mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== THOTH A Catastrophics Newsletter VOL VI, No 3 May 31, 2002 EDITOR: Amy Acheson PUBLISHER: Michael Armstrong LIST MANAGER: Brian Stewart CONTENTS THE TRUE DISBELIEVER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mel Acheson A YOUNG AMATEUR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jason Goodman MILLISECOND PULSARS . . . . . . . . . . discussion with Don Scott A MYSTERY SOLVED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Wal Thornhill -----<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< THE TRUE DISBELIEVER by Mel Acheson "I'll believe it when I see it" could be the motto of the empiricist. His not unreasonable belief is that reasonable belief in an idea should be governed by tests that give results which can be sensed. His concern is that beliefs not anchored to what is sensible can't be distinguished from beliefs that are fictional. But with a little empirical investigation, the empiricist will see that the converse is also true: "I'll see it when I believe it." Our perceptions are largely influenced, often determined, by our beliefs. Seeing and believing are Siamese twins joined at almost every organ. The sense we make of our sensations follows the ideas that usher our sensations to a seat in our sensibilities. Furthermore, testing is a tool of selection: from among several ideas proposed as solutions to a problem, a well-designed test can select the best. But testing can't generate the ideas. Conjecture must come first. Insofar as beliefs empower perception, the suppression of what could be called "conjectural beliefs" impairs perception. Imagination, the mind's eye, is as much an organ of perception as our physical eye. In addition, the logic of testing dictates that only refutation is certain. Confirmation provides no guarantee that a better solution won't come along tomorrow, especially when continued investigation discovers unexpected facts and ideas that transform the problem. Hence, the reasonable belief based on sensible tests is at best provisional. It must always be vulnerable to the speculations of new dawns. Having seen this, the empiricist will recognize that his concern over non-sensible beliefs must be matched by a symmetrical concern over sensible disbeliefs. The greatest obstacle to discovery is the contrapositive of his motto: "I won't see it as long as I disbelieve it." With scientific discovery, as with a novel, the key to new insight is the suspension of disbelief. To believe one thing with certainty, we must disbelieve everything that raises doubt about it. The empiricist who slips over the line and believes his knowledge is "for sure" must close his eyes and mind to contrary insights. Conversely, if we disbelieve everything that raises doubt about one thing, we effectively believe that thing. The empiricist who knows something is impossible effectively believes that what makes it so is absolutely true. Eric Hoffer noted in his 1951 essay, _The True Believer_: "It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs." It requires "a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world .... Strength of faith ... manifests itself not in moving mountains but in not seeing mountains to move." Because conception and perception are so inseparable, both belief and disbelief are fact-proof screens that obstruct discovery of novel understandings. The true believer, who possesses ultimate truth, is a cognitive twin to the true disbeliever, who possesses ultimate truth by default. In the sciences especially, where a history of empiricism has raised sensitivity to the dangers of true belief, blindness comes most readily from true disbelief. Scientists who are reluctant to claim certitude for their knowledge are reckless in claiming impossibility for rival ideas. The empiricist interested in discovery must adopt the additional motto: "Don't disbelieve what you don't believe." Mel Acheson thoth at whidbey.com www.dragonscience.com ************************************************************ A YOUNG AMATEUR EXAMINES CRACKPOTTERY IN SCIENCE By Jason Goodman [ed. note: Jason Goodman shares his research on his website at http://www.geocities.com/kingvegeta80/cosmology.html.] I am an amateur astronomer in my early 20's. About a year ago, I read "The Big Bang Never Happened" by Eric Lerner. This sparked my interest in alternate concepts, especially plasma cosmology, non- recessional redshifts, and catastrophism. I tried discussing these ideas at several different message boards online. In most cases, I was met not by scientific discussion or even logical refutation, but by base insults. In the November and December 2001, issues of "Scientific American," Skeptic Society Director Michael Shermer gives a recipe for identifying pseudoscientific crackpot ideas. He calls it a ten-step "baloney detection kit." I've summarized it here and added my own comments (JG). "1. How reliable is the source of the claim? Pseudoscientists often appear quite reliable, but when examined closely, the facts and figures they cite are