Images returned by high-powered telescopes and recent space probes have challenged astronomers' long-standing assumptions about galaxies and their constituent stars, about the evolution of our solar system, and about the nature and history of Earth.
The new discoveries also suggest that our early ancestors may have witnessed awe inspiring electrical events in the heavens - the source of myths and symbols around the world.
In December 2013 on Sott Talk Radio we interviewed Australian physicist Wallace Thornhill. Wallace graduated in physics at Melbourne University in 1964 and began postgraduate studies with Prof. Victor Hopper's upper atmosphere research group. Before entering university, he had been inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky through his controversial best-selling book, Worlds in Collision. Wallace has published several books with David Talbott including Thunderbolts of the Gods and The Electric Universe, on the combined subjects of the recent history of the solar system and the Electric nature of the Universe. So, in short, he was the ideal person to discuss this most interesting of topics with us.
Running Time: 01:54:00
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Transcript:
Niall: Hello listeners and welcome to another episode of SOTT Talk Radio. I'm your host Niall Bradley. With me in the studio tonight is Joe Quinn.
Joe: Hi there.
Niall: Pierre Lescaudron.
Pierre: Bonjour.
Niall: And Scott Ogrin.
Scott: Hello.
Niall: So this week we have a very special guest with us: Wallace Thornhill of Thunderbolts fame. Wallace Thornhill is an Australian physicist and Chief Science Advisor to the Thunderbolts Project which I think a lot of our readers and listeners will be familiar with. The Thunderbolts Project is an interdisciplinary collaboration of accredited scientists and independent researchers. Their mission is to explore the electric universe paradigm, something we are going to be discussing today with him in person. Wal is also the co-author, with David Talbot of two superb books that we highly recommend; The Electric Universe and Thunderbolts of the Gods. The Thunderbolts Project website is thunderbolts.info and Wal has his own website at holoscience.com. Welcome Wallace.
Wal: Thank you very much.
Niall: Thanks very much for being on the show.
Joe: And for getting up so early. You're pretty much at the antipodes of where we are right now - close enough anyway! - down under. It's a totally different world down there - almost! - definitely a different time zone!
Pierre: Ten hour difference! Maybe we can start with the first question? The Electric Universe, why such a title?... and, for mainstream science, the universe is not electric?
Wal: Yes the title came to me in the late '90s. I had been working on the problem of what exactly were the Thunderbolts of the Gods because this aspect of lightning which is represented by all of the ancient nations, the representation itself looks nothing like lightning today and they also associated it with planets in the sky, which doesn't make any sense in today's world. In the process of figuring out what was going on in our own solar system it occurred to me that there was far more to it than that because electricity is involved at every level in our existence, right from biology through weather systems. On the sun we see very powerful electrical activity and so on. When you look out into deep space you also see the same kinds of things. It's a repeated pattern. When you delve down into the other direction, how far down can you go into atoms and then the particles within atoms? What about those particles themselves? Gradually over a number of decades it dawned on me that the electric force was all you needed to explain all of them. Therefore when it came to writing the book The Electric Universe, I coined that title and also tried to point out that the science of the future will be one of simplification, not inventing new particles and new energies and all of these kinds of things and gradually going further and further down a dead end of modern science.
Niall: Now there are a lot of areas in science where it's acknowledged that electricity plays a key role but the contribution I take from your work is, looking at cosmology, how the planets interact in the solar system at the level of the galaxy and beyond. This is an extraordinary addition. How does the standard model work, because I read your work and I say 'okay, that makes sense, but I can't make heads or tails of what they are trying to tell us in terms of how planets 'form by accretion', that there's a great big mass, a high gravitational force?'... Okay so maybe that is a starting point for the electric universe, the big picture.
Wal: The standard model of stars and the universe are all based around the gravitational collection of matter, that gravity is a force which is so weak that we can jump away from the entire Earth. The entire Earth cannot hold us to it. Whereas the electric force by comparison is phenomenally powerful. It's ten to the thirty nine times more powerful than the gravitational force and yet it's ignored in astronomy. I can see the reason for that when I was at the university we were asked to calculate how much energy would be required to separate all of the positive and negative charge inside a teaspoon of salt. It was some phenomenal figure. So the feeling was that the energy is just not available to separate charge.
And then the problem arises if astronomers are taught this gravitational model of the universe, they are completely unaware of the kinds of things that can happen when you have powerful electric forces in operation. Astronomers acknowledge that the universe is 99.99 percent of charged particles, free-moving charged particles but they always assume they are in equal numbers. In other words there are no electrical force in action. That these particles are all free to move and if there is a separation of charge, it's instantly because of that powerful force, neutralized. So that's the big difference.
There is a problem too in science that it's a cultural activity. There's a lot of talk about the standards in science and how you adhere to observation and experiment, the empirical approach as they call it. However we are just humans and we attach ourselves very strongly to stories that we are taught as kids and in fact people will go to war over these stories so that is the power of the paradigm as they call it. So when someone comes up with a completely different viewpoint the tendency is to dismiss it. If that story continues, to denigrate the people who are spreading the story and generally creating problems. But it means science progresses very slowly. Rather like Arthur Koestler characterized it in his book The Sleepwalkers people stumbling around in the dark and tripping over things. And this is the way the results coming back from the space probes are being handled now. Mostly what you read about are surprises, things that shouldn't exist, stars that shouldn't exist and behavior out in deep space that shouldn't exist.
So the electric universe shows that all these things can be simply explained and that you don't have to indulge in higher mathematics. The first principal of physics is to get your concepts right and to be very clear in your language and this is something that modern science certainly is not. The language is obscure, particle physicists talk about charm and color. What in the dickens does that mean? It has no physical meaning. And at the other extreme, astronomers talk about magnetic reconnection. Well what does that mean? It's like trying to connect lines of latitude and longitude. It's meaningless. But when you introduce the electric force and look at the work of the engineers who work with high energy plasma discharges, they are all generally members of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) the biggest professional organization of the world, these people actually recognize the real behavior of electricity and plasma but they are ignored. I have only seen one astronomer at an international meeting of the IEEE Plasma Sciences Division. He was a radio astronomer and he could see the connection between his observations in the radio field and what these plasma scientists were talking about. So the hard evidence has already come in that shows that the electric universe model is not only viable but it's predictive and yet it's ignored and we are denigrated as being cranks and so on.
Pierre: You were talking about the beliefs we acquired when we are kids, one of the beliefs we acquired in school is that space is a vacuum. So how can electrical phenomenon occur in a vacuum?
Wal: That's right, but when we got into space with the first space craft it was a total surprise, the amount of electromagnetic activity once you got beyond the Earth's atmosphere. Since then it is realized that of course that space is full of plasma. When I say full, that means that there are only a few particles per square cubic meter for instance. However when you look at the colossal volume of space then you realize that that amounts to an awful lot of matter and not only that, an awful lot of electricity.
Pierre: You mentioned several times plasma. From what I understand plasma is a very common phase of matter but most people don't know what it is. Can you explain what plasma is in simple terms?
Wal: I'm glad you asked. On the Earth we generally see solids, liquids and gases and all of these are substances that have equal numbers of positive and negative charges and they are all bound to some degree, which means that we don't witness what's called plasma. Because if you were to heat a solid, liquid or a gas to a certain very high temperature, not only would all of the particles come apart, but they would then, the atoms themselves would start losing electrons. When you have an atom that has lost an electron it becomes positively charged and of course the negative charged electrons are then freely moving. That is a plasma. We've all seen it of course. There is a plasma inside your fluorescent tubes. There are novelty plasma balls and inside those plasma balls you will note that the electric current flows in writhing filaments. They look as if they are almost alive. This is one of the things that the plasma universe and the electric universe brings to astronomy, this aliveness instead of these dead objects just coalescing under the force of gravity. Plasma is also seen in lightning and in a flame and in arc welding and so on. It is around us but we don't recognize it necessarily as being a plasma.
Joe: So mainstream cosmology and mainstream astronomy, science and NASA for example don't dispute the fact that there is plasma in the universe.
Wal: Not at all. You'll see in text books it's stated that 99.99 repeating percent of the universe is in the form of plasma. That's the visible universe. In other words stars themselves are supposed to be balls of plasma where the temperature is sufficiently high that the atoms within it are mostly disassociated into positively charged particles and electrons.
