be orbital motion of charges within the electron to generate its magnetic dipole. The transfer of electrical energy between the charges in their orbits must be resonant and instantaneous to conserve energy and for the electron to be a stable particle. Therefore Wilhelm Weber’s presently dismissed electrodynamic law in fact applies. The same argument applies to its positively charged partner, the proton. This sub-subatomic model satisfies Einstein’s view that there must be some lower level of structure in matter to cause resonant quantum effects. Moreover Weber’s law, being instantaneous, removes the ‘spookiness’ of the connection seen between widely separated (so-called ‘entangled’) particles that Einstein complained about.

We must have a workable concept of the structure of matter that satisfies the observation that inertial and gravitational mass is equivalent. First, gravity must operate at the subatomic level because Newton’s law refers to mass and not composition or charge on matter. The feather and the bowling ball fall with the same acceleration in a vacuum. Second, Isaac Newton wisely recognized the significance of his simple but most important spinning bucket of water experiment, where the water rises up the wall of the bucket against Earth’s gravity. It has been described as one of the simplest and most important of all experiments performed by Newton. Simply stated in a review4 of the seminal work of Prof. André Assis’ Relational Mechanics5:

"Take a bucket filled with water, and set it into rotation (for instance, by attaching it by a rope to the ceiling, twisting the rope and then letting it unwind); you shall see that as soon as the motion of the bucket is communicated to the water, the surface of the liquid will become curved (as a paraboloid), and curved it will remain if the bucket is stopped all of a sudden. This means that the water ‘feels’ the rotation independently of its relative motion with respect to the bucket. So this rotation must be regarded, in Newton’s opinion, as relative to absolute space" [i.e. as absolute motion, emphasis added].
~Marco M. Capria

Newton wrote:

"The effects which distinguish absolute from relative motion are, the forces of receding from the axis of rotation. For there are no such forces in a circular motion purely relative. . ."
~Isaac Newton. “Scholium.” Principia.

This should have been sufficient to discard Einstein’s relativity! His principle of the equivalence of his ‘inertial frames of reference’ has the effect of making arbitrary moving observers the centres of their own individual universes, which is nonsense. To do physics requires absolute standards of measurement, not relative standards. If further argument were necessary, Einstein went on in his general relativity to discard the indispensable force of gravity! (more on this below).
  • image: Sir Isaac Newton
    caption with image: It is critical to note that Newton was very careful to warn theorists away from mistaking what we call “time, space, place, and motion” with their true existence because physics concerns itself exclusively with “measured quantities.” Specifically he says: “those violate the accuracy of language, which ought to be kept precise, who interpret these words [time, space, place, and motion] for the measured quantities. Nor do those less defile the purity of mathematical and philosophical truths, who confound real quantities

    image: Albert Einstein with chalk board
    caption continued: with their relations [analogies] and sensible measures.” In other words, we do not know true realities or even true measures because all we have at hand are heuristics, and we must therefore be careful not to confuse any clock with real time, or any measure with real space, or shape with real place—all issues he discusses in his definitions (and first principles) at the start of the Principia. Einstein falls directly into this fallacy when he mistakes the measures of relative time for actual time (which Newton called “duration”). Newton’s duration allows for simultaneity, whereas Einstein’s distorted spacetime scrambles reality and makes simultaneous action impossible—an argument ad absurdum that violates reality. Simultaneity is essential for universal coherence.
Magnetism and Gravity
Coulomb’s electrical force law is similar to Newton’s force law of gravity, which provides a fundamental clue. Gravitational mass plays the same role as electrical charges but it is independent of the charge on a subatomic particle. In 1992 Prof. André Assis of the State University of Campinas in Brazil published a paper showing how the works of the great experimentalists of the 19th century, particularly Wilhelm Weber, could explain magnetism, gravity and their magnitudes in terms of charge neutral electric dipole interactions!

"In conclusion we may say that in this model of generalized Weber electrodynamics we obtain: electrostatics as a zeroth-order effect, magnetism and Faraday’s induction as a 2nd-order effect, gravitation as a 4th-order effect, and inertia and precession of the perihelion as a 6th-order electromagnetic effect."6
~Prof. André Assis

Assis noted that the model could also apply to the electron and proton since they exhibit inertia. The orders of magnitude of the forces match observations, which is a remarkable fact.

The noted physicist, Fritz London, who had developed the theory of molecular bonding by the atomic electric dipole force, contemplated an electric dipole model of gravity. Like gravity as we experience it, the London force is only attractive because the electric dipoles can rotate into alignment like bar magnets on a glass tabletop. This induced-dipole to induced-dipole electrical attraction is the force that permits matter to condense into liquids and solids.

