(light music) (thunder rumbling) - When dinosaurs were discovered, nobody wanted to believe that. That was really a shocking thought, that these giant creatures actually existed way prior to human beings. Things like meteorites, no one believed that meteorites existed. Thomas Jefferson famously said, "No such thing as a rock
could fall from heaven. That doesn't make any sense at all." But we now know, meteorites
not only fall from heaven, but they've fallen from the planet Mars and landed on the
Earth. - I cannot identify a
paradigm-shifting set of ideas more profound, more
fundamental, more sweeping in their implications than
the Electric Universe paradigm. But everyone in our group
recognizes that there is a wall that is almost impossible to penetrate. - So much money is going into science, and lots of progress, the
progress is incremental, not many scientific revolutions. We face a lot of problems
these days that need solutions, and often solutions will come
from scientific revoluti
ons. - I suddenly realized
that to get any further, I had to discard Einstein's
way of looking at things. - People take the dogmas of science to be a kind of religious belief system or quasi-religious belief system. And it's this dogmatic belief system which I think is now constricting and holding science
back in a very serious way. - Science is no different to
any other human endeavor. All the base elements that are present in other aspects of society
are present in science. - Peer review doesn
't work. It only works to protect the status quo, the settled science. - Part of the problem
is that the scientists have taught what was
taught in 1950 since 1950. - We are today in the
midst of a revolution. (thunder rumbling) - A earth-shaking revolution
in human thought is coming. (light uptempo music) - [Narrator] In the 1920s,
there lived a scientist named Immanuel Velikovsky. He was trained in medicine,
and in Freudian psychiatry. He practiced in Palestine and wrote many scientific
papers
and articles, even collaborating with Einstein
who became a good friend. When World War II threatened, Velikovsky moved his family to New York and devoted himself to
the research of ancient texts, including the Old Testament
and ancient Egyptian documents. This led him to form a theory that Earth went through intense
catastrophes and cataclysms around 3,500 years ago. He sent his findings to leading academic
libraries and scientists. - Velikovsky came across the understanding that the ancient pe
oples had suffered a terrible catastrophic disaster which was on a global scale. He wanted to find out what the agent was, and it became abundantly clear, and it's been clear to all of the scholars who followed his work, that it was the planet Venus
was the archetypal comet, it was the Doomsday Comet. And it explains all sorts of odd things like why do people think that
these comets that we see today could ever be considered as the bringers of destruction of the Earth. - [Narrator] In 1950, his
book "Worlds in Collision" was published and became an instant New York Times bestseller, but received huge backlash from the mainstream scientific community. - Here's Immanuel Velikovsky, he's just published a best-seller, and it is rejecting the standard history of the solar system. And it's proposing things
that are utterly preposterous if you are holding to the standard view of solar system history. He said Venus appeared in
the ancient sky as a comet. It was an earth-threatening comet, it w
as terrifying, it
dominated human imagination. And humanity's experience
of this comet, Velikovsky said, shows up in human records
that we think of as myth. - I mean, the word myth
used to mean, you know, a falsehood, you know. And then myth then became
something, a sacred story, it kind of got elevated. And now it's become possible
to view it as physical history, we've started to change our attitude. And that's the only thing
that exists in the human record that could tell us what
happened in t
he past. - [Narrator] Famously, the
young Cornell astronomy professor Carl Sagan proceeded
to systematically criticize and encourage suppression
of the work of Velikovsky. - There is a curious argument alleging major recent
collisions in the solar system proposed by a psychiatrist named Immanuel Velikovsky in 1950. He suggested that an
object of planetary mass which he called a comet
was somehow produced in the Jupiter system. He doesn't say exactly how it's produced, but maybe it's spat out of
Jupiter. (static whirring) - [Narrator] Eventually,
however, some of Velikovsky's work was indeed proven to be true. - Previously I'd given a talk about all the surprises in the solar system that they have discovered
during the Space Age. In 1950, the accepted
theory was Uniformity, that nothing ever happened
drastic on the earth, the solar system had
no electromagnetic field, the solar system was
exactly the way it's been for billions of years, and that
mythology was pure fiction. Velikovsky ca
me along and
said all those aren't true. When they started sending
up all the space probes, they found that what he
said turned out to be true and what they said didn't. And when you send a space probe to somewhere you haven't been before, the results are usually advertised as, "Surprise! Astonished! Who would have ever expected? We've got to re-think everything, our theory just doesn't match this." (thunder cracking) - [Narrator] And Carl Sagan
himself backed off somewhat from his earlier harsh
