Why Be Interested in Plasma Cosmology?

The field of astrophysics and its failing paradigms have horded so many billions in funding, particle accelerators, books, and documentaries over the past three decades it’s become “too-big-to-fail.” The weakness of its models shouldn’t be terribly surprising given the weakness of the force they’re based on—gravity. Unable to account for the forces and energies needed to make the theories fit the facts, astrophysicists have conjured up non-falsifiable notions that are swiftly pushing it into the realm of science fiction. Yet few question its legitimacy. 

Gravity is a quadrillion trillion trillion times weaker than the electric force. If the human body had one percent more electrons than protons and two people stood side by side, the repulsive force between them would be enough to lift the Earth. Of course, to achieve a voltage of this magnitude with liquids, solids, and gases would require incalculable amounts of energy and effort. But plasma is very different than the other states of matter. With enough plasma and time, large forces and high-energy phenomena can arise entirely on their own. That’s the very reason the chemist Irving Langmuir named it plasma, because its life-like, self-organizing properties reminded him of blood plasma. And in the cosmos, unlike on Earth, it’s liquids, solids, and (ordinary) gases that are the anomalous states, collectively accounting for less than one percent of one percent of the normal matter in the Universe. 

 

Eschewing this knowledge, astrophysics have resorted to inventing fantastical notions like dark matter and dark energy to explain how this feeble force has given rise to such a bountiful universe in such a small amount of cosmological time. Not only have they dismissed plasma physics and electromagnetism as means’ of explaining numerous astronomical observations; they’ve employed fictions like magnetic reconnection and “frozen in” magnetic fields that completely contradict well-established science. The “dark forces” are called dark for the very reason they aren’t directly observable—EVEN IN PRINCIPLE. 

 

In contrast, plasma can be readily observed in the cosmos and on Earth, and laboratory and computational experiments have consistently produced results usually attributed to astrophysicists’ pet theories. And out of the several cosmological models that were recognized before the present paradigm monopolized funding and peer-reviewed journals, the Big Bang model made the worst predictions about the so-called cosmic microwave background while a plasma cosmologist made the best.  

 

Although I believe some form of plasma or electromagnetism-based theory best explains the nature of the cosmos, I have no wish to persuade the readers to dismiss or adopt any particular cosmological theory. I am both impressed and critical of all of them. My objective is to show that there are good reasons to be receptive to the IDEA of an electrical/plasma cosmology. 

 

Naturally, you’re wondering how so many smart people could be so wrong about their own area of expertise. 

 

Very few people appreciate how essential social and intellectual supervision and correction are in ensuring the quality of human thinking and understanding. 

 

Take science and engineering, the relevant and archetypal example and not at all coincidently humanity’s most successful fields. These are socially-validated and well-defined intellectual areas with lots of social structure and lots of competition, which people tend to be hopelessly over-reliant on for discipline and motivation. There are also incredibly precise ways to measure your understanding. There isn’t much room for BS in these fields. These factors make science and engineering highly self-corrective; that is to say, they have ways of correcting themselves on their own, usually with minimal direct control of a small group of people. In cases like this, the difference between smart and dumb people is almost infinite. But pull people out of such an environment, like life, and people become highly vulnerable to the universal flaws in human thinking, which result from their social, emotional, and primitive instincts and flaws in cognition (see Intro to Extralogical Reasoning Part Three). In these areas, the difference between smart and dumb people is far, far less. 

 

But generally, science’s self-correctivity has offset these issues, given enough time.   

 

Secondly, it’s been my overwhelming experience that no matter how much evidence you have to support a conclusion, if the evidence doesn’t in one way or another comport with what people already believe, then they’ll in one way or another deny or dismiss the evidence, even if it means blatantly denying or making up facts (an idea they already believe includes a misguided faith in experts). In other words, people are only interested in theories and explanations that are consistent with what they already believe or what they want to believe. 