Similarly, on the subatomic scale, the Electric Universe model of structured electrons and protons has the gravitational force due to the distortion of the orbits of sub-subatomic charges orbiting within the electrons and protons in atoms to form subatomic electric dipoles, which, being free to rotate, line up radially. The orbital distortion (see diagram below) is then due simply to the offset of the heavy nucleus inside each atom of a body toward the center of mass of that body. Gravity is produced by the sum of the radially aligned subatomic electric dipoles formed by all the electrons and protons within a celestial body. The gravitational force depends only on mass because it is a subatomic phenomenon. And as a subatomic phenomenon, gravity cannot be shielded electrically. So, the inertia of a body is due to its gravitational interaction with all other bodies in the universe. The inertial mass is equivalent to the gravitational mass.

Newton’s universal constant of gravitation, or G, is neither universal nor constant. It is a dependent variable because it has a dimension including mass. G also depends upon stored electrical energy, or charge distribution, within the gravitationally induced spherical electret (or surface charge) of a celestial body. Therefore, we cannot deduce the density or composition of a celestial object by measuring its gravity! For example, comet nuclei are observed to be rocky with sharply featured geology and no surface ice—dismissing the dirty snowball model.

Comets are “Rosetta Stones” for the Electric Sun model.7 Changes in their surface charge gives rise to rotational disturbances and so-called “non-gravitational” acceleration. Moving remotely in the electric field of the Sun, comets have plenty of time to charge more negatively. As they accelerate in the inner solar system toward the Sun the rapidly increasing electric stress on the comet causes a plasma discharge—including a huge plasma sheath (coma) and well-collimated cold cathode discharge jets. Charge exchange with the solar wind changes the mass and moment of inertia of the comet causing unexplained gravitational accelerations and rotational anomalies. Mineral particles and atoms, including oxygen, are sputtered electrically from the surface. There is no “non-gravitational” force on the nucleus. The oxygen atoms combine with protons from the solar wind to give the misleading OH signatures attributed conventionally to water ice from the comet nucleus.8

  • image: Wilhelm Weber (1804-1891)
    caption with image: Wilhelm Eduard Weber worked with Carl Friedrich Gauss as his assistant and collaborator. With Weber’s help, Gauss invented accurate measuring of the intensity of magnetic fields; and to this day, we measure the strength of magnets in units of gauss. In 1870 Weber—before J. J. Thomson’s 1897 conception of the electron—posited dipolar (positive and negative) electrical particles attracting and repelling each other both in the direction of their flow and—if we picture flows along two wires—laterally or ‘transversely’ between the wires. In contrast, the predominant view today is that the particles are influenced by the field (or wiring, as it is usually understood) and the wiring influences the particles, but the particles do not influence each other. It is arguable that the electron radius calculation and the electron-proton mass ratio were implicit in his work.
Dipole Gravity and Cosmology
Notice that the same electro-gravitational pole faces outward in all celestial bodies. So they repel one another gravitationally as if they were particles of the same charge polarity. The repulsive gravitational force on the Earth from the rest of the universe is sufficient to accelerate the 6 x 1024 kilogram Earth by 60 km/sec every 6 months as it circles the repulsing Sun. Gravity is a real force.
Of course repulsive dipole gravity forbids the formation of galaxies, stars and planets by gravitational accretion, mergers and collisions. It ensures balance and order in the non-expanding Electric Universe. The father of plasma cosmology, Hannes Alfvén, considered gravitational systems “the ashes of former electromagnetic systems.” That is why gravity applies only inside the Sun’s plasma heliosheath, or ‘heliosphere,’ which shields us from the local galactic electromagnetic environment. It does not work for electromagnetic galaxies.
  • image: Hannes Alfvén (1908-1995)
    caption with image: Hannes Olof Gosta Alfvén was a Swedish electrical engineer and physicist who provided many of the fundamental theories of plasma cosmology and won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics. Alfvén contributed our knowledge and understanding of the aurorae, the Van Allen radiation belts, the effects of cosmic magnetism on the Earth, and the behaviour of plasma in the Milky Way.
Intrinsic Redshift and the Real Universe
The observational evidence for repulsive gravity was assembled by the ‘modern day Galileo,’ Dr. Halton Arp.9 The notion of ‘pushing gravity’ has been around since Isaac Newton but has struggled to find a sensible physical explanation—until now, when gravity is finally understood. Arp showed the visible universe is much smaller than cosmologists think because he found physical associations between high-redshift quasars and low-redshift active galaxies. In one fine example, the quasar is in front of the galaxy!10 So redshift is largely an intrinsic effect in the young quasar rather than a Doppler effect from recession at high velocity. Edwin Hubble was right to believe the expanding universe hypothesis implausible.11 The “new principle of nature” he needed was a full understanding of redshift. Quasars are not isolated objects near the edge of the visible universe. They are ejected from the cores of active galaxies. Their redshift decreases and brightness increases with distance from their parent. High redshift and faintness are a measure of the youthfulness of a quasar and not its distance from us.12 What we see is Hubble’s “small, finite universe.” The big bang never happened!