criticism. - The worst aspect of the Velikovsky Affair is not that many of his
ideas were wrong or silly or in gross contradiction to the facts. Rather, the worst aspect
is that some scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky's ideas. The suppression of uncomfortable
ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it
in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand
where fundamental insights will arise from, about our mysteriou
s
and lovely solar system. And the history of our
study of the solar system shows clearly that accepted
and conventional ideas are often wrong, and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources. - [Narrator] Fast forward to David Talbott, a researcher and publisher
of Comparative Mythology. - My name is Dave Talbott and I have for decades been deeply involved in a new paradigm that is commonly called The Electric Universe. I am the Founder and Director
of the Thunderbolts
project, which has emerged as a
very powerful Internet voice on behalf of the Electric Universe. (audience applauding) So I, decades ago, was very attracted to the work of Immanuel Velikovsky. In 1972, I began involvement
in a project to go public with the Velikovsky debate. That debate was more than 20
years prior to our involvement. But I was putting out a publication, it was called Pensee magazine, distributed free to students
on Oregon campuses. This had a very modest launch,
the story about
Velikovsky. Velikovsky himself had
agreed to write an article, and then that idea of an
article grew into contributions from other scholars that
had recently taken interest in Immanuel Velikovsky's work. And we published a
special issue on Velikovsky, and it just exploded, it was
an international phenomenon. We broke records at a
number of college bookstores in the sales of "Velikovsky Reconsidered" by this little publication,
Pensee Magazine, and the result of that
was a 10-issue series. And a
lmost immediately
after launching that series, through like three or four issues, Doubleday signed a contract
with us for publishing excerpts from this series of publications as a book. "Velikovsky Reconsidered"
then became a good seller on college campus bookstores. - [Narrator] Around the same time on the other side of the world, down under, physicist Wal Thornhill was also researching Velikovsky's ideas. - I'm Wallace Thornhill
and my passion in life has been the pursuit of what
I call the El
ectric Universe. (light music) The real inspiration came
when I was in high school and I read "Worlds in Collision"
by Immanuel Velikovsky. And he showed me there was
a way of understanding things much more coherently
across multiple disciplines, because what he did was
to come to the conclusion that Venus had been a
comet within human memory, and that the implications of this were that electrical
interactions had occurred between planets and were
witnessed by ancient peoples around the world. B
ut the way that they were recorded, in myth and legend and so on, has been dismissed by modern science, simply because they
can't make any sense of it. And this is to be expected because the experiences
our forgotten ancestors had, are completely outside modern experience. As a Physics undergraduate at University, I felt that I needed to check
to see whether Velikovsky had chosen his sources and
that, just to fit his argument, which is a very common failure of research. So I used to haunt the sh
elves
of the Anthropology section of the University library, I was the only Physics student I think I ever saw in those shelves, but just picking books
based on their titles to do with creation myths and
so on from around the world and that included South Sea Islanders, Australian Aboriginal
Dreamtime, Myths of Middle India, all of this kind of thing. And I found that I could open those books and read these stories, and they sprang to life viewed through Velikovsky's
reconstruction of events. An
d that to me was a good test. Well while I was at University,
I began collecting articles which gave me more
ammunition for Velikovsky's views, this was in the mid to late '60s. In the early '70s, the Pensee journal was started up by David Talbott, and I subscribed to those of course, and there I found a whole lot of scholars who were also inspired and working, or trying to understand more
about Velikovsky's scenario, which was one of chaos or
disorder in the solar system. - I'm C.J. Ransom, I o
riginally
was a plasma physicist and worked in aerospace for
about 30 years, then retired. When I was in graduate school, what's now Dr. David Carlyle
and Dr. Jim Durham and I would sit around in the lab sometimes and discuss Velikovsky. When we got out of school, we all agreed that Velikovsky
was not given a fair hearing and somebody ought to look at it. So I started doing research. I had a whole bunch of three by five cards and I'd write down a reference and this did or did not fit Velikovsky,
it supported him or it
detracted from his work. After about six or eight months, I had a huge stack of
cards that supported him, and a very small stack of
cards that detracted from it. So I told the other two, and Carlyle was at a meeting in Princeton at a Plasma Conference, went by and met Velikovsky
while he was in town, and told him about my research. And so Velikovsky said, well, he would write
me a letter, which he did, and asked me for the information. And so I sent him all of that and th
