Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project
at Thunderbolts.info
The novelist Robertson Davies once stated,
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
In the 21st century, scientists on Earth are observing and gathering data
in unprecedented detail on the remotest phenomena in the physical Universe.
Of course, as those who have followed this series are aware,
what they actually find is routinely very different than what they expect.
And what is the source of these surprises?
Probably more than any physical science on Earth, in astrophysics and astronomy,
where the essential tool is not a microscope but a telescope,
data can be interpreted a number of ways.
In the sciences, as in life,
invalid interpretations begin with erroneous assumptions.
In the 20th century's space sciences, one such assumption was that electric
charges and currents cannot exist in the so-called vacuum of space.
An intriguing insight into common beliefs on the subject
can be found in the discussions of some popular websites.
On the website Quora.com, the question is posed in the form of the query,
“Does lightning exist in space?”
The most viewed response attempts to answer as follows:
“There is no lightning in space.
Lightning is the result of ionization of air into a channel of plasma
caused by strong electric field
(in this context between a cloud and the ground).
There is no air in space and nothing to get ionized.
Strong electric field would produce nothing in space and there would be no lightning.”
The notion that nothing exists in space to become ionized is of course laughable.
Astrophysical plasmas, or “ionized gases”,
have been a subject of intense scientific and laboratory investigations for nearly a century.
And even the notion of so-called space lightning at the vastest cosmic scales
has more recently been appearing in astrophysical literature.
In 2011, radio astronomers reported their measurement of the electric current
in a nearly 150,000 light years long extragalactic jet.
As reported in the New Scientist article,
“Universe’s highest electric current found”:
“A COSMIC jet 2 billion light-years away is carrying the highest electric current ever seen:
10¹⁸ amps, equivalent to a trillion bolts of lightning.”
As we’ve reported recently, new papers in peer-reviewed astrophysical journals
propose that powerful electric currents flow in extra-galactic jets
and that the jets themselves are “fundamentally electromagnetic structures.”
However, if you follow science media,
it’s likely that you’ve not noticed any attempt
to contextualize the development as significant for astrophysics.
One person who has noticed this disconnect is Thunderbolts colleague Chris Reeve,
who has spent many years documenting the online discourse on scientific controversies,
including the occasional “skeptical” polemics
against the Electric Universe and Plasma Cosmology.
Recently, Chris published a commentary exploring why the recognition
of vast, cosmic electric currents has apparently yet to register
either with science journalists or most online commentators.
Chris’s initial comments were presented in an item posted by a Slashdot.org editor,
entitled, “Can Electricity Travel Through Space on Astrophysical Jets?”.
An October 2017 paper titled "Electric Currents along Astrophysical Jets" reports that
"Several researchers have reported direct evidence
for large-scale electric currents along astrophysical jets."
A review of the citations at the end of that paper and others would seem to suggest
that one of the great Internet science debates has finally been settled:
Electricity does indeed travel through space over vast cosmic distances.
What has been interesting to watch about this unexpected development
is that science journalists have so far not explicitly reported this as a shift in theory,
and commenters on sites like phys.org appear to deny that any change has even occurred:
"The jets have been shown not to be electric currents,
the energy and the physics involved are certainly not electromagnetic."
This comment completely rejecting these new findings
was highly rated by other phys.org readers,
suggesting that the failure to explicitly report this as a change, in theory,
has left this controversial topic in a highly confused state.”
With Chris’s permission, we now present his full commentary,
outlining the history of the controversy.
I've been engaging people on these topics for around 12 years now.
In fact, it was some peculiar interactions I observed here on Slashdot back in 2007 [slashdot.org]
which greatly stimulated my interest in this topic.
The idea that electricity flows through space
is largely the brainchild of Hannes Alfven,
who earned the Nobel for his creation of magnetohydrodynamics
(the math which models cosmic plasmas using fluid equations).
What has not been particularly emphasized by scientists or the science journalists
is that Alfven realized towards the end of his career
that the widespread application of MHD in astrophysics was a huge mistake.
And he used the opportunity of his 1970 Nobel acceptance speech for MHD
to explain to the astrophysical community
why they should not be using MHD to model cosmic plasmas.
