Just last week someone posted a short article about plasma cosmology here. I browsed around learned all I could about it in a few hours. It leads to some strange places: the “Velikovsky affair,” steady-state cosmological models, scalable plasma experiments, non-cosmological red shifting, catastrophism and so on. I love “fringe” scientific theories, so it was good entertainment, at the very least.
The archetype of the lone, heroic scientist standing up against a moribund scientific establishment is there for a reason of course–many times in the history of science such “cranks” have turned out to be right. Wegener’s theory of continental drift may be one of the best known examples: he was bullied for decades by establishment geological circles.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that plasma cosmology (or any other “crank” theory for that matter) is right, or has the right to lay claim to such martyrdom. But while plasma cosmology (or steady-state cosmological theories) may be wrong in the main, they may yet lead to some interesting avenues for discovery, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. During my lifetime (I’m 38) the attitude towards some ideas (once thought to be silly, ignorant, or antiquated) have actually made a bit of a revival…the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (inheritance of acquired characteristics) being a notable example. And I could think of a few more–multiverse theory, panspermia, both of these ideas seem to be gaining some traction.
