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Cosmology in Crisis—Again!
by Wallace Thornhill
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May 24, 2009
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Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing ever could.
- from The Sound of Music.
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>> The only place in the universe where we find the big bang.
Picture credit: New Scientist
[Click to enlarge]
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It seems the toughest thing for scientists to grasp - that
a cherished paradigm like the big bang can be wrong. The
latest crisis was reported in Physorg.com on May 5th:
"Study
plunges standard Theory of Cosmology into Crisis."
The study of dwarf companion galaxies of the Milky Way support
the view that a "modified Newton dynamic" [MOND] must
be adopted. “This conclusion
has far-reaching consequences for fundamental physics in general,
and also for cosmological theories.” One of the
researchers involved said, “it
is conceivable that we have completely failed to comprehend the
actual physics underlying the force of gravity.”
In my
news
of April 21st I wrote, “we
are so far from understanding gravity that we don't know the right
questions to ask.” There I proposed "Electrically
Modified Newtonian Dynamics," or "E-MOND," as the
solution for solar system stability. However, the problem involving
the dwarf companion galaxies is more fundamental to cosmology. The first
problem in physics is to choose the correct concepts to apply to our
observations. That determines which physical laws to apply. But that's
not the end of it. We must remain aware that all laws are man-made
and provisional - they are subject to modification on appeal. Historically,
cosmologists have denied that electricity has any relevance in space.
They have refused to consider how the laws of plasma physics might
apply to their otherwise incomprehensible observations. Provisionality
is a formalism to mask dogma.
Richard Feynman, lecturing his students on how to look for a new
law in physics, said, “First
you guess. Don't laugh; this is the most important step. Then you
compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience.
If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple
statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful
your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it
disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to
it.”
Sounds simple? Perhaps that is why we see so many proposals for
new laws of physics in the mad scramble for a Nobel Prize. But
the emphasis is all wrong. It encourages wild guesswork and
burgeoning complexity. Complexity facilitates endless "twiddling
of knobs" to match new "experience." Theories become
practically unfalsifiable and unscientific - as witness, "string
theory." Underlying the guesswork in cosmology is the paradigm
of the big bang. A paradigm is a system of belief that tends to be
taken completely for granted. The guesswork is limited to modifications
that don't disturb the conviction. Questioning the established paradigm
is resisted. The case of
"the
modern Galileo," Halton Arp, is a classic example where
the big bang "disagrees with experience" - and the
experience is declared to be wrong. Feynman could usefully
have added that it doesn't matter how many people believe a
theory, “If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong.
That's all there is to it.”
Cosmology is in crisis because from the very outset the
"big bang" was not science! The big bang invokes
a miraculous creation of the universe from nothing. It is a
misguided attempt to manufacture a creation story to complement,
or compete with, the biblical Genesis story. But real
science doesn't do miracles. There was no contest anyway. The biblical
creation story, like those of all other ancient cultures on Earth,
has nothing to do with the creation of the universe. To believe so
is to misunderstand the ancient meanings of "heaven"
and "earth."
A scientific, forensic investigation of mankind's earliest ideas
about heaven and earth show that "heaven" was the arena
of the planetary "gods," whose behavior was fearfully
witnessed by our prehistoric ancestors in a catastrophic period of
awful
electrical splendor in the skies.
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>> The Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime "Wandjina" from the Kimberley region
is a sacred "creator." The rings around the head "represent clouds and lightning."
The line between the large "eyes" is not a nose and "indicates where the power flows down."
The "Creator Wandjina" created "only through his voice, with power."
Photo credit: Jutta Malnic.
[Click to enlarge]
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The spectacle motivated prehistoric humans globally to carve
and paint rock faces with similar enigmatic representations
(petroglyphs and rock art) of what has only recently been
identified as ultra-high-energy auroral type displays. Our
forebears were recording something unimagined today - the
distinctive evolution of plasmoid "thunderbolts"
hurled between celestial bodies on unusual cometary orbits.