Joe: So they don't dispute that. They recognize that. So where is the division then in terms of the effect or how plasma plays into the understanding of the universe between the electric universe theory and the orthodox theory?
Wal: That's another good question. The difference is that astronomers are taught a form of plasma physics which is called magneto hydrodynamics. It's a great word which means nothing to most people but what it means simply is that it is a magnetized fluid. Magneto hydrodynamics is treated as being electrically neutral however it contains a magnetic field. The theory of magneto hydrodynamics is reasonably complex. Hannes Alfvén, the father of plasma cosmology and a Nobel Prize winner pointed out in his Nobel Prize winning speech that the use of magneto hydrodynamics in space was incorrect. In fact it was a mistake that he'd made. But no one wanted to hear about it at that stage because everyone was on the bandwagon of the mathematical theory of magneto hydrodynamics.
This is one of the other problems with modern science is this fixation on mathematics because all that mathematics can do is describe what you observe, it cannot explain it. So you have to be very careful. You have to get your concepts right before you actually use mathematics to help uncover the secrets of the universe. At present the scientific concepts are way off the beam.
Pierre: You mention, if I correctly understand, so the space is made mostly of plasma, plasma is conductive. And you mention discharges.
Wal: Yes.
Pierre: So how are we to understand that there are electric discharging occurring within and between celestial bodies like comets, planets and stars?
Wal: Perhaps the last obvious plasma discharge is a comet. Back in the nineteenth century if you get hold of scientific journals then, you will see references to the electrical nature of comets. Because at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, discharge tubes, you know the old Geissler Tubes where people would put a discharge into a rarified gas and see all these wonderful effects, they were a kind of, almost a toy of the scientists at that time and were fascinated by the things they saw. They could see the relevance of those phenomena with that of a comet. So you would see references of the electrical nature of comets. But that all went away when the dogma came in that electricity doesn't do anything in space therefore a comet cannot be an electrical discharge. This is this hang-up, this problem that astronomers are not taught the real plasma physics that present cosmologists work with and that shows that if you just have two regions of plasma moving past one another, they will actually induce electric currents in each other. So certainly throughout space there is electrical phenomenon right in front of the astronomer's eye pieces, if you like, but they cannot see it. It is a very odd thing to witness science in this state where it's obvious to some people what's going on and to others it is completely opaque.
Joe: So mainstream science, I am going to blame NASA, I'm going to use NASA as the word for mainstream science here, because they are responsible for everything, so NASA contends that electricity does nothing in space. So then it doesn't exist?
Wal: It's not a phenomenon to be concerned about except over very short distances. They will acknowledge some electrical effects associated with the sun but nothing like a circuit which extends out past the Earth and beyond the solar system.
Joe: Even though this can be shown to be true?
Wal: Yes, in fact Hannes Alfvén drew the electric circuit of the sun. The only mistake he made was to assume that the sun was the generator of the power in that circuit. What we've been able to show is that the sun is connected beyond the solar system to the galactic circuit and the galactic circuit is connected beyond to other galaxies and so on. It's a hierarchical situation which is the kind of thing that you see in electrical phenomenon, is this repeated patterns on different scales.
Pierre: You mentioned a circuit in the solar system. What are the specifics of this circuit, where does it start from, where does it stop and what is going on within this circuit?
Wal: Well it's like being embedded in the insides of a radio; all you can see is what is going on very close to you; if you were miniaturized to that extent, and we are certainly miniaturized in the universe. What Hannes Alfvén did was to draw a circuit which has current flowing in at the poles of the sun and flowing out in a chute if you like, the solar wind as it's called. It's not a wind it's a current sheet, that flows out and then at some point it curves back and comes in again at the poles. And he thought that the sun was driving this current. But at the poles of the sun there are magnetic field lines that extend off and don't come out beyond the solar system.
One of the first things that you learn about electric currents flowing in space is that they follow the magnetic field lines. So there are currents flowing in at the poles of the sun. The question then that occurred to myself and Professor Don Scott, who is a retired professor of electrical engineering and one of my close colleagues, was how exactly does this connect to the galactic circuit? We're working on that now, and we have the concepts in place because you can actually look into deep space and see some of these stellar circuits lit up. They're called planet nebulae. So by looking at these things in deep space we can transfer that model down to the size of our own sun and I think we will be able to show the extended circuit of the sun beyond the heliosphere as it's called.
Joe: So your electric universe research contends the forces that interact between bodies in the universe, planets etc., is electrical whereas NASA, for example, would say that the main force is gravity, is that correct?
Wal: We don't argue with the use of the word gravity. The thing that NASA don't understand is that gravity itself is an electrical force. This is one of the simplifications of the electric universe. It is possible to explain magnetism and the electric forces of gravity all in the same simple terms. You don't have to invent forces every time you find something different. You don't have to invent another force. For instance, astronomers know that there is something wrong with the theory of gravity and this is why there have been efforts to tinker with it. There is this thing called MOND, Modified Newtonian Dynamics where gravity is supposed to work differently on the very large scale compared to our scale. But this is just throwing in ad hoc ideas.
The electrical universe model which I actually shared on my website shows that you can understand gravity and the solar system and the way it works like clockwork only if you have a theory of gravity which is modified by the amount of charge on a body. We already see comets changing their orbits and one of the reasons is that they're discharging and therefore they're changing their charge nature and in doing so they actually change the force between themselves and the sun. Now the standard model, all it can do is talk about the jets on the surface of the comet making that change. In other words this is all astronomers have got to work with; it deals with things like boats moving through water, where you have shock waves and all this kind of thing. They've got no idea of looking at electrical activity which has really cut them off from the nature of the universe.
Joe: Yeah, it sounds like it. From a NASA scientist's point of view if I asked such a person what gravity is, would he be able to tell me?
Wal: No.
Joe: So it's just a word really.
Wal: There is no scientist on Earth that can tell you what it is. They can describe it and they can use Einstein's metaphysics, that is, trying to describe it in terms of warped space. Well you can't warp space. Space is merely a concept, a location in three dimensions and how do you go about warping that? That's a geometric approach which doesn't explain a darn thing. It doesn't explain how matter happens to warp space, it doesn't explain what matter is and it doesn't explain what space is. You are left with virtually nothing except the mathematics.
The electric universe says that gravity is very similar to the magnetic force. You know how if you put a lot of tiny magnets on a slippery surface, like a glass tabletop, they will all spin around so that they align and point in the same direction and they will try and move towards one another and attach themselves like a daisy chain. That's how gravity works, only what we are talking about here is a very tiny distortion in all of the particles that make up every atom.
Now this gives rise to a number of very interesting answers to questions which are not explained and that is why you cannot shield from gravity. It's simply because all of the particles in every atom in the body whether they are metals or non-metals, it doesn't matter what they are, will respond similarly to the presence of matter that's nearby. They will all try to align themselves and since they are free to move within the atom they will all tend to align and form little football shapes instead of spheres. Those little football shapes have a positive end and a negative end. It's the attraction between those positives and negatives that give you that weak force of gravity. It answers the puzzle why is the force so weak? It's because the distortion of subatomic particles is absolutely miniscule.
Joe: It sounds very obtuse of NASA to ignore what's right in front of their noses in that sense. There's a decent understanding of electricity and electromagnetism and has been for a long time and it can explain, as you just described, many things that NASA is grappling with and has been grappling with for a long time. But, as you said, they're forced to invent new forces that they can't explain, black holes.
Wal: Yes.
Joe: When they could simply explain through well-known forces like electricity. I don't understand why, how.
Wal: Yeah, this is the power of the paradigm that I mentioned earlier. Once you are within a culture that believes in a particular way of thinking, it's very difficult to break free from that. It took me decades to let go of Einstein because I thought people are going to think I'm crazy. But I find now I'm in good company. There's thousands of scientists around the world, most of them in the Natural Philosophy Alliance, who have come to the same conclusion, often from different angles but the result has always been the same, that Einstein's theories don't make sense. And this is why there are probably so many books and so many people read them and then they say "I still don't get it" because fundamentally it doesn't make sense. There's nothing difficult about the electric universe, it's the sort of thing you could teach kids in high school very easily. Also is raises the interesting real questions that we have to pursue in the future. The big questions are not answered because we're nowhere near being able to answer them. And this is the humility of the electric universe as well. We are not saying we have a theory of everything, there's no such thing at present.
