VOL III, No. 4 Feb 15, 1999 EDITOR: Amy Acheson PUBLISHER: Michael Armstrong LIST MANAGER: Brian Stewart CONTENTS THE BENEFITS OF CATASTROPHE ARE UNDERAPPRECIATED . by Mel Acheson THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE . . . . . . . . . . . by Wallace Thornhill reviewed by Amy Acheson POLAR CONFIGURATION DISCUSSION . . . . . . . . . .from kroniatalk HISTORICAL ANALOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Duane Vorhees ELECTRIC STAR COMMENTARY . . . . . . . . . . . . by Wal Thornhill ---------------------------------------------- THE BENEFITS OF CATASTROPHE ARE UNDERAPPRECIATED By Mel Acheson People who have never sailed on anything but perfectly calm seas will think it ridiculous that their decks or their stomachs could heave. So it's to be expected that people today, having never seen anything but the calm sailing of the planets around the sun, should dismiss as impossible claims of a stormy solar system. It's easy to interpret the testimonies of ancient peoples as the ravings of a febrile imagination that peculiarly afflicted them. It's only a bit more difficult to shrug off or to explain away the ruins and the scars of the storm as we and our space probes pick our way through its aftermath. But the scars on our souls, passed down from parent to child, institutionalized, acculturated, perplex and plague us. The normal and the neurotic intertwine and become indistinguishable. The best intentions produce the worst consequences. Great evils are perpetrated by people who have good reasons. Catastrophics won't cure this. As Freud discovered and Reich explored, merely becoming aware of the primal trauma doesn't heal the wound. Healing comes from discharging the fixated energy, relaxing the muscular (and character and cultural) armoring. It takes time and effort. But catastrophics can provide a conceptual framework to facilitate healing. It can assuage the guilt: The primal trauma was no one's fault. It can liberate response-ability: We have the ability to respond with healing. It can calm the fear: Premonitions of millennial doom are projections of past instabilities. It can focus attention on the present: The success of uniformist theories in explaining present conditions reassures us that "its over". And it can elicit an unexpected insight: Not only did we survive, not only are we healing, but the artistic creativity natural to human beings has converted-is converting-the trauma and its scars into textures of meaning and truth transcending the accidents of nature. Literature, paintings, dramas, and music come easily to mind. The sciences-which were considered arts until recent times-must also be included. We are neither victims nor imitators of catastrophe but artisans creating aesthetic meaning from the chaotic and inchoate raw materials of matter and events. And underlying this is the implication that catastrophes may have driven, perhaps even generated, our creativity, our consciousness, our species. Whether born of catastrophe or matured by it, we can transcend the cramp of egocentrism that reduces us to whining and embrace the opportunities of creating lives that connect with a universe of vitality. The benefits of catastrophe are underappreciated. Mel Acheson thoth at Whidbey.com ---------------------------------------------- THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE CD by Wallace Thornhill review by Amy Acheson Wallace Thornhill's CD offers a visual invitation to toss aside the straightjacket of paradigm paralysis and explore the universe from an electric point of view. He covers an enormous range of phenomena, from subatomic particles through stellar and galactic evolution, floodlighting our understanding of the universe with insights garnered from mythical symbols, space probes, and plasma lab experiments. As an illustration, let me compare the received explanation with Thornhill's electric explanation for the tail of Halley's Comet, both presented in light of photographs returned by the ESA spacecraft Giotto in March, 1986. The standard theory states that "Comets grow tails only when they get warm enough for ice and dust to boil off. . . . on the [sunward side], jets of gas and dust spurt from active holes in its [the comet's] surface and are illuminated by the sun." (THE GREAT COMET CRASH, Spencer and Mitton, pg. 2) Thornhill's electrical theory of the same data begins with "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. It was confirmed by the discovery of x-rays and high energy ions near the nucleus that the material was being electrically removed. " [THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE CD, pg. 43] Thornhill goes on to discuss non-gravitational orbital anomalies of comets, then challenges received opinion 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." Thornhill was first motivated to leave the comfortable highway of orthodox astronomy and explore the lonely out- back of a new paradigm by reading Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds In