- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- See: Subject Index--Plasma, Link: http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/00subjectx.htm#Plasma
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