distorted, taken out of context or occasionally even fabricated." JG: The facts and figures stated by plasma cosmologists are the result of laboratory experiments and computer simulations and the facts and figures of catastrophism are the results of legitimate and intensive forensic research. The Big Bang theory (BBT) has a much sloppier record. For example, it predicted irregularities of one part in 1000 in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The COBE satellite (Cosmic Background Explorer) recorded irregularities of only one part in 100,000, one hundred times less than the BBT predictions. Despite this, the mainstream still cites the CMB as proof of the BBT and they almost never point out the problems associated with the COBE findings. "2. Does this source often make similar claims? Pseudoscientists have a habit of going well beyond the facts. Of course, some great thinkers do frequently go beyond the data in their creative speculations. Watch out for a pattern of fringe thinking that consistently ignores or distorts data." JG: This is very much a corollary of #1. It's been my experience that the new cosmologists are careful to distinguish between observation and speculation, while the purely hypothetical aspects of the BBT, are often presented as fact. Dark matter, for example, was invented to disguise observations of orbital motion which do not conform to gravitational theory. "3. Have the claims been verified by another source? Typically pseudoscientists make statements that are unverified or verified only by a source within their own belief circle. We must ask, "Who is checking the claims, and even who is checking the checkers?" Outside verification is crucial to good science." JG: This is interesting. Since the ideas of the new cosmology were already considered pseudoscience from the get-go, it is very hard to get any significant amount of people outside the "belief circle" to even listen to them, let alone try to verify them. The mainstream wouldn't want to verify crackpot ideas, now would they? "4. How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works? An extraordinary claim must be placed into a larger context to see how it fits. When people claim that an unknown advanced race built the Egyptian pyramids and the Sphinx, they are not presenting any context for that earlier civilization. Where are the rest of the artifacts of those people? Where are their works of art, their weapons, their clothing, their tools, and their trash? Archaeology simply does not operate this way." JG: Good point. But plasma cosmology fits what we know very well. The behavior of plasmas (filamentation, inability to "freeze in" magnetic fields, twisted/braided geometries, etc.) has been proven in the lab. It's the mainstream that has pushed the limits of physical reality past the breaking point with their ideas. Superdense objects, such as black holes and neutron stars both violate proven physics. During the last couple of years, this model has been stretched even further past physical reality with the concept of "quark stars." "5. Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only supportive evidence been sought? This is the confirmation bias, or the tendency to seek confirmatory evidence and to reject or ignore disconfirmatory evidence. The confirmation bias is powerful, pervasive and almost impossible for any of us to avoid. It is why the methods of science that emphasizes checking and rechecking, verification and replication, and especially attempts to falsify a claim are so critical. Outside verification is crucial to good science." JG: There is plenty of information for both sides of the cosmological debate. Each one's ideas and theories contradict the other side's. Confirmatory and disconfirmatory evidence abounds in astrophysics regardless of which cosmology one supports. "6. Does the preponderance of evidence point to the claimant's conclusion or to a different one?" JG: In cosmology, the evidence strongly agrees with the alternative ideas and refutes the BBT. Electromagnetic/plasma connections are being discovered everywhere, from gigantic galactic clusters to tiny nearby comets. The evidence points to a non-expanding universe and to catastrophic changes of the celestial order witnessed by the ancient humankind. "7. Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the desired conclusion? A clear distinction can be made between SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientists and UFOlogists. SETI scientists begin with the null hypothesis that ETIs do not exist and that they must provide concrete evidence before making the extraordinary claim that we are not alone in the universe. UFOlogists begin with the positive hypothesis that ETIs exist and have visited us, then employ questionable research techniques to support that belief, such as hypnotic regression, anecdotal reasoning, conspiratorial thinking, low-quality visual evidence, and anomalistic thinking." JG: Halton Arp and the intrinsic redshift astronomers focus on analysis of the distribution of high and low redshift objects