Pierre: A while ago you mentioned discharges occurring in comets and when you say that I have a picture in my mind of a bug entering a bug zapper. That's what you call this device, I think. Is there any legitimacy in this analogy.
Wal: Could you just repeat that? I didn't quite catch the analogy.
Pierre: You mentioned discharges occurring in comets.
Wal: Yes.
Pierre: And when you said this phrase, I had a picture in my mind of a bug entering a bug zapper and I wanted to know if there's any legitimacy in this analogy.
Wal: You mean like an iceberg or something.
Joe: No, a bug entering a bug zapper.
Wal: Oh, a bug zapper. Oh I beg your pardon.
Pierre: No, I'm sorry. That's me. My problem.
Wal: I'm sorry Pierre. I should be able to understand you. I was in France not so long ago.
Pierre: I am sorry.
Wal: Well, let me think about that. Not entirely, because a bug is electrically inert so it comes into an electric field where it acts as an instantaneous conductor for a moment and gets fried by the electric discharge that passes through it. A comet is actually a charged body so when it's traveling very slowly through the outer reaches of the solar system, it picks up whatever electrons and positively charged particles it needs to establish equilibrium with its environment. And that's all very fine but when it starts to accelerate towards the sun it comes hurtling in, in the later stages of its travels in its orbit, and its finding itself a region of space which, because it's approaching the highly charged object the sun, is sufficiently different that it can't adjust to its environment without beginning to glow. In other words it becomes a glow discharge and that's what forms the corona. And that corona can become huge. Then as it gets closer to the sun the surface begins to break down and that breaks down in these tiny electrical jets that are known as cold cathode discharges, where the electrons begin to be stripped and atoms begin to be stripped from the surface minerals.
Now the idea of 'dirty snowballs' comes from the picture that we've had for centuries now of the formation of the solar system from a cloud of dust and gas. The only explanation they could come up with for comets was there must be bits left over and they're well beyond the solar system and occasionally they get nudged and come into the solar system. But all of the evidence is against that. And this is a funny thing about evidence; it can be misconstrued, ignored, shoved in a basket, too hard basket and so on, and people will continue to tell you stories about how the world works and yet it has always ignored bits of data sitting in their filing cabinet.
This is one of the features of our conference next March in Albuquerque. We'll be talking about the evidence. So the evidence is all there that what's going on, on a comet is electrical discharge in nature because these cathode jets are very finely colimated, in other words they come in a very thin jet and this is one of the surprises that astronomers had when one of the spacecraft flew through these jets and they said it was like bursts of machine gun fire. In other words, it was only there for a brief instant and then they're out of it, which is the kind of thing you expect from a jet like that. It's not what you would expect from a comet that is just slowly sublimating dust and materials rising off its surface. None of that is what you would expect from just a heat-driven model. There are many other things of course about comets which show that it's obviously an electrical discharge phenomenon.
Niall: Yeah, it's brightness for one thing. How does the NASA standard model explain how they are able to even see them. I mean we can see them if they pass by at certain points with our own bare eyes. Is that white supposed to be snow and ice?
Wal: It's supposed to be material that's been lifted off the surface by heat.
Niall: It's incandescence so it's burning off.
Wal: No, it's not burning off. It's being lit up and fluorescing in the ultra violet light from the sun so it's the ultra violet light that is supposed to do all the damage. But even this doesn't fit the observations.
Joe: Have there been any comets that have been far enough away from the sun where they have been burning more brightly than they should have based on that theory?
Wal: Yes, comets have flared in the outer solar system, beyond Saturn's orbit. Comet Halley did that I think.
Joe: And what was their explanation for that?
Wal: Oh it must have hit something. So this is the thing. Astronomers only have collisions, collapses and explosions to work with. They're all mechanical things.
Niall: They have their predictions and then it doesn't happen so they have to account for why what they predicted didn't happen, so something unpredictable happened like it got side winded by another asteroid or something.
Wal: And when you look at the vast volumes in space, the chances of that happening are millions to one. But it happens repeatedly, there are many comets that have done that. Quite often they can be associated with solar flares, solar activities which have preceded the flare and which occur about the time when the disturbance arrived at the comet. So electrical disturbance from the sun once again seems to be involved. The same happened with Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 when all of its bits hit Jupiter. None of the bits actually hit Jupiter. They all were disintegrated in the ionosphere by electrical discharges between the fragments and the planet. This is why the astronomers were amazed at the brightness of the impacts. They didn't expect to see much at all. Also there was a lot of electrical activity, the auroras and so on that lit up, so the whole thing was an electrical encounter.
Pierre: It gives a very different take on comets, asteroids and meteorites. Does it mean that actually the threat is not only mechanical i.e. a direct impact but also the threat can be electrical in nature?
Wal: The threat is largely contrived. What will happen, because the Earth itself is a charged body, when a large object approaches the Earth and reaches its electrical environment, the most likely thing to happen is that in the magnetosphere and the ionosphere the incoming object will discharge and be destroyed. I think that is what happened at Tunguska. In fact there is strong geological evidence from Russian scientists that there were discharges from ground towards the object. There were eyewitness reports as well and on the ground you find what are called diatremes which are geological formations which can be explained as a lightning bolt from beneath the Earth out towards space.
Joe: Didn't they fire at a comet, I can't remember the name of the comet. NASA fired a
Niall: Temple One.
Joe: Yeah, a copper rod or something, and there was a discharge seen before it actually impacted? There was a discharge between ...
Wal: Yes.
Niall: Which wasn't supposed to happen.
Joe: Of course not.
Wal: Well, that was a total surprise. I was listening to the control room when it happened and it was total shock and surprise. An explanation was put forward later which said that it must have hit a thin outer crust before it actually hit the body of the comet. Well that's just ad hockery at its worst because when the experiment was announced about four years earlier, I went on record on my website with my predictions, and I said that if the comet was discharging at the time, which it was, there was likely to be an electrical discharge between the comet projectile and the comet body before it actually struck the comet. I also predicted that there would be a shift in the discharge activity on the comet because suddenly it splattered highly conductive copper ions into a kind of atmosphere above the comet, so that region would become highly conductive and any discharges nearby would switch to it. The other thing I said was that the discharge or the outburst would be more energetic than they expected and that was certainly true because they couldn't photograph the crater which was one of the main aims of that particular experiment. All of their cameras were blinded by the outburst.
Joe: In terms of NASA ignoring this electric nature of the universe let's say, what are the problems of that for us as a species? What are we losing out on because some people might say "Well, you know the universe is a big place. Strange things happen." Is there a real downside to this?
Wal: Oh yes, there is a great downside here because what we are missing is probably one of the greatest leaps forward in science in human history, because my work dovetails with that of my colleague David Talbot from Portland, Oregon. He spent a life time studying the ancient records globally of that was going on in the sky and all of the stories of the ancient sky gods, the planetary gods. I mean they have the same thing here. The Australian Aborigines have their stories of the dream time where there's a rainbow serpent that changed the face of the Earth and did all sorts of amazing things when there were two suns in the sky and the rainbow snake swallowed one of them. All of these kinds of things have an actual explanation in terms of plasma physics but they have no explanation in standard astronomy.
The result of that is that our cultures are built around stories we don't understand, but the electric universe illuminates those as well. So we begin to see our real place in the scheme of things and that is a liberating thing. It is something that the human race desperately needs I think because we are at present behaving quite irrationally. When you look at our situation in the universe and here we are fighting over petty things. We're destroying our environment willy nilly. We have this unresolved fear of finishing space you know, doomsday. The fear of doomsday is widespread and we don't understand it. The electric universe explains all of this and I think there will be an explosion, not just in science, but in culture and the arts and everything as a result.
Joe: Okay, well that would definitely be a positive. But what I'm understanding is, from what you are saying, what I'm inferring maybe is that these ancient stories of things happening in the sky, and gods and different things can be explained by the electric universe theory, but what would they explain about those myths? How would they make them apparent to us and what would we learn from them?
