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~~[MERIT]~~ · 08-15-2012, 08:59 PM

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NATURE'S POINT-DEFENSE SYSTEM?

Conventional geological principles are of little use in interpreting these electric machining factories in space. Time will tell, perhaps, how far they apply on Earth itself. Often, when contemplating shattered landscapes or rugged mountain vistas such as those around where I used to live in the Californian Sierra, I have difficulty reconciling what my eyes are telling me of fresh, sharp features and recent stupendous violence with serene accounts of slow uplifting and the gradual workings of erosion and deposition.

It could be that nature provides us with our own terminal defense system against rogue objects striking the Earth. (After riding the ozone depletion and global warming bandwagons, this seems to be NASA's latest ploy for scaring the public and encouraging Congress to keep the funding flowing.) An object of alien potential penetrating Earth's plasma sheath, if not deflected by electrical forces, would have a strong probability of being disrupted by the energy release of an arc discharge before impact. Meteoritic iron has been found scattered over hundreds of kilometers around the famous Meteor Crater in Arizona but very little below the crater floor itself, raising the possibility that it could well be merely an electrical scar. The same might be said for the many strange effects attending the Siberian Tunguska event in 1908, where a massive object apparently disintegrated explosively several kilometers above the surface.

COSMIC CURRENTS

If the potential of a body immersed in a plasma is not continually renewed by electric currents, it will quickly dissipate its charge to take on the potential of the plasma, and its isolating sheath will disappear. The Swedish Nobel Laureate Hannes Alvén did pioneering work giving primacy to the fundamental electrical nature of the universe and proposing an alternative cosmological model. While the mainstream gravity-based theory is forced to postulate near-infinite concentrations of the weakest force known, and a string of never-observed inventions like "missing mass," dark energy," and "inflation" to explain observations that don't fit, plasma cosmology deals with a universe of electrically active matter, shaped primarily by electrical forces arising from the currents flowing through it.

Velikovsky's suggestion of planets carrying charge had been ridiculed on the grounds that the electric force acting between them would have been obvious. The objection was based on the assumption that the intervening space was a vacuum. When it was shown in fact to be a plasma, the establishment rejected Alvén's model by promptly going to the other extreme of assuming it to be infinitely conducting. It was argued that this would make it unable to sustain the electric field necessary to create a potential difference, and a difference in potential is necessary to make a current flow. (In the same kind of way, frictionless quicksand, analogous to a resistance-less electrical medium, would be unable to support a length of pipe with one end elevated higher than the other. Since an elevation is necessary to maintain a pressure difference, there could be no flow of water in the pipe.) But the objections were based on theoretical studies of hot, dense plasmas, where the availability of current-carrying electrons and ions is effectively unlimited. In cool, rarified plasmas, the current that can flow is limited, which is another way of saying that a resistance is encountered. Resistance supports a potential difference.

All this was known to shirtsleeves-and-soldering-iron plasma experimenters. It seems that astronomers and cosmologists didn't talk to them. One forms the impression that the insistence on the impossibility of interplanetary currents, like the insistence on a pure vacuum before, was to preserve the ideal of isolated bodies interacting in ways determined solely by such innate properties as mass, density, composition, and so forth, which lent itself to elegant and appealing mathematical modeling. But no mathematics was available for treating everything as a connected system in which the medium plays a complex, active role.

Compared to the ordinary solids, liquids, and gases that make up our immediate environment inside the atmosphere, the behavior of plasma is certainly complex. Its constituent charges move in response to both electric and magnetic fields. But whereas an electric field produces a straightforward acceleration directed toward the source--attractive or repulsive, depending on the polarity--a magnetic field has the curious property of inducing a force at right angles to the direction of motion of a charge moving through it. This causes a charged particle to trace out a circle as it progresses, resulting in a helical path described around a hypothetical "line of force" denoting the field's direction. And that's not the end of it. A moving charge, as we said earlier, forms a current, and a current creates its own magnetic field. Such secondary fields will combine locally with the externally imposed field in various ways, resulting in filaments, braids, sheets, cells, and dynamic structures changing strangely and unpredictably. The name "plasma" was coined from biology in the 1920s to capture the eerie suggestion it can impart of living matter.

For sheer implausibility, few mechanisms could rival the Big Bang as a way of creating galaxies. Matter exploding outward simply becomes more rarified, with the chances of interaction rapidly decreasing. Such ad hoc inventions as "fluctuations" and "irregularities" have to be introduced to provide focal points, and then various unobservables to provide the necessary forces. In any case, the work of Halton Arp3 suggests strongly that the distance interpretation of redshift assumed since the 1920s is wrong, and the Big Bang is a fiction anyway. A more convincing approach would conceive the structured universe that we see today as evolving from an earlier plasma epoch, in which gravity played a negligible role. Gravity would become significant later, when sufficiently dense concentrations of matter had been swept together by electrical forces.

