Thunderbolts of the Gods

As described in the previous post, the generally accepted explanation of the nature of our universe is the theory of the “Big Bang”.

According to this theory, scientists tell us that all the matter and energy that now fills the universe was flung out from a primordial explosion of quite unimaginable fury that occurred some 14 billion years ago, and that everything we see in the sky today is a consequence of that original explosion.

This theory was not the product of a single human mind. It was the end result of numerous brilliant minds over a span of almost 400 years, with each making their own vital contribution towards the final theory. Furthermore, this theory did not rest upon visual observation alone, but was supported by an elegant mathematical foundation.

As explained in the last instalment, it was the noted scholar and astronomer Edwin Hubble who, in 1929, published his discovery that the velocity of distant galaxies increased with their distance from the earth, and that their velocity was directly linked to the red-shift in their spectral lines of light.

He was also able to show a simple relationship between the distance of a galaxy and the shift in its spectral lines. The farther out each galaxy was from earth, the faster it was travelling, and the greater its red-shift. It was from this discovery that he concluded that the entire universe was expanding, and that everything was moving away from everything else.

Over time this theory had come to be accepted so completely that there no longer seemed to be any room for doubt. So there was considerable consternation when an American astronomer named Halton Arp not only challenged the accepted theory, but went on to list his reasons for believing that the entire theory of the “Big Bang” was fundamentally wrong.

In hindsight, it should have been obvious right from the start that the “Big Bang” theory was a train wreck just waiting to happen. The very idea that all the energy and matter contained in the universe today could have been compacted into an infinitesimally tiny source that somehow exploded into the universe that we see today defies all understanding.

Scientists still cannot explain either the cause of, or the reasons for, the “Big Bang”, but are content to assume that it somehow must have happened, because of the expanding universe that exists today. But what they fail to see is that this entire imbroglio is the result of their initial mistake – which was to interpret the red-shift as a Doppler effect in the first place.

In fact the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan of Cornell University wrote the obituary for the “Big Bang” theory more than a quarter of a century ago when he penned the following lines: “This red shift, observed in the spectral lines of distant galaxies and interpreted as a Doppler effect, is the key to cosmology.”

The basic problem with treating the red-shift as a Doppler effect was that if this interpretation should later be found to be incorrect, then the entire theory of an expanding universe as a consequence of a primordial “Big Bang” would collapse like a pack of cards. And this is exactly what happened.

It all started off innocently enough when Halton Arp published his Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies in 1966. The initial purpose of his book was to show photographs of nearby galaxies that did not fall into any of the classic categories of galaxy shapes, so that it could be used by fellow astronomers to test their theories of galactic formation.

It was only some years later that Arp realized that several of the objects illustrated in his Atlas also appeared on the published list of recognized quasars. As previously explained, although “quasars” (short for Quasi Stellar Radio Sources) looked like stars, the extent of their red-shift showed them to be travelling at speeds of up to nine-tenths of the speed of light, which placed them among the most distant objects in the visible universe.

In some photographs Arp discovered a quasar in the foreground of known galaxies, and in others there appeared to be matter bridging the two objects, implying that they were very close in space. But if they were, and their red-shifts were due to Hubble expansion, then both objects should have similar red-shifts.

However, the problem confronting Arp was that these galaxies were found to have much smaller red-shifts than the quasars associated with them. It was clear to Arp that these differentials could not be explained by the Doppler effect, nor to any physical movement of the objects concerned, but must be the result of a non-cosmological or “intrinsic” origin.

He also noticed that quasars were not evenly spread over the sky, but tended to be more commonly found in positions of small angular separation from certain galaxies, which suggested that they were in some way related to these galaxies. Arp hypothesized that quasars were actually local objects ejected from the core of active galactic nuclei.

So he set to work to publish his findings by submitting a paper to the “Astrophysical Journal”, which was the leading publication in its field. Somewhat naively perhaps, Arp hoped that his unusual discovery might attract the acclaim of his peers. What actually happened, however, was yet another travesty in the long, sad saga of science, in silencing those who challenge entrenched ideas.

The editor of the “Astrophysical Journal” at that time was S. Chandrasekhar, an accomplished Indian-American astrophysicist who subsequently became a co-winner of the Nobel prize for Physics. As Arp was later to find out, Chandrasekhar did not choose to send his paper to a referee, which was the accepted practice for reviewing papers submitted for publication.

Instead, he returned his paper to the Director of the Institute where Arp worked, with the words “This exceeds my imagination” scrawled across the top of the paper. What happened next is best described in Arp’s own words, which can be heard at 3 minutes and 40 seconds of the following video.