Wal: Well the imagery that was used, for instance the thunderbolt that Jupiter held, was sculpted by ancient peoples and it bears no resemblance to anything that we consider to be lightning today, the old jagged lightning bolt. The lightning bolt of the gods has a shape which is known as a plasmoid. It's a very convoluted shape. It's a bit like a football with a pinch in the middle and sometimes with flames or something emitting from the ends. This has nothing to do with Earthly lightning but it is the form that a discharge takes in, a very thin plasma, the thin plasma of space. Now we can actually go back before historical records and look at the petroglyphs, that's the rock carvings around the world, and there's one particular figure which stands out and is repeated in it hundreds of thousands or even millions around the world and it's called the squatter man figure. It looks like somebody who's squatting their legs at right angles of their body and then their calves coming down to the ground if you like, and then their arms are upraised at right angles to their body, but beneath the elbows and the knees of these characters are two bright circles and the question was, what on Earth does this represent?
Well generally it was just thought to be a kind of stylized human figure and thus the squatter man. But a leading plasma physicist, one of his claims to fame is that the what's known as plasma instabilities are named after him because he studied them in very high electrical discharges. And they take on a series of forms that a quite distinct; one of them, when you look at it side on, looks like the squatter man complete with the two rings or the two circles between the elbows and the knees. It's so clear and it works so well that with the rock carvings and the other forms of the rock carvings, because he has identified the other forms of plasma instabilities, what it means is that ancient peoples saw in the sky something quite phenomenal and that was an electrical discharge within the solar system between planets. And of course that is impossible according to astronomers.
Joe: That suggests that these primitive, ancient cave people knew more about the nature of our universe than NASA does.
Wal: Yes. Well this is why we should listen to them more carefully and not just dismiss what they have to tell us as being mere myth and legend and nothing to do with reality.
Joe: And do you think that any of the things that were described in these myths and legends and carved onto these cave walls etc., were indicative of some kind of a close encounter with maybe a comet or something that had a direct impact on these peoples' lives rather than just a something?
Wal: Well when the pyramids were built the stories even then are memories so it's something that happened in prehistory, but which was memorialized by the ancient civilizations, which of course as we know seem to spring from nowhere. Well they sprang from the ruins of whatever there was before that. It means that the history of the human race, and of the Earth, and of the solar system has a very dramatic recent chapter and is one that we can actually piece together to a fair degree and it fits with what is now believed by astronomers to be the most likely place to find life in the universe. And that is planets associated with brown dwarfs, small stars that glow dimly but with sufficient energy to be life-giving if you know what I mean.
It seems that the history of the Earth was involved in one of those types of systems. Now this just sounds like complete science fiction but we've been able to piece the evidence together and that appears to be the case. Now what the ancients were seeing and recording on the rocks, were some of the final pages of that last chapter of the history of the solar system where the Earth was being monstered by planets like Mars and Venus up close and personal. And when planets get close enough that their electrical environments clash, then you will get these colossal plasma discharge phenomena. And this is what the ancients were representing on the rocks. They thought it was so important, and so amazing, and so terrifying that it was the most important thing that they could do because I know that the plasma physicist who made the connection said he tried to chisel in a piece of rock what these people had done and he said damned hard work. He didn't know how they actually accomplished it.
Joe: So they were motivated.
Wal: They were motivated. It gives some inkling as to some of our modern fears and motivations which we don't understand. And of course in psychiatry and psychology it's felt that if you can understand what really happened in your past then it's possible to heal from it. And I think the human race is desperately in need of some kind of global accounts to rely upon and healing because our behavior is quite erratic.
Joe: Absolutely. Well it doesn't take a lot of imagination to get to the point where you see that the beliefs of doomsday and the experiences that you are talking about in the relatively recent past on our planet, probably talking maybe between ten to twenty thousand years ago?
Wal: Yes.
Joe: That they had experiences with close passages with other celestial bodies that really shook the planet up and this led to these ideas of doomsday because this wasn't a pleasant experience, I'm presuming, for the people on the planet being strafed by electrical discharge.
Wal: There was a tendency too on the part of the survivors, to blame those who were destroyed as being the people responsible for bringing all this terrible wrath of the gods upon us. This them-and-us attitude is still obvious in our modern society. We are the true believers and you are the infidels, the deniers. It even occurs in science where beliefs come in and you're called a denier if you challenge the present belief. So to understand that I think, is liberating as well because you can see that our warlike behavior is quite irrational. It's an attempt to recreate the terrible destruction that mankind suffered in what he felt was doomsday, the end of the world.
Joe: I can imagine how it may have led ultimately into the creation of religions and that is one of the major causes of conflict in the world and has been for so long.
Wal: Yes and by not understanding what they mean, the conflicts will not end.
Joe: I think NASA should just go ahead and incorporate as a religion.
Wal: Well modern astronomy, cosmology has been compared to a religion by practicing astronomers, some well-known astronomers. Fred Hoyle was one I think. Dr. Halton Arp who has shown that the big bang theory is based on an incorrect interpretation of the evidence. These people, when they try and challenge the standard views, have their evidence denied in much the same way as any religion does.
Joe: Heretics are...
Wal: They don't burn them today. They just
Joe: Ostracize them, yeah.
Wal: Most of the people who are at the cutting edge, quite a few of them have committed suicide as a result of the kind of reception they get.
Pierre: I was wondering, those episodes of cosmic turmoil, do you think they could be cyclical in nature?
Wal: No I'm pleased to say. What happened then was an incident which probably happens throughout the universe on a fairly regular basis but is one which we're unlikely to witness again in the history of the human race. It's the kind of thing where two stars are captured, one star captures another. And of course in gravitational theory that's practically an impossibility. But in the electric universe where you understand gravity as an electrical phenomenon, it's something that is to be expected as a natural course of events. This is one of the reasons why you see so many star systems which are multiples; binaries, triples and so on. It's far more than you would expect from the gravitational accretion model of star formation, but it is the kind of thing you expect in the electric universe model. The history of the Earth and the human race is involved with the capture of a brown dwarf by the sun. It's as simple as that and it's also as complicated as that. Planets are not formed the way we are taught. Planets are formed in what is in effect a lightning bolt in a cosmic cloud and this is exactly what astronomers have discovered in recent years and have been blown away by it because they didn't expect it. You do not expect to see stars strung along like glowing filament, like beads on a cosmic string.
Joe: To make sure I understand you correctly, the event that you are talking about that we won't see again, is this the same as the events that were described in the ancient cave drawings?
Wal: Yes. They're not so much described. Various parts of the episode were remembered and so on and by using our understanding of modern science we can try and piece together in a forensic manner what was being discussed. In fact this is one of the keys of the electric universe. It came from realizing that you needed to apply the same kind of forensic techniques that detectives do in trying to piece together a story from a whole lot of unreliable witnesses. This is what my friends Dave Talbot and some of the other comparative mythologists have done. Using this technique it's amazing what you can uncover. We've been able to produce the prime suspects in all this mayhem and in the process my job has been to try and figure out how this works in terms of known physics, because none of it conforms to modern astronomy. It all works and this is the beauty of it. Modern astronomy cannot even explain why the solar system works like clockwork because the gravitational system of more than two bodies is inherently unstable. It should just fall apart, fly apart in a relatively short space of time in cosmic terms. But that is not what we observe. The solar system operates like a clock and of course this has led to all sorts of theorizing based on retro calculating back into billions of years. You can't do that. The solar system has a history, it's a dynamic thing, a living thing almost, it is electrically powered and it responds to electrical forces in ways that are just not countenanced at present.
Joe: You said it was a brown dwarf being captured by our sun and then an interaction between our planet and this brown dwarf?
Wal: Yes, the interactions that followed involved electrical exchanges between bodies in the solar system if they came close together. I figured out, and I've got all this on my website too, that the exchanges work in such a way that it seems likely that this electrical exchange these interplanetary thunderbolts, are producing the stability that we see now is because the planets will space themselves apart so they don't keep doing it. Today we know for instance that the cometary tail of Venus, which is actually an electrical discharge, a very thin dark mode of discharge, reaches to the Earth's orbit and the Earth's tail reaches Mars. And when it does, Mars suffers global dust storms and its ionosphere clears of the blue haze so that astronomers can see through the blue haze. In the past centuries it was known as the blue clearing of Mars. All of these are electrical things but they are very minor now compared with what would happen if those planets came much closer to the Earth.
Joe: If it's possible, can you describe the kinds of experiences for the people on this planet at the time? Are we just talking about lightning bolts raking the Earth and chasing people around? I'm presuming it would also cause a lot of seismic activity probems within the planet?
