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The Electric Sky is a 6” x 9” soft-cover book of 256 pages with full-color graphics authored by EE Professor Don Scott, a member of the Thunderbolts editorial staff. The book contains sensible science for the experts written for the public, and represents the first substantial public exposition of the latest developments in the Electric Universe/Plasma Cosmology that is challenging the current “gravity only” system of thinking. It further undermines the “scientistic” cosmological mythology of the “big bang” and the “expanding” universe, while replacing it with confirmed electrical engineering and high energy plasma explanations.
An old thinker, one William of Occam said, Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. (New creations ought not be multiplied beyond necessity.) This is the classic razor used to slice bad arguments to bits and might be used on black holes, dark matter, and other new "creations" expressly employed to justify wrong ideas. Without resorting to these sensational, imaginary chimeras, the electrical paradigm combined with an understanding of intrinsic redshift solves the impossible energies and constructs needed by the prevailing model.
The chapters in the book cover the history of Electric Universe/plasma cosmology, the electric sun in depth, Arp’s findings on redshift and the implications for quasars, galaxies, and gamma ray bursters. Professor Scott gives a simple electrical explanation for the solar magnetic polarity reversal, something that hitherto has been particularly baffling. This book is a great read.
The author earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Electrical
Engineering at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT. Following
graduation he worked for General Electric in Schenectady, NY, and
Pittsfield, MA. He earned a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering at the
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts, and was a
member of the faculty of the Department of Electrical & Computer
Engineering at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst from 1959 until
his retirement in 1998. During that time he was the recipient of
several good-teaching awards. He was, at various times, Assistant
Department Head, Director of the undergraduate program, Graduate
admissions coordinator, and Director of the College of Engineering’s
Video Instructional Program.
In 1987, the McGraw-Hill Book Company published his 730-page textbook, An Introduction To Circuit Analysis – A Systems Approach. He has authored numerous scientific papers and chapters.
He is a lifelong amateur astronomer. Some of the author’s images of astronomical objects can be viewed at: www.astrotes.info
“I really love
this book. It is causing me to rethink a great deal of my own
work. I am convinced that The Electric Sky deserves the widest
possible readership…. I felt genuine excitement while reading and
felt I was delving into a delicious feast of new ideas.”
“You don't have to be
an astronomer to enjoy this book. It's an exciting story about how a
small group of physicists, engineers and other scientists have
challenged the ‘establishment’ – the ‘big science’ astronomers who
are reluctant to listen to anyone outside their own elite circle.”
– Lewis E. Franks, PhD, Stanford University,
Fellow of the IEEE (1977), Professor Emeritus and Head of the
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of
Massachusetts (Retired).
“Gravity was the focus of 20th century astronomy. For the 21st century, it will be
electromagnetism and plasmas in addition. This forthcoming
scientific revolution is presaged by the rapid pace of discoveries
about our own star, the Sun, and its total plasma environment, and
discoveries about the nature of the interstellar medium."
– Timothy E. Eastman, PhD, Head of Raytheon's space physics and astrophysics
groups. He is well known for his work on magnetospheric boundary layers and the initial
discovery of the Low Latitude Boundary Layer.
http://www.plasmas.org/space-astrophys.htm
“It is gratifying to see the work of my mentor, Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfvén enumerated
with such clarity. I am also pleased to see that Dr. Scott has given
general readers such a lucid and understandable summary of my own work.”
– Anthony L. Peratt, PhD,
USC, Fellow of the IEEE (1999), former scientific advisor to the U.S.
Department of Energy and member of the Associate Laboratory
Directorate of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is the author
of Physics of the Plasma Universe and numerous published papers.