en we started corresponding. And that's how I got into it. - [Narrator] David Talbott
was eventually joined in his work by Ev Cochrane. - My name is Ev Cochrane and I was trained as a Geneticist at Iowa State. So my first area of interest
was Biological Evolution, and I kind of branched out from there into the world of Comparative Mythology. Oh yeah, I read every
sentence Velikovsky ever wrote. You know, Dave's kind of
from the previous generation and so they were very
involved with Velikovsky h
imself, and much more involved in the whole Velikovsky Affair situation. And that's what drew me to the controversy in the field in the first place, was the idea of mainstream
science suppressing Velikovsky. I came to it from that standpoint, and then just became
interested in the science of it. So I've never described
myself as a Velikovskian, I don't necessarily subscribe
to his theories at all, but certainly his ideas were the wellspring from where Dave and my
work grew, that's for sure. (lig
ht music) In the early '70s, Dave became enamored of Velikovsky's theory
that Saturn used to be a dominant body in the sky, it was known as the Primeval Sun God. And so that was originally
part of "Worlds in Collision." Velikovsky pulled it the
last second intending to come back to a second
volume and discuss that situation, he never did. After his death a couple
articles were published, but by then Dave had
taken the bull by the horns and produced this masterpiece of a book called "The Saturn M
yth," that was, you know, much more detailed and sophisticated than
Velikovsky's ever was. - [Narrator] David Talbott was researching all the ancient records he could, hieroglyphs, ancient
texts, petroglyphs, stories, to determine what
exactly was the experience of the ancient peoples around the world. - I was working with the
images of planets in the sky that preceded the explosive birth of the great civilizations. And all of the themes
that I found in Velikovsky, relating to Venus and Mars, th
ey were all part of
that story, they were there. I mean, Venus is a comet,
but it had a particular role. There was a planetary
configuration in the sky, centered on the celestial pole, and this planetary configuration
involved Saturn, Mars, and Venus in an extraordinary alignment. - The idea was that it was likely that Earth, Venus, Mars, and
Saturn, at least those four, at one point were much closer together and not in orbits around anything but in a, what's called a polar alignment, which is,
the joke is, it's planets on a shish kebab. The astronomers of course laughed at this, "It's ridiculous, you can't
have a bunch of planets in a shish kebab, that's
nuts, it would fly apart. You have to have them like an atom, it has to have a nucleus, and things around it, that would be stable, but this thing in a line? No, no way." And there was a fellow by
the name of Bob Grubaugh, who's a mathematician who
got to know Dave, and said, "No, no, no, Dave, that's
a stable configuration. It's just
as stable as the rotating disc." - The value of this idea was, number one, it was derived entirely from
things that are not disputed. In other words, the
tradition of a Primeval Sun that is in the earliest
astronomies identified as Saturn. So if you have a
visualization of the ancient sky in front of you, you have
this huge sphere of Saturn. Right at the heart of that sphere you have this discharging comet Venus in its very first form. And within that discharging star, as preposterous as it may
seem, there is, globally recorded, a darker smaller central orb. And that is the archetypal
Warrior Hero of world mythology. So what happens to these bodies is the full account of world mythology. - And so that's his life's work, that attracted me to the debate. And so Dave and I started
collaborating in the early '80s, I met him in I think 1981,
and we very shortly thereafter then started writing about
the planet Venus together and collaborated on a series of articles. Dave and I first started
writing our articles for the journal Kronos, which at that time was
the main Velikovsky organ, and that took over for
Dave's journal called Pensee, which was from I think 1972 to '74. And so once Kronos folded up shop, Dave started up Aeon in 1988, and so it was his brain-child. He organized everything, and so I was kind of his right-hand man. So originally it was a two-man operation, and we would crank out six
book-sized volumes a year. So it was a ton of work, and you know, I think we produce
d some fantastic stuff, and so that came out for about 20 years. - [Narrator] It was inevitable
that eventually David Talbott and Wal Thornhill would meet. - Yeah, I met Wal Thornhill in 1996, '97, ahead of a conference we
were sponsoring in Portland. And I invited him to that conference, and he had come to
Portland (thunder rumbling) to spend 30 days in my office, sleeping on the floor with
the rain pouring down outside and so on, but for a purpose, not just to come to the conference, it was ju
st a three-day event. But he wanted to show me that what I had
reconstructed is electrical. I'd never even thought
of such a thing. (chuckles) So gradually, Wal completely convinced me that we were like this, we
were telling the same story, but one was the history
of a human experience, and the other was the electrical behavior of the plasma universe
that presents that very detail. So it was a wonderful connection. - I've pretty much stayed in the Comparative Mythology field, but Wal was always