in the sky, which documents physical connections between them that nullify the Expanding Universe. Plasma cosmologists since Birkeland in the late 19th century have focused on laboratory experiments that can be scaled to fourteen orders of magnitude. "8. Is the claimant providing an explanation for the observed phenomena or merely denying the existing explanation? This is a classic debate strategy--criticize your opponent and never affirm what you believe to avoid criticism." JG: The supporters of the new cosmology DO have an entire cosmology that is complete and detailed, explaining the phenomena that the BBT fails to explain. However, you rarely hear anything about the alternate ideas in cosmology from a mainstreamer. Only two mainstream astronomy books out of the dozens I have read even mentioned plasma cosmology or Arp's works, and none of those even hinted at catastrophist's research. About the only time you hear them talk about catastrophics is when you try to discuss it with them. And then they simply declare that alternative ideas are "wrong" or "stupid" or "unscientific." If you don't agree, then you, too, are "wrong" or "stupid" or "unscientific". "9. If the claimant offers a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation did?" JG: Plasma cosmology offers explanations for all the phenomena the accepted theory tries (and fails) to explain. Moreover, it accounts for phenomena that remain, in the words of the mainstream, "big mysteries" in astrophysics. For example, standard theory (comets as icy snowballs) expected comet nuclei to be icy- bright, while plasma cosmology theory (comets as electric discharge phenomena) expected them to be burnt like the terminals of a battery. The two comet nuclei that have been photographed on spacecraft flybys, Halley and Borrelly, are extremely dark -- astronomers compare their appearance to black velvet, coal, or photocopy toner. "10. Does the claimant's personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa? All scientists hold social, political and ideological beliefs that could potentially slant their interpretations of the data, but how do those biases and beliefs affect their research in practice? Usually during the peer-review system, such biases and beliefs are rooted out, or the paper or book is rejected." JG: Yet whenever someone points out the biased attitudes of the peer-review system toward mainstream science, he is dismissed as, you guessed it, a crackpot. "Clearly, there are no foolproof methods of detecting baloney or drawing the boundary between science and pseudoscience. Yet there is a solution: science deals in fuzzy fractions of certainties and uncertainties, where evolution and big bang cosmology may be assigned a 0.9 probability of being true, and creationism and UFOs a 0.1 probability of being true. In between are borderland claims: we might assign superstring theory a 0.7 and cryonics a 0.2. In all cases, we remain open-minded and flexible, willing to reconsider our assessments as new evidence arises. This is, undeniably, what makes science so fleeting and frustrating to many people; it is, at the same time, what makes science the most glorious product of the human mind." JG: Is it me, or is Mr. Shermer contradicting mainstream thinking with this last paragraph? The attitudes taken toward many unconventional thinkers, like myself, are often rude and closed- minded. We could write a book (just a figure of speech) of the base insults lobbed at us. When the universe is discussed, it is accepted without question that it all began with a Big Bang. Nowhere but the crackpot fringes will you hear that there's even a 10% chance that this theory is wrong. Mainstream astrophysics would do well to follow Shermer's advice: become more "open minded and flexible," and "reconsider their assessments as new evidence arises." Jason Goodman SOURCES: http://www.sciam.com/2001/1101issue/1101skeptic.html http://www.sciam.com/2001/1201issue/1201skeptic.html *************************************** MILLISECOND PULSARS: by Don Scott ZWP wrote: Check this out gents -- and make sure you're not holding anything that will spill... zane http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0205/26pulsar/ DON SCOTT RESPONDS: Thanks for posting this Zane. It is yet another piece of evidence that supports the Electric/Plasma Universe theory. Those who have read my past posts will know that I (and Wal and others) maintain that all pulsars are simple electrical "relaxation oscillators". I believe they are binary pairs that are experiencing electrical discharges from one of the members of the pair to the other. There is no such entity as a "neutron star". There can't be. (See http://207.10.97.102/chemzone/lessons/11nuclear/nuclear.htm for an explanation of radio active decay that would quickly demolish any such star.) The story contains a gold mine of non sequitors and illogical conclusions. FROM THE WEBSITE: "The system has one of the lowest-mass companions of any stellar binary. The finding provides clear evidence that neutron stars can slowly "accrete" (i.e., steal) material