Chapters
1. Introduction
2. Science Rules
3. Some "Ugly Facts"
4. How Big Is the Space Around Us?
5. The Case of the Missing Matter
6. The Case of the Missing Neutrinos
7. Cosmology's Roots
8. The Plasma Pioneers
9. Shake Hands With the Plasma
10. The Electric Sun
11. The Sun's Electrical Atmosphere
12. Open Magnetic Fields and Other Fictions
13. The Solar System
14. Stars (Electric Cosmology)
15. Stragglers, Bursters, and Pulsars
16. Galaxies
17. Redshift and the Big Bang
18. Lowering the Drawbridge
App. A: Birkeland Currents
App. B: Computation of Redshift Values
App. C: Solar Electron Flux
App. D: Open Letter to the Scientific Community
Index
List of Plates
Venus
Globular Cluster M13
Spiral galaxy M33
The Bubble Nebula
The Horse-head Nebula
The Pelican Nebula
V838 Monoceros
“Cosmic” Microwave Background
Galaxy 0313-192
Dr. Hannes Alfvén
Galaxy NGC 4650A
The Eagle Nebula, M16
The cover picture is an image of the Helix Nebula, NGC 7293 taken by the author at his observatory in Arizona.
In recent years we have read about the “discovery” of black holes, neutron stars, cosmic strings, and such things as dark energy and invisible matter. Anyone who reads Sagan, Hawking, and the other popular astronomy writers can see how complicated and counter-intuitive the concepts of modern astrophysics are becoming. Even so, until recently, I assumed that astronomers and astrophysicists knew what they were talking about.
Now – I’m sure they do not.
It was when astrophysicists began saying things that I, as an electrical engineer, knew were wrong that I began to have serious doubts about their pronouncements. But I agonized over whether those doubts were legitimate. Even though my life-long avocation has been amateur astronomy, my formal background is in engineering – not astronomy or cosmology.
Earning a doctorate in electrical engineering eventually led to my teaching that subject at a major university for thirty-nine years. What troubled me most was when astrophysicists began saying things about magnetic fields that any of my junior-year students could show were completely incorrect.
If astrophysicists were saying things that were demonstrably wrong in my area of expertise, could it be that they were making similar mistakes in their own field as well? I began to investigate more of the pronouncements of modern astrophysicists and the reasoning behind them. This book is an account of what I unearthed when I started digging into this question.
It is becoming clear that knowledge acquired in electric plasma laboratories over the last century affords insights and simpler, more elegant, more compelling explanations of most cosmological phenomena than those that are now espoused in astrophysics. And yet astrophysicists seem to be intent on ignoring them. Thus, lacking these fundamental electrical concepts, cosmologists have charged into a mind-numbing mathematical cul de sac, creating on the way a tribe of invisible entities – some of which are demonstrably impossible.
I have tried to hack a path through these hypotheses, contradictions, and alternative explanations that will be clear and understandable for the average interested reader to follow. The answers to the questions we ask are not stressfully convoluted and arcane – rather, they are logical, straightforward, and reasonable – and long overdue.
I hope your journey through these pages will be meaningful, educational, perhaps exciting, and most important of all, eye-opening.
DES
Chapter 1
Introduction
A revolution is
beginning in astronomy and cosmology that will rival the one set off by
Copernicus and Galileo. The stream of increasingly bizarre
pronouncements coming from astronomers and cosmologists has recently
encountered a serious challenge. This challenge is led by a cadre of
scientists and engineers, several of whom were Nobel Prize winning
pioneers. They are offering simpler, verifiable explanations about the
makeup and functioning of the cosmos. Their new ideas, in more ways than
one, are electrifying the discourse in astrophysics.
The defenders of the
present cosmological realm are resisting this intrusion into their once
exclusive domain. But on-going discoveries about how electric plasma
behaves in space are relentlessly forcing dramatic changes in the way we
view the universe. The discipline of electric plasma physics
– which until lately has been outside the realm of astronomy – is
quickly displacing many of the outmoded theories of traditional
cosmology and astrophysics. We now know that cosmic space is full of
electricity (electric plasma) and over the last several decades the
study of this form of matter has developed into an established body of
scientific knowledge.