interested in Velikovsky's work. I would say he really
blossomed in the mid-'90s with trying to figure
out the nature of comets, and how Venus could present the images that we had reconstructed
from ancient history. And the upshot of that is, you would have to have some pretty powerful plasma-like forces emanating from Venus and associated structures, to create these amazingly beautiful and spectacular forms in the sky. So it's really Wal's genius
that has fleshed that out. The reason we chose
C
omparative Mythology is, it's easy to imagine one
culture being idiosyncratic and maybe figuratively describing a planet or some historical situation. But by taking the comparative method, if you find the same story in Mesopotamia as you do in Meso-America, that is compelling
evidence that a real history is behind those common stories. - One of Dave Talbott's
fundamental tenets is, "Don't use a myth to
reconstruct the history of humans and the solar system if it's not global." And what he will g
o on to say is, "Make your history out of archetypes which are globally attested,
which are not obvious." Archetypes that combine
like three different elements you would never dream of putting together, but they are put together
all around the planet. - Dave Talbott's stories
about cross-cultural myths, you know, taking a look around the world, seeing the uniformity in some storylines, the qualities of these gods, and oh my God, you know
the Chinese think the same way about this god and the Gree
ks do, and the Meso-Americans do, and oh, this is a human experience. So you know, this is not baloney, this is some common
experience that occurred, and it had to do with
something extraterrestrial, we're not talking Alien Astronauts, we're talking about a
experience in the celestial order, a physical experience. But of course they animated it, everything had you know
its own energy, you know. They wouldn't, it's not a rock to them, it's some God that has some evil intent, or it's warring on an
other body in the sky, they're exchanging energies, there's destruction happening, there's destruction can
be happening to the Earth. So we tell stories about
that, what else would we do, you know, to memorialize those experiences? So it wasn't all a suppression, you know, pushing away of the memory. It was a way to encode it, you know, and myth is the way to encode it. - The majority of our research
is just trying to reconstruct the earliest history of Venus
in the world's consciousness. Dave i
s a total expert at
the early Egyptian texts, he was always concentrating
on the Pyramid texts, the Coffin texts, and I was
familiar with those as well. Then I moved to Mesopotamian material and discussed the earliest
Sumerian and Acadian writings. And in both cultures you
have the leading goddess, Inanna in the Sumerians and
Ishtar in the Semitic cultures, identified with the planet Venus. It's clearly described as
a extraterrestrial warrior that caused disasters on the earth. - [Narrator] At s
ome point,
this polar configuration of planets began to break apart. - The breakup of that system is the story of the departure of the gods. I mean, and in fact, what
culture didn't remember we were once living in
the presence of the gods, they went away? Okay, so there's a theme,
like all other themes, it has a place in this
reconstruction, the gods departed. The soul of the Primeval Ruler
of the sky departs from him. That central soul did not
remain in that position, it departed. It became a f
laming serpent-dragon, it attacked the world, this was the end of the world. And all the stories of
the Clash of the Titans, the Wars of the Gods and so on, relate to the dismemberment
of this planetary configuration and the incredible activity. What were they battling in the sky with? They always have weapons. Well, we look at the weapon of the gods, and we find that it is
always the thunderbolt, (thunder rumbling) the Cosmic Thunderbolt, not a blast of lightning,
a Cosmic Thunderbolt. It was a
thing in the
sky, it had visual form, it never looks like lightning. So I gathered up the forms
of the ancient thunderbolt, there's lots of mythic images of them, and I showed these forms of
the ancient Cosmic Thunderbolt are the forms of electric
discharge in plasma, and this is so specific,
it couldn't be accidental. You only have to look to a comparison of electric discharge in the plasma lab to these very elaborately
sculpted thunderbolt images from Greece and ancient
Near East and so on, a
nd you see, it's a perfect match. - Around 2,000, another
gentleman joined the movement, his name is Tony Peratt. He was a plasma
physicist at Los Alamos Lab. He is, you know, one of the
world's top plasma scientists, and so he was even further
responsible for showing us how these images could have been created through electromagnetic forces. So that was a huge bolster to our theory. - My name is Donald Scott. I have a PhD degree in
Electrical Engineering, which I used to teach at the
University
of Massachusetts for 39 years. And Tony Peratt, who's
another electrical engineer, he came and said, "Yeeh, that's right. And in fact some of this stuff, these ancient petroglyphs
that we see carved into the rock walls of canyons here, they look just like what
I see in my nuclear lab in Los Alamos, and they're
called the Peratt Instabilities." It's hard to carve stuff
on rock with another rock, try it some time. I did one time. Tony said, "Yeah, go out and see if you can carve an X on the rock.