Wal: Well that's true. In fact earthquakes are a form of underground lightning, volcanic and earthquake activity. The energies of earthquakes have been well explained by shifting rocks but if you factor in underground thunderbolts then you have the energy. Also some of the weird effects that are observed above earthquakes like electron counts in the ionosphere, and glows, and gas releases and all sorts of things on the surface, you realize that electricity plays a part.
Now so there would have been a lot of earthquake activity. There would have been tidal effects which would have been rather horrific, you'd have the sea washing over the land and those kinds of things. The actual piecing together of that part of the story has been the life's work of another one of the Thunderbolts team and his name is Dwardu Cardona and he's published a series of books that give the most complete documentation of what was witnessed and how it can be interpreted in terms of this scenario that I am talking about. It's a monumental piece of work and it's still, I think we are up to the fifth volume, but it's fascinating reading because you begin to understand more about who we are and also the fact that astronomers are partly right when they say that the most likely place to find life in the universe is as a satellite or on the satellite of a brown dwarf. But of course they're hampered because they don't understand what a star is.
The real answer is even more amazing than they envisage. This is the kind of thing which we've been able to uncover from descriptions of what the sky looked like before our earlier system was captured by the sun. I mean this raises amazing thoughts like we are interlopers. We are the aliens in this solar system, ideas like that, which really sets you thinking about our real place in the universe, and the amazing business of life and life in the universe. How does it begin? All these questions suddenly open up with new vistas, they provide new questions. But the whole thing I think would inspire kids at school to return to science. Right now they're leaving in droves because it is this heavy mathematical, theoretical, deductive approach which is boring, except for those people who like to play those games. And of course they are the people now telling us they can practically read the mind of god. They're looking in the mirror. They're just looking at a mathematician. God was more than a mathematician if you can use those terms.
Joe: Yeah the description of the events that such a discharge between another body would have caused the planet makes me think of the biblical deluge of Noah and even the exodus and stuff like that. It just leads us back to the idea of how this misunderstanding of what actually happened was used to create religions, a complete fabrication of just a story made up and retroactively given reality and we all believe it.
Wal: And also given anthropomorphic aspects. All of the stories of the heroes and the goddesses and so on and the maidens in distress, are all archetypes, as this has been pointed out by the comparative mythologists and also by people like Joseph Campbell who looked at these archetypes from the past. And the archetypes all have an explanation in terms of this recent history of the solar system, the warlike god Mars and the two aspects of Venus the beautiful goddess and also the raging monster the Medusa with a hair of snakes. Well the hair of snakes was an electrical discharge phenomenon. All these things can sort of suddenly be seen in sharp relief when you allow the concepts in. This is part of the problem for people coming to the electric universe, is you have to approach it with a beginners mind. This is how breakthroughs are done. You have to let go of your beliefs and that's a very difficult thing to do, but if you can or just suspend your disbelief for a while and allow the big picture to sink in, that's when it grabs people. They say to us that it has changed their lives because the meaning stretches far beyond just science.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I can see that it does. You said that it's unlikely that we will ever have another experience of a brown dwarf being captured by our sun and causing this kind of an upset which is good, but I am wondering about smaller bodies in terms of comets. If another comet happens to come by, how close would it have to pass the Earth for there to be some kind of a direct?
Wal: It would have to interfere with the ionosphere so it would have to be very close and the effects would be rather like the Tunguska event, which could be devastating over an inhabited area, a densely populated area. It was devastating over that thinly populated area in Russia. There is evidence that there was a comet that disintegrated in that way, Comet Biela in the 1850's, and at the time there were all sorts of weird effects on the Earth. There was strange weather and in North America there were strange fires, the Great Chicago Fire.
Joe: But that was blamed on Mrs. O'Leary's cow I think wasn't it? It kicked over a bucket or something?
Niall: That was NASA's first theory. [Laughter]
Wal: But when you read the phenomenon that actually happened, and there have been books written subsequent to that one, I think actually that one too describes some of these things. The things that happened are typical of what you would expect from plasma discharge fires, not from normal fires. And also there was falls of sand, which were unexplained. How do you get sand falling from the sky? Well you can if you destroy an incoming object in an electrical discharge. In fact the great sand fields on Earth are probably the result of material falling from space, not from anything geological.
Joe: I read a report about just what you're talking about from the time that Comet Biela and the Chicago fire and there was an account of what people describe as strange colored fires moving across open land with no obvious source of combustion and people being found who were in the path of this fire being found dead but unburned and pennies or coins fused together in their pockets and other accounts of tons of pig iron, just raw iron having melted apparently and then just solidifying again.
Wal: That's right. Some of the stones, parts of a building sort of flowed like lava.
Joe: That's bizarre.
Wal: So it was quite weird, yeah. That's the kind of thing I would expect. Most craters are electrical. The famous one in America, meteor crater, is a good example. They dug into the floor of that crater looking for the heavy minerals and metals and things that they expect from the object that impacted, as they said. They never found any and they won't because that was an electrical discharge crater.
Electrical discharge craters are always circular or a series of circles superimposed on one another so you get elongated ones. It's because lightning always strikes the surface at right angles directly from above, not from an angle, from the side. You see on the Moon almost all of the craters on the Moon are circular and also a lot of them are very fresh and you will also see craters perched on the rims of other craters without causing much damage which you would expect from an explosion. But a lightning bolt machines the surface. You can actually test this by looking at electron micrographs of surfaces that have been spark machined and you see the same kind of features, in the electron micrograph and this is once again repeated patterns of different scales, as you see on the Moon and on other planetary bodies.
So geologists have been limiting themselves to the idea that the Earth is a closed system and that the things we see operating today are the only forces that were in operation in the past. That's just not so, it's just an assumption. In fact the electrical forces can build mountain ranges and carve oceanic trenches and so on, in a matter of minutes. So it offers a completely different way of looking at the formation of the layers on the Earth; the strata and also volcanos and earthquakes and cratering and so on. At present they're restricted in their interpretation.
Joe: It sounds like our planet wasn't just formed. It was formed and reformed through an electrical event.
Wal: Yes, a very active birth of a planet from another planet which can happen electrically. A gas giant for instance if it's disturbed, or the buildup of charge within it is such that the electrical forces overwhelm the gravitational force. You can have material ejected into space. Now we see this all the time. The Sun ejects billions of tons of matter in the coronal mass elections and other stars in deep space are seen to eject phenomenal amounts of matter into space. It's never considered that this is a normal process and that it could happen on all scales. But this is a way to form a series of moons around a gas giant. Their parent is right there. They were born from the body of the object that they are orbiting. So in the process of their birth of course the object that is being born can suffer terrible surface electrical sculpting and the Earth I think suffered that. The ocean basins as a case in point. You don't need to have drifting continents. In fact there is no force on Earth that can cause the continents to drift. When it was being born it seems that it had a pole-to-pole discharge which just carved the ocean basins.
The reason I say this is that if this was a standard process on all planets as they form from a cloud of dust and gas, you would expect to see surfaces on each of the planets that look very similar. You don't. They're all different. They've all have their own history. It's the same with comets. This is one of the reasons you can't predict what a comet will do because they all have their own histories. They are all debris from the sculpting of planetary surfaces. There's an awful lot of Martian material floating around. In fact the meteorites from Mars are still landing on Earth. The ancients witnessed the sculpting of Mars by one of these cosmic thunderbolts. They described it and they actually memorialized it. You can see sculptures of the scar of Mars. The North American Indians called it scar face. The question is, and when you look at Mars through a telescope; the biggest feature on the planet, which stretches a third of the way around it, is the giant Valles Marineris electrical scar. It is an electrical scar without any shadow of a doubt.
Niall: And it probably extends to mountain ranges also.
Wal: Yes.
Niall: That's a fascinating idea.
Wal: Mountain ranges generally have a granite underpinning and granite rock is an intrusive. It's as if something happened inside a rock to cause the rock to melt and intrude into the surrounding rock. It's as if a lightning bolt shot through the rock and the fossilized lightning bolt is the granite. The core of mountain ranges tends to be granitic which suggests that it was electrical forces which built the mountain range. Also you have what's called the ridge and gully effect which is like a Lichtenberg figure. I don't know if you've seen one of those but the Lichtenberg figure is the pattern you get on a non-conducting surface. If you have a spark travel and you induce a discharge across that surface you get what's called the Lichtenberg figure. Sometimes you will see it when lightning has struck a golf course and it burns the grass and you see this radiating pattern of fine structure, this pattern. Well, the ridge and gully pattern in the Himalayas for instance is the archetypical Lichtenberg figure.