 

Again, in the past, self-correctivity eventually won out. But it’s hard, and the benefits of self-correction and the statements in the above paragraph are not considered as heretical in philosophy and science as you might think. To show this, I will have to explain elements of science rarely known outside these fields.  

 

Physicists may start out more open-minded, curious, and theory-oriented than most, and may remain so in some ways, but theoretical physics is a heavily paradigm-driven field that’s based far less on generating new theories than is often assumed. 

 

Most of what goes on in physics has been dubbed “mop-up work,” the reinforcement and consolidation of its prevailing paradigms. “’Normal science,’” as the famous philosopher Thomas Kuhn said, “doesn’t aim at novelty and when successful finds none.” Science has never been as “settled” as most think. There are many aspects of physics as seemingly elementary as the causes of lightening and airplane flight that are still contested by experts. The lingering loose ends of scientific paradigms are obscured by the fact that if the paradigm and its concomitant theories linger for long enough without being challenged, they tend to harden into facts (from Wallace Thornhill and David Talbot’s Electric Universe). Understanding how to use something and knowing what happens (e.g., how to produce and use an airplane or what occurs in the Cosmos) can also create the misimpression that scientists have a full grasp of the how and why—which any scientist can tell you are by no means necessarily the same.   

 

Kuhn showed in his famous Structures of Scientific Revolutions that science progresses much more through revolution than evolution. And like all revolutions, the overthrow of an establishment is always preceded by the latter’s cataclysmic failure. To replace a scientific paradigm, you can’t simply come up with a better one: The current paradigm has to fail; it has to fall flat on its face. This is the only way to overcome the tremendous forces that will inevitably resist it. 

 

These forces aren’t just the “intellectual inertia” of individual physicists; as a complex system, the field itself has tremendous “emergent inertia” inherent to the complex and self-organized nature of its organizational, logistical, monetary, and social infrastructure. This inertia arises from the collective actions of the field’s many members and institutions, which, in turn, undergo highly complex interactions with the rest of society. Nor is this inertia necessarily consistent with the NATURE of the inertia of individual physicists. If a person somehow made legitimate breakthroughs with numerous members of the field’s vanguard, their ideas could still be spurned by the field at large.

 

Though humanity’s study of Nature will never be conducted as well as it hypothetically could, Kuhn says all of the above is an essential part of the scientific process. During revolutions, scientists perform logical gymnastics and concoct more and more new ideas and explanations in a desperate attempt to save the paradigm; but in doing so, they provide the data and discoveries needed to give way to the new paradigm. Notwithstanding that alchemy may have had certain negative influences on chemistry, for example, it provided the inspiration, confidence, and data that chemistry needed by researching itself out of existence.             

 

When paradigms change, everything about the field tends to change with it. Kuhn said there is a total “gestalt switch,” or a change in how they view the very essence of Nature and science. A gestalt is a body of elements that gives rise to an “emergent essence,” an image or perception that exceeds the sum of its parts. If properly designed, for example, a picture of a white vase in front of a black backdrop could also be seen as two human faces placed nose-to-nose. A gestalt switch occurs when there’s a change in what a viewer ACTUALLY SEES without an accompanying alteration of the picture itself. In the example above, the picture of the vase would be seen as two faces, or the two faces could metamorphosis into a hypothetical third image. Scientists from different paradigms see different things even when looking at the exact same phenomenon. In addition, experimental and mathematical standards as well as the field’s culture and pedagogy change just as much as how scientists’ view the World around them.   

 

As you can see, there are serious difficulties establishing new theories, but once again, in the past, self-correctivity tended to eventually win out.    

 

There’s another element of science most educated people don’t know about: 

While irrationality is an enemy to intellectualism generally, there are even ways the field’s self-correctivity can actually benefit from human irrationality. 