Collision. Thornhill accepted the challenge of integrating the cultural record of mythology and the experiments of the plasma lab and the advances of the space age into a coherent picture. He summarizes this synthesis admirably in a single picture which appears on page 146 of the CD. The photo shows an ancient statue of Zeus, thunderbolt poised in his up-raised hand. But the object called "thunderbolt" isn't the zigzag symbol a child might draw to symbolize lightning. Instead, it's a bundle of corkscrew filaments within a football-shaped envelope, a shape recognizable today as a plasmoid. The ancient artist, who presumably had no experience in plasma labs, sculpted a shape that has been meaningless for centuries until a replica was produced in modern times by connecting two concentric metal tubes to a high-voltage source. How could this be, unless the thunderbolts of Zeus actually were interplanetary electrical discharges? Thornhill recommends Eric J. Lerner's THE BIG BANG NEVER HAPPENED as an introduction to the concepts of the electrical universe. I agree, but with a couple of reservations. The book 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. Also, 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. Inside the orbit of Pluto, Lerner drops the electric paradigm for the more conventional gravitational solar system and nuclear powered sun. This -- the solar system -- is the arena that most of Thornhill's CD covers. His electrical claims extend from the microstructure of meteorites to the energy source of the sun, and along the way provide an explanation for the surface features of planets and moons. 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 that, although plasma is a good conductor, it is 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. 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 CD 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, is a function of the strength of the galactic plasma field it 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 to test it, and Thornhill's predictions are no less outrageous than the rest of his theory. ". . . there are no supermassive stars. The masses of close orbiting stars, where plasma sheaths are shared, are incorrectly deduced from gravitational forces alone. . . there are no such things as neutron stars . . . [and] we are left with none of the necessary precursors to the infamous black-hole. . . they [black holes] 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." [p 36] Packed into the section of Thornhill's CD called "Electricity in Space: How Do Stars Work?" are enough questions to inspire many volumes of research. But this is only one small segment of the Electric Universe CD. Thornhill shows how the electrical paradigm affects our understanding of the entire solar system. At every scale, on every planet, satellite, asteroid and comet, he finds evidence to support an electrically driven solar system, one involved in recent turmoil. On the terrestrial sphere, Thornhill compares discharges in the high-voltage lab to lightning scars on golf courses and videos taken of lava tubes in Australia to sinuous rilles on the moon. He finds that these enormous scars on the moon have more in common with lightning scars than with collapsed lava tubes, the conventional astronomical explanation. Thornhill takes us on a fast-paced tour of planets, moons, asteroids and comets. All show evidence of planetary-scale electrical scarring. He claims that Valles Marineris, the 4000 kilometer long canyon across the face of the planet Mars, is an example of a cathode discharge, a lightning scar. He interprets Olympus Mons, the biggest "volcano" in the solar system, as a giant "blister", comparable to fulgamites found on lightning conductors after a strike. On Venus, Thornhill displays the 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 discharge. 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. He shows examples of the process continuing even today on Jupiter's moon, Io, and Halley's comet. In defence 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 (Mars' moon, Phobos, appears on the CD as an illustration of this point) are so large in proportion to the asteroid or moon that if they were formed by impact the entire body would have been destroyed. Yet these bodies with oversized craters are common in our solar system. The most exciting addition to this new version of The Electric Universe is the 21 video segments, including clips made of experiments conducted in a plasma lab. My personal favorite was the anode scarring ... where a miniature replica of the Martian volcano, Olympus Mons, was raised on a disc of red clay impregnated with graphite. Summing up, Thornhill says that "The Electric Universe introduces 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." (pg. 154) But Thornhill's not asking for followers, only objectivity. In the closing video, he asks us to "allow for the possibility." ---------------------------------------------- POLAR CONFIGURATION DISCUSSION >From