Part of the reason that you haven’t heard these arguments before is that people (like wiki editor Joshua Schroeder) have meticulously scoured wikipedia to cleanse it of all opposing cosmological & astrophysical viewpoints. So, Ian Tresman from the UK created his own wiki in coordination with these theorists at plasma-universe.com.
Anthony Peratt, who is an advisor to the Department of Energy, has been the subject of incredible hostility for his pursuit of these investigations. My vague understanding is that there have been events – such as the defacing of government websites – which inspired reactions by the appropriate government agencies (FBI, CIA, etc). These topics are mired in confusion, in part because plasma physics is the science we use to study nuclear weapons.
But, there is also the fact that cosmology acts as the basis for our worldviews. It helps us to answer questions about who we are, where we come from, and what we can expect to happen to us in the future. It shouldn’t surprise anybody that questioning cosmological beliefs inspires an emotional reaction. These reactions should be expected to correspond to the amount of time somebody has invested in the theories being challenged, as well as any occupational relationship to the topic. We like to imagine that scientists will gladly give up an older idea if a newer one can be shown to be better, but the reality is that a lot of resistance should be expected when we are talking about re-asking questions which haven’t been asked for decades.
On the topic of galactic mechanics and simulation:
Anthony Peratt’s electromagnetic galactic simulation
Galaxy formation in the Plasma Universe is modeled as two adjacent interacting Birkeland filaments. The simulation produces a flat rotation curve, but no hypothetical dark matter is needed, as required by the conventional model of galaxy formation.
The simulations derive from the work of Winston H. Bostick who obtained similar results from interacting plasmoids.[1] [2]
In the early 1980s Anthony L. Peratt, a student of Alfvén’s, used supercomputer facilities at Maxwell Laboratories and later at Los Alamos National Laboratory to simulate Alfvén and Fälthammar’s concept of galaxies being formed by primordial clouds of plasma spinning in a magnetic filament.[3]
The simulation began with two spherical clouds of plasma trapped in parallel magnetic filaments, each carrying a current of around 10^18 amperes. The clouds spin around each other until a spiral shape emerges. Peratt concluded that the shapes seen in the simulation appeared similar to observed galaxy shapes, and posited a morphological sequence that corresponded to Halton Arp’s ideas that galaxies formed out of quasars ejected from AGN.4 Perrat’s spirals had qualitatively flat rotation curves.
Experiments with the PK-3 Plus (Plasmakristall-3 Plus) dusty/complex plasmas laboratory on the International Space Station, has shown dusty plasmas in a weightless environment that seem to show “vortices in the plasma resembling a galaxy”,[5] and a “mini-galaxy [that] can be used to study formation of real galaxies”.
There has been much confusion on the topic of worldviews in science. Many people continue to fail to understand what a worldview is, or that they even exist within modern science. There is a structure to scientific theory which starts with properties that apply to concepts, then propositions involving two or more concepts, models based upon collections of these propositions, and then worldviews which drive efforts to construct those models. Worldviews come into play most importantly at two particular points in the scientific process: In the formation of hypotheses and at the inferential step. Worldviews can be based upon anything that is happening within the mind of a scientist. Scientists look to these worldview in order to identify promising avenues for investigation, and our university system actively creates this worldview.
There is the potential here for problems. Worldviews can act as the channel through which bias flows into science. The hypothetical and inferential steps are important points at which new ideas can enter into scientific discourse, where they can be groomed into new models. Thus, what we have to be on the lookout for in science is evidence that reasonable explanations which follow from alternative worldviews are not being investigated.
In this particular case, we can get very specific in identifying what worldviews we should be questioning: It is the belief that where scientists and astronomers see evidence for electricity in space, that it must be a “2nd-order”, localized phenomenon which results from other more fundamental phenomena (expansions, explosions, gravity, etc). This has been the dominant worldview for many decades now. But, it’s important that people realize that this belief does not just independently emerge within the minds of scientists. We teach this worldview within our universities. It’s not a mystery why they believe it.
And this worldview has remained in place as a guide for the Astrophysical Journal, even as many observational reasons and arguments have emerged over time to challenge it. It is the worldview itself which naturally leads scientists to propose a largely “dark” universe – for the force of gravity is just too weak to explain what we are seeing, and from what we can tell, the distances between stars are just too enormous for gravity to explain these motions.
Robert Burnham developed a model to show us in ordinary terms how much space there is out there between the stars. To understand its scale we need to know a couple of real distances.
As noted above, the distance from the Earth to the Sun is around 92,960,000 miles (149,605,000 km). Usually rounded off to 93 million miles (150 million km), this distance is called the Astronomical Unit (AU).
A light-year (ly) is equal to 63,294 AU. Coincidentally, this is about the same number as the number of inches in a statute mile, 63,360. Therefore, there is around the same number of inches in 1 AU (63,360 x 92,960,000) as the number of miles in 1 light-year (63,294 x 92,960,000). Those are really big numbers. Let’s stick to inches.
Burnham set the scale in his model so that 1 inch (1″) equals 1 AU or 93 million miles. Then 1 mile in our model would equal 1 ly. This scale would be expressed as 1:6,000,000,000,000. That’s one unit represents six million million units, which is a scale of one to 6 trillion or 1:6×10¹².
Let’s start describing a Burnhamesque miniature scale model of our solar system using this scale. We know the distance from Earth to the Sun (1 AU) will be one inch. How big will the Sun be? The Sun’s diameter is about 870,000 miles, so in our scale model the Sun will be a little under 1/100th of an inch across. That’s a very tiny speck. The Earth will be one inch away from the Sun but so small (0.00009″, or 9 one hundred thousandths of an inch) that we would not be able to see it without a microscope.
Pluto’s orbital radius is 39.5 times larger than Earth’s, so Pluto will be 39.5 inches, or almost exactly 1 meter, from the Sun.
The heliosphere, the region around the Sun which the solar wind permeates, is about 7 feet in our model.
So where is the nearest star in our model? Our nearest neighbor is Alpha Centauri, which is over 4 light-years away. That’s more than 4 miles in our model.
Yes, 4 miles. Our model Sun is one tiny speck, and it’s 4 miles to the next nearest speck. That’s a lot of space in between. So how big is our galaxy in this tiny model? The model galaxy would stretch 100,000 miles across. The thin disk and spiral arms would be a thousand miles thick. Its central bulge of stars would be well over 6000 miles from top to bottom. Our galaxy is but one of hundreds of billions of galaxies visible in the observable Universe with our present instruments. The nighttime sky appears to be crowded with stars, but stars are separated typically by over 10 million times their diameters.