Currents flowing through space plasmas are called "Birkeland currents," after the Norwegian experimental astrophysicist Kristian Birkeland (1867-1917), who first identified electrical currents from the Sun as the cause of Earth's auroras. The magnetic fields created by currents flowing in parallel give rise to forces that are attractive at long range, "pinching" them together to produce the long filaments characteristic of plasma currents. Such filaments are seen, for example, in auroral displays, solar prominences, and the "plasma ball" demonstrations found in laboratories and as home curiosities. At shorter range the forces become repulsive, causing the filaments to persist as discrete entities instead of merging. These two actions give filaments a tendency to come together and wrap around each other, producing braided rope structures which again are typical of plasmas.

Pinching filaments together concentrates mass, while the tightening rotation of their wrapping around each other will concentrate angular momentum. The kind of result we'd expect, then, would be successions of rotating plasma clouds marking the lines of currents flowing in immense cosmic circuits. Just like galaxies. Laboratory experiments with plasmas have reproduced spirals, barred spirals, and all the other structures representative of catalogued galaxy types. They do it using processes that are familiar and observed to occur in nature, without recourse to invisible inventions and mysterious metaphysics. If the rotations are governed primarily by electrical forces, it becomes hardly surprising that they fail to obey the simple gravitational law that works well enough locally, here in the Solar System, and hence require exotic mechanisms for a theory dominated by gravity to stand.

STAR AND PLANET FACTORIES

A remarkable property of plasma is that its behavior scales up through 14 orders of magnitude. In other words, phenomena created and studied on millimeter scales in laboratories can be identified at the largest levels of the cosmos--not just in the forms of galaxies, but also in the galaxy clusters, superclusters, and "walls" that make up the universe's largest-scale structures. Instead of existing as scattered conglomerations of isolated, weakly interacting objects, the universe becomes an interconnected system of stupendous power transmission across the vastest distances, linking its largest-scale manifestations all the way down to the smallest in a hierarchy of repeating structural themes. Currents from intergalactic space thread the galactic disks from rim to axis, forming filaments that sweep up dust and gas to produce the spiral arms. Stars are formed along the filaments like strings of beads in a scaled-down version of the same self-pinching process. And at the next level down from stars, we find planetary systems.

The generally promoted explanation of planet formation is that they and their parent star condense out of the same spinning gaseous nebula as it contracts. However, this model has some severe problems. For one thing, it has been shown that the clumping of matter postulated as being the first step toward producing a planet couldn't happen in a system like our own, inside the orbit of Jupiter. Its gravitational effects would keep such material distributed around an inner orbit, as is indeed the case with the Asteroids. And even if precursor clumps did somehow form, simulations consistently show them as rapidly dispersing rather than consolidating.

To conserve angular momentum, the material in such a contracting disk would need to rotate faster as it fell nearer the center, producing a centrifugal force that would oppose the contraction. Again, calculations and simulation show that these forces would balance long before a density capable of inducing stellar ignition was reached, making problematical how the central star could form at all. In our Solar System 98% of the angular momentum is carried by the planets. The gravitational model offers no mechanism by which angular momentum could have become concentrated out there to allow the Sun to collapse--nor really any real explanation of where it originated from in the first place, since the net angular momentum of a randomly swirling diffuse cloud should be small.

Finally, images like those of the Orion nebula recently captured by the Hubble Telescope show newly born stars moving away rapidly from the stellar nursery regions. Such motion is consistent with their being the result of energetic electrical events but is difficult to account for on the basis of isolated clouds self-collapsing under gravitation. In the electrical theory, planets form from plasma jets ejected as a result of instabilities in stars. This could sometimes constitute a multi-stage process in which smaller planets are born from primary gas giants. Again, the phenomenon of axial jets is a common feature of plasma structures, assuming spectacular dimensions in the enormous galactic jets that produce intense sources of radio energy. The problem of how planetary concentrations of matter could have come about under self-gravity doesn't arise, and current flow through the intervening plasma provides a ready means of transferring angular momentum outward. Hence, the planets arise naturally the way we see them, and the Sun has a way of condensing and compressing to become what everyone knows it to be. . . .

Except that not all of the theorists involved with developing the electric model of the universe over the last thirty years or so are convinced that the Sun really is what "everyone knows" it to be.