So the Earth's mountain ranges certainly have an electrical input to their creation. What's more, it's known that some of these events occurred within the memory of mankind. The North American Indians have legends of the formation of significant features in North America and you will find similar things in other places. In Australia of course the Australian aborigines, their rainbow serpent changed the face of the land; built mountains, dug waterholes, river courses and so on. When geologists have this new tool in their toolbox, it will open up the subject enormously because there's so much to be done. You can test these things by for instance, visiting a crater and testing for radioactivity and weird magnetic effects around the crater. So it's not as if we are just picking these ideas out of the air. We have people who have been inspired by what's possible and are going out and doing this work now.
Joe: It's really awe-inspiring in a way to think that such forces have shaped our planet in the relatively recent past and, who knows, may do again. But I can understand in that sense why there is such reluctance by the mainstream science to accept this, because it kind of downgrades our position as a species. We're simply on this planet and we are not so special anymore and there are greater forces that don't really care about us and could just decide to strafe the planet and rearrange continents and everything on it.
Wal: I think I would take issue with you there because one of the things the electric universe does in the realm of biology is it gives you some clue as to what is going on at a level below where scientists are looking at present. And that is the connectedness of everything in the universe. And also the information that is available in the universe, in real time. This is something that is not contemplated at present because Einstein's speed of light barrier stands in our way, but it's a barrier that is theoretical and it's not real.
For instance it's been shown that the force of gravity has to act in real time. Newton's Law does not include time, therefore the Earth has to know where the Sun is right now in the sky, not where it appears in the sky, because the light doesn't reach us and the Sun until eight and a half minutes later by which time the Sun has moved on. Now if the Earth was pulled to where the Sun appears in the sky, we would have a slingshot effect and the Earth and all of the planets would suffer the same problem, and they would all be slung out of the solar system in a period measured in tens of thousands of years. That's not happening.
Now one astronomer has calculated the speed with which gravity has to operate to be able to explain close orbiting binary stars, because that's the most severe test. And he has calculated that the speed of gravity has to be in excess of 2 times ten to the ten (2x1010), that's twenty billion times the speed of light. Now, we used to think that the speed of light was fast, but when you look at it upon a galactic or solar system scale, it is a snail's pace. Solar light takes hours to get to the outer planets. That's a snail's pace on the galactic scale. To take 100,000 years for the light from a star to travel across the galaxy, that is really glacial.
To be a coherent system, the solar system has to have gravity operating far in excess of the speed of light. For a spiral galaxy to form and to be a stable system, it requires that all of the stars in that system know where the other stars are in real time. So it gives you an idea of the speed of gravity. Now I said earlier that gravity is an electrical force. So that means the electric force has to operate at that speed and it also is required for subatomic particles to be stable because if the particles within the atom don't know where each other is in real time, the whole system will fly apart and we wouldn't have any such thing as a stable atom. It's a simple requirement in the world we observe that there is something that operates faster than the speed of light, much faster.
Now biological systems since they are composed of atoms and all atoms seems to know about the presence of other atoms in real time through this gravitational interaction, it means there is an electrical interaction between all the atoms in your body in real time. No speed of light delay, no nerve pulse signal delay which means you operate as a coherent system. But it also means that you are in communication with all other like systems in the universe if you like. So what we are is a representation of something that's greater than ourselves. Now I find this a very empowering thing. We are not isolated on this tiny piece of rock around an insignificant star in an insignificant galaxy amongst all the other billions of galaxies. We are an integral, functioning part of what appears to be an intelligent universe. It seems that our purpose is to understand the universe because in so doing we form the self-referential part. The universe learns about itself through us. That makes our life worth living.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Is there anything more to that, in terms of how humanity as a whole therefore interacts with - you're essentially saying we are an integral part of everything else in the universe in a certain sense and there's some kind of a communication between humanity as a whole, let's say and maybe even individually, on an information level?
Wal: Yes.
Joe: How does information relate to electricity? Is there anything on that?
Wal: Well the electric force is involved and this is one of the, as I've said the reason I called my work The Electric Universe is I realized that at the heart of it all, the interaction is the electric force operating far in excess of the speed of light. In other words we have a coherent real time existence. The problem I face of course is that having said that, that discards Einstein's Theory of Relativity. All that's saying is that using the slower speed of light you have to take that into consideration when you are trying to talk about simultaneity for two different observers. And that's okay. I mean that's right, we know the equations work but what does it mean? It doesn't mean much at all except that you are using a method of signaling which is slow.
Joe: Well that is borne out by the idea of action at a distance that has been exploited by mainstream science.
Wal: Quantum theory and the spooky action at a distance is not spooky at all. That's how the universe works. There is a recent article about worm holes in space to explain this apparent instantaneous interaction between entangled quantum particles. All of this language is misleading and this is the problem with science. It uses a lot of terms and that which are ill-defined and often used in confusing and contradictory ways.
When you simplify science and use simple terminology you can get back to reality in my opinion. The reason quantum theory is merely a recipe book and not an explanation of what goes on is because the concepts are missing underneath. The essential concept is that there is a force between all matter which operates far in excess of the speed of light. So forget Einstein's Theory of Relativity and all that stuff. And that for coherence and information transfer that is the preferred method of signaling.
The other thing is like gravity, it cannot be shielded. So this is why ESP (extrasensory perception) experiments done in Faraday cages, works. A faraday cage is completely transparent to this signaling. And of course this raises the other issue if we wanted to contact ET (extraterrestrials), we wouldn't use radio waves or electromagnetic signaling, because any intelligent race would not use radio signals to communicate over interstellar distances. You would use this longitudinal electric force. And we don't know anything about that. Tesla was heading in that direction but so much of his work is sort of apocryphal you don't know what he actually discovered and what he didn't but certainly the evidence suggests that he was aware and that the longitudinal electric force was of profound importance.
Joe: It's amazing to think that if mainstream science would just adopt this electric force or electric universe theory and the ideas that are behind it that are pretty transparent, many of them provable, that suddenly we would enter into a whole new realm of science that would probably start to approach mysticism and spirituality even. Those are terms we give to things that can't be proven by science but it seems like they are just waiting there for us to discover.
Wal: Just waiting for us to understand. It's just that our concepts are rooted in the middle ages. There's all sorts of possibilities ahead in the scientific realm. Once you understand the concepts behind gravity you can then set about trying to think, well how do you defeat gravity? If it's an electric force you can reverse the polarity. It's just that no one's understood what the origin of gravity is within matter, so they haven't been able to figure out how to defeat it. But obviously this gives you the clue. What you need to look at is dielectrics in a strong electric field because that will reverse the polarity of the subatomic particles within that dielectric. So flying saucers and UFOs and things may not be a figment of our imagination.
On the other hand, the other end of the scale of course in biology, you realize that western medicine is severely limited by looking at the body in a mechanistic sense and just considering it as a complex chemical interaction. There is far more to it than that. There are scientists who are working in the forefront of understanding that. I can mention Rupert Sheldrake, you've probably heard of.
Joe: Yeah.
Wal: The cellular biologist Bruce Lipton. These people are looking at this outside influence in biological systems. And it also relates of course to all sorts of natural medicine aspects as well. And you begin to realize that the medical fraternity are actually doing us no service at all in trying to shut down attempts to instill natural therapies into the mainstream medical curriculum.
It also applies to manufactured foods too because manufacturing food based on chemistry is a flawed paradigm and it's very dangerous. It was like when we were playing with atom bombs in the initial stages. The guys who were doing that didn't know what they were doing. They were taking on a risk for the whole of humanity without understanding what they were doing.
We really have to make scientists more accountable and one of the ways of doing that is to break down these rigid little disciplines where those involved know more and more about less and less and they don't talk to the people down the corridor because they think that their work has nothing to do with them. But when you begin to see this big picture and you can see all of the parts and their relationships, you begin to realize that this is a completely non-functional way of doing science. Institutionalized, over professionalized, specialized science is not the way to go.
Joe: Agree with that.
