Jan
16, 2007
Bodies and Circuits
The flood of surprising space-age observations is bursting the
explanatory limits of conventional views, which date from the
gaslight era. A new view of the universe is emerging, one based on
the modern discoveries of the electrical properties of plasma.
An apple fell on
Isaac Newton’s head and he conceived the gravity universe.
An aurora “fell” on Kristian
Birkeland’s
head and he conceived the plasma universe. The story of
Newton and the apple is apocryphal. But Birkeland trekked to
the Norwegian Arctic, stood under the aurora, and took
measurements that revealed the presence of electric
currents.
Newton lived in
a world of apple trees, gaslights and gears. Birkeland lived
on the threshold of a world of aurora probes, electric
lights and plasma.
It’s been over
300 years since Newton encountered his apple, and his
conception of gravity, now modified by Einstein and
supplemented with similar mechanical theories of solids,
liquids and gasses, has become the popular vision of
space—an almost-empty universe of self-contained bodies. And
now it’s been 100 years since Birkeland encountered his
aurora, and his conception of electric currents in space,
developed by such pioneers as Irving Langmuir and Hannes
Alfven, has been a footnote to standard theory, rarely
called upon except to explain the occasional curiosity in
space.
But aided by the
new tools of the space age, we’ve discovered that the
earlier “curiosities” are much more than footnotes. They are
predictable patterns, and they point to radically new
possibilities. The cosmic theater has outgrown the Newtonian
stage, and we need a larger setting to understand the
broader cosmic drama. Instead of a vision of isolated bodies
turning gear-like in a
vacuum, we need a
vision of electrical circuits embedded in a conducting
medium whose components drive each other and may be in
resonance. We have left the familiar world of solids,
liquids and gasses. We have entered a world of plasma, where
the rules are different and more complex. We now live in an
Electric Universe.
Plasma is any
substance that contains charged particles: negatively
charged electrons, positively charged ions, or dust
particles that have an excess of either electrons or ions.
Fluorescent and neon lights are plasma. Lightning is plasma.
Earth’s magnetosphere, the solar wind, and the
sun itself are
plasma. The glowing
nebulas in space,
often called gas clouds by mistake, are plasma. So are the
dark clouds, composed mostly of molecules of hydrogen, but
revealing themselves to be plasma by their magnetic fields
and radio emissions. Back on Earth, the familiar world
dissolves in the realization that power lines are plasma;
molten rock is plasma; even raindrops may be plasma.
A region of
plasma may be quiescent and almost indistinguishable from a
solid or a liquid or a gas. But if a variability of
sufficient intensity develops in some property—from shock,
say, or a magnetic field variation, or an electric current
running through it—the quiescent plasma can become active.
Active plasma exhibits electrical behavior.
In regions of
active plasma, sheets and filaments of charged particles
flow, as can be seen in auroras and solar prominences. Flows
of charged particles are electric currents. Persistent
currents “close” in circuits; otherwise the charged
particles would accumulate and quickly stop the flow.
This—the
existence of circuits—is the essential distinction between
the gravity vision and the Electric Universe vision. In the
former, theorists use the term “plasma,” but they are
thinking of the kinetic theory of gasses modified to
accommodate magnetic field effects. They overlook the
electrical behaviors of plasma circuits. In the Electric
Universe vision, these electrical behaviors explain
straightforwardly the many phenomena that have appeared
curious and enigmatic to space-age explorers: radio and
x-ray emissions from planets and
comets, polar jets of
braided plasma filaments and hourglass-shaped nebulosities
of stars (such as the Herbig-Haro objects imaged above),
beams of energetic particles along the spin axes of
galaxies, and everywhere glowing filaments and magnetic
fields. The existence of plasma circuits underlies the
contradiction between the isolated bodies of the gravity
universe and the connected components of the Electric
Universe.
The behavior of
active plasma at every point is influenced—or driven—by
conditions in the rest of the circuit. Fluctuations are
often driven to form double layers (DLs)—thin regions of
opposite charge build-up with large voltage drops between
them. DLs are electrical phenomena that do not appear
in observations of magnetic fields. The electric forces in
DLs can be very much stronger than gravitational and
mechanical forces. Gas theory modified to encompass
“magnetism” will overlook them.
DLs separate
plasma into cells and filaments that have different
qualities—different temperatures or densities or
compositions. These cellular and filamentary structures show
up especially in planetary nebulas, but they can be
invisible in optical wavelengths and appear in x-ray or
radio observations.
DLs are “noisy,”
emitting radio waves over a broad band of frequencies. They
can sort matter into regions of like composition and
condense or rarify it. DLs can accelerate charged particles
to cosmic ray energies.
And DLs can
explode. Energy from the rest of the circuit flows into the
break, and the explosion can release much more energy than
is present locally. This effect is seen in flares on the sun
and is likely responsible for the outbursts of novas, the
so-called “exploding” stars.
The
electromagnetic forces in currents squeeze the conducting
channels into thin thread-like filaments. These filaments
attract each other in pairs, but when they get close,
instead of merging, they spiral around each other. Pairs of
pairs, and more, may entwine into plasma “cables” that can
transmit electrical power over enormous distances. We see
these cables as the “jets” that connect Herbig-Haro stars
and active galactic nuclei with DLs that may lie many
light-years away.
But the “cables”
can be invisible, too. These make up the galactic circuits
that power the stars, analogs of the power lines , invisible
at night, that carry electricity from generating stations to
city lights. The “flux tube” that connects Jupiter’s
moon Io to the bright
spots in Jupiter’s auroras is an invisible plasma cable,
undetected until a space probe flew through it.
The new vision
of the cosmos connects components at one scale into circuits
that are coupled to and driven by circuits at larger scales.
This new cosmos is laced with hierarchies of interacting
circuits.
The question
arises: Where is the generator? At the largest scale we can
observe, that of superclusters of galaxies, all we see are
loads, power-consuming objects. If there is a
generator, it lies beyond the reach of our telescopes. But
the question belies an assumption carried over from the
older vision: the assumption that the universe begins with
neutral matter and that something—a generator—must separate
charges to start the currents flowing. But it’s equally
plausible to assume that the primordial condition of the
universe was (or is) one of already separated charges. In
any case, what we observe, and where our inquiry begins, is
that charges are combining—electrically—in front of our eyes
and our newly invented sensors.
_______________________
Please check out Professor Don Scott's
new book The Electric Sky.
NOTE TO
READERS: Wallace Thornhill, David Talbott, and Anthony
Peratt will share the stage with other investigators of
planetary catastrophe at the British Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies “Conference 2007” August
31-September 2.
GET INFO