When I talk to people online about the Electric Universe, I am always starting from a state of apparent guilt. There is a general expectation online that the people arguing against conventional scientific theories are simply misinformed or unable to comprehend the gist of the textbook theory – or that a person is not capable of disagreeing with those ideas unless they can read and perform the most complex mathematics associated with it.
But, what credentials does a person need to differentiate a filament from a cloud? And what happens when astronomers and theorists publishing within the Astrophysical Journal insist upon using terminology – like “clouds” – which is oftentimes plainly at odds with the observations made by radio astronomers? Why would an astronomer use a term like “elephant trunks” to describe a phenomenon that, by many accounts, is suggestive of the behavior of electrodynamic plasmas?
We find that … the well-developed trunks are made up of dark filaments and knots which show evidence of twisted structures … A few years ago we found that one of the more prominent elephant trunks in the Rosette Nebula has a very intriguing internal structure (Carlqvist et al. 1998). The trunk is essentially built up by a number of filaments and knots. An interesting finding was that the filaments show a twisted or helical structure. Further studies have revealed that also many other trunks show clear signs of being twisted. The twisted geometry of the trunks is not easy to account for by current theory.
When we see a filament in space that extends light years in length, the natural question should be what holds it together? What keeps it from dispersing or breaking? When you see lots of filaments like this, and when they are oftentimes formed into networks like highways, and at multiple scales of existence – as we now see at the interplanetary, interstellar, intergalactic and supergalactic scales – we need to be seriously questioning their physical basis. When researchers working on Tokamaks observe the same sorts of skeletal dusty plasma structures there as well, it really demands that we take a second look at this notion of plasma scaling. We should not be so averse to suggesting the word fractal. Is it necessarily the case that for each scale at which we see filaments that we should infer, as astrophysicists do, a fundamentally unique cause?
Let’s review …
Supergalactic (based on redshift = velocity, but not incredibly different for Halton Arp’s interpretation of redshift):
Intergalactic (again, redshift = velocity):
Interstellar (parallax works to 1% diameter of Milky Way, btw):
Interplanetary:
Suggestions that the cosmic filaments form in expansions or explosions are certainly worth pursuing as a hypothesis, but since we know that filaments are the hallmark of electricity in the plasma laboratory, since we see that magnetic fields are actually quite common in space, since we know that magnetic fields and electric currents tend to go hand-in-hand in the laboratory, thinking like a scientist demands that we build a second model to compare the first against. We probably shouldn’t throw rocks at the people who are trying to do just that. People could alternatively choose to simply ask poignant questions and then verify the answers.
The heart of the matter is what causes what? Is the electricity a 2nd-order effect – the effect of other causes (option 1), as is generally taught to most all astrophysicists today? Or, is electricity the cause of the other things we see (option 2), and gravity simply dominates at certain scales of existence? Are there enigmatic observations which pertain to option 1 which become resolved by considering option 2? Which worldview is the simpler one? Which must propose the most invisible forces and particles to work? These are the sorts of questions we need to be asking.
Most people reading this will not be aware that this debate over what we are seeing in space (is it gas or a plasma?), and over how to model cosmic plasmas, has been going on for a number of decades. But, that’s an important fact to consider when critics like Tim Thompson insist that the astrophysical community is justified when they refuse to read research papers on laboratory plasmas. IEEE is not an obscure scientific organization, and most of the matter we see with our telescopes is known to be in the plasma state. Does Tim not understand that what these theorists are doing is taking laboratory plasma physics observations and applying them to our observations of space? How is it possible that people who don’t read IEEE’s Transactions on Plasma Science would nevertheless offer poignant critiques on the EU approach?
