[Music]
In previous episodes of this seven-arc series, we covered how the development of
new instruments has accompanied, or gene- rated, fundamental shifts in scientific thinking.
The instruments measure overlooked discrepancies and detect unimagined
qualities. The previous explanatory ideas won't stretch over the new evidence
without patching, and the patches become awkward and arbitrary. At some point scientists decide that the
old patched ideas are too much of a nuisance and they come up with new ideas that fit better.
Brahe’s more precise instruments arguably led to the replacement of
Ptolemy's kinematic model of planetary motions with Newton's dynamic model.
Patching Ptolemy's perfect circles with ellipses, especially when strong
objections were already raised against his linear equant element, would have
been playing with dogmatic thinking. The great increase of instrumentation in
the 18th and 19th centuries, led to the replacement of Newton's
dynamic model with Einstein's rubber space-time model in the 20th century.
Gravity as a force was abandoned in favor of gravity as a warped coordinate
system. But the use of the same term for both conditions caused confusion. People
still talked about gravity as a force. The invention of electronic instruments
and the ability to send them into space, has now brought a flood of new data that
doesn't fit Einstein's space-time. But instead of looking for clearer explanations,
theoreticians are playing with dogmatic thinking. Early in the 20th century, astronomers
categorically ruled out the possibility that electricity might compete with
gravity as a cosmic force. That decision became a dogma that prevented them from even looking at
plasma experiments. With little knowledge of the actual behavior of plasma, they hid the new data
behind ad-hoc excuses of collapsed matter, and undetectable dark matter, and
unexplained dark energy. They patched Einstein's rubber idea with fantasies that were invented to make the
math work and to save the theory. But the theory is obscured by the stitches.
For example, the idea of neutron stars began as a patch to conventional gravity and gas theories.
Some stars appeared to be too small to contain enough conventional matter to
produce their observed gravitational influence and light output. So astronomers invented an untestable
form of collapsed matter. They imagined that the increasing and unresisting
gravity of a shrinking star would squeeze the electrons of atoms onto their nuclei.
This allowed many more atoms to be packed together, enhancing gravity and radiant output.
When they found motions and energetic outbursts that exceeded the neutron
star's capacities, they presumed that the now irresistible bending of gravity
followed their equations of collapse to the mathematical point of zero.
They didn't seem to realize that they were crossing the empirical border into metaphysical nonsense,
because gravity would bend space-time so strongly nothing - not even light - could
escape the collapsed star. So it would be unobservable. Hence this
second patch was named a black hole. Only crackpots remarked that the point
that exploded at the beginning of the Big Bang would have been the mother of
black holes, and therefore the Big Bang couldn't have happened. But it turned out that much was escaping,
if not from the black hole, at least from nearby. The black hole was reconceived
as the mathematical point, as well as the nearby phenomena. It could be observed after all.
In fact, black holes often appeared not just to pull everything in, but to blow everything out.
They were transformed into white holes with magical mathematics. Astronomers never considered that the
nearby phenomena might be caused by something other than a black hole.
Similar difficulties of too much energy in too small a space, also turned up in
observations of galactic motions. Galaxies and clusters were moving too
fast for their mutual gravity to hold the cluster together. Most clusters should have dissipated
long ago, and stars in the arms of spiral galaxies should move slower, the farther they were
from the center. But they appeared to be moving at about the same speed, regardless of their distance.
In fact, the entire universe was more energetic than could be explained by the
gravity of its calculated mass. So dark matter and dark energy were
imagined to save the theory of gravity from complete falsification.
Those patches made 96 percent of the resulting universe of theory unobservable.
Astronomy abandoned scientific principles and sank into dark speculations about dark phantasms.
Black holes and collapsed matter are not explanations, they're excuses.
They try to squeeze the abundance of energy that's observed and that's
available in electrically active plasma, out of the dearth of energy that is all
theories of gravity and gas can supply. Dark matter and dark energy hide a
pretense of bloated gravity behind an empirically dishonest claim of invisibility and untestability.
Because astronomers believed in the 19th century gravity and gas universe before
plasma was discovered, they believed that electricity, in what they imagined to be
empty space, was impossible. The old theories became a belief system,
a dogma that was absolutely true and unquestionable. What else could it be, believers
exclaimed, transforming the question into a foregone conclusion. Many observations confirm relativity,
they declared. But confirmation only confirms what the believers already know.
The new evidence and new ideas confront them with what they don't know.
Discovery lies in the dis-confirmations, the anomalies. Discovery lies in searching for and
testing alternative explanations. Even as the traditionalists retreated
into dark dogma, the pioneers of radiant matter that Langmuir later renamed
plasma, and Birkeland's terella, were exploring electricity in space.
Striations and bubbles, plasma - not gas - bound by double layers and sorted by its
various characteristics, and moving by a hand that could be much heavier than gravity.
Theoreticians shunned the new experimental findings, because they
couldn't be expressed in prestigious mathematical generalities, from which the
real universe of observation could be deduced. Hannes Alfven, an early plasma
experimenter and one of the founders of plasma cosmology, wrote this about the situation.
”The cosmical plasma physics of today is to some extent the playground of
theoreticians who have never seen a plasma in a laboratory. Many of them still believe in formulas
which we know from laboratory experiments to be wrong. Several of the basic concepts on which
theories of cosmical plasmas are founded are not applicable to the condition prevailing in the cosmos.”
”They are generally accepted by most theoreticians, they 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.”
Hiding in conceptual darkness and playing mathematical games with
imaginary objects negates the found- ational assumptions of scientific thinking.
The objects of investigation must be sensible, that is able to be sensed, able to be detected.
They must be amenable to experimentation. They must be explainable, not solely predictable.
Theoreticians must not only follow the math, but also follow the language,
theories must mean something. Scientists must search for alternative
explanations and test them for coherence and correspondence with the alternative
interpretations of the selected evidence . Ad-hoc patches complicate theories. The
Standard Model is suffocating itself under its arbitrary patches. Plasma is detectable with many
instruments. It can be generated in laboratories and its properties observed.
Explanations of its behavior can be proposed and tested. Its observed
properties correspond with the observed behaviors of cosmic phenomena, and
provides simple and straightforward explan- ations. But its electrical properties are not
allowed in the Standard Model. Mechanical inventions and the mysterious
mathematics must stand in for electrical activity. The alternative to patching is the
development of new fundamentals. The old theories and the old thinking served
well to get us where we now are, but they're becoming a hindrance. They're
becoming obscured by dogmatic thinking. Space age evidence is surprising and unexpected.
Predictions from the old theories are not found. Contrary evidence that falsifies them is found.
We should stop pretending that the old gravity- and-gas thinking is adequate for our needs.
But the revolutionary effects of such a change in thinking will not be limited
to one discipline. The previous metaphysics of uniform and gradual change affected all of thinking.
Now the possibilities of larger and faster changes in the natural world
will revolutionize all disciplines. The empirical world has moved into a new
conceptual space. A new way of thinking is emerging, one that rejects
the worshipful belief that only gravity is of importance in cosmology.
An awareness of the greater energy and power of electrical activity and plasma
systems in space opens our thinking and our worldview to larger and faster
working explanatory possibilities. The Electric Universe model of cosmology is one such possibility.
[Music]