Questions and Answers
When we were children,
most of us looked up in awe at the night sky at one time or another and
asked, “What are stars, Daddy? What lights them up?” He might have
answered, “They’re little Suns – just like our Sun, but far, far away.”
None of us was told
that the stars worked electrically. Everyone knew the stars were not
electric lights.
As we grew up, we may
have read science books in which astrophysicists declared that stars are
continuously burning hydrogen bombs – and that they condensed from
spinning clouds of gas and dust. Today they tell us that stars even more
massive than our Sun are rotating faster than dentists’ drills. They say
that in the cores of galaxies, monstrous invisible Black Holes suck in
everything around them, even light – but that “little black holes” spit
jets of matter back out. And they claim that 96% of the material in the
entire universe is invisible. Are these responses any more believable or
satisfying than those that Daddy offered us?
Can you make sense out
of press releases and TV programs that attempt to explain the newest
astronomical “discoveries” – things like invisible dark energy, warped
11-dimensional spaces, and black holes that spit out matter? If not, you
have lots of company.
The time to search for
some realistic, intelligent, scientific answers has arrived. And those
sensible answers are out there for those who are ready to listen.
Plasma physicists know
that 96% of the universe is not made up of “invisible
matter” but rather of matter in the plasma state. Electromagnetic forces
between electrical charges are many orders of magnitude stronger than
Newton’s gravitational force, and we are finding that deep space is
filled with electrical charges and magnetic energy. In fact, using the
accepted estimated value of the magnetic field strength in the volume
between our Sun and its nearest stellar neighbor, this field stores an
amount of energy that would keep the Sun radiating for about 200 years
[1]
.
Astrophysicists do not
study experimental plasma research in graduate school
[2].
They rarely take any courses that discuss Maxwell’s equations
[3] and
electromagnetic field theory. Thus they attempt to explain each new
discovery using what they do study – gravity, magnetism, and fluid
dynamics – the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century tools of their
forefathers, Kepler and Newton. Consequently their methods have not kept
up with the science of the Nineteenth Century, let alone the
Twenty-First. No wonder they do not understand that many cosmic
phenomena are due to forces other than gravity, fluid flow, and the
magnetism of lodestones. When questions arise about the failure of their
incomplete models, cosmologists often invoke “new properties” of
magnetic fields – properties that magnetism simply does not have, or
they propose the existence of unobservable entities and forces. They
almost never reexamine their basic assumptions or rethink their
hypotheses.
The cosmos in fact
does not contain the mysteriously undetectable entities that present
astrophysical theories require. Modern, straightforward explanations of
all the phenomena astronomers find so enigmatic are now available to us.
Anyone interested in astrophysics needs to become aware of the
properties of the electric plasma that fills more than 99%
of the universe. Ours really is an Electric Sky.
Alfvén’s Warning
In February 1981,
eleven years after Swedish electrical engineer Hannes Alfvén won the
Nobel Prize in Physics, he published yet another book
[4].
This one was called Cosmic Plasma
[5].
By disregarding Alfvén’s new text, as they had his earlier works, the
astrophysics community did not heed his warnings that they were working
their way down a dead-end path strewn with errors of understanding. The
complicated maze that astrophysics has become in the last few years is a
direct result of years of ignoring Alfvén’s work and his advice. Hannes
Alfvén is the central figure in the emerging electric plasma cosmology.
All our space probes
that have been equipped to detect separated electrical charges –
electric plasma – have found it, lots of it. The behavior of these
plasma clouds is scalable, that is to say, giant cosmic plasmas behave
in much the same way (obey the same physical laws) that small laboratory
plasmas do here on Earth. Therefore we are able to create accurate
models of cosmic-scale phenomena in the lab and study them.
Technology and Science
>People have great
confidence in science these days. Recent advances in medicine,
communications technology, computers, chemistry, genetics, and
information science have made our lives better. We look at the
achievements in these fields of human endeavor and acknowledge them with
admiration. “These scientists, doctors and engineers really
know what they are doing.”
