By the sixties Alfvén was proposing this as the basis of the formation of the entire Solar System. It was generally rejected on the grounds that electrical currents could not be supported in such plasmas. Ironically, the reason that was given went back to work on solar electrodynamics that Alfvén himself and a few colleagues had done during the early years of World War II, in which Sweden remained neutral. For an electrical current to flow, there must be an electric field maintaining a voltage difference to drive it, in the same way that for a water current to flow, a pipe must have a gradient to maintain a pressure difference. But, it was argued, a conducting plasma would short out any electric field that tried to form, preventing any voltage difference from developing, and so no current could be driven.
This does come close to being true in the Sun, and the success of Alfvén's own theory in representing solar phenomena was used as justification for treating all plasma models the same way. Alfvén tried to point out that the limitation on electric fields only applied to dense plasmas, but it was in vain. Whereas before his ideas had been opposed on the grounds of space being a mathematically idealized insulator, now the criticism was that he couldn't be right because the space he described was assumed to be a perfect conductor. Nevertheless, his earlier work had been so thoroughly vindicated, providing much of what became standard reference material for plasma work, that in 1970 Alfvén was awarded a Nobel Prize, particular mention being made of the very theory whose limitations he had been trying to get the physics community to appreciate. He probably made history by being the only recipient of the prize to criticize, at the award ceremony, the reasons for which his own work was being recognized. "But it is only the plasma that does not understand how beautiful the theories are," he said, "and absolutely refuses to obey them." 49
Space probes pushing out to Jupiter, Saturn, then Uranus through the end of the seventies and into the eighties confirmed the whole system of magnetic fields, ionization belts, and twisting plasma currents that Alfvén had theorized. This time the initial proponent of the ideas that led to it all was not overlooked. The vast plasma circuits extending across space are known today as Birkeland currents.
Solar System to Galaxy
After spending a short while by invitation in the Soviet Union, in 1967 Alfvén moved to the U.S.A. and settled in San Diego. Electrical forces, not gravity, he was by now convinced, had been the primary influence in shaping the Solar System. Gravitation became a significant factor only later, when the natural tendency of plasmas to organize coherent structures out of a diffuse medium at much faster rates had already produced higher-density regions—the "clumpiness" that Big Bang cosmologists had been unable to bring about by means of gravity alone. Only when matter cooled sufficiently for electrically neutral atoms to form could objects like planets arise that moved essentially in response to gravity alone and which allowed the familiar celestial dynamics that worked well enough within the local neighborhood of the Solar System. But local behavior couldn't be extrapolated to describe a universe existing 99 percent in the form of plasma in stars at temperatures of millions of degrees or charged particles streaming through space.
Wasn't the disk-shaped galaxy little more than scaled-up Solar-System geometry? A proto-galaxy rotating in an intergalactic magnetic field would generate electric fields in the same way, which in turn would produce filamentary currents flowing inward through the galactic plane to the center, and then up along the rotational axis to loop back in a return path reentering around the rim. As in the case of the Solar System, the self-"pinching" effect would compress these currents into twisting vortexes sweeping around the galaxy like immense fan blades and gathering the matter together into high-density regions along which proto-stars would form as subvortexes. However, it will be a long time yet before man-made probes are able to venture out into the galactic disk with instruments to test such theories.
Peratt's Models and Simulations: Galaxies in the Laboratory
Encouragement came, nevertheless, from a different direction. In 1979, Anthony Peratt, who had been a graduate student of Alfvén's ten years previously, was working with the aerospace defense contractor Maxwell Laboratories on a device called Blackjack V, which generated enormous pulses of electrical power—10 trillion watts!—to vaporize wires into filaments of plasma, producing intense bursts of X rays. The purpose was to simulate the effects of the electromagnetic pulse produced by a hydrogen bomb on electronics and other equipment. High-speed photographs showed the filaments of plasma moving toward each other under the attraction of their magnetic fields, and then wrapping around each other in tight spiral forms strikingly suggestive of familiar astronomical pictures of galaxies. Computer simulations of plasma interactions that Peratt performed later at the Los Alamos National Laboratory duplicated with uncanny faithfulness the features of all known galaxy types. By varying the parameters of the simulations, Peratt was able to match the result with every one of the pictures shown in Halton Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and guess with confidence just what electromagnetic forces were shaping the galaxies.
These simulations also suggested a possible answer to another mystery that astronomers had been debating for a long time. In a galaxy held together purely by gravity, the velocity of the component stars about the center as it rotates should decrease with distance from it—as with the Solar System, in which the outer planets move more slowly in their orbits around the Sun. Observations, however, show that the speeds of stars orbiting the galactic center remain fairly constant regardless of distance. This is just what the simulations showed would be expected of an electrically formed galaxy, where the spiral arms form coherent structures that trail back like the cords of a gigantic Weed Eater, moving with the same velocity along their whole length. Conventional theory had been forced to postulate an invisible halo of the strange gravitating but otherwise noninteracting dark matter surrounding a galaxy— there for no other reason than to produce the desired effect. But with electromagnetic forces, behaving not peculiarly but in just the way they are observed to on Earth, the effect emerges naturally.