" You're sitting there and you don't, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of time. So these people were
really obviously either scared, or awed, or in religious aura of what they saw in the sky. And so Tony said, "Yeah,
what these petroglyphs prove is that these tremendous plasma displays did occur in ancient times, and ancient man saw these figures," which he said, "I know
'cause I see them in my lab, I know they do occur." (instrumental music) - It was apparently a somewhat
contained environmen
t, progressively unraveling
into enough freedom for the planets to find
their equilibrium positions in the system we know today. Very much unlike and very far removed from that close proximity
of this primeval cocoon in which we existed, and the planets were
in such close proximity, just dominating the sky, now it's a remote planetary system. But every culture, I mean
literally every culture, remembered the gods departing. And most commonly you see these figures becoming remote stars. - Dave's f
avorite, one
of the favorite things he has to say is that all cultures on Earth talked about a time before time, the Garden of Eden, for example. And that's when they were all lined up, they were all inside of a plasma sheath. And the inhabitants had no
idea what the stars looked like. They had no idea about the Universe 'cause they were surrounded
by this beneficent fog which is the Garden of Eden, and life was easy but there
was no way of telling time. And then finally, for some
reason, this t
hing broke up. It could have been that
this little shish kebab was traveling through space and eventually came within closer distance to the sun than it was, and the sun's gravity and electric field essentially disturbed
that planetary alignment and it broke up. So that was every culture in the world, cultures that have never
talked to each other, they have all, all of them have at the
end of their Garden of Eden, there's always the End of the World, and all hell breaks
loose, and fire and flame
. Well, you can imagine if you're on a planet and the thing is in a
configuration that's breaking up! And it eventually ended up in this very placid
arrangement that we have today. So the idea that it was always
this way, we don't believe. (waves crashing) - And so that's what we've been doing since very early in
the '80s, over 25 years, re-constructing that
story and that history. And it has, you know,
profound ramifications, not only for the origins of religion, the origins of language, but es
pecially for the
foundations of modern science, because modern science will tell you Venus has not moved off its present orbit for many billions of years, and we know that to be incorrect. And so, if we are right, it really pulls the carpet out from under
conventional astronomy. - In fact, if I reflect on the history of paradigm-changing ideas, I cannot identify a
paradigm-shifting set of ideas more profound, more
fundamental, more sweeping in their implications than
the Electric Universe paradi
gm. I mean, Darwin had a
huge impact on education and scientific investigation, but if you just compare the implications of Darwinian insights to the insights within the Electric Universe,
it's actually no contest, because there's so much
more that is being affected by the Electric Universe that is emerging into human consciousness now. We just go on doing what
we are doing and, step by step, it is always bolstering our confidence that a earth-shaking revolution
in human thought is coming. - [Na
rrator] Over time,
the community of scientists, scholars, and other
experts and researchers, in various fields, grew around them. - Obviously I think the Aeon
journal put us front and center as far as organizing a
community of like-minded scholars. And so Dave and I were pretty prolific during the '80s and '90s, we were putting out these massive books, and so it would be nice to get
some help from other people. And so over the course
of time guys like Wal, Dwardu Cardona, Fred Jueneman, and vari
ous other scholars and scientists from around the world
kind of became interested and chipped in, and really helped us out. Certainly Tony Peratt
is at the top of that list as far as first-rate scientist
that pointed Dave and I in new directions that
we wouldn't have been familiar with otherwise, you know. And it turned out to be
revolutionary in its implications. And so it's been, you know, we've been very fortunate
from that standpoint, to be associated with
a community of scholars where every
body has complementary
and supplementary ideas that can kind of serve as a
self-corrective mechanism, to keep us on the straight and narrow. - I could name a number of people who have been key to all of this, and one of them was
Velikovsky's scientific adviser, Ralph Juergens. And he published an
article in the early '70s which challenged the
view of how the sun works. And that was one
article where as I read it, I intuitively knew that he was right, because the model was simple. And it was base
d on engineering principles which I understood. I felt I had to take that on board and then see what else
could be done with it. - Dave met up with Wal and Wal began to talk about
electrical things and said, "This configuration that