Significantly, Arp also found the redshifted light from quasars is quantised—it decreases with distance from its parent in discrete steps, which proves the effect is intrinsic to the matter in the quasar. The nonsense of quantum phenomena only occurring at the atomic scale is apparent here.

The Electric Universe, following plasma cosmologists, has quasars born in pairs as oppositely directed beams of neutrons, escaping in ultra-high-speed bursts along the axis of the active galaxy’s toroidal dense plasmoid nucleus.13 As the neutrons decay into electrons and protons they begin to slow in the galactic magnetic field and form condensed matter with gravitational polarization and mass. As Arp observed, the quasar increases in mass and slows down. The light electrons are slowed more than the protons by the parent galaxy’s magnetic field, so the quasar begins life electron-deficient. The electrical polarization within the quasar steadily increases with the arrival of electrons from the galactic jet ‘umbilical cord’ and their recombination with protons to form hydrogen atoms. As the energy state (electrical polarization) of the electrons and protons in the quasar atoms increases, the energies (masses) of one or the other will reach a quantum threshold (like an atom) and jump to a new resonant state. This will cause the emitted spectrum of the atoms to increase in frequency—that is, the redshift to decrease—in a quantum transition.
Based on this model, the surprising, alleged ‘accelerating expansion of the universe’ concept is invalid. Supernovae Type 1a cannot be used as ‘standard candles’ because their intrinsic luminosity is dependent upon the power available from their host galaxy; the higher the redshift, the lower the power and luminosity, which has given rise to the erroneous theory of an accelerating expansion of the universe and the introduction of another ad hoc ‘fix’—mysterious ‘dark energy.’ The visible universe is not expanding. Arp found it to be relatively static and balanced, which is why he reasoned that gravity is cosmically a repulsive force.
  • image: Conventional redshift diagram
    caption with image: The above diagram shows the conventional view of redshift as a measure of distance from the observer. It explains that as the universe expands (a result of the Big Bang at the bottom of the diagram), light is stretched. This stretch is called redshift. The principle is that red is the longest visible wavelength of light. So any colour of light that moves toward red on the spectrum of colour would be considered redshifted even if it is not truly red. The opposite of redshift is blueshift. The Electric Universe contends that class of supernovae used as ‘standard candles’ to measure the expansion of the universe is fundamentally flawed. As Dr. Halton Arp discovered, redshift is an indication of a quasar’s age and its relationship to its parent galaxy. It follows that the universe is not expanding after all and that there was no Big Bang. It is worth noting that the Big Bang hypothesis was first proposed in 1927 by the Roman Catholic priest and cosmologist Father Georges Lemaitre. He saw the event as “the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of creation” (see S. Singh. The Big Bang. London: Fourth Estate, 2004).
Electrical Formation of Celestial Bodies
Plasma cosmology shows spiral galaxies and stars are accreted and formed by powerful long-range electromagnetic forces generated by intergalactic Birkeland current filaments threading the visible universe.14 It is such filaments between galaxies that produce the observed cosmic web. Gravity cannot do that.

The Electric Universe simply states that stars and planets are formed at the same time and in the same electromagnetic accretion process, along ‘interstellar lightning bolts’ within molecular clouds. Inside the Milky Way,

"Herschel has delivered spectacular vistas of cold gas clouds lying near the plane of the Milky Way, revealing intense, unexpected activity. The dark, cool region is dotted with stellar factories, like pearls on a cosmic string."15
~ESA Report, 2 October 2009.

In addition, secondary bodies are formed by electrical expulsion from stars undergoing sudden electrical stress in which the only recourse to restore equilibrium is to expel bulk charged matter in a nova or flaring event. That is generally the origin of close orbiting ‘hot Jupiters,’ and the many satellites of more distant gas giant planets in the process of capture of a gas giant by a star. ‘Accretion disks’ are generally ‘expulsion disks.’ For example, the ephemeral icy rings of Saturn signify Saturn’s recent electrical capture by the Sun, causing an expulsion event from the planet. This gains profound importance when it was subsequently found that the water on Earth matches that found at Saturn!16 The mystery of the origin of Earth’s abundance of water may finally be solved.