Today most people have
cell phones. New surgical procedures, hospital techniques,
instrumentation, and medicines are saving, prolonging, and improving the
quality of our lives. We have digital devices we can put in our pockets
that hold 6000 books, more than most people read in a lifetime. Through
GPS receivers we can tell exactly where we are anywhere on the surface
of Earth. The latest stock market report is available to us while we are
mountain climbing in Asia. We flew to the Moon decades ago and we have
sent landers to Venus and Mars. We have orbited Jupiter and Saturn and
visited several of their moons. Presently another of our interplanetary
probes is on its way to Pluto. Four deep-space probes are now near the
outer limits of our Sun’s reach – the heliopause. We have orbiting,
computer-driven telescopes that can see a thousand times better than the
largest earthbound optical observatories of only a few decades ago.
We have put our faith
in scientists and engineers, and it has clearly paid off – except in
astronomy (and possibly archeology and geology).
Why would we want to
single out these fields and cast doubt on their results?
The answer is because
there are no tangible, usable products from which we can judge the
validity of theories emanating from sciences that deal with events that
happened long, long ago and far, far away. Professional astronomers
judge their success by the degree to which other astronomers believe and
accept their ideas. They do not produce results that we, the public, can
physically evaluate: They just send up rockets, take pictures of the
night sky, write papers, and tell us impressive stories about how it
supposedly works and how it supposedly got there. Most of their recent
explanations are counterintuitive and almost impossible to understand.
This does not mean everything they claim is necessarily wrong, but how
can we actually verify what they are telling us?
The same question can
be raised about the archeologists: They dig holes around the world, they
look at bones and shards, they write papers, and they tell impressive
stories about mankind’s history. Theoretical geologists also tell
impressive stories about how the continents have shifted and how and
when the mountains formed.
Both these groups are
considered successful if other archeologists and geologists accept their
hypotheses. Popularized versions of their theories are published in
Scientific American, Discover, and National Geographic.
None of these fields (archeology, geological history, and astronomy) is
able to produce results that can be tested experimentally. So how can
these researchers judge the correctness of their conclusions without
considering a range of possible explanations that are based on
different assumptions?
This book will not
specifically address problems in geology or archeology. They are
mentioned here only for completeness – to point out that both these
branches of science have difficulties similar to astrophysics. There is
almost no way to judge the validity of theories that deal exclusively
with phenomena that happened long, long ago and far, far away – with
things that we cannot directly get our hands on. This is not the fault
of the investigators in those areas; it is simply an inherent problem
for them. How do they cope with it? This is one of the questions the
first few chapters will address.
There is an important
difference between science and technology. An old professor of mine, who
was Russian, once said to me, “Do you know how they used to test a new
bridge in Russia? They put the engineer who designed it under
the bridge, and then they marched the army across it.”
Astrophysicists do not design anything that we can march the army
across. But today, if you are an engineer who designs a bridge that
falls down or a cell phone that does not receive a signal, your failures
will quickly be embarrassingly obvious to all. The fruits of technology
are real and are testable (do they work?). Most of the results of the
science of astrophysics are not testable.
We ought to question
whether our trust is as well placed in the untestable pronouncements of
astrophysicists as it is in the work of the engineers and technicians
who give those scientists the tools they use. There is no doubt that the
Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer infrared orbiting telescope, the
Chandra orbiting x-ray observatory, SOHO[6],
and the magnificent, new, big, ground-based telescopes are all genuine
technical marvels. The images and data that are retrieved
from them are stunning in clarity and precise in detail. They produce
real and accurate scientific data. But are the published interpretations
and hypotheses that attempt to explain this data as accurate as the
tools that provide that data in the first place? We must learn to
distinguish between the quality of the technical tools
that are used and the quality of the scientific conclusions and
theories that are being formulated by those who use those tools.