As Arp explains in this video, he was asked to change to another line of research, and when he failed to do so, he was denied further access to the Palomar Observatory. He lost his job at the Carnegie Institute and was obliged to move to Germany where he later joined the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.

There was a not a little irony in this, for Max Planck had himself been the victim of oppression by his peers, who initially rejected his idea that energy was not transmitted in waves, but in tiny packets called “quanta”. And of course it was this discovery by Planck that was to become the basis for the entire science of Quantum Mechanics.

In fact, as a disillusioned Planck noted at the time, new theories do not succeed in science by the brilliance of their ideas, but because the old professors die off, and are replaced by younger men who are more open to new ideas. Arp himself had the last laugh when a new epigram was linked to his name. It was called Arp’s Law, and it stated: “Whenever science is confronted by two competing theories, it invariably chooses the wrong one.”

However, establishment scientists who rely on Government grants for their status and survival, continue to cling to the old idea of the “Big Bang”, and are not about to join the growing group of believers who have joined Arp’s camp. They continue to resort to stratagems like “Dark Energy” and “Dark Matter”, both of which are purely hypothetical, in order to prop up the shortcomings of existing theory.

Another scientist who propounded ideas that were in conflict with the established view of the universe was a Russian-Jewish psychiatrist named Immanuel Velikovsky. He became yet another victim of establishment science when he published his seminal work entitled Worlds in Collision in 1950.

According to Velikovsky, sometime within the last 4,000 years, an enormous convulsion took place on the planet Jupiter. As a result of this convulsion, a proto-planet the size of earth was ejected from Jupiter. And although Velikovsky never said this himself, I am happy to go on record as saying that the most prominent feature associated with the planet Jupiter, its giant red spot, is actually a remnant of that explosion that still persists to this day.

According to the legends that Velikovsky discovered in the course of his research, the object that was ejected from Jupiter ended up as the planet Venus. So, according to Velikovsky, Venus is a very young planet, less than 4,000 years old. And in the course of its erratic orbit around the sun, it began to have close encounters with other planets, particularly Mars and the earth.

In his book Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky  provided a vast amount of evidence indicating that Venus had a close encounter with the earth around the 15th century BC, and that it threatened the earth again some 52 years later.

The electromagnetic effects of these encounters forced Venus into a new orbit which then brought it onto a collision path with Mars. These close encounters led to Mars being thrown into a new orbit, where it began to threaten the earth.

A series of disastrous encounters then took place between the earth and Mars, after which Mars settled into its present orbit around the sun. Venus, meanwhile, had become an inner planet with a new orbit between Mercury and the earth. For those interested in learning more about the life and works of Velikovsky, I cover these in greater detail in my Podcast # No 9, Podcast # 10 and Podcast # 11.

As one can imagine, if the response of the scientific establishment was hostile to the works of Max Planck and Halton Arp, their reaction to the revolutionary ideas of Velikovsky was positively apoplectic. They not only succeeded in getting his original publisher (Macmillan Books) to discontinue publication of his work, but he was declared a persona non grata on college and university campuses, and denied access to all scientific journals to answer the scurrilous claims of his critics.

Yet the irony was, as Velikovsky himself sardonically commented, that whereas Darwin’s equally revolutionary book The Origin of Species, which has been hailed by the scientific community as one of the greatest triumphs in all of science, contained not a single scientific reference, his own works by contrast were replete with references so that readers could validate all of his sources for themselves.

Despite the scandalous invectives directed at him and his work, Velikovsky was undaunted. As he explained, his works were based on exhaustive research over a ten year period into the legends and records of ancient cultures around the world, which all told the same basic story of battles in the sky between planetary gods that took place within the recorded history of mankind.

Furthermore, he threw down the gauntlet to his critics by declaring that if the recorded stories of these ancient cultures happened to be in conflict with the accepted theories of the scientists of his day, then the fault lay with scientific theory, and not with the events described by these ancient cultures.

One of the people who were inspired by the works of Velikovsky was an American author by the name of David Talbott.  Talbott received his Bachelor of Science degree from Portland State University, where he majored in Education and Political Science. However, it was not long before his interests gravitated towards comparative mythology, and alternative histories of the solar system.

In 1987, Talbott founded the journal Aeon, which allowed him to publish many of his own works. He later became the initial President of the Mind Exploration Corporation, an organization whose mission was “to identify, investigate and market groundbreaking discoveries on the frontiers of science, technology and human understanding”.

It was in the course of these investigations that his life changed as a result of a chance meeting with an Australian physicist by the name of Wallace Thornhill.

