The Virtue of Heresy:Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer by Ratcliffe Hilton

Author:Ratcliffe, Hilton [Ratcliffe, Hilton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Published: 2007-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9: A Twist in the Tale

Putting an electrical spin on the Universe.

T imeline: March 2006. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory releases a series of Spitzer infrared images taken of the collision between the copper projectile and comet Tempel 1 during the 2005 NASA Deep Impact mission. The sequence tracks the impact as a function of brightness, and NASA scientists express surprise at what their analysis reveals. One can very clearly see in the photographs a bright flash of light before the impacter strikes the comet! Now if that wasn’t an electrical discharge, then what was it? No official explanation is forthcoming. The following month, the European Southern Observatory issues a press release detailing their observation of the spectacular break-up of a comet. On the night of 23 April, fascinated astronomers at the Very Large Telescope atop a small mountain called Paranal in Northern Chile watch intently as the comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 violently fractures for the second time in three days. S-W 3 had been an object of high interest ever since its first known fragmentation in 1995, with good reason. Immediately prior to the first break-up, it flared briefly to a thousand times its normal brightness! A significant flare preceded each subsequent fissioning of the comet, and now, like the tempting trunk of a gum tree in an Australian thunderstorm, it is torn apart in a short, sharp flash of blinding light. Astronomers have actually observed the splitting of about 30 comets to date, and every time it was accompanied by a bright burst of light. Astrophysicists try to explain this phenomenon by citing fracturing caused by solar heating, but does anyone really think that a comet travelling through a sea of electrically charged plasma wouldn’t be struck by lightning?

The progress of astrophysics has been hobbled by a myopic inability to see across the fences separating various scientific disciplines. I firmly believe that most astronomers cling to highly unlikely gas models for the Sun and other stars simply because of their ignorance of the nuances of nuclear chemistry. The tracks of nuclides leave no doubt in the minds of those with the requisite skills to read them. The odd chemistry credit obtained along the way to a degree in physics is simply insufficient to equip astronomers to see the detail. This is pointedly clear also in our lack of depth in electrical field theory and experimental plasma dynamics. A bit of training in these disciplines and we begin to see the universe in a whole new light, if you’ll forgive my intentional pun. We are trained instead in all our schools to believe in a purely mechanical universe with no electrical potential, a place where rotational dynamics are solely the result of interaction between mass and gravity. The evidence of our eyes tells us in no uncertain terms that it is not such a place, but it has taken the vision of people with a solid background in electrical engineering to explain to us just how the universe is shaped and sustained by an interaction of two of nature’s primal forces: Electricity and magnetism.

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