   

A certain myopic doggedness is often needed to complete a challenging inquiry or develop a complicated idea. Though often confused, the presentation of an argument and the process that led the thinker there are two completely different things. However beautiful, logical, and eloquent a thinker’s final presentation of a theory may be, intensive thinking is ugly. Even if a theory is correct, proving and developing it requires squeezing it into Nature’s box, which takes a doggedness only irrationality can provide. 

 

The benefits of competition between scientific theories shouldn’t be overlooked, either.

   

Many things in this Universe benefits from competition—whether it’s the evolution of an ecosystem, an industry, an economy, a sport, or a field. It’s a scientific and historical fact that almost all scientific theories throughout history have been horribly wrong—and not just in light of subsequent information or the advantages of hindsight; they were questionable even at the height of their respective popularity. But in order for the right (or closer to right) schools of thought to get the right catalysts and competition, you need to have smart people believing in questionable ideas. My own reasoning philosophy, for instance, owes its existence to a desire to debunk standard “thinking,” leading to otherwise infeasible discoveries. 

   

The East’s failure to keep pace with progress in the West is commonly believed to be the result of a lack of competition. Many have sighted a lack of competition between Asian nations in general. Others have pointed to the fact that because citizens of collectivist societies are believed to be better at seeing different viewpoints, which may be good for the INDIVIDUAL’S wisdom, their practitioners lacked the myopia needed to develop scientific paradigms. Seeing different viewpoints inhibits the irrationality schools of thought need to become attached to questionable ideas. Instead of individual scientists seeing all viewpoints with a mere preference for one or another, it’s better, long term, to have scientists myopically fixated on separate ones, causing scientists to more passionately research them and give each paradigm its due chance.   

   

Does this mean wisdom hinders the development of science overall? At the very least, science requires the ability to temporarily deviate from what would otherwise be considered wise and rational thinking--and that philosophy and science, however much they may overlap, are not one in the same.       

   

Thus, fierce competition enhances self-correctivity further. 

 

But here’s the crux: Physics’ self-correctivity has been impaired, and it’s made the field vulnerable to their human flaws. 

 

Previously, cutting-edge physics could be pursued by anyone with relatively basic training. It got harder during the modern physics revolution, and before long, theoretical physics studied phenomena either too small to be directly observed, or too far away to study without advanced technology, all of which required highly abstract mathematics to fully understand. 

 

Ask yourself this: How self-corrective can Big Bang cosmology be when the overwhelming number of things they observe are thousands, millions, or even billions of light years away? How self-corrective can quantum field theory be if what’s being studied is less than a billionth of a meter?  

 

The rise of modern physics gave physicists numerous mathematical and conceptual licenses. Licenses are often perniciously corruptive, for the breaking of social and psychological inertia tends to be an accelerative or exponential process, beginning slowly but increasing at an ever-increasing rate. Many models of reality started as useful abstractions but were inevitably reified on one level or another, “becoming” reality itself and creating the impression that physicists are studying true reality far more than is actually the case. The reifications led to more reifications and semi-reifications, and theories became progressively more unphysical and non-falsifiable. Einstein himself was always dissatisfied that he couldn’t tie the the warping of space-time back to some concrete aspect of reality—yet now everyone treats it as absolute reality.

 

Does this mean quantum theory and general relativity were mistakes? No, not necessarily. But everything needs to be sufficiently recognized and treated for what they are, and what starts as a good thing doesn’t always stay that way. 

 

Though ostensibly opposites, quantum theory (including quantum field theory and particle physics) and its philosophy still exert technical and philosophical influences on cosmology (based more on general relativity). No one questions the utility and numerous applications of quantum mechanics, but its agnosticism and disinterest in causality makes it—or should make it--a field of engineering, not science. Science seeks to discover both truthful and pragmatic principals that advance humanity’s understanding of Nature. Engineering, on the other hand, is based on achieving specified practical ends, not on the pursuit of truth for its own sake—it just so happens that correctness-oriented methodologies tend to be most effective. It should be easy to believe, then, that a branch of engineering posing as a science bottomed on abstract mathematics with the trappings of mysticism can have pernicious long-term effects.              