The electrical birth process also explains the mystery of rotation of galaxies, stars and planets. Birkeland currents are a twisted pair of current filaments, a configuration familiar to electrical engineers for reducing electromagnetic radiation, or energy loss, from wire pairs. Accreted matter spirals in toward the axis of the twin filaments to form a single rotating body, or a pair of close-orbiting bodies. “The origin of binary stars has long been one of the central problems of astronomy.”17 It has been found that protostars and young stars are more likely to be found in binary pairs inside “elongated core structures” strung at intervals along a cosmic Birkeland current channel inside a molecular cloud. Similarly, interplanetary Birkeland current “thunderbolts” during close encounters may form smaller binaries in dusty plasma that may fuse together to form the classic dumb-bell shape, seen in many comets and asteroids. And the puzzling edge-on ‘boxy/peanut’ shaped central bulge of some spiral galaxies may be simply explained using this model. Gravitational accretion theory doesn’t work.
  • image: Birkeland currents central to the Electric Universe
    caption with image: Left to right, top to bottom in the above image: (1) the galactic network of Birkeland currents; (2) the internal directional turning of Birkeland currents displaying counter rotation of layers; (3) the north pole of Saturn displaying layers that when viewed in motion, display counter rotation (see NASA footage); (4) the north pole of Jupiter displaying similar counter rotation (see NASA footage here as well). The foremost expert on Birkeland currents is Donald Scott. For an excellent introduction to the subject, check out Scott’s model here.
video embedded
caption with video: Watch this video to better understand Birkeland currents and our solar system.

Electric Stars
Stars form “like pearls on a cosmic string” along Birkeland current channels in molecular clouds. The electromagnetic accretion process known as Marklund convection18 separates the elements by increasing ionization potential, radially from the current channel axis. The result is the heavier elements are coolest and found closest to the axis while helium and hydrogen form the outermost atmosphere. The hypothetical extreme conditions for thermonuclear energy generation in the core of a star are not fulfilled. Planets are formed in the same process. The distinction is simply due to a body’s mass and response to the ambient plasma electrical environment. The stars and planets grow in mass and are eventually left behind as their electrical umbilical cord snakes about.19

However, the stars continue to act as a focus for ‘dark mode’ current from ubiquitous lower energy Birkeland current filaments, like those traced near our solar system by their radiation at radio frequencies.20

Note that the mass of a body cannot tell us anything about its composition since mass is a property of matter, not the amount of matter. Mass is an energetic variable, according to E=mc2. The electric charge on the surface of a celestial body will contribute to the strength of the dipole field within the body and so affect its gravitational mass. For example, the existence on Earth of megafauna and megaflora in the past signals that the Earth has had a dramatic change in its electrical environment in the geologically recent past. It has been calculated on the basis of the cross-sectional strength of bone and muscle that for those giants to exist and be fleet-footed the Earth’s former gravity must have been as low as a third or a quarter of today’s strength.21 Each planet in the solar system has its own history. It is obviously not a graded system formed by primordial accretion.

Newton’s law of gravity, in the repulsive sense, applies in interplanetary space beyond their gravitationally attractive ‘spheres of influence.’ Small bodies within those spheres of influence are dominated by the attractive polarization induced by the planet. We are simply attracted like iron filings to the nearest pole—the Earth’s surface. We are intimately connected as part of the Earth.

But perhaps the most confronting idea is that dipolar gravity, with the same pole facing inwards, will tend to produce hollow shells rather than condensed bodies with dense cores. So, there are no super-dense celestial objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes. A shell model of the Earth makes simple sense of deep earthquake data.22 The standard model of the Earth’s interior requires ad hoc inner and outer cores with special properties in a complicated attempt to explain seismic anomalies. Meanwhile, it has been found that the so called ‘core-mantle boundary’ is much rougher than the Earth’s surface. This is to be expected since matter will fall upwards to the inner surface during the Earth’s formation. And there are no internal erosive forces.

Of course, hollowness would also contribute to the low mass and calculated low densities of some celestial bodies. The Sun’s mean density is only 25 percent of the Earth’s mean density (but its photosphere is not a surface, it is the top of the Sun’s ionosphere). The planet Saturn would float on water. Comets have rocky and sandy surfaces, as shown by the Deep Impact experiment and comet 67P, yet they exhibit very low densities. Significantly, researchers recently found “sand-like material under the rocky surface of asteroid Ryugu” when they fired a 2-kilogram copper ball at the asteroid at 7,200 km/h.”23

The neutron and the nucleus
We observe that a neutron combines the charges from a proton and an electron in a relatively long-lived metastable resonance outside the atomic nucleus, which decays in minutes. Its decay must have a cause and seems to involve an interaction with a neutrino. But we have no evidence that neutrons exist in the nucleus. There seems no binding energy within nuclei that might provide the known needed binding energy of neutrons.

The Electric Universe model has only one force—the electric force. So neutrons cannot exist in the nuclei of atoms. Atomic nuclei are composed of protons held together by a sufficient number of electrons to occupy a geometric structure where the repulsive force between protons is offset by the proximity of the electrons between them such that the resultant force is attractive. The nucleus is made up of protons and shared electrons. It is a ‘structured atom model’ that is being investigated and shows great promise in understanding details of elemental isotopes, their stability and their chemistry.24 There is no such object as a neutron star. Plasma cosmologists have explained the detailed signal from pulsing neutron stars in terms of electrical activity in a normal stellar magnetosphere.25

A model for the neutrino and the essential æther
The famous equation, E = mc2, is an example where books and encyclopaedias slip unnoticed into referring to mass ‘m’ not as a phenomenon related to matter, but as matter itself. Yet this simple equation is telling us some profound truths that are fundamental for cosmology. They are—energy, mass and the speed of light are all attributes of matter.