from their companions and dramatically increase their spin rate, ...." DON SAYS: Fine, the system has one of the lowest-mass companions of any stellar binary. That's nice. But that fact certainly does NOT provide "clear evidence that neutron stars can slowly "accrete" (i.e., steal)material from their companions.." FROM THE WEBSITE: "The companion will eventually vanish as a result of both the force of gravity pulling matter onto the neutron star(accretion), and the pressure from the resulting X-ray radiation emitted from the neutron star blowing matter away from the companion (ablation). " is 100% conjecture which is not supported by any observations taken over time. Gravity pulling matter one way and X-ray "pressure" are opposite forces neither of which are significant when compared to electrodynamic effects.(Actually, I'm not sure that X-rays produce "pressure" on anything.) I could go on, but you get the idea. They are wallowing around in a failed theory populated with fictional entities which they expound with an attitude of complete confidence. It's scary. They have absolutely NO idea about what they are looking at or talking about. Pulsars are simply relaxation oscillators. All the above boils down to the fact that charges, moving in a magnetic field, put out "electromagnetic radiation" - especially in a cosmic plasma, where we have Birkeland currents where charges spiral along within the magnetic field. So that's why cosmic plasmas give off EM signals. If the plasma current pulsates, so will the signal. And, so one last thing, if I may. A "relaxation oscillator" is an electrical circuit wherein a capacitor first charges up (because current is flowing into it) and then, when the resulting voltage on the capacitor gets "too large", it discharges rapidly. What determines the value that is "too large" depends on the physical situation. How often this charge/discharge cycle occurs depends on the electrical properties of the circuit. Two stars in a binary pair could easily be acting like such an oscillator. The magnitude of the charging current going from one of the stars to the other would depend on the voltage difference between them. This voltage goes up and down with the charge/discharge cycle. The bottom line is this: The frequency of this pulsation can be very high; the charge/discharge period very short. It is not determined by the mechanical (rotation speed) properties of the binary pair but, rather, by their electrical properties. The two stars can be rotating around each other and revolving on their axes) quite slowly. No magic "neutronium" or "strange matter" is required to hold them together because they simply do NOT rotate at2000 rpm. This is the speed required by the 30 millisecond repetition rate seen in the Crab pulsar (33 pulses per sec x 60 sec per min =3D 2000 rpm). That "lighthouse" would be really spinning! This demonstrates the degree of nonsense these folks are willing to engage in so that they can avoid thinking about ANYTHING electrical. ~Don Scott A THOTH READER ADDS: The only way Astrophysicists can imagine the millisecond periodicity of a pulsar is with the 'lawn sprinkler' model, e.g., the spinning black hole or neutron star. But all of the radiation properties of pulsars say it is just a pulse in a transmission line like those which occur naturally in the lab or in any number of industrial products. [Ed note: 17 radiation characteristics are listed in a 1995 paper by Kevin Healy and Anthony Peratt: reprinted below.] Astrophysicists only address item number 2 from the list, the "double pulse". The precession model of the pulsar was born to account for this observed double pulse. Hundreds of papers have been written on it in the Astrophysical Journal. Turning to reality, there is no such thing as a pulsar. An electrical circuit in space accounts for all of the observed properties. They were first observed not in stars, but in very high energy density plasmas under laboratory conditions on Earth. THE LIST: "In particular, any model must address the following known pulsar features: 1) Radio luminosities estimated to lie in the range of 10^27 to 10^30 ergs per second (10^20 to !0^30 W.) 2) Pulse periods within a range of a millisecond to several seconds. 3) Stable mean pulse profile having one, two or three components. 4) Monotonic rotation of linear polarization vector with a signature that depends on the component structure. 5) Slow decrease of the pulse width with increasing radio frequency, and with increasing period. 6) Slow decrease of periodicity, usually with dP/dt in a range between 10^-14 the 10^-16 sec/sec, but for millisecond pulsars as small as 10^-19 sec/sec. 7) Glitches -- a jump-like decrease in the period P. 8) Interpulse components midway between the main pulses. 9) A continuum, low-power background. 10) Linear polarization angle modes spaced by 90 degrees. 11) A circularly polarized component that reverses polarity between pulses in the main pulse. 12) Memory in the pulse-to-pulse fluctuations which in some pulsars takes the form of periodically spaced subpulses drifting slowly in time. 13) Erratic pulse-to-pulse amplitude fluctuations. 