 

Plasma didn’t even have a name until 1928, and it wasn’t until after Einstein’s death that its prominent presence in the cosmos was acknowledged. Plasma physics is a relativity new branch of applied physics, and is not typically studied by theorists, even in school. Mathematicians and the like have definite tastes in mathematical techniques (see the works of Sabine Hossenfelder), and it exerts a significant impact on their receptivity to a theory. Hans Alfen, the first plasma cosmologist, said the mathematics involved in plasma physics hold no appeal to most theoretical and mathematical physicists. 

 

Thus, considering the nature and predilections of theoretical physicists, it was inevitable they’d have little interest in it. 

 

Criticism and disagreement can provide great opportunities for corrective feedback, but academia’s response to heresy tends to be as bad as everyone else’s, resulting in obscurantism. Halton Arp, one of Edwin Hubble’s students, for example, found catalogs full of evidence that cast doubt on the Universe’s supposed expansion and was ultimately all but kicked out of mainstream academia. Interestingly, Hubble himself also had doubts about its expansion. 

 

Just as abstractions tend to evolve into actual facets of “reality,” as stated, “lingering hypothesis left unchallenged tend to harden into facts.” Big Bang cosmologists have successfully suppressed heretical research for long enough that everyone’s come to accept very unproven theories as settled science.  

 

In the past, science’s self-correctivity might have saved the day, but when they’re studying things this small and this far away with a host of conceptual and mathematical licenses and are possibly “too-big-to-fail,” correction may not be coming any time soon. Secondly, as was previously mentioned, when a scientific revolution occurs, the predecessor paradigm provides the data that gives rise to a new model. Other than failing to explain observations that better fit plasma-based models, mainstream astrophysics doesn’t seem to be yielding any conceptual data that would inform a plasma cosmology, something that would make it more appealing.        

 

Personally, I’m not optimistic about opening the eyes of orthodox physicists. Each side’s principals are based on other principals that are based on other principals, etc. many times over. The disagreements are at once intricate, fundamental, and widespread—and go well beyond physics. The initial discoveries of plasma cosmologists and their ilk have led them to unconventional views about other branches of science, as well, further separating them from their competitors. The foundations of ideologies are always heavily influenced by social and psychological factors that aren’t easily to put to words. The fringe theorists have the same flaws as their conventional counterparts in one way or another—not to mention their own. Speaking very generally, mainstream theorists veer on the side of conservative and standard thinking while the heretics tend to be contrarian and non-conformist, and conversion to a side tends to reinforce one’s natural inclinations.

 

Kuhn said, “There are significant limits to what proponents of different theories can communicate to one another.” This is due to the aforementioned incommensurability of different paradigms—characterized by gestalt differences in their views of Nature and science--and the two in question are about as different as you can get.      

 

Nonetheless, I implore the readers to learn of alternate theories. Even if their beliefs remain unchanged, there are always benefits to thinking about things from different points of view. Occasionally questioning your own beliefs is healthy, and in refuting your opponents’ arguments, you can improve your understanding of your own. It’s also a good exercise in open-mindedness.

 

Kuhn spoke of an “essential tension” that embraced a balance between a mode of thinking towards one’s paradigm and another away from it. Kuhn believed that Nature was too complex and humans too flawed to study Nature at random, and you can’t interpret experimental and observational data in the absence of a theoretical context. But at the same time, paradigms have never proved infallible or irreplaceable, and, of course, many ambitious scientists want to make new discoveries—and they do need to be made. Kant said that quality philosophy is achieved through a dialogue between a priori theories and empirical analysis. Hegel talked about a “synthesis” that was achieved over time by competing ideologies, which tends to be the way philosophy progresses. The essential tension, consideration of alternate theories, and multifarious dialogues should be a central part of all intellectual fields, and physics shouldn’t be granted a variance.