This realization sweeps away the fog of modern metaphysics instantly. Mass depends on the energy of the matter. And the speed of light is not a universal constant because it is affected by the material medium it is passing through. Maxwell’s æther must be reinstated. The universe has a material medium, essential for the transmission of light. The ‘perfect vacuum’ doesn’t exist. And photons don’t exist because there can be no particle with zero mass.

Fundamentally, energy is bound up in the electromagnetic structure of matter. Einstein was wrong when he spoke in 1920, “according to the special theory of relativity, both matter and radiation are but special forms of distributed energy.”26 ‘Energy’ remains undefined in physics because of the confusion. The Electric Universe defines energy as a measure of the motion of charged matter with respect to all other charged matter in the universe. Uncharged subatomic particles are included since they are composites of equal numbers of oppositely charged sub-particles.

Without matter there can be no ‘pure energy’ at the instant of the Big Bang or ‘vacuum energy’ afterwards. Matter cannot be annihilated. The term ‘antimatter’ is misleading and incorrect. The merging of a particle and its ‘anti-particle’ must result in the release of stored electromagnetic energy and the coalescence of the combined constituent sub-particles to form a collapsed, stable particle of vanishing internal energy, or mass. Such particles are called neutrinos. The process can be reversed if a neutrino receives sufficient resonant electromagnetic energy that it re-forms a particle and its mirror image particle. On this topic Dr. Halton Arp writes:

"there can be no such thing as ‘new’ matter. So when we speak of creation of matter we do not mean matter coming into our universe from somewhere else (there is nowhere else) or from nothing. We must mean the transformation of previously existing mass-energy."27
~Halton Arp

Empty space is not empty. It is an æther of neutrinos. They are the sources of matter in the universe, awaiting the burst of gamma rays to open them to form the stuff of atoms. Being composed of orbiting charged sub-particles, neutrinos form the neutral dielectric ‘æther’ required by Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. It is the medium through which the electric force is transferred directly via chains of electric dipoles.

The real nature of light
What is the real nature of light? It cannot be both a wave and a particle. Einstein’s special theory of relativity discarded the medium (æther) required by James Clerk Maxwell for the transmission of light. Einstein was confirmed in his view by the Michelson-Morley experiment. However, that experiment showed a residual, which can be explained by the æther being ‘dragged’ along by the rotating Earth. This was later confirmed by far more rigorous repeats of the experiment by Dayton Miller. The Dayton Miller story makes interesting reading. If it weren’t for the extraordinary power of self-delusion, commonsense would tell us that a wave can’t exist in nothing. Maxwell was right, light is a transverse electromagnetic wave moving through a dielectric medium, the æther.

The universe is teeming with neutrinos. And since neutrinos are resonant orbiting systems of charge, like all matter, they will respond to the electric force by distorting to form an electric dipole aligned with the electric field. The speed of light in a vacuum may be seen as related to the moment of inertia of the neutrino in response to an alternating transverse electric force.

What about the bending of starlight by the Sun, which discovery raised Einstein to megastar status? The residual found in the Michelson-Morley experiments shows that the Earth and all ponderable bodies ‘drag’ an æther ‘atmosphere’ along with them. The bending of starlight near the Sun is the effect expected of an extensive neutrino atmosphere held to the Sun by gravity. Neutrinos do, after all, have some mass. Light will be slowed in the denser medium—causing normal refraction or bending of light.
  • image: Michelson-Morley experiment deemed faulty by the Electric Universe
    caption with image: The Michelson-Morley Experiment is conventionally taken to prove the non-existence of the aether. Essentially the idea was to use the interference properties of light waves to produce a dimming and brightening of observed light. If one simply merges two rays of light travelling at the same speed, their wave patterns (imagine undulating waves) will be synchronized (i.e. their crests and troughs will align). This alignment will result in a brighter light. If, however, one ray in this scenario falls behind the other such that one’s trough converges with the other’s crest, an observable dimming will take place. The assumption of the Michelson-Morley Experiment was that the aether is a flowing current of some sort. If it flows, goes the reasoning, then it must carry along waves of light slower upstream, faster downstream and at another rate cross-stream. Since light speeds could only be measured on a two-way trip, Michelson set up an experiment with a semi-reflective mirror that would allow half the light of each of two rays to pass through at right angles to each other with the whole apparatus set upon a rotating table. See here for an animated view of the experiment. When turning the table, one should observe a dimming and brightening of the light due to the interference of the aether flow. Although this experiment was performed under various conditions, no such fluctuation was observed.
The light-speed non-barrier
We must give up the notion that the speed of light is a real speed barrier for the transfer of information. Light speed may seem fast on our puny scale, but on a cosmic scale it is glacial. Imposing such a speed limit renders the universe totally incoherent. Weber’s electrodynamics, which encompasses gravity, is instantaneous. There would be no stable atoms, planetary systems or galaxies if this were not so.