In this book, we will
look at many of the theories of present-day astrophysics and compare
them to corresponding answers that have arisen from the study of
electric plasma. But before we can propose any new alternative cosmology
– a Plasma Cosmology to replace the presently “accepted” astrophysical
and cosmological belief structure – we have to examine some of the basic
problems inherent in those accepted ideas. Before we buy into any new
way of looking at the cosmos, we need to ask, “What’s wrong with the old
way?” To answer this, we must establish some fundamental guidelines
about how a true science discovers knowledge. We must be clear in our
own minds how to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. There
are basic requirements and inherent limitations involved in the
scientific method with which we must be familiar. In fact there is more
than one scientific method, and we have to be clear about the
differences among them.
When a dentist repairs
a cavity in your tooth, the first thing he does is to excise the decay.
The first third of this book is similarly devoted to exposing many of
the things that are wrong with the present paradigms of astronomy and
cosmology. These first six chapters are not intended to be an
indiscriminate rant against mainstream science but rather a
dispassionate exposé of some of its real deficiencies. We must take a
cold, hard, analytical look at the methods of modern science in general
and astrophysics in particular.
The only way we can
judge the scientific output of astrophysics is to ask: Is there a better
way of looking at the cosmos that answers our questions in a simpler,
more straightforward way – one that does not require hypothetical
entities and counterintuitive notions? Has the astrophysics field kept
up to date with the rest of science? Is it making use of all the modern
scientific tools, techniques and data that are available? Is it open to
hypotheses that look at old data in new ways? These questions will be
explored in the first three chapters.
In order to make
informed judgments about how stars can affect each other (or possibly
collide), we need to have a sense of how far they are from each other.
We need to have an intuitive, conceptual model of how big galaxies are
and how far apart they are. This is provided in chapter 4.
A key example of one
of the shortcomings of present mainstream astrophysics is that so many
things seem to be “missing.” There is missing matter, invisible dark
energy, invisible “strings,” and too few solar neutrinos. These are
discussed in the fifth and sixth chapters.
After detailing these
criticisms in the first six chapters, we progress to the main content of
this work – a description of the experimentally verified properties of
electric plasma, how they pertain to what we see in the sky, and how
they avoid the pitfalls we have just examined.
Beginning in chapter
7, with a sequence of scientists and discoveries that have led to our
basic understanding of electric plasma, we start to see that the sky is
indeed highly electrical in nature. The hypotheses of these plasma
scientists on the subjects of solar, stellar, and galactic behavior are
careful extrapolations of their demonstrated experimental results and
physical principles. They do not involve invisible matter
or unseen forces or “new science” – claims that the laws of physics must
be different out there in deep space (where we cannot falsify them) from
what they are here on Earth.
We will then take a
close look at some of the obviously electrical properties of our Sun,
the solar system, the stars, and our galaxy. The work of Dr. Halton C.
Arp on the property of starlight called “redshift” (and the way his work
has been received by the astrophysical community) is so closely entwined
with the problems of accepted astrophysical theory that we devote an
entire chapter to it.
Finally, we will
attempt to answer the question, “So what?” Why is it important that the
average person knows about what is going on now with science in general
and with astrophysics in particular? How will it affect me?
The main thrust of
this book is that the time is ripe for informed people from outside
astrophysics to demand reasonable answers to reasonable questions and to
evaluate what the astrophysical theoreticians have been telling us.
If, as we will claim,
the causes of most of the observed phenomena of modern astronomy are
electrical in nature, do you need a degree in electrical engineering
before you can understand them? Indeed not. The average informed person
can understand and make rational judgments about these
ideas. All it requires is the time and patience to read and to think
logically and critically about the issues. Some basic facts and a few
new concepts will suffice. So the main goal of this work is to convince
you, the reader, that you really do have both the capability and
responsibility to make informed, critical judgments about the
pronouncements of established scientists. A careful reading of these
pages will enable you to make an informed assessment of this new
plasma-based alternative cosmology.
