The Vortex Atom, a Forgotten Theory?

Posted on March 30, 2025 by sschirott

The Vortex Atom, a Forgotten Theory?
by Mathias Hüfner

The Thunderbolts Project is now a quarter of a century old, since the unforgotten Wal Thornhill dedicated himself to a new cosmology with his essay “Gravity vs. Plasma.” He defined it as follows:

The Electric Universe Model of Cosmology is new and based on the most general case of the behavior of electrically charged bodies embedded in a charged plasma. Plasma is a gas in which electrons have been removed from some atoms—in other words, it is ionized. Like a metal in which the electrons can move freely, plasma is an excellent electrical conductor. 99.999% of the matter in the universe is plasma. A charged plasma has a small excess of negative or positive charge. Plasma naturally forms filaments in response to electric and magnetic fields. These filaments can magnetically “clamp” together, forming stars. Stars are not isolated but receive electrical energy from the galaxy—hence the solar corona, which is millions of degrees Celsius in temperature. Electromagnetic forces are infinitely stronger than gravity and can easily explain phenomena attributed to black holes. Electromagnetic forces can repel or attract. Gravity only attracts – it takes astonishing sleight of hand to explain colossal ejections of matter from the centers of galaxies. Plasma cosmology is the practical field of electrical engineers. Due to the enormous scalability of the phenomena, it is experimentally verifiable.^¹ — Wal Thornhill

Throughout The Thunderbolt Project’s 25-year existence, supporters from around the world have compiled numerous arguments and data supporting the idea of an Electric Universe, despite all the resistance of proponents of the academically established theory of the Big Bang. From the perspective of plasma physics, the visible cosmos with bodies constantly interacting through resonance effects is a “driven” open, nested dynamic system. Isaac Newton could explain why the apple falls from a tree, but not why the moon doesn’t fall to Earth. For him, God was responsible for that. Albert Einstein wanted to explain this by curving the mathematical concept of space, using the old concept of cosmic spheres. Unfortunately, he couldn’t distinguish space from a surface. He also didn’t understand the principle of time, since he considered time to be independent of the motion of mass and thus failed to recognize that motion is an asymmetric category. Furthermore, rectilinear motion in an inertial frame is accelerated motion. Unaccelerated motion is motion around a force center. This is a closed circular path. Every driver knows that cornering requires not only engine power but also steering force, which is perpendicular to the engine power. Ideally, such motion around an inertial center can be force-free or weight-free, as astronauts tell us. None of this deterred Georges Lemaître from developing his physical religion, which became the foundation of the Catholic faith in 1951 under Pope Pius XII.

Physics has the Lorentz force for curved trajectories, which is composed of electric and magnetic components. In the cosmos, it describes the Birkeland currents, and in the atom, the electron trajectories of the shell, which Louis de Broglie observed. This brings us to a forgotten theory by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), supported by Hermann von Helmholtz and James Clerk Maxwell in the second half of the 19th century. Helmholtz’s theory of vortex motion provided the mathematical basis for Thomson’s vortex atom theory. Thomson recognized the potential of Helmholtz’s work and used it to develop his theory of vortex atoms, in which atoms are represented as stable vortex rings in a perfect fluid. However, he had no idea what caused the vortex ring, the positive atomic nucleus. Ernest Rutherford first discovered this in 1911 during electron scattering experiments when Thomson’s vortex model had already been rejected.

In the 1860s, Maxwell developed his ingenious system of equations by applying physical analogies and mathematical models. (Figure 1) He used his knowledge of stresses and strains in continuous fluids to develop a mathematical theory of electromagnetism. Maxwell justified his choice by claiming that the rotation of the plane of polarized light by a magnetic field showed that “the cause of the magnetic action on the light must be a real rotation taking place in the magnetic field.” (curl B) Later, he inserted imaginary “idler wheels” (curl E) between the vortices to resolve the velocity discontinuity, with the displacement of the idler wheels serving as a symbol for electric current. (div E) This methodical approach eventually led him to a mathematical electromagnetic field theory.

_{^{Figure 1: Maxwell’s system of equations as an open system of short momentum range}}

It had long been known that a wave requires a propagation medium. The concept ether (ancient Greek: blue sky) has been used for this medium since antiquity. The ether played a central role in the understanding of the cosmos. In ancient Indian understanding, this term stood above the four terrestrial phases of matter.