14) Micropulses within single pulses that are sometimes periodically spaced. Other Problems a model must address include: 15) The extreme bandwidth of radiation observed, in some pulsars from radio frequencies to gamma ray energies. 16) A very high Doppler-interpreted velocity, up to 500 km/sec. 17) The global pulsar system and topology which, for the Crab Nebula encompasses a fibrous and filamentary region 2 x 10^16 meters beyond the pulsar; 'wisps', 'jets', and other features symmetrically oriented 19^15 meters beyond the active region. Full paper, Radiation Properties of Pulsar Magnetospheres: Observation, Theory, and Experiment. K. Healy and A. Peratt, Astrophys. Space Sci. 227, 1995, available here: http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/papers.html ************************************************************ A MYSTERY SOLVED -- WELCOME TO THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE! by Wal Thornhill "We simply do not have a truly unified view of the world, one that paints an unambiguous picture of some overall scheme. ...one invariably confronts a deep fissure that can be overcome only with revolutionary new ideas." ~Etienne Klein & Marc Lachi=E8ze-Rey, THE QUEST FOR UNITY - The Adventure of Physics. NASA has confirmed a "deep fissure" in our understanding of the universe. The answer, though revolutionary, is simple. But it implies that the real nature of the universe is nothing like the fanciful stories we are being told. So who will have the courage to listen? Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph filed this report: Mysterious force holds back NASA probe in deep space: A SPACE probe launched 30 years ago has come under the influence of a force that has baffled scientists and could rewrite the laws of physics. Researchers say Pioneer 10, which took the first close-up pictures of Jupiter before leaving our solar system in 1983, is being pulled back to the sun by an unknown force. The effect shows no sign of getting weaker as the spacecraft travels deeper into space, and scientists are considering the possibility that the probe has revealed a new force of nature. Dr Philip Laing, a member of the research team tracking the craft, said: "We have examined every mechanism and theory we can think of and so far nothing works." "If the effect is real, it will have a big impact on cosmology and spacecraft navigation," said Dr Laing, of the Aerospace Corporation of California. Pioneer 10 was launched by NASA on March 2 1972, and with Pioneer 11, its twin, revolutionised astronomy with detailed images of Jupiter and Saturn. In June 1983, Pioneer 10 passed Pluto, the most distant planet in our solar system. Both probes are now travelling at 27,000mph towards stars that they will encounter several million years from now. Scientists are continuing to monitor signals from Pioneer 10, which is more than seven billion miles from Earth. Research to be published shortly in The Physical Review, a leading physics journal, will show that the speed of the two probes is being changed by about 6 mph per century - a barely-perceptible effect about 10 billion times weaker than gravity. Scientists initially suspected that gas escaping from tiny rocket motors aboard the probes, or heat leaking from their nuclear power plants might be responsible. Both have now been ruled out. The team says no current theories explain why the force stays constant: all the most plausible forces, from gravity to the effect of solar radiation, decrease rapidly with distance. The bizarre behaviour has also eliminated the possibility that the two probes are being affected by the gravitational pull of unknown planets beyond the solar system. Assertions by some scientists that the force is due to a quirk in the Pioneer probes have also been discounted by the discovery that the effect seems to be affecting Galileo and Ulysses, two other space probes still in the solar system. Data from these two probes suggests the force is of the same strength as that found for the Pioneers. Dr Duncan Steel, a space scientist at Salford University, says even such a weak force could have huge effects on a cosmic scale. "It might alter the number of comets that come towards us over millions of years, which would have consequences for life on Earth. It also raises the question of whether we know enough about the law of gravity." Until 1988, Pioneer 10 was the most remote object made by man - a distinction now held by Voyager 1. (c) Text copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002. Solution of the mystery: Common sense suggests that it is unlikely that the laws of physics will need to be rewritten, simply that we should understand better those we have. We need not trouble ourselves with arguments about the nature of gravity in this instance because the mystery can be solved if the electrical nature of the universe is acknowledged. The mystery only arises because astrophysics is taught incorrectly. Students are taught that any separation