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    The Electric Universe: Slide Presentation & Notes by Wallace Thornhill
                                       
   (KRONIA, Beaverton, Oregon, 1997)

   Reviewed by

Amelia Acheson

   Thornhill's presentation offers a visual invitation to toss aside the
   straightjacket of paradigm paralysis and to explore the Solar System
   from an electric point of view. He covers an enormous range of
   phenomena, from subatomic particles through stellar evolution,
   floodlighting our understanding of the universe with insights garnered
   from mythical symbols, space probes, and the plasma physics lab. As an
   illustration, let me compare the received explanation re the tail of
   Halley's Comet with Thornhill's electric account, both presented in
   light of photographs returned by the ESA spacecraft Giotto in March,
   1986. The standard theory has it that: "Comets grow tails only when
   they get warm enough for ice and dust to boil off...[O]n the [sunward
   side], jets of gas and dust spurt from active holes in its surface and
   are illuminated by the sun."[1]

   Thornhill's electrical theory of the same data reads: "The fly-by of
   Comet Halley didn't show material being boiled away, instead it showed
   plasma beams centered on craters facing the Sun. What we saw were
   circular craters being formed right in front of the Giotto cameras --
   producing the same kind of scarring seen on asteroids and moons. That
   the material was being electrically removed was confirmed by the
   discovery of x-rays and high energy ions near the nucleus."

   Thornhill goes on to discuss non-gravitational orbital anomalies, then
   attacks received opinion which states that a comet is defined by its
   size and composition. He claims instead that it is the eccentricity of
   the orbit of a celestial body, moving it into regions of increasing
   electrical stress, which creates the visible tail. "A planet on such
   an orbit would put on a spectacular cometary display..." (p. 48.)

   Thornhill found his motivation to leave the comfortable highway of
   orthodox astronomy and explore the lonely out-back of a new paradigm
   in the study of catastrophist mythology. Along the way, he
   incorporated insights from plasma physics and atmospheric electrical
   phenomena. The process of synthesizing these viewpoints into a new
   paradigm involved years of research, but Thornhill summarizes it
   admirably in a single picture, one so startling that it appears three
   times in this notebook. The photo in question shows an ancient statue
   of Zeus, thunderbolt poised in his up-raised hand. But the object
   called "thunderbolt" isn't the familiar zigzag lightning symbol.
   Instead, it's a bundle of corkscrew filaments within a football-shaped
   envelope, a form recognizable today as a plasmoid. The ancient artist,
   who presumably had no experience in plasma labs, sculpted a likeness
   that has been meaningless for centuries -- until a replica was
   produced in modern times by connecting two electrodes in a vacuum to a
   high-voltage source. Is this a coincidence, or were the thunderbolts
   of Zeus interplanetary electrical discharges?

   Thornhill recommends Eric J. Lerner's, The Big Bang Never Happened,[2]
   as an introduction to the concepts of the electrical universe. I
   agree, but with a couple of reservations. It should come with a
   warning: Lerner's political and religious opinions (including, but not
   limited to, barbs against catastrophism) may be offensive to some
   readers. In addition, while describing the scalability of plasma
   phenomena, jumping from events in the lab to similar events in
   galaxies, his imagination fails him at the stellar scale. Once inside
   the orbit of Pluto, Lerner drops the electric paradigm for the more
   conventional gravitational Solar System and nuclear powered Sun. This
   -- the electric Solar System -- is precisely the arena that
   Thornhill's notebook covers.

   Thus, Thornhill challenges us to drop the accepted view of the Sun as
   an isolated fusion factory and think of it as a focal point of
   galactic electrical energy. He tells us: "...although it is true that
   a plasma is a good conductor, it is very limited in its ability to
   carry current. So, if the rate of charge separation within the galaxy
   exceeds the capability of the plasma threading the spiral arms to
   carry it, the plasma will be under constant stress and current will
   flow continuously, powering the stars within it." (p. 28.)

   In defense of this outrageous claim, Thornhill points out that stellar
   electrical discharges provide a simple explanation for solar phenomena
   that have baffled the atomic energy paradigm. Among these mysteries
   are: Where did all the neutrinos go if the Sun is fusion-powered? Why
   is the corona so much hotter than the surface of the Sun? Why do the
   outer layers of the Sun rotate faster than the inner? Why does the
   solar wind accelerate as it gets farther from the Sun? And what are
   sunspots, anyway? Thornhill's presentation compares close-ups of
   sunspots to Birkeland currents -- the distinctive twisted filaments
   that plasmas form because of their long-range attraction and
   close-range repulsion. He speculates that sunspot activity, as well as
   the size and color of a star, are functions of the strength of the
   galactic plasma field the star is embedded in. In this viewpoint, even
   gravity becomes a variable, dependent on the electrical field in which
   an object is orbiting.