Grubaugh says is stable, is definitely stable, and the electrical
properties of these planets would be consistent
and we can go from there. We can have a model and see if it works." Then I got into the act a little bit later, after I'd read Juergens'
Electric Sun mod
el, and I was more interested
in the sun, still am. There were other people who shared in the similar ideas with Dave, that's Ev Cochrane and
Dwardu Cardona, Ginenthal, and a few other people, so the whole group sort of came together. The impetus was Dave and
his study of ancient times and ancient stories, that's the way the whole thing got started, and then little by little
we've sort of expanded. - [Narrator] This community
of scientists and scholars eventually became known
as the Electric Uni
verse, or EU for short. - The Electric Universe
acknowledges the fact that all matter is electrical in nature, (thunder booming) and that we can understand
far more about the Universe, cosmology and ourselves
by using this understanding and applying it to a simplification of all the present Physics, which involves multiple
forces and multiple particles, a complete zoo of particles, and a lot of confusion, especially with some of the
very expensive experiments that have been carried out recently,
which have produced just more surprises rather than confirmation of previous ideas. I'm so confident in the
interdisciplinary support for the Electric Universe model. It's not so narrowly
focused as modern science is. Most people are so focused
on their own area of interest that they don't consider that
the problems they're facing may be answered by somebody in a completely different discipline. The communication between disciplines is very poor at present. - The EU has several aspects, a whole
bunch of different directions. Dave with his Mythology
and Dwardu, God love him, and Wal's and my ideas about electricity and how it all can work. And there's several
other aspects of it too. - My name is Andrew Fitts
and my particular interest is in the Sociological
Study of Catastrophism. So everybody's different. That's what's exciting about this group because there's room for everybody. I mean, you got the hardcore
scientists, mathematicians, you got the, you know, mythologists, you got the
psychologists,
you got the geology people, you got people wanting to show
you the proper understanding of what an atom is. - Irving Wolfe and I became involved in the whole Velikovsky community in 1974. There was a conference at
the University of Lethbridge, where Velikovsky was
given an honorary doctorate, and I was invited to be one
of the group to give a paper. And that's where I finally met Velikovsky, and we were then in
touch for the rest of his life. He died I think in 1979. Velikovsky v
igorously
argued that abstract gravity is not the answer to the
motions of the heavenly bodies. He believed that
electromagnetism played a part, and probably, in his
mind, the greatest part. So he was the one who pushed 70 years ago for electrical interactions
in the Universe, particularly in the solar system. And Dave Talbott and Wal
have picked up from there, and they now say that the entire Universe, the whole bloody Universe
as big as we know it, is electromagnetic. And this is just starting
to come up. What Wal and Dave have started is gonna be a torrent of
insights into how everything, from the smallest parts
of the cells in our body to the largest structures in the Universe, can all be only explained
in terms of electricity and magnetism, or
electromagnetism together. So they're on their way to proposing a whole new paradigm
for understanding of reality. - I'm Bill Mullen and I teach
Classics at Bard College. I've done that since 1985. So I've been giving papers at conferences i
nspired by Immanuel Velikovsky, starting from the year in which I worked with him, 1973 to 4. (expansive music) When you see the Great Canyon of Mars, a third of the planet, it is a canyon whose
features could not possibly have been produced by
erosion of wind or water, but who could perfectly
resemble the kind of configurations that electrical discharges produce, I mean even in a laboratory. And it takes NASA photography
of that Great Canyon, and you look down into the canyon, and you see these
incredibly
sharply etched features all the way to the bottom. That is some mega-discharge
of some other body close enough to Mars
to have produced a huge, as it were, lightning bolt. (lightning whirring) - The EU, our guys, are of the opinion that there is a heck
of a lot more electricity up there in space than
most astronomers think. The surface of the sun is very electrical. Thinking about it that way, we've been able to explain some things that regular astronomers,
helio astronomers, have no
explanation for. We think that stars are
born from Birkeland currents. When the Birkeland
current gets into a pinch for whatever reason, if you bend it like you bend a soda straw, you will crimp it, and in
any restriction or crimp, there'll be what's called a Z-pinch, and the plasma reacts
and essentially explodes, and compresses matter. And that's the way we feel stars, and all objects, planets, asteroids, anything you want to think of, are made because of the
compression of matter at a Z-pinc
h in one of these long current streams. The reason that I got