Pierre: Going back to this notion of longitudinal current, could you explain how an electric current or electric phenomenon can be superluminal, going faster than the speed of light?
Wal: The speed of light is determined by the response of the medium through which it's traveling. Now when I say medium, of course the speed of light is supposed to represent the speed of a photon or a transverse wave through a vacuum. But you cannot sustain an electric field in a vacuum. The matter has to be present. That doesn't mean charged mater, it just means something that can be distorted to form a little electric dipole. So that means there is no such thing as a vacuum. The empty space is actually teaming and it's teaming with neutrinos. The neutrinos are standard particles. That is they are structured like all the other subatomic particles, and they can be distorted to form a tiny electric dipole. So what you're looking at with light is the disturbance, transverse disturbance traveling through the medium of neutrinos.
Now we know the speed of light changes when it goes through glass and water and so on, so the speed of light is not a constant. It's a variable depending upon the medium through which it is traveling. This reintroduces the idea of the ether. Maxwell's equation of electromagnetism requires an ether. Einstein did away with the ether and didn't explain how exactly electromagnetic waves would continue to move. So he invented the proton which is supposed to be a massless particle but there is no such thing in the universe as a massless particle. And you forget that he was exposed on it. That's complete nonsense. All particles must have mass because they contain energy and the energy is bound up in the motion of particles within particles if you like. It's a kind of repeated pattern once again. This is a feature of the electric universe, this kind of fractal nature of the universe. The more you delve into it you see more and more detail and it's a repeated pattern.
So, I've talked about light, so it takes time to travel through this medium. Gravity on the other hand is a polarization of subatomic particles. So in a vacuum all of the neutrinos have this distortion, a longitudinal distortion, from one end to the other. It's like a chain. And as you know there is a difference between pulling on a chain, if you are standing on the other end you can feel the instant that chain is pulled, whereas if somebody waves the end of this long chain or rope, the wave takes some time to get to you. So this is the difference. Gravity operates by this longitudinal pull and electromagnetism or light, operates by waving the rope and that takes time to get to the other end. So that's the difference. It's also like dropping also a stone into a pond. If you have a microphone underwater some distance from where you dropped the stone in, you will hear that stone drop very shortly after in the microphone, but the ripple from the stone takes some seconds, even minutes to get to you and that's the difference.
Pierre: Ok, that is a very clear analogy with this chain or a rope. Maybe another question; you mentioned previously during the Comet Biela event that it induced some weather disruptions and I was thinking that Earth weather is full of those spiraling phenomenon; those anti-cyclones, those cyclones, those tornadoes, hurricanes and the lightning. I suspect like for the rest of the universe, our atmosphere according to mainstream science, is a void or is not driven by electric phenomenon. What is happening in reality? What is the role of electricity in Earth's weather?
Wal: Yes. There, as I said before, Hannes Alfvén figured out a circuit for the Sun and the Earth is embedded in that circuit, so are all the planets embedded in the Sun's circuit. So our weather is very much dependent upon the electric currents that are flowing between the Sun and its environment in the galaxy. Now this is not something that's input into any weather model or climate model, so you could say there is no such thing as a weather expert or a climate expert because one of the major factors is missing. When you look at the outer planets, some of the fastest winds in the solar system are on the most distant planets. I think Neptune has winds that exceed thousands of kilometers per hour and yet it is the furthest planet from the Sun. It receives very little heat input.
On Earth of course it is assumed that it's the heat input that drives the weather. Well certainly it has a significant effect but the major patterns themselves are better described electrically, particularly the powerful storms when you see those great rotary systems and the towering connections to the upper atmosphere in the clouds and so on. But in recent years the spacecraft between the Earth and the Sun have been able to trace the magnetic fields, they call them flux tubes, it's another one of these terms that doesn't explain anything. They're actually current filaments like you see in those novelty plasma balls, between the Sun and the Earth. They can enter the magnetosphere and now they've found this charge transferring between the magnetosphere and the ionosphere and the ionosphere and the Earth in all of those weird things seen above big storms those sprites and elves and magical names they give them.
So there is a direct electrical input to our weather systems. It's usually assumed that thunderstorms drive the electrical circuit in the Earth's atmosphere. That's not true. The thunderstorms are merely an effect of having power input to the ionosphere and trying to reach the Earth and finding ways to get to the ground, the most convenient way. And usually what you will find is in a leaky capacitor it'll find a weak spot where it can find a path to ground and that's where the lightning will travel. And so we have seen that lightning traveling now between the ionosphere and the ground. The lightning is not generated in the cloud. It's generated above the cloud and it's already waiting for the cloud to act as a part of the ground. This has been proven by high altitude balloon flights across thunderstorms. The scientist who did it remarked he was amazed to find that the charge was already there. He thought it would gradually build up after one of these lightning bolts instead of that he said it was already there just waiting to go. The gun is cocked waiting for the trigger to be pulled. So this electrical factor explains lightning because, would you believe lightning is not explained? They're still puzzling as to how thunderstorms can generate the voltages required to initiate a lightning bolt. Well the answer is already there, that the power comes from without.
Niall: It comes from the Sun?
Wal: It comes from the Sun and then you take the next step and say what about the power from the Sun? And you say "Well that comes from without as well". All of the features of the Sun go to show that this is the case. When you look at a sunspot, you're peering beneath the bright electrical discharge that we call the Sun. And beneath the photosphere, it is dark, much cooler. There is no nuclear explosion going on inside the Sun. It is a body like any other only much larger, like any other planet. And the plasma - cosmologists have already shown that when you form stars in these cosmic clouds along these cosmic lightning bolts, the first elements to be accreted to form the core of the star are the heavy elements. That's your metals and things, the sort of things that make up a planetary core. Then on the outer reaches you get the lighter elements and the gases hydrogen and helium. And that's the bit that lights up of course. This is why we think a star is made of hydrogen simply because it's the outer atmosphere that's lighting up.
Pierre: So if I correctly understand, when the sun spot occurs it's an electric current that appears to be glowing lighter element surrounding the Sun and that spreads into the solar system. Here comes the paradox; seemingly, apparently sun spot levels are very low for years now. The Sun is unusually quiet and at the same time mainstream science claims that we're going through a global warming. How can we reconcile reduced solar activity with an alleged global warming?
Wal: I think what we have to do is get used to the fact that there are no guarantees about the Sun's power supply. Because it's external and related to our place in the galaxy, it can change. Stars have been observed to change quite rapidly. That, in general, looking around the nearby stars, that doesn't seem to be something that is going to happen to us, thankfully. However, the power input to the Sun also has a direct effect on the Earth's weather and the severity of its weather and so on. This is something not looked at, at present. It's all put down to global warming which is a very simplistic and unproven argument. In fact the Sun is the source of our energy so that's where we look to for any changes. Hopefully in the future we will be able to chart the circuitry of the Sun well out beyond our solar system and that will give us some bit of weather forecast if you like. As for human impact on climate I would say that is practically zero.
Niall: I take it you are not part of Al Gore's consensus then?
Wal: Oh god no.
Pierre: We are with you on this one.
Wal: Science is not done by a show of hands. When you think of the severe lack of understanding in modern science of just the basics; what is gravity, what is electricity, what is this, what is that, you realize that there is no such thing as a real expert on these subjects. Also there are plenty of scientists who have pointed out all of the flaws in the anthropogenic global warming scenario but of course, they are deniers which imply of course that this is a religious belief.
Joe: They should just call them heretics, go ahead and call them heretics.
Wal: Heretics, that's right, yes. I mean when you talk about deniers and heretics, you're not talking science anymore. You're not dealing with the issues. And these people who are so-called deniers have raised issues which have to be addressed. You cannot ignore them. From my point of view - I wrote about this on my website too under the heading of Global Warming in a Climate of Ignorance - until you understand, get the concepts right, all of these pronouncements are worthless. What we have to do I think, is just realize that we cannot guarantee steadiness of the Sun's input to the Earth and therefore all we have to do is try to adjust to whatever happens. That's all we can do. We are not in control. The idea that we can control these things is nonsense but it is part of this insanity that arose out of our facing doomsday.
Have you noticed as long as I have been interested in science, which is about the age of four, I've noticed that it doesn't matter what era you're in there's always some fear of catastrophe, either comets, although comets are the most common one, impacts from comets and so on, or some sort of disaster that is going to occur to the Earth usually from some external source. Mankind is desperate to be in control because of his history, his unknown or unrecognized history. Once we begin to understand ourselves better maybe we will stop haring off and doing silly things in response to imagined scenarios. This is just the latest in a long line.