of charge in space is quickly neutralized as electrons rush to neutralize the charge imbalance. As a result, electricity in space is almost never mentioned, except as a transient effect. So no astrophysicist would think to ask the question of whether there is a steady interplanetary electric field. They have not "examined every mechanism and theory." It is always assumed that there is a source of electrons to meet any deficiency and that they can be supplied faster than the charging process. However, space is a far better vacuum than any we can achieve on Earth, so the assumption that there are sufficient electrons available may not be true. And where there are sufficient electrons, in their rush to neutralize the electric field they may undergo the magnetic "Z pinch" effect that cuts off the current at some maximum value before recovering and beginning the cycle once more. In fact, observations of energetic activity in space on all scales show this kind of "bursty" behavior. The most recent example came from Jupiter and was reported by Scientific American on March 4 as "a mysterious X-ray 'hot spot' that flares up like a beacon every 45 minutes." We produce X-rays every day in industry and medicine by using electrical discharges. Why would Nature do it any other way? In our electric universe the forces between charged objects is of the same form as Newton's equation, with charge replacing mass. The BIG difference is that the electrical force is about 10^39 times stronger than gravity. So if there is an electric field in space, it will have a measurable effect on a charged spacecraft. An electric field in space can give rise to electric discharge phenomena like those seen in a low-pressure gas. The most familiar example is the neon tube, and for some lucky people-the wonderful natural spectacle of an aurora. Extensive research was done on gas discharges early in the 20th century but its application to solar physics, pioneered briefly in the 1970's by an engineer from Flagstaff, Arizona, Ralph Juergens, was perforce published in an obscure journal and permitted to sink without trace. This is a diagram showing a discharge tube with all of the important features annotated above the tube. [Full article, including diagram and pictures, available here: http://www.holoscience.com/news/mystery_solved.html][D.S. =3D dark space]. Note that in the Sun's huge environment, the only bright regions are very close to the Sun because the energy density is too low to excite a glow. Below the tube are graphs showing the variation of important variables along the tube length. The simple discharge tube demonstrates some of the complexity of electric discharges in near vacuum and surprisingly it holds the key to the mystery of spacecraft deceleration. As Juergens argued, within our solar system the Sun bears all of the hallmarks of a small spherical anode in a galactic discharge. The planets occupy a vast region within the heliosphere, known in gas discharge theory as the positive column, which has a weak electric field centered on the Sun. Unlike the thin neon tube, the Sun occupies a vast sphere more than 16 billion miles across, so the positive column disappears and the current is carried throughout that volume by a low density of ionization. It requires only that the Sun's electric field has sufficient strength to cause a drift of electrons toward the Sun, superimposed on their random thermal motion. In other words, it is immeasurably small. Notice that the net charge density in the positive column is zero. In other words, there are an equal number of negative and positive charges in interplanetary space. That is what spacecraft have generally found. The regions of high electric field are close to the anode and cathode. In the Sun's case, being the anode, it is in the corona, where electrons are accelerated toward the Sun, causing the apparent million-degree temperatures there, and the protons are accelerated away from the Sun-to form the solar "wind." The continued acceleration of the positive particles in the solar wind beyond the orbits of Mercury and Venus is a natural consequence of the same weak electric field that slows down the negatively charged spacecraft. The cool photosphere beneath a "hot" corona is, for the first time, understandable if the Sun's energy is delivered externally. Of course, the Sun does not have an identifiable cathode in space like the metal cathode in the glow discharge tube. Instead, the plasma in space forms a bubble, known as a "virtual cathode." Effectively it is the heliopause. In plasma terms, the heliopause is not a result of mechanical shock but is a Langmuir plasma sheath that forms between two plasmas of different charge densities and energies. In this case it forms the boundary between the Sun's plasma and that of the galaxy. Such "bubbles" are seen at all scales, from the comas of comets to the 'magnetospheres' of planets and stars. To the plasma engineer they show that the central body is electrically charged relative to its surroundings. After launch, a spacecraft accepts electrons