An Explanation for X-ray Flashes
The most intense X-ray emission in the Blackjack V plasmas came from center of the spiral form. This was evocative of the high-energy bursts from galactic centers that cosmologists were trying to explain in terms of black holes and other exotic concepts. Blackjack V didn't use black holes. But there was a way in which sudden explosive releases of energy could come about from purely electrical causes—the same that sometimes cause the plug of an appliance to spark when it's pulled out of a wall socket.
An electric field that drives currents and accelerates particles in a cyclotron, a neon light, or a TV tube is produced by a changing magnetic field (in other words, not by a steady one). A magnetic field accompanies an electric current. In the late fifties, Alfvén had been called in by the Swedish power company ASEA to investigate a problem they were having with explosions in mercury arc rectifiers used in the transmission grid. The rectifiers used a low-pressure mercury vapor cell containing a current-carrying plasma. It turned out that under certain conditions the ions and electrons forming the plasma could separate in a positive-feedback process that created a rapidly widening gap in the plasma, interrupting the current. The fall in the magnetic field that the current had been supporting generated an electric field that built up a high voltage, accelerating the electrons to the point where the ensuing heat caused an explosion.
Alfvén's work had shown that analogous effects involving suddenly collapsing magnetic fields could also operate at larger scales to produce such results as solar flares. The energy released in such an event is nonlocal in that it derives not just from the conditions pertaining at the point where the current break occurs, but from the magnetic field sustained around the entire circuit. The energy stored in a galactic circuit thousands of light-years long and carrying ten million trillions of amperes can be a staggering 1057 ergs—as much energy as a typical galaxy generates in 30 million year
s. The electric fields produced by that kind of release could accelerate electrons to enormous velocities, approaching that of light. Accelerated charges radiate electromagnetic waves. Black-hole-density concentrations of gravity are not necessary to generate jets of radio brilliance that can be heard on the far side of the universe.
Eric Lerner and the Plasma Focus
Peratt published his findings in a small astronomy journal, Astrophysics and Space Science, in 1983, 50 and the following year in the more widely read amateur magazine Sky and Telescope. 51 Little reaction came from mainstream astrophysicists. Then, toward the end of 1984, he was contacted by Eric J. Lerner, a theoretician who had been pursuing a parallel line of thought, though not within the recognized establishment. Lerner's interest in the subject had been stimulated at an early age by an illustration in an astronomy book of all the trains that would be needed to haul the billions of tons of coal whose burning would equal the Sun's output in one second. He studied physics at Columbia University and the University of Maryland, with an emphasis on nuclear fusion, and in the mid seventies formed an association with Winston Bostick, who was working on an approach to controlled fusion known as the plasma focus. Invented independently in the sixties by a Soviet, N. V. Filippov, and an American, Joseph Mather, the device first compresses electrical energy a millionfold into a sub-millimeter-size donut of filamentary plasma called a plasmoid, and then collapses the associated magnetic field to shoot out two intense, high-energy beams, each in the order of a micron (one ten-thousandth of a centimeter) wide—electrons in one direction and ions in the other. In the course of this, some of the confined ions are heated to sufficient temperatures to fuse.
Bostick too thought that filamentary processes might be involved in galaxy formation, and this led Lerner to wonder if something like the energy concentration mechanism of the plasma focus might account for the distant, highly energetic, yet compact quasars mentioned earlier. Since 1980, the new Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, consisting of twenty-seven dish antennas spread over miles of the New Mexico desert, had revealed enormously energetic jets of energy emanating from quasars, similar to the ones already known to power the emissions of radio galaxies, which Alfvén's work attributed to collapsing magnetic fields. If the visible core region of a typical radio galaxy is pictured as a spinning dime, two narrow jets of particles shoot out along the axis in opposite directions for a distance of about a foot before cooling and dissipating into football-size "lobes," where the energy is radiated away as radio waves. The same processes occur at lesser intensity in the jets created by ordinary galaxies also. In the case of quasars, conventional theory postulated charged particles spiraling inward in the intense gravity fields of black holes as the source. Maybe black holes weren't needed.
Going All the Way: Galaxies to the Universe
A plasma focus can increase the power density of its emission by a factor of ten thousand trillion over that of energy supplied. (Power signifies concentration in time; density, concentration in space.) The flow of current inward along a galaxy's spiral arms, out along the axis, and looping back around via the rim reproduced the geometry of the plasmoid—the same that Alfvén had arrived at about four years earlier. But the suggestion of structures produced via electrical processes didn't stop there. Astronomers were producing maps showing the galaxies to be not distributed uniformly across space but in clusters strung in "superclusters" along lacy, filament-like threads running through vast voids—scaled-up versions of the filaments that Lerner had visualized as forming within galaxies, from which stars formed as matter densities increased and gravitation broke them up. These larger filaments—vast rivers of electricity flowing through space—would create the magnetic fields that galaxies rotated in, enabling them to become generators; indeed, it would be from the initial drawing together and twisting of such large-scale filaments that galaxies formed in the first place.