Interested plasma
scientists and electrical engineers have been thrashing out the various
hypotheses of Plasma Cosmology in their conferences and publications. So
far, most astrophysicists have completely ignored them. Instead of
engaging in further futile attempts to persuade the astrophysical
community to seriously consider these new ideas, a growing band of
plasma scientists, engineers, and a few brave cosmologists and
astronomers are simply bypassing them. A paradigm based on electric
plasma, which does not find new discoveries to be enigmatic and puzzling
but instead to be predictable and consistent, is slowly but surely
gaining ground. But it may well be that general acceptance of these new
ideas will have to wait until the present occupants of the astrophysics
power structure have retired from the scene.
Right now what is
needed most is the public’s realization that astrophysics, led by
insular theoreticians and not by well-informed, broadly educated
scientists, has stumbled far down that erroneous path predicted by
Alfvén.
A cadre of plasma
scientists and engineers, who are presently employed in industry,
government labs, and universities – but not in most astronomy
departments – is quietly working to modernize cosmology. Will this new
breed of scientists and engineers,[7]
who are waiting in the wings, be called upon to clean things up? Or will
the incomprehensible fog of black holes, dark energy, magically
unobservable matter, and other fanciful fictions be allowed to continue
to shroud our true understanding of the cosmos?
Of course, the stars
are not electric lights – at least not in the sense that we know
electric lights. But they are basically electrical in
nature, and their observed properties can truly be understood only from
an electrical viewpoint. Let us see how.
[1]
E. J. Lerner, Private communication.
I have received your book and have devoured it in a
day! Great reading!...Is there a sequel coming out? It is the sort of
book that needs to be in every school library. −
Garry Maxfield
I just finished reading The Electric Sky by Donald Scott.
Great work!! I was most impressed. It was well written, convincing
and balanced. I was especially impressed with his explanation of
the history of astrophysics and why government and academic
astronomers and astrophysicists and the scientific press insist on
clinging to failed theories of cosmology. − David O. Smith
I had always
believed the highly educated, professional science community, though
in a much more narrowly focused way, followed the same type of
approach in their individual studies for whichever field they
pursued. It is disheartening to see how wrong I was.
Where We Are Headed
It’s Time to Decide
[2]
“Double Layers and Circuits in Astrophysics,” Hannes Alfvén, IEEE Transactions
on Plasma Science, Vol. PS-14, No. 6, Dec. 1986
[3]
The fundamental mathematical relationships upon which all of mankind’s
electrical knowledge is based.
[4]
Other books by Alfvén (1908-1995) are: On the Origin of the Solar
System (1954); Atom, Man and the Universe (1964); Worlds –
Antiworlds: Anitimatter in Cosmology (1966); The Great Computer:
A Vision (1968); Living on the Third Planet (1972); Evolution of the Solar System (with G. Arrhenius) (1976). Also see
http://plasmauniverse.info
[5]
Cosmic Plasma, by H. Alfvén, D. Reidel Pub., 1981.
[6]
The SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
[7]
See Appendix D – An open letter to the scientific community signed by
leading plasma engineers and physicists.
When a theory as
well researched and backed by actual laboratory studies as the
“Electric Universe” is presented to mainstream cosmology only to be
rejected out of hand is an abomination to all of the sciences. Why
are they so blind? If it is just so the grant money stays flowing
they have no business being scientists. I THOUGHT SCIENCE HAD
PROGRESSED BEYOND THE FLAT EARTHERS A LONG TIME AGO.
I never really
bought the Big Bang theory. Though it is backed by
some relevant scientific
theory so was “Star Trek”. I found a copy of Eric Learner’s book
“the Big Bang Never Happened “ at a school book sale. Although I
don’t agree with everything I was fascinated with plasma
experiments’ “spiral galaxy” formations. A light went on and I
began to read all I could about this subject.
I believe you are
on the correct path with this theory. The comet observations alone
should convince the skeptics there is something to the electric
universe theory.
The Electric Sky
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