from the surrounding space plasma until the craft's voltage is sufficient to repel further electrons. Near Earth it is known that a spacecraft may attain a negative potential of several tens of thousands of volts relative to its surroundings. So, in interplanetary space, the spacecraft becomes a charged object moving in the Sun's weak electric field. Being negatively charged, it will experience an infinitesimal "tug" toward the positively charged Sun. Of most significance is the fact that the voltage gradient, that is the electric field, throughout interplanetary space remains constant. In other words, the retarding force on the spacecraft will not diminish with distance from the Sun. This effect distinguishes the electrical model from all others because all known force laws diminish with distance. The effect is real and it will have a fundamental impact on cosmology and spacecraft navigation becauseS Pioneer 10 has confirmed the electrical model of Stars! Pioneer 10 is now 7.4 billion miles from Earth, maybe 90 percent of the way to the heliopause. The electrical model of the solar system predicts that additional anomalies will be found if a distant spacecraft encounters the heliopause while still in contact with Earth. For the heliopause is the "cathode drop" region of the Sun's electrical influence. It is a region of strong radial electric field, which will tend to decelerate the spacecraft more strongly. Almost the full difference between the Sun's voltage and that of the local arm of the galaxy is present across the heliopause boundary. As a result, it is the region where so-called "anomalous" cosmic rays are generated by the strong field. It has nothing to do with a shock front and some poorly defined acceleration mechanism. Some measure of the driving electrical potential of the Sun may be gained from the study of "anomalous" cosmic rays. Also we can deduce the driving potential of other stars by the study of normal cosmic rays. The implications of an electrical dimension to stars are profound. Obviously, if we do not understand our closest star, all speculation about more distant stars and their histories are misguided. Of course, it begs the question of the power source that maintains the galactic charge differentials to power stars. It is here that the electric star hypothesis merges seamlessly with plasma cosmology, which also had its origin in electrical engineering. Plasma cosmology, which is now recognized by the IEEE, is practically unknown amongst astronomers and astrophysicists. The latter have been content to ignore the warnings of Hannes Alfven, the "father" of plasma physics and plasma cosmology, that their use of plasma theory is outdated and wrong. For example, the spiral arms of a galaxy must carry the electric current that lights the stars. The force between parallel currents varies inversely with distance, instead of the much more rapid fall-off of gravity with the square of the distance. The result is that the longest-range force law in the universe governs galactic motions, and short-range repulsion maintains the integrity of the spiral arms. In comparison, by using the puny force of gravity astrophysicists must insist on the cranky notion that most of the mass in the universe is invisible and distributed in arbitrary fashion. Even so, they cannot explain the preferred spiral structure of galaxies. As a leading member of The Spaceguard Foundation, Duncan Steel's final comment about comets is self-serving. Those who publicize the threat of comet or asteroid impact with the Earth have a great deal to "unlearn" and learn anew about the electrical nature and origin of comets. What really happens when charged bodies are on a collision course? Who has ever seen a single bolt of lightning in an artist's depiction of cosmic impact? Spaceguard argues that an impact could send us the way of the dinosaurs. But something far more dramatic than a puny impact killed the megafauna, simply because they could not function in Earth's present gravity. Our scientific beliefs must change spectacularly once the electrical nature of the universe is recognized. ~Wal Thornhill visit the electric universe at www.holoscience.com ************************************************************** PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA GROUP WEBSITE: http://www.kronia.com Subscriptions to AEON, a journal of myth and science, now with regular features on the Saturn theory and electric universe, may be ordered from this page: http://www.kronia.com/html/sales.html Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: http://www.aeonjournal.com/index.html http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/ http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/velikovskian/ http://www.bearfabrique.org http://www.grazian-archive.com/ http://www.holoscience.com http://www.electric-cosmos.org/ http://www.catastrophism.com/cdrom/index.htm http://www.science-frontiers.com http://www.dragonscience.com ----------------------------------------------- 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.