Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe, brought to you by
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The following presentation is an adaptation of the Mel Acheson's TPOD
'Tool Time'. The link to the article may be found in the description box of this video.
Have you ever seen a carpenter try to cut a 2x4 with a hammer?
Probably not. Carpenters usually carry a saw as well as a hammer in their tool
boxes, and they know to use the proper tool for the task at hand. If they didn't
have a saw they could likely flail away with the hammer and eventually produce a
splintered length of wood that more or less fit their need. But it wouldn't be
pretty. Astrophysicists have only one tool in
their kit -- the hammer of gravitational theory. When called upon to build an
explanation for the phenomena of a universe filled with plasma, they can't
cut it. They're forced to flail. An oscillation in a plasma discharge that
produces a thousand pulses of electromagnetic radiation per second -- a
pulsar -- will be splintered into ad-hoc kindling by the hammer of gravity.
Several stars' worth of matter must be pounded into a tiny volume and spun
around at a thousand r.p.s. Then a hotspot must be tacked on to produce the pulses
of radiation. The self-constraining filaments of plasma spiraling out from
the poles of active galaxies -- galactic jets -- require even more gravitational
hammering. An astronomical quantity of matter must be pounded into such a tiny
volume that it loses most of its recognizable properties and becomes a
black hole. The black hole then pulls in all the surrounding matter and squeezes
it. Next, gravity has to poke tiny holes in the squeezed matter to squirt it back
out. Finally, emergency aid for magnetic forces has to be called in to keep the
streams of hot gas from evaporating into the empty space around them.
The spiraling filaments of a plasma 'rope' can pinch down into a small 'hot spot'. If
the current density is high enough, the pinch and the tubular or conical volume
around it can glow revealing the filamentary structure in visible light. To
explain these planetary nebulae with gravity, a catastrophic imbalance between
radiation and gravitational pressures must be generated in the core of a star.
The resulting explosion blows off a spherical shell of hot gas. That shell
must then be molded into the observed bipolar shapes (the tubes and the cones) by
way of asymmetric interactions with previous gaseous emissions and
interstellar gas. Sometimes a little help from currentless magnetic fields is
thrown in. As far as is known, with the possible exception of bar magnets, an
electric current is the only way to produce a magnetic field. But
"electric current" is an alias for a plasma. These examples of gravitational
flailing illustrate a fundamental incommensurability in viewpoint. A
carpenter chooses a saw or a hammer according to whether he's working with
wood or with steel. Identifying the material at hand is one of those
cognitive activities that's so basic it's taken for granted. It's often
unconscious. It surprises us when it's forced into our awareness by being
mistaken, when what we assumed was a nail turns out to be a splinter of wood. This
vacuum of sensory deprivation tends to suck in material from the nearest source
of cognitive substance which is preconceived ideas. To a man with a
hammer, everything looks like a nail. And to a physicist with a theory of
gravity, everything looks like mass. When the mass he imputes to the source of
the thin stream of photons doesn't nail down the explanation he needs, he
imagines more mass, invisible mass, mass compressed into black holes and expanded
into dark halos, until his universe is 90% imaginary. A physicist with a theory
of plasma is much better off. At least she can perform laboratory experiments
on her alternatives to black holes and dark matter.
She has more sources of information about her material than the thin stream
of photons from the sky. She can test the ideas she imagines with the sparks
she can manipulate. She can hammer on the wood; she can saw on the nail; she can see
that doesn't work and go back to try the reverse. She can be scientific, can use
concepts as tools and can avoid transubstantiating them into pseudo-
religious icons.