A pioneer of plasma cosmology and the Electric Universe, Hannes Alfvén, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1970, warned of a looming crisis in cosmology due to the ignorance of theoretical physicists about the real behavior of plasma in space. That crisis remains as a long-dormant infection waiting to cripple its host. The symptoms can be seen in attempts to explain auroras and solar activity in terms of unreal magnetic effects (“snapping” and “reconnection” of field lines—try to imagine snapping and reconnecting the lines of latitude or longitude!) and with no clear idea of how the magnetic fields are caused. But any high school student knows that electric currents generate magnetic fields. So magnetic fields in space are an effect of electric currents, not a cause. It seems that graduate physics training skips practicalities and commonsense and focuses on mathematical theorizing and the virtual-reality world of computer modeling. Alfvén was first and foremost a practical electrical engineer. There are many other crises to be acknowledged by cosmologists. In 1929 Hubble and Humason formulated the apparent redshift-distance relation of galaxies in deep space. In the metaphysics of Einstein, an expanding space seemed like it might explain the observations. But as an observer, Hubble remained more clear-minded. “The assumption that red shifts are not velocity shifts but represent some hitherto unknown principle operating in space between the nebulae leads to a very simple, consistent picture of a universe so vast that the observable region must be regarded as an insignificant sample.”1 Mathematical theorists eschewed simplicity and commonsense by assuming that the redshift was due to the Doppler effect and employing Einstein’s metaphysics so they could retrocalculate the seeming expansion back to a primordial point, or singularity—which has no physical reality. Score: mathematics-1; physics-0. But there is another simple option, unmentioned by Hubble, that instead of some “unknown principle operating in space between the nebulae” there is an intrinsic electric principle responsible for both the redshift and the faintness of a galaxy or quasar. Recently supernovae in highly redshifted objects have been found to be fainter than expected. Big bang theorists surmised that the expansion of the universe must be accelerating. The response to this discovery was to invent yet another mysterious fudge factor for the unscientific big bang scenario — “dark energy.” This follows a tradition established with the conjuring up of invisible “dark matter” where needed to save the Newtonian dynamical model of spiral galaxy rotation. Rather than becoming clearer and simpler, big bang cosmology demonstrates “wild guesswork and burgeoning complexity” with each new discovery. It is clear that both faintness and redshift are related to a lower intrinsic energy of quasars, galaxies, and the supernovae they contain. I have shown earlier that supernovae are an electrical discharge phenomenon. Neither redshifts nor supernovae can be used as a standard to measure intergalactic distances. If proof were needed for this commonsense assessment, the distinguished astronomer Halton Arp has shown repeatedly that highly redshifted quasars are born from nearby, low-redshift galaxies. The redshift of quasars is a measure of their youthfulness! Because of quasars’ physical and statistical connections with nearby galaxies, the faintness of highly redshifted quasars cannot be attributed to distance. Even more compelling is the discovery that intrinsic redshift takes discrete (quantized) values, which proves that the redshift is related to the matter in the quasar and not a measure of speed of recession or some effect upon light in traversing the intervening space.
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 18:04:07 +0000
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