We have direct evidence of the superluminal action of the electric force, given that gravity is a longitudinal dipolar electric force. Indeed, Newton’s celebrated equation requires that gravity act instantly on the scale of the solar system. The Earth responds to the gravitational pull of the Sun where it is at the moment, not where the Sun was 8 minutes ago. Otherwise, the Earth and all other planets in the solar system would experience a torque and be slung into deep space within a few thousand years.

The coherent, real-time, Electric Universe
What about time? With all matter in the universe connected in real time through the electric force of gravity, time is universal. There can be no time distortion or time travel—something that common sense always told us. However, atomic clocks—our most accurate timepieces—are subject to shifts in resonant states based upon their energy. And with a real definition of energy we can see that the atomic clocks orbiting above the Earth will ‘tick’ at a different rate to those on the ground. Forget Einstein! All the engineers do for the Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) is to set their clocks on the ground to count a different number of ‘ticks’ in orbit so they keep time with those on the ground.

Electric Biology
If information about normal matter can be transferred in real-time, why not more subtle information required for coherence of complex living systems? Modern biology has no idea how living systems maintain coherent control throughout a body. Here we enter the field occupied by scientists like biologist Rupert Sheldrake, with his theory of morphic resonance; and the cellular biologist Bruce Lipton, with his ‘intelligence’ of the living cell residing in the receptors on the outer cell wall. We have a real science model to pursue the mind-body connection, the ‘subtle energy’ of living systems, memory and consciousness. The many taboo subjects for today’s micro-specialists may be opened up for investigation at last. This model argues for a coherent, interconnected, conscious universe.

The Bigger Picture
Electric Universe cosmology is an unprecedented scientific and cultural revolution. The arts, history and sciences are combined in a phenomenal and awe-inspiring panorama of the recent history of the Earth and humanity. Perhaps only the few humans who have witnessed Earth from space have felt the inspiration that such a perspective offers. On Christmas Eve 1968 the Apollo 8 spacecraft with astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders entered lunar orbit. At the beginning of the fourth orbit, their spacecraft was emerging from the far side of the moon when “Earthrise,” one of the most influential images in history, was taken. The image affected Anders who said later, “This is the only home we have and yet we’re busy shooting at each other, threatening nuclear war, and wearing suicide vests. It amazes me.” He gave up his religious beliefs because he could not imagine a judgemental deity up there “wondering whether Billy was a good boy yesterday?”

This comment by Anders emphasises that we must first understand ourselves before we can understand the universe. And for our long-term survival we must understand the origin of our existential fear, which is at the heart of our irrational, destructive behaviour toward each other and the planet. A desperate need for order seems to drive modern big bang cosmology, which has returned to Pythagorean and Platonic mysticism and has nothing useful or even sensible to offer us. It seems significant that real science,28 the search for truth, was disrupted in the catharsis following the end of the insane First World War. The world was keen to escape the reality of the re-enacted apocalypse. Lately, I have discovered that the great European scientists of the 19th century, who were experimenting with electricity and magnetism, were close to a real, coherent understanding of gravity, magnetism, light, the atom, and the Electric Universe. Sadly, we have wasted a century or more.

The big bang has its origin in the creation myth of the splitting open of a primordial ‘cosmic egg.’ Historically we have the unexplained exploits of the planetary gods brandishing their apocalyptic weapon—the ‘thunderbolt of the gods.’ Why is there global accord about the planetary gods? Venus is always female; the beautiful princess with long flowing hair; or her alter-ego, the terrible Medusa monster with venomous serpentine hair. Mars is always male; the archetypal warrior hero who saves the beautiful princess from chaos monsters. He is scarred in battle. North American Indians called Mars “Scarface.” How can these dramatic stories about tiny moving specks of light in the night sky have come about? Such foundational questions never occur to today’s specialists who have been disciplined to believe in Newton’s clockwork solar system where ‘bad things’ only happened in an unfathomably remote past.

Paradoxically, religions are the most divisive feature of human existence. They provide no scientific answers but rather pose fundamental questions facing humanity. What is the origin of the Chicken Little fascination with the end of days; of doomsday? In my lifetime I have seen fear of a nuclear winter; of comet impact; of an ice age; and now it is global warming and a pandemic. What was the origin of the divisive human obsession with heavenly gods; the old warring planetary gods and their apocalyptic weapon—the thunderbolt? I was in high school when I found an answer. In 1950 the textbook publisher, The Macmillan Company, released a best-selling book by Immanuel Velikovsky titled Worlds in Collision. It inspired me with a well-documented, multi-disciplinary forensic investigation of global references to planetary gods and their interactions. The archetypes and exploits of each planet are the same the world over. They must have been witnessed as the Earth rotated beneath some celestial spectacle. But it seems we never learn from past mistakes. Worlds in Collision suffered the modern equivalent of a medieval book burning at the hands of astronomer priests who threatened a boycott of Macmillan’s textbook business. The company was forced to transfer the rights of their best-seller to Doubleday.

