A NEW PARADIGM OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT - THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE Article 9 : Gravity or Electricity - which one Rules the Universe? by Rev Nicholas Sykes It is common today to find certain terms in text books and educational websites that are intended to describe our universe. Such terms include "yellow dwarf star" for our sun, "interstellar gas, dust and giant molecular clouds", "Black Holes", including the one "at the very heart of our galaxy", "dark matter not visible to us", binary star systems that are formed "due to gravitational attraction", the "Oort Cloud", and many others. These terms and concepts are commonly used by today's scientific cognoscenti, and these experts do not take kindly, for the most part, to anybody who questions whether or not they are actually describing objective reality and whether any of these concepts are grounded and verified in experiment and observation. Some scientists however are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with such talk, because for one thing, this model (what I call the "old paradigm" science) is constantly being "tweaked" in ways that a more honest application of scientific method would not allow. In my physics laboratory in school many years ago, we would have spoken of "cooking" the results of an experiment to make them match what we think the experiment "ought" to have delivered. In today's science, how often have we heard the excited cry that such and such an observation has "sent us back to the drawing boards". However, when you follow up the literature on the particular matter, you nearly always find the astonishing results to get modified or downplayed so as better to fit the prevailing theory. In the wider world of academia, there are many students of science who have been told that their paper MUST demonstrate the prevailing theory, because if it doesn't, they won't get a grant. "Black holes" and "dark matter", as well as "dark energy", are all entities that have never been confirmed directly by any observation. Moreover, many people accept that their inherent nature makes direct observation of them impossible. They are, however, considered to be necessitated by a mathematical construction of the known universe, assuming that the universe "runs" by the weakest force known to man, namely gravitation. But what if that grand assumption were not true in the first place? What if the universe including our Sun "runs" by a much stronger force, namely electricity? As has been noted in a previous article, since we observe in everyday life that electrical forces are vastly stronger than gravitational forces, how long can it be maintained in all seriousness that for driving the universe the stronger force is to be ignored while the much weaker (gravitational) force is to be asserted? There is a human and historical cause for the assumption that it is gravity that runs the universe. This assumption is made because of our customary geocentricity, and because of the huge advance in understanding of the solar system that took place beginning in the seventeenth century through Sir Isaac Newton's Principia and the mathematical elucidation of solar system gravity to be found therein. We suppose that because it is gravitation that runs the earth in its relationship with the Sun (at least so far as we have understood it), the same must apply further out ad infinitum through our galaxy and throughout the whole cosmos. But if it is not gravitation but a much stronger force that runs the cosmos, the mathematical need for entities such as black holes, dark matter and dark energy immediately falls away. We should remember that from the seventeenth century standpoint, the great advances in understanding current electricity came centuries later. The unlikelihood of gravity being the force that runs the universe is shown by the following consideration. This can be verified by reference to The Electric Sky by Don Scott (see website referred to below). A fair scale model of the cosmos can represent one light-year (the distance travelled by light in one year) by one mile, and also represent one Astronomical Unit (distance from the Sun to Earth) by one inch. In the model the orbit of the Earth around the Sun will be represented by a circle with a one-inch radius. An 880,000-mile diameter Sun will scale down to a mark of approximately 1/100 inch across - just a speck. Pluto the outermost planet (or planetesimal) will orbit around this speck at a radius of approximately three and a half feet. But the nearest star on the model - another mere speck - will lie four and a half miles away. This is fairly typical of the closest distances between any of the stars in the galaxy. How conceivable can it be, therefore, for gravity to be the driving factor of a galaxy? We are thinking, comparatively speaking, of gravitational forces between 1/100th inch specks isolated by over four miles from one another. It may be, therefore, that the way the solar system runs, with our own as the only example we can know to any great extent, is quite different from the way the galaxy runs as a whole. Even if we are right in judging gravity to have a comparatively dominant influence upon the positions and movements of the planetary bodies of our system, that certainly does not imply we would be right to assume gravitational dominance for interstellar forces in a galaxy, and even less so, for intergalactic forces in the cosmos. Indeed, if the galaxies were powered by vast electrical energy transfers through the plasma environment of space, the puny force of gravitation in such a context could be safely ignored altogether. And this would mean that concepts such as dark matter, dark energy, black holes, the Oort Cloud, and even the Big Bang itself along with a host of other stalwarts should be put out to the pastures of science fiction. We shall take a closer look at this another time. For more information on the new paradigm, see www.holoscience.com