Plasmoids followed the Earth's magnetic field lines to the
magnetic poles. The "earth" was originally the
magnificent auroral-type display "created" in the
heavens. The antics of the capricious "gods" were
remembered and
memorialized
by the first civilizations in their prodigious building
works to recreate the "kingdom of heaven" on today
what we call the Earth.
Thunderbolts
of the Gods describes this first scientific
documentation of the origin of global themes in myths and
religions. It introduces the real cosmology of
The
Electric Universe. Only a
REAL
COSMOLOGY can reunite the fragmented sciences and provide
a clearer human perspective of the universe.
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The Big Bang - One Crisis After Another
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>> Alfvén receiving the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics from the King of Sweden.
[Click to enlarge]
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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.
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>> Halton Arp recognizes the study of electrified plasma as the future of astrophysics.
Photo credit: Jean-Pierre Jans, 2005.
[Click to enlarge]
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It seems the hardest thing for a scientist to grasp that a
cherished consensus belief, perhaps one that is decades or
a century old, can be wrong. Following is an excerpt from a
report of the most recent crisis in cosmology. It calls into
question both the existence of dark matter and our concept
of gravity. The bell tolls loudly for the big bang!
Study plunges standard Theory of Cosmology into Crisis
As modern cosmologists rely more and more on the ominous
"dark matter" to explain otherwise inexplicable
observations, much effort has gone into the detection of
this mysterious substance in the last two decades, yet no
direct proof could be found that it actually exists. Even
if it does exist, dark matter would be unable to reconcile
all the current discrepancies between actual measurements
and predictions based on theoretical models. Hence the number
of physicists questioning the existence of dark matter has
been increasing for some time now.
Competing theories of gravitation have already been developed
which are independent of this construction. Their only problem
is that they conflict with Newton's theory of gravitation.
“Maybe Newton was indeed wrong,” declares Professor
Dr. Pavel Kroupa of Bonn University's Argelander-Institut für
Astronomie (AIfA). “Although his theory does, in fact,
describe the everyday effects of gravity on Earth, things we
can see and measure, it is conceivable that we have completely
failed to comprehend the actual physics underlying the force
of gravity.”
-
physorg.com,
May 5th, 2009
Comment: Newton himself had the sense not to
propose “the actual physics underlying the force of
gravity.” All he did was to provide a mathematical
expression describing the mysterious instantaneous
tension between all matter in the universe. Einstein merely
confused the question with his unreal notions of matter affecting
empty space. On the other hand, the electrical concept of gravity
deals with real-world physics. It uses the observation that matter
(subatomic particles) under electrical stress exhibit different
masses to draw attention to the fact that Newton's simple law of
gravity embodies electrically variable masses. In other words,
in an Electric Universe we require Electrically Modified Newtonian
Dynamics, or
E-MOND,
to embellish the usual acronym.
This concept applied at the atomic level also provides a simple
solution to the quasar redshift puzzle. Arp and others have
shown that the redshift of any object is made up of an intrinsic
component and a velocity component. The velocity component is
the only one recognized by mainstream astronomers. The intrinsic
redshift is a property of the emitting atoms in the object.
It decreases with time in discrete or quantized 'jumps.'
Quasars appear to be ejected, deficient in electrons, from their
parent active galactic nucleus (AGN). The lightweight electrons
remain tangled in the AGN plasmoid for much longer than the heavier
protons and uncharged neutrons. As a result, the quasar has lower
initial charge polarization compared to matter on Earth and, from
the principle of E-MOND, all subatomic particles in the quasar have
lower masses. Therefore, the emitting atoms also have lower masses,
and their radiation has lower energy. The result is the observed
intrinsic redshift of atomic emissions from quasars and their
relative faintness.