The exact history of what happened is difficult to track down,
and I've never seen it fully told in an academic setting
― which is really quite extraordinary, in a history of science sense.
Quoting The Plasma Universe of Hannes Alfven, by David Talbott:
"Alfvén's interest in magnetic fields laid the foundations of today's MHD theory,
a theory widely employed by astrophysicists.
In the original formulations of the theory,
Alfvén spoke of magnetic fields being 'frozen' into neutral plasma,
and the magnetohydrodynamic equations he formulated implied that
the electric currents that create magnetic fields could be effectively ignored.
Hence, the plasma activity on the Sun and in more remote space
could be analyzed without reference to any larger domain
of electric currents or electric circuits ..."
To this notion, astronomers were readily attracted, and for a time
they thought they had an ally in the brilliant electrical engineer.
Although his 'fundamental work and discoveries in magnetohydrodynamics
led to his Nobel Prize in 1970, the background to this occasion is paradoxical.'
Through much of the 19th and 20th century, most astronomers and cosmologists
had assumed the 'vacuum' of space would not permit electric currents.
Later, when it was discovered that all of space
is a sea of electrically conductive plasma,
the theorists reversed their position,
asserting that any charge separation would be immediately neutralized.
Here they found what they were looking for in Alfvén's frozen-in magnetic fields
and in his magnetohydrodynamic equations.
Electric currents could then be viewed as strictly localized and temporary phenomena
— needed just long enough to create a magnetic field,
to magnetize plasma, a virtually 'perfect' conductor.
The underlying idea was that space could have been magnetized in primordial times
or in early stages of stellar and galactic evolution,
all under the control of higher-order kinetics and gravitational dynamics.
All large-scale events in space could still be explained in terms of disconnected islands,
and it would only be necessary to look inside the 'islands'
to discover localized electromagnetic events
― no larger electric currents or circuitry required.
In this view, popularly held today, we live in a 'magnetic universe'
(the title of several recent books and articles), but not an electric universe.
The point was stated bluntly by the eminent solar physicist Eugene Parker,
"No significant electric field can arise in the frame of reference of the moving plasma."
But the critical turn in this story,
the part almost never told within the community of astronomers and astrophysicists,
is that Alfvén came to realize he had been mistaken.
Ironically ― and to his credit ―
Alfvén used the occasion of his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize
to plead with scientists to ignore his earlier work.
Magnetic fields, he said, are only part of the story.
The electric currents that create magnetic fields must not be overlooked,
and attempts to model space plasma in the absence of electric currents
will set astronomy and astrophysics on a course toward crisis.
In accord with Alvén's observations, American physicist, professor Alex Dessler,
former editor of the journal Geophysical Research Letters,
notes that he himself had originally fallen in with an academic crowd
that believed electric fields could not exist in the highly conducting plasma of space.
He stated,
'My degree of shock and surprise in finding Alfvén right
and his critics wrong can hardly be described.'
In retrospect, it seems clear that Alfvén considered his early theoretical assumption
of frozen-in magnetic fields to be his greatest mistake,
a mistake perpetuated first and foremost by mathematicians
attracted to Alfvén's magnetohydrodynamic equations.
Alfvén came to recognize that real plasma behavior is too
'complicated and awkward' for the tastes of mathematicians.
It is a subject "...not at all suited for mathematically elegant theories."
It requires hands-on attention to plasma dynamics in the laboratory.
Sadly, he said, the plasma universe became
"...the playground of theoreticians who have never seen a plasma in a laboratory.
Many of them still believe in formulae
which we know from laboratory experiments to be wrong."
Again and again, Alfvén reiterated the point:
the underlying assumptions of cosmologists today,
"...are developed with the most sophisticated mathematical methods
and it is only the plasma itself which does not 'understand'
how beautiful the theories are and absolutely refuses to obey them."
There exists considerable confusion on this topic
of electricity through space over cosmic plasmas,
and it has been extraordinary to observe that this confusion
is especially pronounced in the tech community.
I have sought to document this bias in the tech community (and elsewhere)
against electricity in space since I first observed it.
Perhaps the most important untold story is about this mistaken assumption
which formerly dominated astrophysics and cosmology,
that space is basically empty (as in there is no interstellar matter).
If you go back and look at what transpired, we can see that this mistake
played an important part in the selection of theories and hypotheses.
