First you have a wrong cosmological model based on "gravity". Then you look for possible predictions wich fits into this wrong model and when you think you´ve found someting, then you call it evidences.
It´s STILL a wrong cosmological model though.
"
That seed would eventually grow into a framework called "electric universe" theory, which Thornhill and David Talbott would later develop together and which would gain a fervent worldwide following.
Thornhill and Talbott began their official EU collaboration at another conference, years later. "Since my university days, I had been prepared to assist those leading the fray in any way I could," Thornhill said. "But at that 1994 conference, I realized that the leaders were gone and it was up to me."
In preparation for that meeting, which was called "Planetary Violence in Human History," Thornhill spent a month sleeping on his friend's office floor. He wanted to convince Talbott that the ancient images he'd been studying—petroglyphs that look like the cartoon Suns in the top-right corners of kindergarten art—bore witness to catastrophic plasma events. Plasma, the idea went, pervades the universe in filaments. Those filaments carry electric current, and that current controls the cosmos. "Magnetism, gravity and the nuclear forces are all different manifestations of the electric force at vastly different scales," Thornhill said of the basis of the theory.
Thornhill called his conference talk, "The Electric Universe."
Today, it's not just Thornhill and Talbott. EU also has the backing of a fervent community, those in The Thunderbolts Project. Since Thornhill and Talbott founded this movement, the internet has spread it.
The Thunderbolts website has 1,800 forum participants, with about 130 online simultaneously at peak traffic. The Thunderbolts Facebook page has around 10,000 followers.
One hundred seventy-five people donate $1,905 per month to the Thunderbolts Project
Patreon campaign for video production. On its YouTube page, six feature-length documentaries have anywhere between 300,000 and a million views. The group holds annual conferences. This year's is at the Sheraton in Mesa, Arizona.
Reddit user NeeAnderTall, an EU follower and Thunderbolt subreddit peruser, began life wanting to be an astronaut. NeeAnderTall, who didn't want to use his real name, consumed science fiction like fuel. But as the years supposedly depicted in
Space 1999 and
2001: A Space Odyssey approached without measuring up, he grew frustrated.
"Everything I wanted to experience was always 20 years away," he said.
So he decided to reverse-engineer a UFO (something he no longer believes in). In the classifieds at the back of
Popular Science magazine, he found an ad for
High-Energy Electrostatics Research, a tome that deals with "anti-gravity." Soon, he enrolled in college astronomy and geology classes. He gave status-quo answers to get good grades, but he didn't buy into all of it, especially dark matter.
While browsing Reddit one day, he came across Thornhill and Talbott's video
Thunderbolts of the Gods, an EU primer. He watched YouTube video after YouTube video, hooked. He likens EU to "a hipster teenager [rebelling] against parental restrictions and taboos."
That reaction against convention also led Marc Royal, a 47-year-old music producer in Alberta, Canada, to the electric universe. In his early twenties, he felt constrained by the corporate demands of his intended career in graphic design. His true passions were making music and reading physics books from Foyles Bookstore in London. When he considered going back to school to formally learn more about the universe, he met with a professor to investigate his options.
"I want you to put all the books down because I want to teach you from scratch," the professor said, of his auto-didacticism.
"I thought, 'Oh, that's indoctrination,'" said Royal. Which he was not into.
He opted to continue his solo studies. Soon, he concluded that gravity holds physics back from a grand theory that could explain everything. He evolved the germ of his own unified theory: that "most things could already be explained by electricity alone." He didn't find the Thunderbolts, or the official electric universe, until later.
Royal still lurks on the Thunderbolts forum, but the negativity now keeps him silent. A
typical comments section is full of
ad hominem attacks and invective toward mainstream astronomy and EU doubters. He doesn't think the Thunderbolts have it all figured out.
"They need to work the maths out and get their papers peer-tested," he said.
But most in the astronomy "establishment" or "NASA," which seems to be the blanket EU term for a conglomeration of mainstream astronomers, would say EU doesn't deserve refutation.
"We know stars generate energy through nuclear fusion, not plasma discharge; we know craters are formed from asteroid and comet impacts, not huge electric arcs; we absolutely know that special and general relativity work, despite some EU proponents' claims," said Plait, who has tangled with EU commenters a time or two. "From what I've seen, most EU claims are on the cranky end of [the] scale. That's why most astronomers ignore it: No evidence for it, tons of evidence against it, and no support mathematically or physically."
EU makes few predictions. It doesn't have a unified framework, or mathematical laws underpinning it. The underlying physics doesn't go far beyond, "It's electric." Data doesn't support or disprove specific hypotheses. And where are all these electrical arcs in space? And what could their power source possibly be?
It's hard to point out the holes in EU hole by hole because, well, there are a lot. (
Here are some others' attempts to poke holes.) Proponents also cherry-pick individual phenomena to explain: individual entries on how stars shine, how craters form, why galaxies have their shapes, and what causes planets and craters. They don't give a whole-universe overview detailed enough to unify those phenomena and also apply to phenomena they haven't yet described.
The gaps in electric universe theory do drive followers from the fold. David, a former enthusiast who now calls EU an "anti-science cult" and wished to use only his first name, was undone when someone asked about Thornhill's latest electric explanation of gravity.
"When I looked into it, I was literally flabbergasted at how stupid it was," he said. "I really was ashamed that I had ever listened to a word Thornhill said."
Now he tries to de-convert others in the Thunderbolts forum, a process that he calls his "work."
"Why, just now I finally made someone see the light," he said, and sends me a link to two recent posts (the
before and the
after). "Deprogramming someone is kind of like the thrill of catching a large fish," he said.
rest at
The People Who Believe Electricity Rules the Universe
it's a hoax.