Like the atom itself, the constituents of each atom - the protons,
neutrons and electrons - can be viewed as resonant systems of charge,
capable of exchanging electromagnetic energy for quantum jumps
between stable resonant states. The quantum jumps over time to
lower redshift values occur as electrons from the parent galaxy's
jet arrive at the quasar and increase the quasars' charge
polarization. As its mass increases, according to E-MOND, the
quasar slows from its high ejection speed at 'birth,' due to
conservation of momentum. When the intrinsic redshift value gets
down to around z = 0.3, the quasar starts to look like a small
galaxy or BL Lac object and begins to fall back toward its parent,
while continuing to decrease in redshift. Eventually it becomes a
companion galaxy. Arp has photos and diagrams of many such family
groupings. Many can be traced to three and four generations of
ejecting objects.
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[Click to enlarge]
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In an Electric Universe, faintness together with high
intrinsic redshift is a measure of youthfulness, not distance
and speed of recession.
The report continues…
Two new studies could well lend further support to it [MOND].
In these studies, Professor Kroupa and his former colleague
Dr. Manuel Metz, working in collaboration with Professor Dr.
Gerhard Hensler and Dr. Christian Theis from the University
of Vienna, and Dr. Helmut Jerjen from the Australian National
University, Canberra, have examined so-called "satellite
galaxies." This term is used for dwarf galaxy companions
of the Milky Way, some of which contain only a few thousand stars.
According to the best cosmological models, they exist presumably
in hundreds around most of the major galaxies. Up to now, however,
only 30 such satellites have been observed around the Milky Way,
a discrepancy in numbers which is commonly attributed to the fact
that the light emitted from the majority of satellite galaxies
is so faint they remain invisible.
A detailed study of these stellar agglomerates has revealed some
astonishing phenomena: “First of all, there is something
unusual about their distribution,” Professor Kroupa
explains, “the satellites should be uniformly arranged
around their mother galaxy, but this is not what we found.”
More precisely, all classical satellites of the Milky Way - the
eleven brightest dwarf galaxies - lie more or less in the same
plane, they are forming some sort of a disc in the sky. The
research team has also been able to show that most of these
satellite galaxies rotate in the same direction around the
Milky Way - like the planets revolve around the Sun.
Contradiction upon Contradiction
The physicists do believe that this phenomenon can only be
explained if the satellites were created a long time ago
through collisions between younger galaxies. “The
fragments produced by such an event can form rotating dwarf
galaxies,” explains Dr. Metz, who has recently moved
across to the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt
(German Aero-space Center). But there is an interesting catch
to this crash theory, “theoretical calculations tell
us that the satellites created cannot contain any dark
matter.” This assumption, however, stands in contradiction
to another observation. “The stars in the satellites we
have observed are moving much faster than predicted by the
Gravitational Law. If classical physics holds this can only
be attributed to the presence of dark matter,” Manuel
Metz states.
Or one must assume that some basic fundamental principles of
physics have hitherto been incorrectly understood. “The
only solution would be to reject Newton´s classical theory of
gravitation,” says Pavel Kroupa. “We probably live
in a non-Newton universe. If this is true, then our observations
could be explained without dark matter.” Such approaches
are finding support amongst other research teams in Europe, too.
The deviations detected in the satellite galaxy data support the
hypothesis that in space where extremely weak accelerations
predominate, a "modified Newton dynamic" must be
adopted. This conclusion has far-reaching consequences for
fundamental physics in general, and also for cosmological
theories. Famous astrophysicist Bob Sanders from the University
of Groningen declares: “The authors of this paper make a
strong argument. Their result is entirely consistent with the
expectations of modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND), but
completely opposite to the predictions of the dark matter
hypothesis. Rarely is an observational test so definite.”
Source: Bonn University
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>> This diagram shows the development of a spiral galaxy
like our Milky Way in an Electric Universe.
[Click to enlarge]
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The long-range (1/r) electromagnetic interaction between pairs
of intergalactic current filaments, known as "Birkeland
currents," attracts matter from a vast volume of space.