kroniatalk Dr Emilio Spedicato wrote: We are looking now at the dynamics of the polar configuration. There is one free parameter and it is impossible to explore numerically the behaviour for all values of the parameter. For some reasonable values it seems that the alignment is destroyed after a few months. However since the bodies are close one should take into account also the tidal forces and it seems that NO ONE has ever implemented these forces for a similar dynamical system. We hope to be able to do this in a next future. Dave Talbott added: Actually, Dr. Robert Bass did undertake a preliminary analysis of tidal friction, and he concluded that it worked in the direction of stability - a significant consideration if the planets were extremely close together, as we have hypothesized. Dr Spedicato: The equilibrium equations suggest anyway that the original diameter of Venus had to be greater, otherwise Mars would cover completely Venus. This implies in my view that Venus during the collapse of the configuration lost mass. A loss of mass could be explained if Venus had a catastrophic interaction with Jupiter (possibly a grazing impact), which I think should be considered also in terms of the births of Venus myths and the evidence that Venus for a time had a cometary aspect. Dave said: While the cometary aspect of Venus may indeed have caused it to look larger than it does today, it needs to be understood that what happens to Mars visually in relation to Venus depends on the position of the terrestrial observer. For an observer beneath the 45th parallel, as Mars moves toward the Earth it does not occlude Venus, but moves visually BELOW Venus. When it as large as Venus, it is almost or entirely below the sphere of Venus, depending on the precise location of the observer. In the past, several folks ... have made the error of assuming the observer to be squarely on the axis. But in fact the small size of Mars enables the observer beneath the 45th parallel to see "over" Mars as it approaches the Earth, thus causing it to descend visually. Of the participating planets, only Mars has a size enabling it to do what the myths claim of it ("descent of the hero"). Ev Cochrane adds: Like Dave, I found this statement most puzzling. In fact, as I have demonstrated using high tech computer simulations, Mars fits neatly within the visual outline of the much larger Venus when located in relative close proximity to Venus. Dr Spedicato: I am now rereading Worlds in Collision, after ten or more years. I am in awe of the scholarship of Velikovsky, despite the fact that he certainly mixed up events that had different timing. I think that a final picture on the past of the solar system will have elements from your theory and Patten and of course Velikovsky. Karen Josephson asks: Do you think it would be appropriate to suggest to [Dr Spedicato] that he make his analysis both ways <> and see what happens ???? Amy Acheson responds: Aye, Karen ... that's the rub. The mathematics is not yet developed to analyze multiple electrical planetary interactions. In order to make the formulae simple enough to work the math, you have to make "simplifying assumptions" (see Mel's Jan 31 THOTH editorial), and still they only work for systems in relative equilibrium [interacting planets ARE NOT IN EQUILIBRIUM.] So here's where we all too often end up: the well-mathed gravity will allow us to get "this close" to replicating our interpretation of how the planets behaved according to mythology. If there's any leftover bits between the numbers and what the myths require, you wave the fudge-factor wand (electrical effects) and, bingo, you can do just about anything. In my estimation, there are two dangers in this approach. First, there's the one our friends, the debunkers, always bring up (unsupported, this is a fudge-factor itself): that electrical interactions might not be capable of what we're asking [facilitating capture, rounding orbits, digging 4000 km long gashes across the face of Mars, etc.] Second, there is the possibility that electrical interactions in such an inequilibrium situation as planetary interaction will so overwhelm the gravitational interactions that there is simply no point in even looking at the gravitational math. To borrow a concept from an earlier paradigm, what's the point of devising more and more complex formulae for determining the exact phlogiston content of various hardwoods now that we understand that burning involves chemical reactions with oxygen? Problems or no, I'm confident (as the visualization of an electrical universe becomes clear) that someone is going to develop the math needed to understand/explain/predict its behaviors. As Halton Arp put it (wrt finding a mechanism to explain how a nonvelocity redshift could act on an entire galaxy -- a vast assemblage of stars, gas and dust) "The advance in understanding required to explain these observations has been thereby considerably escalated and now represents a spectacularly exciting challenge. The stakes in the