There are many names associated with the development of the electric and plasma
universe. Some get more recognition than others. In this episode, I want to cover
someone who is often cited by the late Wal Thornhill, but probably is a name
that you are not familiar with. Charles Edward Rose Bruce was a quite remarkable
man who saw a deep connection between sparks, discharges, lightning and the cosmos at large.
Who was he and what remarkable insights did he provide? He was born the son of a tailor and
graduated from the University of Edinburgh with first class honors in
mathematics and natural philosophy. He then joined the Electrical Research
Association in Leatherhead, England. Bruce's early years at the Electrical
Research Association was spent working on the analysis of oil-based circuit
breakers. He published a sequence of papers on the subject, including one that
won The Institution of Electrical Engineers’ Kelvin premium award. This
helped keep the ERA at the leading edge of the rapidly growing circuit breaker technology.
Then in 1939, he shifted his attention to lightning. Two years later, he would
publish a paper simply titled, “The Lightning Discharge” which would end up
being heavily cited and once more win him the Kelvin premium award. His
contributions to the subject include the significant strengthening of the
electrical gradient, known to occur in lightning strikes, as well as a demonstration that the grounding of
transmission lines would be counter- productive. After attending a lecture
on astrophysics at the Edinburgh University in 1941, he became very interested in exploring this, together with his
understanding of electricity. During this lecture, the lecturer referred to a solar prominence which
reached a height of 1 million kilometers in an hour. Charles Bruce quickly deduced that its
velocity of propagation was almost exactly that of a lightning leader stroke and that, since it moved like
lightning it probably was lightning of some form. Soon after this, he developed a theory
that solar prominences consisted of electrical discharges in plasma, rather than that of moving solar matter.
He would go on to publish over a hundred papers concerning the electrical basis
of various cosmological phenomena. In 1946 and 1947 he was elected as a
fellow of The Institute of Physics and The Institute of Electrical Engineers.
Despite this, his work would be largely ignored by mainstream science. In 1944, he produced a privately
published monograph titled, “A New Approach in Astrophysics and Cosmogony”.
It was spurred on by a lack of success in mainstream science at the time, to
explain the major phenomena in astrophysics. He saw that gravitational masses, like stars,
were centers of energy liberation and also the origin of high-speed electrically charged particles, which
over time, results in the formation of huge charged atmospheres, so that masses
beyond a certain size become centers of extensive and mainly radial electric
fields. These naturally give rise to conduction processes tending to neutralize the currents. It is the
resulting electrical discharges which determine the nature and direction of universal evolution.
He still viewed stars as being composed of material that at the heart is powered
by nuclear reactions. This engine would provide the separation of charge and lead to the discharge events.
This would then be the start of a new sequence, the atmosphere condensing on a
reduced scale of aggregation which in turn would become the center of an extensive radial electric field.
He saw the same mechanism happening in nebulae, stars, and planets. Now this is very different in some
respects from the Electric Sun model we have today, but you will recognize many similarities.
He points out that it is no coincidence that the photosphere has the appearance,
temperature, and spectrum of an electric arc. A large number of arcs occur in parallel. These quickly result in
neutralization of the accumulated space charge in their neighborhood and go out. These are therefore not stable
discharges, but are more like a transient spark. In his view it is the coming and
going of these discharges which accounts for the observed granulation of the solar surface.
In his model, sunspots are explained because those huge discharges drain away the current from the neighboring
photospheric arc channels and extinguish those arcs. He saw that there was much evidence in
support of his model. This included solar flares which, at the time, had been
shown to have circular magnetic fields surrounding them. He estimated that the
current of these was about 10 to the 14 amps. These give rise to a broadening of
the hydrogen alpha lines due to the Zeeman effect. The variation of these
line widths follows the rapid rise of the current in the flare to a maximum,
followed by the slower fall, analogous to what is observed in terrestrial lightning current waves.
The Crab Nebula’s filamentary structure provides striking visual evidence of the
origin of this structure in electrical discharges. The light from the Crab Nebula also shows substantial
polarization which has allowed them to partially map the magnetic fields in the Nebula.
The result of this mapping is that the field is such as would be observed if the filaments carried currents.
Novae show light curves that have a sudden onset followed by a slower
decline. This is characteristic of an electrical discharge. The rapid increase
in emission line width in the Nova spectrum is generally believed to be a
Doppler broadening but is also readily explained as Zeeman broadening.
In 1958, Bruce presented one of his papers at the second USAF conference on
atmospheric electricity. In it he pointed out that there should exist galaxies
which are radiating an inordinate amount of energy, which should correspond to the
naked-eye phase of a Nova outburst. And this peak-current phase of a galactic
discharge should last for millions of years. Four years later, the first quasar was
discovered, and in due course their lifetimes were recognized to be millions to tens of millions of years.
