Robert sent in a couple of interesting links worth a look. The Asia Times is running a series of articles by Eric Lerner. The first link is https://asiatimes.com/2023/12/the-big-bang-never-happened-so-what-did/… this one follows on from another in September which had the title, ‘Saying Goodbye to-the-Big Bang? which claimed the Big Bang theory is contradicted by evidence that has accumulated over decades, which includes data beamed back by the James Webb Space Telescope. Lerner, instead, goes back to Hannes Alfven. There is an alternative scientific view of cosmic evolution, he says. It doesn’t require dark matter or dark energy, or cosmic inflation. It is plasma cosmology – electrically conducting gases. Some of the key processes can be found on earth – from the production of fusion energy. Rather than being an evolutionary cosmology based on a fixed beginning, which is what Big Bang amounts to, we could go back as far as we can observe with our existing technology. Secondly, a correct understanding of the process of evolution requires a description of reality that recognises that the universe consists not only of structures – things like protons. molecules, cells and people – but also of the processes that bring such structures into existence. As space based telescopes peer further and further out into space, they’ve discovered larger and larger conglomerates of galaxies. Not stars – galaxies. These clusters of galaxies are strung like beads on filaments stretchingf over tens of millions of light years in length. The filaments, themselves, are twisted into a hierachy of larger and larger open clusters, extending to more than four billion light years in radius. Their length is even greater. These are enormous numbers. We can estimate how long it took for those giant structures to form because we can measure the volocities at which galaxies are moving within them. Simple arithmetic allows us to say they must be 7 or 8 trillion years of age – some 500 times older than the Big Bang moment.
Starting in 1978, Alfven and his team showed such structures, given enough time, were the result of interactions among a small number of processes, all well observed in laboratory experiments. The first such process is the famous pinch effect – the attraction of electric currents moving in the same direction, caused by intereaction of the currents with magnetic fields. This was observed by Ampere back in 1820. And so on. It is based on the theory of electrromagnetism as outlined by Maxwell. This has been confirmed over and over again – unlike a lot of cosmological theories.
The second link is https://asiatimes.com/2023/12/fusion-from-filaments-on-earth-and-in-the-cosmos/ … Lerner begins by saying electromagnetic processes in plasmas could produce the giant filaments that we see today on the largest structures in the universe. This happened without a Big Bang – and without dark energy or dark matter. It is based on processes we observe right here on earth. The huge filaments resemble tiny filaments. They are just bigger – but the force of gravity gets larger on larger scales. Over billions of light years gravitational forces became comparable to magnetic forces. This follows directly from the laws of gravitation, known since Newton’s day. Gravitational forces, negligible for filaments light years or even millions of light years across, became dominant when the filaments reached billion light year size. Gravity forms blobs of plasma, contracting along the axis of the largest filaments. The centrifugal forces of the spinning filaments resisting gravity toward the axis, but not along it, which caused disc shaped blobs to form. These set up a new interaction with the magnetic field. As Michael Faraday discovered, a contracting disc rotating through a magnetic field produces electrical currents that move trom the circumference of the disc towards its centre. And so on. You get an idea of what he is saying from the above but one should read the whole article in order to grasp what he is saying. One might have to read it on several occasions to get a handle.
Lerner’s view seems to contradict the Electric Universe ideas espoused on the Thunderbolts web site. Gravity in the EU does not seem to play a major role. Not only that Lerner actually describes one way in which the universe, as it is, formed – from primordial vortices on scales of trillions of light years, to super clusters of galaxies on hundreds of millions of light years, to clusters of galaxies millions of light years across, down to individual galaxies such as the Milky Way, a thousand light years across, to stars a million kilometres in radius [a ten-millionth of a light year]. Further, short lived plasmoids at the core of these objects can be seen on many scales from giant quasars to lesser phenomena. The plasmoids emit beams of ions and electrons in opposite directions – which can be reproduced in a laboratory. Playing out over an immense period of time the universe was cemented into an electrical generator, with gravitational energy converted into kinetic energy – and then into flows of electrical energy.
Later, he says, observations have confirmed filaments exist up to scales of 4 to 5 billions light years in radius. This is a complete contradiction to the idea of an expanding universe. It is a long read but well worth the effort. There are another two posts in the pipeline.