  • image: Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979)
    caption with image: Immanuel Velikovsky is famous for the controversy that came to be known as The Velikovsky Affair. This was an embarrassing moment for mainstream scientists, who showed themselves to be emotional partisans of a cult rather than the rational objective thinkers they’d been pretending to be. In fact, their behaviour was so unbecoming, the populist scientist of the time, Carl Sagan issued an apology, expressing his regret that scientists and academics had lost all rational comportment and dignity in their vicious attacks against Velikovsky. His book Worlds in Collision is an incredible multi-disciplinary study that considers a mountain of evidence indicating large-scale planetary displacement in our solar system with catastrophic consequences on Earth during historical memory and recorded in Biblical tales and myths around the world.
The noted astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle wrote:

"The book [Worlds in Collision] caused a sensation both with the public and among astronomers, the latter becoming stirred to near-violent displays of outrage. Such eminent figures as Harlow Shapley were heavily involved. It could be said that Shapley became angry even to the point of incoherence."
~Sir Fred Hoyle

Of Velikovsky, Hoyle wrote:

"He believed in the primacy of documentary evidence, whereas we believed in the primacy of mathematical rules, rules that enabled us to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, where and when the next total eclipse of the Sun was going to occur."
~Sir Fred Hoyle

This belief in a primordial Newtonian clockwork solar system and dismissal of contrary evidence is unscientific but characteristic of mathematical theorists. It allows unrestrained retro-calculation. But the laws of physics are man-made and subject to revision, particularly in the case of the force of gravity, which in this 21st century still has no physical explanation. The law gives a purely mathematical description of planetary orbits. Yet the unbalanced force of gravity has no feedback mechanism to maintain order for 3 or more orbiting bodies. This disturbing fact is ignored.29 Nonetheless, Hoyle was moved to ask:

"Could it be that Velikovsky had revealed, admittedly in a form that was scientifically unacceptable, a situation that astronomers are under a cultural imperative to hide? Could it be that, somewhere in the shadows, there is a past history that it is inadmissible to discuss?"30
~Sir Fred Hoyle

Velikovsky “in a form that was scientifically unacceptable” had confirmed Hoyle’s suspicion.31 He was a polymath and psychoanalyst—a broadly educated classical scientist, unlike specialists of the last century. In his view, mankind demonstrates a clear desire not to know that the solar system has a recent catastrophic history. All catastrophes are pushed into an unimaginably remote past, so the uniformitarian history of the Earth reads like a reassuring “Once upon a time, long, long ago…” bedtime story. Meanwhile we have developed weapons capable of re-enacting the destruction from heaven wrought by the interplanetary thunderbolts and placed those weapons in the hands of amnesiacs, unaware of the post traumatic subconscious urge to repeat the past. Velikovsky warned that until we remember our past, we cannot heal from it and are doomed to repeat our irrational patterns of unsustainable behaviour toward each other and the planet. We are our own worst enemy.

Clearly, Velikovsky’s over-dramatic book title Worlds in Collision was misleading because what he, and the mytho-historians who followed him,32 described were close electrical encounters of the Earth with other planets. Of course, we now read that the Moon was formed in far off times by collision of the early Earth with a Mars-sized body. Such stories are a result of the empty toolbox of astrophysicists. They only have explosions and collisions to work with. There is no specialist on Earth who understands cosmology as the “Queen of the sciences” for the simple reason that it requires coherence across all disciplinary boundaries. No university on Earth, with their focus on micro-specialisation, provides that. Natural philosophy has been pronounced dead by Stephen Hawking. However, “It is the inductive science of philosophy that teaches the ‘hard’ scientist how to be scientific.”33 And as Jacques Barzun wrote, “If he retreats from the indulgence of self-annihilation, man the philosopher will find ancestral voices to guide him.”34

At university in the early 60s, I think I was the only science undergraduate haunting the Anthropology section of the university library. Reading the creation myths of many diverse cultures convinced me that Velikovsky had made a case that must be answered. The Electric Universe cosmology is the result of a lifetime’s independent research shared with similarly inspired scholars from the arts, engineering and sciences. Because it includes human evidence of the sky stretching back into prehistory, it provides a surprisingly detailed big picture of the recent history of the solar system and our experiences of a series of dramatic interplanetary events. As a result, the Electric Universe is the only coherent cosmology that has correctly predicted and explained discoveries in the space age. And in 2019 a multi-million-dollar independent experiment to audit the electrical nature of stars was successfully completed.35 It will revolutionize the sciences. The Electric Universe is a scientific and cultural paradigm leap that must happen if we are to have a future on this blue jewel of a planet.

