A NEW PARADIGM OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT - THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE Article 6 : The Workings of the Sun * by Rev Nicholas Sykes The currently generally accepted model of the Sun (as well as other stars) operates on the premise that it functions as a nuclear furnace. The Electric Universe paradigm offers a radically different theory of the workings of the Sun, as has already been indicated in these articles. I would like now to sow the seeds of some doubt in readers who are content with the currently generally accepted model of the Sun, before going into any further detail about the EU model of the Sun. We should note that what has become the "nuclear furnace" model of the Sun was first developed by theoretical researches in the years between the First and Second World Wars by Sir Arthur Eddington, at a time when the theory of Relativity was beginning its dominance. Soon after this, men of science began to become greatly impressed by the proposed new applications of nuclear technology both for peaceful purposes and to the ends of war. Furthermore it has been assumed for many years that it would just be a matter of time and the refining of research to discover some way of controlling the process of nuclear fusion which was at the heart of nuclear bomb production. When a nuclear bomb explodes, the nuclear reaction is said to be "uncontrolled" - there is no ability to slow it down or have it produce a smaller amount of power over an extended time. To discover and master controlled nuclear fusion has been an aim of scientists and technologists for some six decades, with the incentive that the basic fuel for it is plentiful and readily available. It was never envisaged when nuclear technology began that the tough nut of controlled fusion would prove to be such a hard one to crack, and so nobody had any qualms about modelling the Sun on just this basis: not being, obviously, an ephemeral phenomenon like a hydrogen bomb (here today and gone tomorrow), if it were to be modelled upon nuclear fusion it must be a controlled fusion furnace that could continue producing energy for billions of years. Electric Universe theorists will note that the nuclear model of the Sun had its beginnings in a time when Physicists had begun to turn away from the experimental verification of their thought-based models - and indeed Albert Einstein's work was a prime example of this. Eddington himself became the chief supporter and expositor of Relativity in Britain. Previous articles have noted how the corpus of Einstein's work achieved almost universal acceptance without any experimental component in its conception, and such verifications as have ever been claimed for it are now under severely critical scrutiny from an increasing body of independent scientists. It is not surprising therefore that the proposed nuclear model of the Sun achieved rapid general acceptance without an adequate experimental or observational basis. After this model was generally accepted Physicists tried to "verify" it, perhaps most famously by trying to detect the neutrinos that such a nuclear reaction in the heart of the Sun would have to produce. They found that there were for sure some neutrinos found to be emitted by the Sun - which can be taken to be verification that there are nuclear reactions occurring there, but not anything like the number that would have to be produced if practically the whole radiant energy of the Sun were actually produced by nuclear reaction. Considerable theoretical fancy footwork on the nature of neutrinos is to this day going on to try to resolve the deficiency problem, but there are other unexplained features of the Sun too that should cause most serious doubts about the validity of the whole model. An educational website http://www.ehow.com/info_10018942_inner-workings-sun.html#ixzz1YEHuQHx P states: "The core is extremely hot. Under these conditions, nuclei that would normally repel each other fuse together instead. In the core, hydrogen joins together to make a helium nucleus. This releases positrons and neutrinos and radiation energy called gamma-ray photons. The fusion in the Sun's core also creates 99 percent of the Sun's heat or thermal energy. The rest of the sun becomes warm when the heat created by fusion moves outward from the core through the layers outside." There is one huge, unstated problem for this model, presumed as factual by the text books and websites: the observation - as opposed to the widespread contrary presumption repeated by this and other educational websites - that by far the hottest part of the Sun is not within the core, where the "furnace" would have to be, but around the outside of it. An international team of researchers points out that the deepest observable surface of the Sun yields a temperature of about 6,000 degrees Kelvin. As we peer into the darker interior of sunspots we see cooler regions, not hotter. But moving outward to the bottom of the corona, the temperature jumps spectacularly to almost 2 million degrees. Thus, the superheated shell of the Sun's corona reverses the expected temperature gradient predicted by models of internal heating. It is clear that an internally heated furnace of any sort, nuclear or otherwise, does not and could not work this way at all. The Sun's temperature gradient - increasing where a furnace model would predict a decrease - is given an explainable cause by the Electric Universe model, and this ought to make it a realistic contender for the minds of scientists and the general public. Indeed it ought to make the Electric Universe model an irresistible contender for research opportunities in the science departments of any new university - such as the University College of the Cayman Islands - that was brave enough and (ultimately to be proved) wise enough to take it on. Workings of the Sun This and the other articles in this series have been published by Cayman Net News.