In 1878, Maxwell wrote an entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica with the following summary at the end: ²

“Whatever difficulties we may have in forming a coherent idea of the nature of the ether, there can be no doubt that interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty, but filled with a material substance or body, which is certainly the largest and probably the most uniform body of which we know.” — James Clerk Maxwell

In academic circles, the idea that the terms ether, electromagnetic field, and plasma state of matter are synonymous has still not taken root. One need only recall the ether dispute between Albert Einstein and Dalton Miller in the 1930s, which Einstein won due to his greater popularity. When Einstein finally realized he was wrong, he began to tinker with his field theory, albeit rather unsuccessfully. But by then, no one was interested in it anymore. At this time, academic circles believe in exotic matter instead of recognizing that it is sufficient to study the electromagnetic forces of ordinary atoms to get answers to questions about the motion of matter. The fact that our ideas about the atom are wrong can be seen in the fact that there is no connection between Maxwell’s ideas about the activation of an electromagnetic wave and the mechanism of quantum mechanical wave theory.

_{Figure 2: Tait’s smoke vortex generator}

The idea of Thomson’s vortex atom is based on the notion of a smoke ring having the shape of a torus, inspired by Guthrie Tait’s apparatus for producing vortex rings and Helmholtz’s vortex theory, which Tait translated into English in 1867. (Figure 2)

The enormous scalability of the idea of the electric universe as a net-like vortex structure is evident from the Hall effect to the quantum Hall effect, which Klaus von Klitzing discovered in 1980 and for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1985. Significantly, this effect was not understood in a two-dimensional Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

As early as 1879, Edwin Hall described an effect, later named after him³, as part of his doctoral thesis. According to Hall, Maxwell motivated him to search for this effect. He was prompted to do so by the following statement by Maxwell:

It must be carefully remembered that the mechanical force that urges a current-carrying conductor across the lines of magnetic force does not act on the electric current, but on the conductor that carries it. The only force that acts on an electric current is the electromotive force. — James Clerk Maxwell

A uniform rotation rotates as long as the magnetic torque is conserved. A two-dimensional oscillation always requires an external force for excitation. However, this force quantum must be supplied and canceled in resonance with the system. To convert the oscillation into a rotation, an electric moment perpendicular to it is required, which in turn creates a magnetic moment. Maxwell, therefore, coupled his rotation equations. This creates a toroidal motion in space, similar to a smoke ring. A source described with div E is required to generate current rings. Although the Hall effect cannot fully explain the atomic vortex, it describes it quite plausibly. Heinrich Hertz demonstrated experimentally the electromagnetic waves predicted theoretically by Maxwell nine years later. This discovery laid the foundation for the communication technologies such as radio, television, and mobile telephony. The electromagnetic waves are transmitted via antennas.

The model of a quantum mechanical atom does not include this fact. While I was still wondering about this,⁴ Klaus Gebler, a retired physics teacher, with whom I am constantly exchanging ideas, showed me his explanation of the quantum Hall effect.⁵ That’s when I realized how an atom works. When atoms emit electromagnetic waves, their electron shells must function like antennas. Over the decades, the technically transmitted frequencies have become increasingly shorter and shorter. Of the two antenna types, the dipole antenna and the loop antenna, only the latter comes into consideration. The loop antenna, with a loop circumference of 0.4 λ, is smaller than the dipole antenna. It has a very narrow bandwidth and an equally small aperture capacitance, which indicates narrow transmission peaks. We can assume with almost absolute certainty that electrons behave like loop antennas when their orbital circumference corresponds to 0.4 λ and is briefly interrupted.

_{^{Figure 3: Atomic model as a Loop-Antenna}}

Figure 3 shows an atomic model representing the electron as a wave vortex, as discovered by Louis de Broglie in 1924.⁶ The wave is characterized here by the normalized velocity parameters p and q, where p describes the wave along the large circumference and q along the small circumference. Varying the parameters p and q reveals that the wave is closed over the constant orbital toroid only for p and q integer values.

As long as the elementary charge orbits around the toroid with constant speed, no energy is radiated. If the vortex’s orbital velocity changes due to an external disturbance, the oscillating circuit opens and acts like an antenna. In Figure 3, this is indicated by the fractionally rational parameter q=1.3.

Klaus von Klitzing then repeated Hall’s experiment in 1980, albeit with modifications. Instead of metal, he used a so-called electron gas, hydrogen at very low temperatures to eliminate the motion of the atomic nucleus, in a very shallow cuvette, so that the gas could only move in two directions. This left only the direction of the current and the direction of the Hall voltage. The electrons could not move in the direction of the magnetic field. His motive was to determine the fine-structure constant α from the ratio of the electron’s orbital velocity, which is linked to the magnetic field strength via the Lorentz force, to the speed of light.

