Plasma cosmology

Plasma is ionized gas. It carries current and makes magnetic fields. Hannes Alfvén, 1908–1995, spent his career on that physics. In 1970 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for magnetohydrodynamics. The prize was for that work. It was not a prize for rejecting the Big Bang.

Plasma cosmology is the further claim that the same laboratory behavior, scaled up, dominates the large-scale universe. The early form is the Alfvén–Klein model, worked out with Oskar Klein in the 1960s and set out by Klein in 1971. Later papers by Anthony Peratt, in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science in 1986, and his book Physics of the Plasma Universe in 1992, extend the program to galaxies. Eric Lerner’s The Big Bang Never Happened, 1991, is a popular book in this line. It is not Alfvén’s papers.

Alfvén’s method was to start from plasma already seen in the laboratory, then scale it. He did not want a cosmology invented on a blackboard and then decorated until it fit. In 1984 he called the Big Bang a myth devised to explain creation. That sentence is his. The paper is “Cosmology — Myth or Science?”

The Alfvén–Klein model says the largest scales hold matter and antimatter in equal amounts, in a universe that did not begin. Clouds of the two, separated by thin double layers, annihilate where they meet. On this account the expansion we see is that annihilation, inside a matter region, not a singular origin. They called the mixed plasma ambiplasma.

Peratt’s 1986 papers compare computer simulations of galactic-sized Birkeland currents, filaments aligned with the magnetic field, to double radio galaxies, quasars, and then spiral galaxies. He treats the electromagnetic pinch as what compresses the plasma, and he has argued that flat rotation curves do not require dark matter. Those are his comparisons. A resemblance in a simulation is not, by itself, a history of the galaxies.

Alfvén waves and magnetohydrodynamics are ordinary physics. Birkeland currents, named for Kristian Birkeland’s terrella work, were later measured by satellites above the Earth. That measurement confirms currents in the magnetosphere. It does not confirm a cosmology.

Working astrophysics uses plasma for the solar wind, for magnetospheres, and for some jets. On the largest scales the working model still gives the dominant role to gravity. Plasma cosmology says the electromagnetic role is the dominant one. That disagreement is the program.

The model in use is the hot Big Bang. Its supports, as that model states them, are the expansion, the microwave background, and the light elements. Plasma cosmology does not use that beginning.

P. J. E. Peebles, in Principles of Physical Cosmology (1993), objected that Alfvén’s picture is not consistent with the isotropy of the microwave background, and that it does not predict Hubble’s law, the light elements, or that background. This page did not reopen the book. That is the objection the survey literature records.

Ambiplasma, on the standard reading, would annihilate into more X-rays and gamma rays than are seen. The filament model needs currents, over megaparsec distances, that have not been measured. Few research papers have carried the cosmological program since the mid-1990s. A quiet literature is a reception. It is not a proof that every sentence was false, and it is not a proof that the program was right.

In 2003 Peratt compared high-current Z-pinch experiments with petroglyphs. He wrote that the same shapes occur worldwide, and that they may record an intense aurora, if the solar wind rose by one or two orders of magnitude, millennia ago. He points at Thomas Gold for the size of that rise. A second paper, in 2007, asks about the direction and the source. That is a claim about ancient images and a plasma column. It is still Peratt’s claim. It is not a dome, and it is not a purple sky.

JayDreamerZ’s Plasma Apocalypse is his own later reading: a cyclical catastrophe, a purple dawn, a dome, petrified mud. He can be read beside this program. He is not this program. His sentences stay on his chair.

Sheb Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater” is a 1958 novelty record. It is not a plasma paper.

The Electric Universe is a later popular cluster. Readers of it are often sympathetic to plasma cosmology. A further claim in that cluster, that stars are powered by external currents rather than by fusion, is not Alfvén’s Nobel work and is not the Alfvén–Klein model. Sympathy is not identity.

• JayDreamerZ — his apocalypse, not this program
• The Purple People Eater — the 1958 song