Joe: Just based on what you are saying about in every era people worried about doomsday from above coming, over the past few years we have been taking quite an interest in the number of fireballs and meteorites that have been seen and observed and reported, entering our atmosphere, the most notable one of late was the Chelyabinsk one in Russia earlier this year. The American Meteor Society, which has a long track record of keeping track of these kind of things, on their website they have for each year going back ten or twelve years, if you look from 2005 to today this year, you see quite a stark, a dramatic increase over those years. Year on year they have been increasing. You can look on YouTube and find all sorts of videos of people just spotting these things. I don't remember that from even ten years ago. I don't remember there being so many reports and even news reports about people who saw a fireball in the sky or heard a loud boom and then the Chelyabinsk thing. Are we going off one type thing in terms of just wondering that there is something up here? What's your opinion?
Wal: The one thing you have to be careful of is whether the reporting systems have changed over the years. There is a possibility that we can strike epochs where there is an increase in the amount of material hitting the Earth. The reason I say this is that despite the fact that scientists believe that comets come from outside the solar system, there was some very good work done by Tom Van Flandern, the astronomer, the late Tom Van Flandern unfortunately, and he said that the orbits of comets suggests their origin within the solar system and due to an explosion. Exploding planet he called it. Now we don't need to try and invent an exploding planet to explain the debris that's flying around the solar system. The electrical machining of a planet surface hurls huge amounts, whole mountain ranges and everything into space. That material then, some of it goes into orbit, as a moon of the two warring planets. Or it can be debris which becomes comets or asteroids. This is why I have said there is no real distinction between comets and asteroids apart from their orbits. They are all debris from these encounters.
Now that means that there can be clouds of this material which was ejected in the same direction and with much the same velocity and I can imagine that some of that has, like the cometary orbits, very distant orbits, and that means that at some point in time when it comes into the inner solar system we can have an increase in the amount of debris that the Earth encounters. So I don't see any problem in having a real increase in debris striking the Earth.
Joe: So there could be a kind of swarm let's say of debris that...
Wal: Yes. This is the kind of thing that happens when a comet breaks up. You end up with a swarm of meteorite showers at regular intervals every year.
Joe: We see the Geminids and the various other 'ids but they are very small. For years people have seen them as falling stars or shooting stars and people see them as little specs and a very few of them are very big. But the thing I'm talking about seems to be bigger, even to the point that quite a few have actually impacted, have reached the surface of the planet. So, maybe we're talking about - is it possible that maybe some kind of swarm of debris that's on a kind of cyclical orbit around the solar system?
Wal: Yes, that's possible. In fact I think that probably happened in the past. There are some questions about the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages where society seemed to fall apart to some extent. The question is was there some external influence which caused disasters, a lot of concern and people's normal concerns were taken over by something else. This is possible. So there are echoes of these past events which will continue down the ages.
Joe: I don't know if you know Mike Baillie, he's a dendrochronologist and he's written quite a few books on that topic, on comets.
Wal: Yes. Yes.
Niall: Along similar lines himself and Patrick McCafferty I think, took old cultural texts, references from Irish mythology in particular, but they looked globally as well, and had a similar approach to you guys where you compared it with the environmental record.
Wal: Mike Baillie has been associated with a group in the UK that I've been associated with almost since their inception, so I know of Mike and have spoken at their meetings.
Joe: Is this a secret group or do they have a name?
Wal: No! It's The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies and they can be found on the web and I often speak at their meetings. So if anyone wants to see me in person, that would be one place to keep an eye on.
Joe: That's a very cryptic name; The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies.
Wal: Yes, it's called the SIS.
Joe: From you and Mike Baillie and whoever else is involved it sounds like they're hiding something very important under that name!
Wal: We don't wish to hide it! Yeah, it was set up with a very strong historical group who were interested in trying to piece together what the sorts of things that might have happened in the past and how do you actually figure out ancient history. The lines of kings and all of that sort of stuff. I wasn't particularly concerned with that. I was perhaps one of their chief science contributors but there are a number of others also. It's very good because being a Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, this is the way of the future. There should be no barriers. People should be able to roam from one thing to another and toss their ideas in. This is what the Society is all about.
Joe: Absolutely because that is one of the things that I think really prevents the truth, or a real consensus understanding of our planet, our history, our universe and our place in it, getting people from different fields who are involved in research putting their information together. But right now it is all compartmentalized and they're kept apart and never the twain shall meet. You're a geologist and you're a historian and that's it, you don't talk to each other type thing.
Wal: It's even worse than that. If you go into the university departments you'll find that A won't speak to B because he doesn't agree with B's theory and vice versa. They won't even read their material. This sort of territorialism is something which is anathema to real science.
Niall: Yeah, exactly. That and money and greed. You've written yourself: "Modern science has become a monolithic structure funded by governments and tied to political outcomes. Radical change is arguably more difficult to achieve in such a situation than at any time in the past. Funding of dissident scientists is not available. Their publications in leading science journals disallowed by the anonymous peer review system jeopardized. Meanwhile the media lazily accept what they are fed by the 'experts.'"
Wal: Yes. This is a systemic problem. At the time of the Renaissance, and this is what we would need is to encourage the Renaissance scholars, they found benefactors and this is virtually what we've had to do, is to find people who are prepared to fund our meetings and so on based on the inspiration gained from what we're doing. I've always felt that to get the message out we just have to network and make it understandable, make it inspirational. That's the only word I think I can use, so that we as a group now have a great number of fantastic volunteers who volunteer their time and their efforts to putting on our conferences for instance, and also to perform experiments. Because the electric universe actually hands science back to the individual. If you were to go into your garage and tinker and try to find out how to build an anti-gravity device, you've got the opportunity. Or how to build an energy device which has low energy nuclear reactions and so on. You've got the opportunity to have a go.
We actually function because of all the volunteers we now have. The inspiration of the group is a powerful thing. I've had people in our meetings in the US, we now have annual meetings of the electric universe in the US. We'd like to do it in other places of course in the future when we get the funding, but people come up to me say this is the most amazing meeting I've ever been to simply because it is broad, it is interconnected, you can ask a question about any subject and people will have interesting things to say about it.
Niall: That's awesome Wal. All power to you.
Joe: We're reaching the top of the hour here so I think we've pretty much done as much as we can do. First of all I just want to thank you for coming on to our show and secondly for all the work you and your colleagues have done for so long, against such odds. Just based on this interview, what we've discussed tonight, it makes it pretty clear that this is essential. This information is essential, this paradigm shift in understanding of us as a species and the planet and the universe and everything. If humanity is going to evolve in any true kind of way, this information is going to be core to that I think.
Wal: I rather liked Arthur C. Clark, a science fiction author and he had a book called Childhood's End. Well I see this as childhood's end only we don't need the intervention of aliens to kick us along. We can do it ourselves.
Niall: We need to grow up.
Wal: Yes.
Pierre: Thank you for your writings. Your books have been, even if they're are not mainstream and are not recommended by mainstream medias and mainstream science, for some of us has been highly inspirational. So thank you for this great gift. Truly.
Joe: So to give the name of the book again ...
Pierre: Yeah, I remind our listeners of the title of your book: it's The Electric Universe by you, Wallace Thornhill and your colleague David Talbot. It's a great book. It explains in an easy way, there are a lot of pictures, there's about a hundred pages and it is better than most, if not all the mainstream science books that you can find on the shelves. So buy it now and read it.
Joe: It should be a textbook in all schools. That's what we should aim for. The main websites are thunderbolts.info, check it out, and Wal's personal website is holoscience.com. Thanks a million Wal, and maybe we will get a chance to speak to you again, it's been great.
Wal: Thanks Pierre, thanks Joe, thanks Scott, and thanks Niall. Yeah I agree with you about it being a school book. My view is that children should be challenged with alternatives and let them make up their own minds.
Joe: Absolutely. Okay folks, we're going to leave it there for this week. It's been great all round. We've had a great show. We've thoroughly enjoyed it. We hope you enjoyed it too. And we'll be back soon, maybe after we take a couple of weeks' break - given the season! - but we'll be back soon with another show. Until then, have a good one.
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