For example, Hannes Alfven's 1937 proposal of a galactic magnetic field was
"met with widespread resistance (if not scorn),
as it directly contradicted the prevailing wisdom
that a vacuum filled interstellar space."
A 1963 Popular Science interview with James Van Allen
points out in big bold letters at the top of page 76:
'Space' was invented on Earth before we knew what was out there.
The article explains:
"I found Dr. Van Allen in Boston, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
where he was conferring with other space scientists.
That evening, over dinner, I asked him about newly discovered phenomena of 'empty' space.
'Most people still think of space as a cold, black vacuum,' I said.
'Is it true that scientists shared this misconception until very recently?'
'Most scientists did think of space as a barren waste,' he said.
'When we started getting real information, it was quite a revelation.'
The crucial turning point in our conception of space, of course, came in 1958
when we finally sent the first instrumented rockets up.
These probes were pretty quickly recognized to be radioactive
when they landed back on the Earth.
This was a big surprise at the time,
and within just a few years, the implications were openly discussed
in the introductions to numerous astrophysical and plasma physics textbooks.
For example:
"Today it is recognized that 99.999% of all observable matter in the universe
is in the plasma state,
and plasmas are found at temperatures and densities far exceeding those
that will support matter in the first three states."
I've documented about 20 examples of these textbook admissions by now.
Here's another one:
"Plasmas can be divided into two broad categories: natural and man-made.
It is an interesting fact that most of the material in the visible universe,
as much as 99% according to some estimates, is in the plasma state.
This includes the Sun, most stars,
and a significant fraction of the interstellar medium.
Thus, plasmas play a major role in the universe.
Plasma physics is relevant to the formation of planetary radiation belts,
the development of sunspots and solar flares,
the acceleration of high-velocity winds that flow outward from the Sun and other stars,
the generation of radio emissions from the Sun and other astrophysical objects,
and the acceleration of cosmic rays."
These more recent admissions by astrophysicists that electricity can flow through space,
therefore, bear enormous importance,
for it is today recognized that of the matter we can see,
it is essentially almost entirely in the plasma state.
So, if we are modeling that plasma incorrectly
― as observations of large-scale electrical jets seem to suggest ―
it stands to reason that certain perplexing mysteries
(like dark matter) are likely to be explained by this mistake.
Perplexingly, the Slashdot community has been overtly hostile to this simple notion
that electricity can flow through space.
Attempts to even just convey new findings in this area
are either completely ignored or treated as pseudoscience
even when the announcements appear in established scientific journals.
For example, here is another recent effort to inform
the Slashdot community of a very important vindication for electricity in space:
"The previously controversial claim that
'astrophysical jets are fundamentally electromagnetic structures'
is becoming accepted by some astrophysicists.
A summary of recent publications on the subject by Don Scott in particular
notes the common presence of counter-rotating cylinders in black hole jets,
a feature not expected by conventional models,
yet a hallmark feature of Birkeland currents
which was mathematically described in a 2015 paper.
Counter-rotating cylinders are considered
an important prediction for the Electric Universe claim
that large-scale electric currents travel through space over plasmas.
This recent acknowledgment offers additional vindication for the historical claim
that the history of Birkeland Currents appears to be mired in politics.
A 2007 Slashdot post titled 'Astronomers Again Baffled by Solar Observations'
elicited a number of hostile reactions by Slashdot readers
that the Electric Universe is obviously a 'crackpot theory',
but what happens if astrophysicists start to widely acknowledge
that large-scale electric currents do indeed flow through space?"
It would seem that a mistaken bias against electricity in space
continues to dominate conversations to this day,
and will surely continue to do so for some time to come
but it also increasingly appears that these convictions are today out of step
with the current claims of the astrophysical community.
So, in a sense, we now see the Slashdot community largely unaware
that a huge theoretical shift has occurred,
and that a lot of ridicule and dismissals in this community
need to now be re-evaluated in the light of the recent recognition
that electricity does indeed travel through space.
If I had to guess at what will happen next, people will probably start suggesting
― as they tend to do ―
that everybody actually already knew that electricity travels through space.
But, the only way to find out how people are going to react
is to finally start reporting on this situation.
This conversation is way past due at this point.