To establish some kind of firm foundation for his ideas, Lerner needed to know the scaling laws that related laboratory observations to events occurring on a galactic scale—the relationships that changed as the scale of the phenomenon increased, and the ones that remained invariant. This was when a colleague introduced him to Alfvén's Cosmic Electrodynamics, first published in 1963, which set out the scaling laws that Alfvén had derived. These laws provided quantitative support for the hierarchical picture that Lerner had envisaged—a series of descending levels, each repeating the same basic process of plasma twisting itself into vortex filaments that grow until self-gravitation breaks them up.
Few outside a small circle were receptive to such ideas, however. The majority of astrophysicists didn't believe that such currents could flow in space because a plasma's resistance is too low and would dissipate them—the same objection that Alfvén had encountered two decades before, now reiterated at the galactic level. Then bundles of helically twisted filaments a light-year across and a hundred light-years long, looping toward the center and arcing out along the axis of our galaxy and—the sizes predicted by Lerner's model—were mapped with the VLA telescope by a Columbia University graduate student, Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, and carried on the cover of the August 1984, issue of Nature. Yusef-Zadeh's colleague, Mark Morris, later confirmed that magnetic forces, not gravity, must have controlled their formation. Encouraged, and at Peratt's suggestion, Lerner submitted a paper describing his theory to Astrophysics and Space Science, the journal that Peratt had published in, but it was rejected, the reviewer dismissing the analogy between galaxies and the plasma focus as absurd. The black-hole explanation of quasars and the cores of energetic galaxies is still favored, sometimes being invoked to account for Yusef-Zadeh's filaments. Lerner's paper did finally appear in Laser and Particle Beams in 1986. 52
The scaling laws implied that the smaller an object is in the hierarchy, the more isolated it will be from neighboring objects of the same kind in terms of the ratio of size to distance. Thus stars are separated from each other by a distance of 10 million times their diameters, galaxies by thirty times their diameters, clusters by ten times their diameters. Hence there was nothing strange about space being so filled in some places and empty in others. Far from being a mystery in need of explanation, the observed clumpiness was inevitable.
An upper size limit also emerged, beyond which filaments will fail to form from a homogenous plasma because of the distortion of particle paths by internal gravitation. The maximum primordial filament would be in the order of ten billion light-years in diameter and compress itself down to around a fifth that size before breaking into several dozen smaller filaments spaced 200 million light-years apart—which corresponded well with the observed values for the superclusters. Beyond this, therefore, there should exist a further, larger structure of elongated, filamentary form, a billion or so light-years in radius and a few billion light-years long. It turned out to have contracted a bit more than Lerner's calculations said. Brent Tully's 1986 paper in Astrophysical Journal announcing the discovery of "supercluster complexes" put their radius at around six hundred million light-years.
Older Than the Big Bang
These were far too massive and ancient to have formed since the Big Bang, requiring a trillion years or more for the primordial filaments to differentiate themselves. Although this news caused a sensation among cosmologists, the plasma-universe alternative remained virtually unknown, since papers on it had been rejected by recognized astrophysical journals, while the few journals in which they had appeared were not read by astrophysicists. However, through contacts in the publishing world Lerner was invited to write a specialized science article for the New York Times Magazine and promptly proposed one on Alfvén and the plasma universe. Alfvén had been skeptical of the Big Bang theory ever since he first came across it in 1939. Nevertheless, in discussing the New York Times offer with Lerner, he cautioned that in his opinion an article challenging the Big Bang would be premature; instead it should focus on the electrical interpretation of more familiar and observable phenomena to pre
pare the ground. "Wait a year," he advised. "I think the time will be riper next year to talk about the Big Bang." 53
But Lerner couldn't let such an opportunity pass, and after further consulting with Peratt and much editing and rewriting, he submitted an article giving a full exposition to his theory. It was not only accepted by the editorial staff but scheduled as the cover story for the October 1986 edition. Lerner was elated. But Alfvén's experience of the business turned out to be well rooted, and his advice prescient. Upon routine submission to the science section of the daily paper for review the article was vetoed on the grounds that Alfvén was a maverick, without support in the scientific community. (Being awarded a Nobel Prize apparently counts for little against entrenched dogma.) A revised version of Lerner's article did eventually appear in Discover magazine in 1988. 54
Other Ways of Making Light Elements . . .
The existence of large-scale structures posed difficulties for Big Bang. But it still rested solidly on its two other pillars of helium abundance and microwave background ratiation—at least, as far as the general perception went. We've already seen that the wide-spread acceptance of the background radiation was a peculiar business, since it had been predicted more accurately without any Big Bang assumptions at all. More recently conducted work showed that it wasn't necessary to account for the helium abundance either.
Kicking the Sacred Cow Page 10