theory game have been sharply raised." Wal Thornhill adds: One way the mathematical modeling might be approached when planets are not embroiled in each other's magnetospheres is to treat the gravitational "constant" as a variable that depends on the charge transfer between a planet and its environment. Eric Crew did something similar in his computer modeling (only he did the simple thing of including the electrostatic force as if there were no shielding by plasma in space) and derived the rapid emplacement of Venus in its present orbit from one that originated out near Jupiter or Saturn. It is more difficult to model the charge exchange between bodies in the plasma column of the Saturnian configuration. But I can imagine there might have been differential effects involving radial distance from the axis of the polar column which might act in such a way as to stabilise the planetary alignment. Mars could have oscillated up and down the column, acting like an oscillating charge carrier, between Venus and the Earth. ---------------------------------------------- HISTORICAL ANALOGY By Duane Vorhees Knowing full well that historical analogy has NO evidentiary value, let me proceed anyway. According to traditional Japanese history, the present imperial dynasty came into being with the accession of the Divine first emperor in "660 BC". His descendants are carefully listed, with their regnal lengths and important events that occurred during their rule. There is an occasional miracle or supernatural occurrence, but in the main the sequence and stories seem credible. Eventually, these emperors and historic events reach a point at which they can be corroborated by Chinese, Korean, or other Japanese sources, at which time we have entered the historic period (as fragmentary and contradictory as the record may be in many particulars). However, archaeologists can't find any evidence of human habitation of the Japanese islands until around what they date to the 1st century BC/AD, and not much for another two or three centuries. And the evidence for an organized State under some sort of unified monarchy seems to indicate a founding by "horse riders" from elsewhere, most likely from the old Korean kingdom of Paekje, perhaps in the fourth or fifth century. It is only after this early period that some measure of contemporary written evidence appears and we start to gain firmer ground as to what really happened. On the other hand, in the late 19th/early 20th century, Japanese historians used the traditional account, which included stories of an early Japanese occupation of southern Korea, as justification for their successful efforts in conquering and colonizing the peninsula--though it seems more likely to us that it was the Koreans who were responsible for beginning Japanese civilization, not the other way round. It seems likely that, given the nature of early historical evidence anywhere, other explanations will be bruited about, some of which will seem to have more explanatory power than others but none of which can be demonstrated to any high degree of certainty. What seems most likely, though, is that the "traditional" accounts will be shown to have been erroneous, constructed either out of ignorance or out of willful distortion to achieve some purpose or other. To me, it is the same situation in regards to very early Egyptian, Jewish, Indian etc "history." There is a paucity of verifiable facts, even if we don't accept (on an operational basis) the philosophical extremism of a David Hume, who holds that we can't really be certain of anything. Part of the problem of claiming, as Henry has done, that in the main much of the Old Testament has been confirmed is the untestability of this statement; it is too nonspecific to have much value. What has been confirmed? Well, kinglists of the Assyrians and Babylonians have been unearthed and deciphered that seem to agree on the names of a few late kings of Israel and Judea and of neighboring states, and there is confirmation of the successful siege of Jerusalem for example. But even here there is not perfect agreement among the sources; so far they can't be precisely synchronized chronologically (how many campaigns did Tigleth Pileser lead, and how do they fit into his overall reign?), some events are mentioned in some documents and inexplicably ignored in others, and sometimes the details of what are obviously the same thing are contradictory among the various sources. So we may be rather sure that "something" happened without clearly knowing exactly what. And of course it is in this uncertainty that honest people may differ. ---------------------------------------------- ELECTRIC STAR COMMENTARY By Wal Thornhill ... magnetic activity is, without exception, seen by astronomers as the prime mover - the cause of electrical activity; electrical activity is always considered a side effect of mysteriously generated and maintained magnetic fields. The Electric Sun model views electric currents as the cause and magnetic fields as an