[1]Ralph Juergens, Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism, Pensée, Fall 1972, p. 9.
[2]Phys.org. Iron is everywhere in Earth’s vicinity.
[3]In a personal letter to Professor Solovine, dated 28 March 1949: “You can imagine that I look back on my life’s work with calm satisfaction. But from nearby it looks quite different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track.” Quoted in B. Hoffman, Albert Einstein – Creator and Rebel (N.Y.: Viking Press, 1972).
[4]Marco M. Capria, Review of André K. T. Assis, Relational Mechanics Apeiron, Montreal, 1999, pp. 285.
[5]André K. T. Assis, Relational Mechanics, pp. 51-8, Apeiron, Montreal.
[6]A. K. T. Assis, Deriving gravitation from electromagnetism, Can. J. Phys. 70, pp. 330-40 (1992).
[7]W. Thornhill, Electric Comets & Asteroids.
[8]B. J.R. Davidsson et al. Nucleus properties of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 estimated from non-gravitational force modelling, Icarus 187 (2007) p. 312. The water production rate falls off “around 30 days pre-perihelion, and continuing for the next 50 days,” which is not expected in the icy comet model but may match the electrical model since it coincides with the minimum radial acceleration of the negative comet with respect to the positive Sun.
[9]Halton Arp, The Observational Impetus for Le Sage Gravity Pushing gravity: New perspective on Le Sage’s theory of gravity,(Apeiron, Montreal (2002).
[10]G. Burbidge et al. The Discovery of a High Redshift X-ray Emitting QSO Very Close to the Nucleus of NGC 7319.
[11]Edwin Hubble,“…on the basis of the evidence now available, a choice seems to be presented, as once before in the days of Copernicus, between a small, finite universe, and a sensibly infinite universe plus a new principle of nature. And, as before, the choice may be determined by the attribute of simplicity.” The Problem of the Expanding Universe. Science 1942; 95: pp. 212-215.
[12]Halton Arp, Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science, Apeiron, Montreal (1998).
[13]See Eric J. Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened, p. 244 ff., Simon & Schuster, 1991.
[14]https://www.plasma-universe.com/galaxy-formation/, Electrical Birthing of Stars.
[15]ESA Report, 2 October 2009.
[16]Phys.org, “The water in Saturn’s rings and satellites is like that on Earth,” 3/12/2018.
[17]Phys.org, “The Origin of Binary Stars.” 21/8/2017.
[18]G. T. Marklund, Plasma Convection in Force-Free Magnetic Fields as a Mechanism for Chemical Separation in Cosmical Plasmas, Nature 1979; 277: 370-1.
[19]A. M. Stutz1 and A. Gould, Slingshot mechanism in Orion: Kinematic evidence for ejection of protostars by filaments, Astronomy & Astrophysics 590, A2 (2016).
[20]G. L. Verschuur, Neutral Hydrogen Filaments at High Galactic Latitudes, Astrophys Space Sci 1991; 185: 305-32.
[21]T. Holden, Do dinosaurs pose a gravity problem?
[22]Jan Lamprecht, Hollow Planets: A Feasibility Study of Possible Hollow Worlds, (2013).
[23]Phys.org, March 20, 2020, Initial findings of artificial impact on asteroid Ryugu.
[24]See https://etherealmatters.org/sam
[25]K. R. Healy, A. L. Peratt, Radiation Properties of Pulsar Magnetospheres: Observation, Theory, And Experiment, Astrophysics and Space Science 227: 229-253, 1995.
[26]G. B. Jeffery, W. Perrett, Sidelights on Relativity. Einstein A. Ether and the Theory of Relativity: An Address Delivered on May 5th, 1920, in the University of Leyden.
[27]Halton Arp, Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science, Apeiron 1998: p. 239.
[28]Bruce G. Charlton, Not Even Trying… The Corruption of Real Science, University of Buckingham Press.“..modern research is incoherent, and therefore whatever masquerades as checking and testing is not merely irrelevant but actively misleading – merely an excuse for unendingly funding permanently inconclusive research.”
[29]Sussman GJ, Wisdom J. Chaotic Evolution of the Solar System,Science 257(3): 56-62, 1992. “the evolution of the solar system as a whole is chaotic, with a time scale of exponential divergence of about 4 million years.”
[30]Fred Hoyle, Home is where the wind blows, pp. 285-6.
[31]Immanuel Velikovsky, Mankind in Amnesia,
[32]David Talbott, Thunderbolts of the Gods, (2002), Dwardu Cardona, Newborn Star, (2016), Ev Cochrane, Fossil Gods and Forgotten Worlds, (2010).
[33]David Harriman, The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics, 2010, p. 243.
[34]Jacques Barzun, Science: the glorious entertainment, p. 306.
[35]See safireproject.com

© Wallace Thornhill 2020

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