Where two filaments intersect, they form a spiral galaxy through
the powerful electromagnetic "Z-pinch" effect. This
concept has been tested in the lab and by 'particle-in-cell'
supercomputer simulations. It shows that the extremely weak
and limited-range (1/r2) force of gravity has negligible
effect in forming a spiral galaxy. It requires no dark matter or MOND!
Formation of the Milky Way galaxy in a cosmic Z-pinch offers a
simple explanation for the discovery of satellite galaxies
rotating in the same sense in the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.
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>> The Z-pinch simulation (left) and the plasma 'witness plate'
equatorial pattern produced in a supernova discharge (right).
[Click to enlarge]
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The immense scalability of plasma phenomena allows us to use
the dramatic example of the effects of a plasma Z-pinch on a
stellar scale in
supernova
1987A to explain what happens on a galactic scale. The Milky
Way is formed in the central plasma column of the Z-pinch.
Surrounding the Milky Way axially are a number of interacting
plasma filaments arranged in concentric cylinders that have
the potential to produce satellite galaxies. The number of
filaments follows a characteristic pattern that suggests they
will not be found "in hundreds." Peratt writes,
“Because the electrical
current-carrying filaments are parallel, they attract via the
Biot-Savart force law, in pairs but sometimes three. This
reduces the 56 filaments over time to 28 filaments, hence
the 56 and 28 fold symmetry patterns. In actuality, during
the pairing, any number of filaments less than 56 may be
recorded as pairing is not synchronized to occur uniformly.
However, there are 'temporarily stable' (longer state)
durations at 42, 35, 28, 14, 7, and 4 filaments. Each pair
formation is a vortex that becomes increasingly complex.”
The rotating "vortexes" of the Milky Way and its
satellites are driven electrically and will be in the same
sense and roughly coplanar.
On a grand scale, the recently
discovered evidence for a
preferred handedness and axial alignment of spiral galaxies
can be explained simply as the result of the general vector
of electric current flow in our small corner of an Electric
Universe of unknown size and age, remembering that the big
bang notions of the size and age of the universe are worthless.
The commentary in the
MIT
Technology Review is revealing:
“..the axis of this alignment
points directly towards the mysterious cold spot in the cosmic
microwave background, which was discovered in the southern
hemisphere in 2004. Nobody knows what caused the cold spot
although there are no shortage of ideas. The cold spot could
be evidence that our galaxy sits in the middle of a supervoid,
a giant empty bubble, say some researchers. Others say it could
be the imprint of a parallel universe beyond our own.”
The evidence2 is available
that shows the "cosmic microwave background" (CMB) radiation
is not "background" at all. It is a local radio "fog"
from interacting Birkeland filaments within the Milky Way.
The "cold spot" confirms that the "CMB" has no
cosmological significance. It is commonsense that one hemisphere
will be "colder" than the other, unless we just happen
to be dead-center in the electric current stream of our arm of the
Milky Way—an unlikely situation. As for the suggestion of a
"parallel universe," it is a meaningless juxtaposition
of words - sadly a regular feature of modern physics.
Clearly, the accepted gravitational cosmology of the big bang is
hopelessly wrong. Galaxies are not formed by collisions and
gravitational accretion. Such a mechanism can only produce random
results, which we do not observe. The latest crisis for cosmology
comes from relying on unempirical mathematical theorists, whose
inappropriate training, dogged use of unsuitable concepts and
confused language has led us astray for the entire 20th
century. We are overdue for a sensible breakthrough in the 21st!
We are not required to guess or invent new laws. The laws
we have are sufficient to understand the Electric Universe - when we
truly understand those laws and where and when they apply.
Wal Thornhill
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References
1. Edwin Hubble, The Problem
of the Expanding Universe, Science, February 27, 1942.
2. G. Verschuur, On the
Critical Ionization Velocity Effect in Interstellar Space and
Possible Detection of Related Continuum Emission, IEEE
Transactions on Plasma Science, Aug. 2007, Vol. 35, Issue 4,
Part 1, pp.759-766.
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