effect. A major problem in having this alternate view taken seriously is the widespread and profound ignorance of electric discharge phenomena. It is certainly not taught to postgraduate astronomers. [One thing] most people don't realise is that lightning compresses, heats and accelerates air upwards. On the Sun that upwelling creates the tops of the bright "granules" that cover the sun. The Sun's "lightning bolts" are seen to advantage in the penumbrae of sunspots where they provide the fine filamentary structure. Those filaments have nothing to do with convection. I predict that higher resolution images of the filaments in the penumbrae will show the usual rope-like structure of Birkeland currents. No one has been able to explain the features of penumbrae of sunspots using the standard solar model. Yet, explaining those features is of paramount importance because sunspots are our only visible window to what lies beneath the photosphere. The electric star model is concordant with and extends the latest plasma cosmology which has a much better (albeit unacknowledged) track record than the standard model. The standard model requires invisible objects and hidden mechanisms to save the appearances. Invisible objects include Black Holes, neutron stars and Dark Matter. Hidden mechanisms include nuclear engines at the centre of stars, Black Holes at the centre of active galaxies, and internal dynamos to generate planetary and stellar magnetic fields. Unconstrained by direct observations, theorists have been allowed to go crazy. They have invented infinitely massive objects to provide the weakest force known, gravity, with enough punch to generate X-rays and gamma-rays. They have invented superconducting plasma (unknown in the laboratory) to allow magnetic fields to become trapped in them. They have accepted the fanciful notion that magnetic field lines can be broken and re- connected to other field lines. (Such "magnetic reconnection" is used to explain energetic solar flares. Meanwhile plasma physicists have churlishly pointed out that solar flares are purely electric discharges). So when confronted with the conclusions drawn from the standard solar model, which is central to modern cosmology, I agree with Gregg Easterbrook who wrote in The New Republic of last October 12; "... for sheer extravagant implausibility, nothing in theology or metaphysics can hold a candle to the [Big] Bang. Surely, if this description of the cosmic genesis came from the Bible or the Koran rather than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it would surely be treated as a preposterous myth." It is worthwhile pointing out that the form of the magnetic field of the Sun matches the expectations of an Electric Sun, with field lines being evenly spaced rather than bunched near the poles like a normal dipole magnet. The even spacing occurs because of electrical repulsion of a net excess of like charges streaming along magnetic field lines and carrying the current of the stellar discharge. It is in fact indirect evidence for the flow of electric current between the Sun and its surroundings. If the plasma were electrically neutral with equal numbers of positive and negative charges in bulk, as is assumed by astrophysicists, then there would be no tendency for even spacing of magnetic field lines near the poles of the Sun. ---------------------------------------------- PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA COMMUNICATIONS WEBSITE: http://www.kronia.com Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: [Ed note: the SIS Website address has changed to: http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/ ] Subscriptions to AEON, a journal of myth and science, may be ordered at the I-net address below: http://www.ames.net/aeon/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/ http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/velikovskian/ http://www.bearfabrique.org http://www.grazian-archive.com/ Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered, 10 Pensée Journals may be ordered at the I-net address below: http://www.e-z.net/~mikamar/default.html ----------------------------------------------- The THOTH electronic newsletter is an outgrowth of scientific and scholarly discussions in the emerging field of astral catastrophics. Our focus is on a reconstruction of ancient astral myths and symbols in relation to a new theory of planetary history. Serious readers must allow some time for these radically different ideas to be fleshed out and for the relevant background to be developed. The general tenor of the ideas and information presented in THOTH is supported by the editor and publisher, but there will always be plenty of room for differences of interpretation. We welcome your comments and responses. thoth at Whidbey.com New readers are referred to earlier issues of THOTH posted on the Kronia website listed above. Go to the free newsletter page and double click on the image of Thoth, the Egyptian God of Knowledge, to access the back issues.