James P. Hogan by Catastrophes Chaos & Convolutions

Author:Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions [Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2012-01-31T19:51:12+00:00

The Cosmic Power Company

I confess that when I first came across this theory some years ago, my first inclination was to dismiss it as preposterous. Everybody knows that the Sun is an enormous hydrogen bomb, because every textbook, encyclopedia, and treatise on popular science says so, and we have been able to recite things like “hydrogen-deuterium fusion” since our high-school days. But let’s remember that all it really stems from is an authoritative consensus based on pronouncements of fact never actually observed and now known to be erroneous, and acknowledge the degree to which cultural conditioning can take on the appearance of being fact. Once the effort is made to recognize and allow for such preconceptions, the subject starts to become astonishingly intriguing.

A first objection that occurred to me was that if the Sun doesn’t have a thermonuclear heat source at its core, what prevents it from collapsing to a smaller size than we see, as the standard gas laws would seem to require? There turns out to be a simple possible answer. The case for fusion reactions involves rarely occurring reaction chains, which in turn require recourse to quantum mechanical tunneling to ignite them.

Dispensing with all this eliminates the need for temperatures compatible with thermonuclear fusion, and at the lower temperatures we’re now talking about, not a lot of the hydrogen would be ionized. In other words, atoms and molecules will predominate. The strong gravitation that still exists would be sufficient to induce a slight offset of the nucleus of each atom from the center, so that each atom becomes a small electric dipole (a body of net neutral charge, but with its positive and negative components displaced to create local “polarization”). Alignment of these dipoles would result in a radial electric field, causing the highly mobile electrons to diffuse outward from the Sun’s center, leaving behind positively charged ions.

The electrical repulsion of these like charges will then oppose the compressive force of gravity without need of a central heat source. Here, perhaps, we have an explanation for the Sun’s apparent isodensity as indicated by the observed 2 hour, 40 minute pulsations that violated models where density increases with depth. (It would seem to follow that the stronger the gravity, the more powerful the electrical repulsion to balance it becomes, making it questionable whether neutron stars – and hence black holes, of which they are supposed to be the precursors – could ever happen at all. But that’s another can of worms that we’d probably best leave be for the moment.)

What we’re considering, then, is that clouds of hydrogen pinched together initially by forces arising from electrical currents in the cosmic plasma filaments become dense enough for self-gravitation to condense them into protostars in pretty much the kind of way that classical theory says. But long before any thermonuclear ignition takes place at the core (if, indeed, it ever could), strong electric fields are created that limit density increase and prevent further collapse. Strong electric fields also attract and

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