   Of course, no new theory can stand without predictions against which
   it can be tested, and Thornhill's predictions are no less outrageous
   than the rest of his theory. For example: "...there are no
   supermassive stars. The masses of close orbiting stars, where plasma
   sheaths touch, are incorrectly deduced from gravitational forces
   alone...I believe there are no such things as neutron stars...[and] we
   are left with none of the necessary precursors to the infamous
   black-hole...[T]hey are an unnecessary fiction required simply because
   astronomers consider gravity to be the only force driving the cosmos.
   An infinitely weak force requires an infinite concentration of mass to
   create the energetic events witnessed in deep space. The mathematical
   necessity does not make it real." (p. 32.)

   The questions packed into the seven pages from 25 to 32 of Thornhill's
   notebook titled "What is the Sun?" are enough to inspire many volumes
   of research. But Thornhill goes on for another 70 pages, describing
   how the electrical paradigm affects our understanding of the rest of
   the Solar System. At every scale, on every planet, satellite, asteroid
   and comet, he finds evidence to support an electrically driven system,
   one involved in recent turmoil. He compares discharges in the
   high-voltage lab to lightning scars on golf courses to lava tubes in
   Hawaii to sinuous rilles on the Moon. He finds that these enormous
   scars on the Moon, called rilles, have more in common with lightning
   scars than with collapsed lava tubes, which is the conventional
   astronomical explanation.

   On Mars, Thornhill claims that Valles Marineris, the gash across the
   face of the planet which the North American Indians called Scarface,
   is an example of a cathode discharge, like the lightning scars on a
   golf course. He interprets Olympus Mons, the biggest "volcano" in the
   Solar System, as an anode discharge, a giant "blister," comparable to
   fulgamites found on lightning conductors after a strike.

   When it comes to Venus, Thornhill displays photographs of unique
   arachnoid, or spider web, patterns of craters and rilles, along with
   on-channel cratering and parallel channels terminating in craters. All
   are characteristic of electrical discharges. Astronomers haven't yet
   agreed with catastrophists that Venus is young, but they now refer to
   its pristine appearance as "recently resurfaced."

   Thornhill's theory replaces the impact model of crater formation with
   an electrical discharge model for a majority of the craters in the
   Solar System. In defense of this viewpoint, he points out that most
   craters are round, whereas impact craters would more likely be
   elliptical. They appear in lines along the bottom of, and parallel to,
   sinuous rilles on many celestial bodies. Often, the craters on
   asteroids and the smaller moons are so large that if they were formed
   by impact the entire body would have been destroyed. (Mars' moon,
   Phobos, appears in one photograph as an illustration of this point.)

   When I first saw Thornhill's original slide presentation on which this
   notebook is based, one slide stood out for me as the most dramatic
   moment of the entire show. Near the end of the lecture (p. 91 in the
   notebook), the room was buzzing with side conversations. Without
   waiting for the whispers to die down, Thornhill projected his next
   picture. Someone gasped, and I turned to look. On the screen I saw
   twenty-one comets stretched out in a celestial shish kebab, one that
   remained coherent (the few off-line bodies actually moved continuously
   into straighter alignment) for a full two-earth-year-long orbit. Until
   I saw that slide, my view of the Saturn thesis was darkened by the
   skeptical thought: "Sure, catastrophism is probable. Even the
   electrical nature of the cosmos is beginning to make sense. But who in
   their right mind, no matter what the ancient sources state, could
   accept the concept of celestial bodies strung out in a coherent line?"
   But this slide wasn't a cave artist's interpretation from the dim
   reaches of myth. It was a photograph taken through a telescope in
   1994: Comet Shoemaker-Levi 9. An observer looking toward Jupiter from
   any one of the outer bodies would have seen the others centered on
   Jupiter, their cometary tails layered into a cosmic mountain or tree.
   Emotionally, Thornhill's presentation was the event that, for me,
   changed the polar configuration from an interesting interpretation of
   mythology to an astronomical possibility. In addition, Thornhill has
   given me the richness of a new paradigm through which to view the
   universe. But Thornhill isn't asking for followers, only for
   objectivity. He thus sums up the notebook with: "...it is up to you to
   decide whether what I am presenting is merely science fiction -- or
   the beginnings of the science of the third millennium of the present
   era. If the latter, it is a far richer science which has no rigid
   disciplinary boundaries and encompasses all of human experience. That
   is the kind of science I would wish for my grand-children."

  Notes
  
   [1] J. R. Spencer & J. Mitton, The Great Comet Crash (Cambridge,
   1995), p. 2.

   [2] (N. Y., 1992).