NOTE: To Read My EU 2016 Performance Poem Paradigm Shift click here

It is interesting how our childhood hobbies and passions sometimes accidentally find us in adulthood. When I was very young I was fascinated by cosmology. I wanted to know everything I could about the origin and development of the universe (though I probably did not call it the universe back then). Basically, I was interested in the big questions: What is this thing we all experience; how did it come about; what is the driving force, etc? These questions are as much philosophical as they are scientific. Indeed in the times of the ancient Greeks, philosophy and science were the same discipline. I retained my fascination with the nature of the universe into high school and university and also wondered if cosmology could explain some of the inexplicable phenomenon I had experienced over the years (precognitive dreaming, etc), but because I was not very good in math I focused on the social sciences instead.

Today I have a BA and MA in the Social Sciences and a PhD in the Humanities and center most of my writing and research on socio-political analysis. However, I’ve held onto my philosophical interest in cosmology throughout the years and reading about it has been kind of a side hobby for me. While I do not have a scientific background, the current mainstream cosmology, which is based on the Big Bang, gravity and Einsteinian relativity, always seemed lacking in some way. It does not seem to provide a very tenable explanation of the universe and many of its suppositions are still shrouded in mystery; things like black holes, wormholes, dark matter, and dark energy all seem to generate more questions than answers.

Mainstream science suggests that we cannot understand these things because, unlike Einstein, we are not geniuses. Black holes, dark matter, and all the other speculative elements of gravitational cosmology are simply too complex for non-genius minds to comprehend. Einstein has become synonymous with genius, and the cult of Einstein makes it almost impossible to question his theories of relativity and his mathematics. Yet Einstein never proved his theory of general relativity and, to this day, high school students are taught Newtonian gravity and mechanics (meaning classical gravity).

But gravity as the driving force of the universe has come to be challenged with the space age (and the advent of new technology) and the confirmation of a force billions of times stronger than gravity. That force is electricity. The space age has allowed us to directly observe and sense (with sensors that are actually out in space) the universe in a way that has led some scientists to argue that the key to understanding objects in deep space and the workings of the physical universe is electricity (and plasma), not gravity.

The space age has opened up a whole new universe and we need new theories to explain it. Plasma science and the electric universe theory has posited a new theory of the universe that, according to one of its founding scientists, Wallace Thornhill, gives a more connected view of the universe: “It says that we are a part of…the sun’s… electrical environment and the sun is a part of the galactic environment. And the galaxy iself is strung, like all galaxies, on huge electric currents flying through the universe” [1]. One of the questions that plasma or electric cosmologists often get is how do you know that there is electricity (and energy) out in space and why should we consider anything other than gravity? Basically, can you prove or demonstrate the electricity of the universe?

Modern technology is making it possible to begin to do just that. As Professor of Electrical Engineering, Don Scott, explains, radio telescopes (which are different than optical telescopes) “broaden the spectrum that we can look at the sky with.” And these radio telescopes “can measure electric currents and magnetic fields and we can determine from those measurements the strength of the electric currents and the amount of energy that is stored out there in space” [2]. I am not a scientist, but these developments seem to suggest that, at the very least, mainstream cosmologists and astrophysicists should be open to considering new ideas and to the possibility that gravitational cosmology may not have all the answers or provide the most comprehensive and comprehensible explanation of the universe and, therefore, requires revision.

I now return to how my childhood fascination with cosmology found me again as an adult. Several years ago I began reading about the electric universe theory (EUT). As a social and political analyst that has long questioned–and challenged–existing dominant paradigms and narratives, the EUT’s alternative cosmology resonated with me right away. The intellectual connection to the electric universe theory was automatic and I set out to learn more about it. At the same time, and this may sound a bit strange, the electric universe was making it self “known to me” years before I had ever heard of it. For many years I had been having a reoccurring dream in which I saw what I describe as a “spiraling hour glass” formation. In that dream, I am looking at this strange symbol and I say to another person in the dream (the same person that would actually introduce me to the electric universe theory in real life a few years later) that, “we have misunderstood the world.” I never knew what the dream meant but the dream felt significant in some way, not least because it was recurring.

A few years after I first had the dream, I was introduced to the electric universe theory by my partner; through the documentary “Symbols of an Alien Sky.” In that documentary I saw the exact same symbol from my dream: the spiraling hourglass formation. It is what the electric universe people call the “thunderbolt of the gods” because it is a symbol that occurs in ancient mythology and ancient rock etchings all over the world. This same symbol also appears in electrical plasma formations in deep space (pictured above) that can be seen using space age technology. It may sound strange or non-academic, but when I saw the same image from my recurring dream in the documentary I knew that the electric universe was something I was being “called” to explore. Here is the image in a nebula in space [3] and in an ancient mythological artifact:

I had a couple other strange occurrences and synchronicities (related to electricity experienced in nature) that led me to write some electric-universe inspired poetry. As some of you may know, I’m also a performance poet and spoken word artist, another childhood passion (performance art) that found me again in adulthood. I recently shared one of my EU-inspired poems, Electric Sky, with the organizers of this year’s Electric Universe Conference and was unexpectedly, and very happily, invited to present some poems at the conference. And so it is that while I shied away from studying cosmology in my youth, I presently find myself in Arizona to present EU-inspired writing and poetry at one of the most important and exciting emergent cosmology conferences of our time.

I will be writing a follow up article after the conference. I will also be posting the poems that I am presenting. In the meantime, I encourage anyone interested in an alternative and arguably more tenable explanation of the cosmos to explore the Electric Universe theory:

http://www.thunderbolts.info

Notes

[1] Wallace Thornhill, Physicist and Electronics specialist. Speaking in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AUA7XS0TvA

[2] Don Scott, Professor of Electrical Engineering. Speaking in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AUA7XS0TvA

[3] It is interesting to note that electric universe scientists describe this plasma and gas based nebula as an “hourglass structure,” the same terminology I used to describe the structure in my dream long before I heard of the EUT.