Arceology
Original Post April 9, 2015 What did the ancient people think of the axis mundi (world axis)? In the footsteps of Mircea Eliade, mythologists and anthropologists tend to think of the axis mundi or ‘world axis’ as a straight object running through the cosmos vertically. While this is, of course, correct for ...
Primordial Plasma
Original Post March 27, 2015 Hot gas or streams of charged particles? Complex rings, knots, and twisted streamers are often ejected from stars (and other celestial objects). The overall shape of so-called "planetary nebulae" sometimes reveal gigantic, bifurcated jets emerging from their central stars, indicating the beginnings of helical shapes ...
Star Drive
Original Post March 19, 2015 Electric Universe theory assumes Earth and the Sun are electrically connected. Previous Picture of the Day articles discuss the linkages between the flow of electric charge through the galaxy, solar electric currents, and terrestrial electric currents. Earth's environment is also driven by those cosmic electrical circuits, ...
Which Came First?
Original Post February 27, 2015 Electric currents create magnetic fields in the Sun. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Asking this question always gets a chuckle from a group of kids who haven’t been asked that before. For adults, it confirms their conviction that unanswerable questions must be ...
Hot Clouds
Original Post February 17, 2015 Charged plasma surrounds the Solar System. Electric Sun theory presupposes that the Sun is a glowing anode, or positively charged electrode. Its oppositely charged cathode is invisible, a “virtual cathode,” called the heliosphere that exists billions of kilometers from its surface, where a “double layer” ...
Hot Plasma or Cold Dust?
Original Post February 11, 2015 Rather than clouds of frigid dust and gas, twisted filaments suggest electric currents in space. Temperatures near absolute zero show up in the infrared image in blue false color in the image at the top of the page. The Eagle nebula is an active "star ...
Bacterial Batteries?
Original Post February 5, 2015 More electric biology. When Bob Ballard found the Titanic in 1985, he and his crew were shocked by how much rust was present on the ill-fated ship. Long "rusticles" were seen hanging from the hull like great mossy streamers. The rusticles were subsequently found to contain ...
The Book of Nature and the Nature of Books
Original Post January 21, 2015 “The Book of Nature” is a metaphor. In science, metaphors are usually passed over as mere embellishments of language. The metaphor is expanded into “the Book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics,” and then scientists turn away from embellishments and get down ...
How You Know
Original Post January 16, 2015 Another epistemological tour de force. Probable, Possible, my black hen, She lays eggs in the Relative When. She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now Because she's unable to postulate how. --- The Space Child's Mother Goose By Frederick Winsor People don't pay much attention ...
Plasma in the Ice Age
Left: Bone pendant from Saint-Marcel (Argenton-Sur-Creuse, Indre, France) Right: Bone pendant from the Grotte Des Espélugues (Lourdes, Hautes-Pyrénées, France) Original Post January 6, 2015 Reproduced above are images of two engraved pendants made of reindeer bone, from prehistoric sites in France. Both objects are attributed to the Magdalenian culture, which subsisted ...
Descartes’ Circular Reasoning
Original Post January 1, 2015 By what physical mechanism do planets and moons orbit around their larger hosts? Before Newton’s theory of gravity burst onto the scene, the so-called ‘vortex theory’ of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), first proposed in the 1630s, was much in vogue. Invoking experimental analogues in ...