Klitzing noticed that the otherwise proportional voltage suddenly exhibited small steps⁷ (green field in Figure 4). Two years later, Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui discovered, during more detailed investigations, that the resistance exhibited a spectral structure depending on the magnetic field strength.⁸ (brown field in Figure 4) This confused the scientific community even more because it contradicted the previously accepted idea of a spherical electron with a fixed charge. The observation implied to them that many electrons acting together can create new particles with a charge smaller than that of a single electron. But this should not be the case. A collection of objects can combine to form a larger object, or the pieces can retain their size but not create anything smaller. If the new particles were doubly charged, it would not be so paradoxical – electrons could “just stick together” and form pairs. However, the idea of fractional charges would be very bizarre indeed.

Like Gebler showed, the fractions used by Störmer have nothing to do with fractional charges. If, however, you interpret them as oscillations per orbit concerning the large and small radii of the toroid, Störmers’ result fits harmoniously into the image of a toroidal electron vortex. Recall the escapement of the anchor of a mechanical watch. Through the pendulum motion, the continuously acting force quantum of the watch weight is either inhibited (large resistance) or released. An analogous image shows Störmer’s brown spectrum in Figure 4. Here, the resistance is not mechanical, but electrical, caused by the oscillations of the electron shell, which either inhibit or release the Hall current.

_{^{Figure 4: Interpretation of the Hall effect according to K. Gebler}}

This also pales in comparison to the image of a rigid spherical electron with an inexplicable dimensionless spin of 1/2, jumping back and forth in energy shells. On the contrary, the electron charge is an amorphous polymorphic vortex with an electromechanical moment that fills every available space over large scales, down to the nucleus, where it can form micromagnets with two protons, ultimately responsible for the strong and weak nuclear forces, as described in my book Dynamic Structures in an Open Cosmos.

A detailed analysis of the SAFIRE plasma data⁹ could provide further insights into the behavior of electrons in the electric field and explain the fusion of protons into whole atoms.

W. Thornhill – GRAVITY vs PLASMA; November 1999
https://www.holoscience.com/wp/gravity-vs -plasma/ ↩︎
J.C. Maxwell – https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica,_Ninth_Edition/Ether_(2.)
and https://archive.org/details/encyclopediabrit08newyrich/page/n887/mode/2up ↩︎
E. Hall – On a New Action of the Magnet on Electric Currents
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2369245?origin=crossref&seq=1 ↩︎
M. Hüfner – The Neutrino Legend and the Collapse of Particle Physics – The Thunderbolts Project
https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2024/03/30/the-neutrino-legend-and-the-collapse-of-particle-physics/ ↩︎
K. Gebler – Why torus models explain quantum phenomena in The Overlooked Rotation
– Physics explains modern theory phenomena
Manufacturer digishop@rotec -cottbus.de 2024
https://www.klaus-gebler.de/ ↩︎
L. de Broglie – Research on the theory of quanta; Thesis, Paris, 1924,
Ann. de Physique (10) 3, 22 (1925). ↩︎
K.v. Klitzing et al. – New Method for High-Accuracy Determination of the Fine Sturture Canstant based od Quantizized Hall Resonance; Phys. Rev Letters, Vol 45 1980 pp. 494-497 ↩︎
H. Störmer – Nobel Lecture: The fractional quantum Hall effect, Reviews of Modern Physics, July 1999;
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Nobel-Lecture%3A-The-fractional-quantum-Hall-effect-Stormer/b930bb929c3f441ddacaf6dbe867748168369348 ↩︎
M. Childs a. o. – The SAFIRE Project Report 2017
https://www.safireproject.com/science/ewExternalFiles/SAFIRE-Project-Report.pdf ↩︎

Dr. Mathias Hüfner is a German translator volunteer for The Thunderbolts Project. He studied physics from 1964 until 1970 in Leipzig Germany, specializing in analytical measurement technology for radioactive isotopes. He then worked at Carl Zeiss Jena until 1978 on the development of laser microscope spectral analysis. There he was responsible for software development for the evaluation of the spectral data. Later he did his doctorate at the Friedrich Schiller University in the field of engineering and worked there 15 years as a scientific assistant. Some years after the change in East Germany, he worked as a freelance computer science teacher the last few years before his retirement.