Like Talbott, Thornhill had been captivated by the writings of Velikovsky. Having graduated in Physics at Melbourne University in 1964, he began his post-graduate studies doing upper atmospheric research. However, he soon found that anyone professing support for the ideas of Velikovsky could experience first-hand, indifference and even hostility from his superiors. He quickly realized that there is no career for a heretic in academia.

He therefore abandoned his studies and joined IBM Australia. He subsequently worked at the IBM Systems Development Institute in Canberra, helping to develop the first computer graphics system in Australia. He also acted as technical support for the computing facilities in the research schools at the Australian National University, which gave him access to their scientists and libraries.

Now that he had the freedom as well as access to scientific facilities, Thornhill began to undertake his own research in astrophysics, and in particular to question the hitherto established dogma of the “Big Bang”. Paramount among his concerns was the reliance upon gravity in the standard model of the universe, with almost no attention being given to the possible role of electromagnetism.

It was Velikovsky who can be said to have pioneered the science of astrophysics, when he pointed out in 1950 that space was not a vacuum, and that the forces of electromagnetism were the key to understanding the formation of the solar system. He then went on to predict that the sun carried a powerful electric charge, and that the earth possessed a magnetosphere with a geomagnetic tail that stretched as far away as the moon.

When the space age began in October 1957, with the launch of the world’s first artificial satellite, scientists at last had the opportunity to investigate the properties of space and the constitution of the planets. They found that all of the above statements made by Velikovsky were correct. Of course he gained no official credit for this, nor did it help to make his revolutionary works any more palatable to the scientific establishment.

Wallace Thornhill was able to take these ideas of Velikovsky, and with his knowledge of astronomy and plasma physics, use them as a basis for questioning all of the entrenched ideas of astrophysics, such as the “Big Bang” theory, the existence of black holes, and even Einstein’s theory of relativity. It was at this time that he had his chance encounter with David Talbott.

It proved to be a fortuitous event. Despite the gulf that existed between the two men in terms of their academic backgrounds, they were united in their admiration for the work of Velikovsky, and both shared a common conviction that the existing theories of Cosmology and the “Big Bang” were out of touch with the new discoveries that were being made by means of satellites and deep space probes.

They found another bond in the research that had been undertaken by Talbott into ancient forms of art in primitive societies around the globe. When Talbott showed Thornhill pictures showing enigmatic spiky objects that were common to many cultures, Thornhill was immediately struck by their similarity with plasma discharges that he had seen in his laboratory experiments.

It was the start of a productive association that continues to this day. In Talbott, Thornhill found an eager listener to his theories, as well as a forum (via his journal Aeon) in which to publish his ideas. And Talbott found in Thornhill a respected scientist who could attract other scientists to their cause. They agreed to collaborate, and joined forces in an enterprise that came to be known as the Thunderbolts project.

The objective of this project was to attract likeminded individuals with the goal of providing a new theoretical model of the universe, that not only explained the workings of the universe in a fundamentally different way, but at the same time resolved many of the anomalies that continued to baffle astrophysicists still committed to the “Big Bang” theory.

They were aided in their efforts by the timely arrival of the digital age, which allowed them to take advantage of electronic methods of accessing information, and publicizing this to interested parties around the world, via email, DVD’s and videos. Over the years, the Thunderbolts group has sponsored conferences that have attracted many mainstream scientists.

It must have been a considerable source of satisfaction to both men when, in the year 2000, Wallace Thornhill was one of the keynote speakers at a conference in Portland, Oregon, along with Halton Arp from the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. They were also joined by the Plasma Cosmologist Anthony Peratt from the Los Alamos Laboratories, who was the author of the book Physics of the Plasma Universe.

Thornhill was also a keynote speaker at the “Intersect 2001” conference held in Laughlin, Nevada. Among those attending the conference were the well-known Oxford biologist Rupert Sheldrake, the cellular biologist Bruce Lipton, and the psychologist Garry Schwartz of the University of Arizona.

In recent years, Wallace Thornhill and his colleagues at the Thunderbolts group have achieved a broad consensus of ideas which they call the “Electric Universe”. They believe that modern astronomy gives a totally disconnected view of space, filled with isolated galaxies comprised of lonely stars and planets drifting in solitary isolation, governed by the clockwork force of gravity.

The Thunderbolts group contends that all bodies in space are interlinked by an electric force which influences matter at all levels, from subatomic particles to galactic clusters. This synthesis of ideas is explained in two books co-authored by Thornhill and Talbott. The first is called The Electric Sun, and the second is called Thunderbolts of the Gods.

These books can be ordered here.

The substance of these two books is also set out in the video below.

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2020 at 9:30 am and is filed under Signs in the Sky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are closed.