Much of this work was driven by his desire to understand lightning. Based on
his extensive studies of atmospheric electrostatic field building and
electrical discharge characteristics, he developed a new theory of discharge
propagation for the breakdown of electrostatic fields in cosmological
atmospheres, which is different from normal long spark or terrestrial
lightning discharges. The main difference is categorized by the temperature in the
leader stroke, which for cosmological atmospheres, would be of the order of eight million degrees.
In long cosmical electric discharges, a point is reached at which a radical
change will occur in the whole propagation process. In the discharge channel, a jet of gas
will be generated, which will flow along the axis of the channel towards its
advancing head. As the temperature of the channel rises, so also will the velocity
of the jet. At a certain point, the velocity of the hot gas will exceed that of the normal process of voltage
breakdown in a hydrogen atmosphere. From that point onwards, the propagation
will depend on the jet of hot gas. And the velocity will depend on its temperature.
These velocities could exceed 4,000 kilometers per second. In this paper on the extension of
atmospheric to space electricity, he points out that there are two thermometers which can be used to
estimate the temperature of the electrical discharges, whether in a laboratory, atmospheric or cosmic.
The first derives from an effect which was first emphasized by Velaski in 1937.
The pressure in the actual regions of an electric discharge is increased by an
amount proportional to the product of the current and the current density as a
result of the movement of the conducting particles in the discharge's own magnetic field. In an electric arc the
current density increases at and towards the electrode spots. Therefore, pressure
gradients are set up which give rise to the anode and cathode jets. Their velocity will be that of the sound
in the gas. If it can be determined, we will have a measure of the temperature.
Applied to the lightning discharge, the theory explains the existence of metallic lines in the spectrum of the
discharge up to the heights of two meters above the ground. And applied to an arc weld, it explains the physical
basis of arc welding. The second thermometer derives from an observed relationship between the level
of excitation and the discharge temperature. If, for example, the level of excitation observed is nine electron-
volts, then the discharge temperature will be 10,000 times more in Kelvin, so in this case 9,000 Kelvin.
Based on this, he outlined that discharges in cosmic sources should be characterized by the following: rate of
propagation; the speed of breakdown is proportional to the breakdown field and
the mean free path; the limiting field is proportional to the gas pressure; and the
mean free path is inversely proportional to it. So, there is no resultant dependence
on the rate of propagation on the pressure. It may be possible for the discharge to
generate a plasma jet with a velocity higher than the rate of voltage breakdown. In this case, the discharge may
then propagate at the plasma velocity. Magnetic fields will be associated with a flow of current in a discharge.
The fields are circular around the axis of the discharge. This can be recognized by the polarization and Zeeman
broadening of the radiation emitted from within them. Pinch effect. The conducting particles in
an electric discharge are within the discharge's own magnetic field which
exert upon them a centripetal force proportional to the current and the
current density. This results in an increase of the pressure towards the axis of the discharge.
Plasma jets. If either the current or the current density varies along the channel
of a discharge, there will be a corresponding gradient of the axial pressure. This creates a jet of hot gas,
or plasma, which will be accelerated along the discharge. This is the origin
of the anode- and cathode-jets observed in the laboratory discharges. The speed
of the jet is limited to the speed of sound in the medium of which it is composed.
In ionized hydrogen, the sonic speed is 12 kilometers per second at 10,000 Kelvin.
It varies as the square root of the absolute temperature. The velocities
observed in the discharge plasmas may be interpreted in terms of the temperature of the discharge.
Current waveform. The current in an electrical discharge builds up rapidly
to a peak value and then decays on a slower time scale. Anomalous waveforms, sometimes shown by
high current lightning strokes, arise from the self-extinction by the pinch effect.
Radiation of atmospherics. A lightning flash or other discharge radiates atmospherics of a characteristic
waveform. Parallel discharges will attract one another. Balls of hot plasma escape at sudden
bends in the discharge. The bends constitute holes in the magnetic field
of the discharge through which the gas compressed by the field, can escape. His many years of research on
atmospheric astrophysics convinced him that not only was the Sun dominated by
electrical discharge, but the universe was so to speak, all electric. And that
the electric fields and their breakdown in electrical discharges account for the
observed phenomena, and accelerate the process of universal evolution from the
universe to galaxies, from galaxies to stars, and from stars to planets. He viewed
atmospheric astrophysics as merely an extension of atmospheric electricity.
In his view, these would be a far better explanation for the existence of
magnetic fields, relativistic electrons, gas jets, the formation of spiral arms, stellar nova, etc.
He noted that many phenomena seen above the surface of stars, can be
explained as analogues, but on a much larger scale, of lightning discharges
observed in the atmosphere of Earth. Although Bruce felt that the charging
mechanism for each process was contained locally, he thought that it was not a vital
precondition of the recognition of electrical discharges as observed
phenomena. As Professor Birch remarked, to deny the existence of what cannot be
explained would leave very little work to do. He felt it very probable that the
charging mechanism for each phenomenon was the same: a collision between solid
particles. The asymmetrical interaction of particles of similar materials leads to charge segregation.
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