into the Electric Universe was because of my background
in electrical engineering. And when I heard astronomers say things that I knew were wrong, I
am reasonably expert I think, after teaching it for 39 years, in Maxwell's equations and a few of the other electromagnetic
properties of matter. Astronomers were saying things like, "There's an open-ended
magnetic field here." An open-ended magnetic
field, that's nonsense, there is no su
ch thing. And they talk about
magnetic fields that begin with a footprint on the surface of the sun, and then they go to infinity. That's impossible. They may go a long way, but it's not infinity because
electromagnetic fields have to come back and join, they're continuous closed loops, just like a circuit would
be a continuous closed loop. Astronomers have some
very wrong ideas about, well, you can't have
charge separation in space. Yes, you can. You can't have an electric field that would push
on something
and make it to move in space. Yes, you can. So I kind of get into this by sort of, like running out onto
the field like a referee in a soccer match going, "Time! Cut! That's a penalty, you can't do that." And so astronomers have
been saying for a long time, "Plasma cannot support an electric field, because plasma's a perfect
conductor and it will short out, like you put a dead
short across the battery, and it's gonna melt everything,
nothing's gonna work." They're wrong. (pensive m
usic) - My name is Peter Moddel. As I understand it, our whole foundation of the thrust of science
is material, is materialistic. It's based on the research
of Physics, physical things. And more and more the
idea came in that Physics can answer everything, to the point where what
isn't Physics isn't real, yeah? It went in that direction,
the whole viewpoint. And this is implicitly behind it, where actually science can answer anything, and what they're not
answering doesn't exist, yes? In other w
ords, non-material existence and so forth doesn't have a place. Now gravity is actually associated in general understanding with matter. The amount of matter is supposed to be the amount of gravity. And so, by having a Universe
that's based on gravity, you're actually supporting the whole idea, the whole material idea that lies behind this physical approach. When you shift to electricity,
this whole thing drops out. And so, the difficulty that
many have in letting go the fact that gravity is a n
egligible force in the Universe compared to electricity, is because gravity's
still tied in with matter, and if you have electricity,
well it's not matter. So there's a whole other
range of understanding that has to move in, and that has to leave, let go this materialistic basis. - Gerald Pollack, and I'm a professor at University of Washington in Seattle. And I've been for the past
couple of decades or so, I've been studying water. The Electric Universe people are generally of the belief system
that
electrical forces dominate nature, the solar system, and
the galaxies and such. The feature of weather
that we have brought forth, is that weather is primarily electrical. And it's not a surprise
because you see thunderstorms, electrical storms all the time. And for many people, the presumption is that the electricity is something added on, or something exotic, but it's not. The clouds are all electrical. The rain, it turns out, may be drawn to the
earth by electrical forces. Most of us th
ink, you have a cloud up there and the cloud somehow
magically for some reason unzips, and all the water comes out and falls down. But experiments have
shown that it's not true. The droplet is not just
falling from the cloud, something is pulling the droplet down. And from our studies, we deduced that these are electrical forces because these droplets are all charged. And most people never
even think about this, how come this heavy water
is sitting above our heads and doesn't fall except when it
rains? And so this is a kind of funny question that I always like to ask, and
we think we know the answer. And the answer has to do with charge, just like the Electric
Universe people are realizing. The cloud is negatively charged, and it turns out that the earth is negatively charged as
well. (thunder rumbling) And if you have a negatively charged earth and a negatively charged
cloud, they repel each other. And if they repel each other, then the cloud is gonna be high up. And the clouds that
h
ave more negative charge are gonna be higher, and the clouds with less negative
charge are gonna be lower. When you listen to your local meteorologist talking about the weather forecast, you'll hear about temperature, and you'll hear about pressure. Not once have I ever heard about charge. And I think answering the question, "Shall I take my umbrella to work today," you know, we don't know,
because often there's a 50% probability of rain. But I think that the predictions
will get a whole lot bet
ter if people begin to understand that electrical phenomena
dominate all weather. - [Narrator] Of course,
to be able to really grasp and propose such revolutionary ideas, it is necessary to abandon some outdated, but deeply held beliefs, about the nature of the
Universe and its history. - It was about almost 40 years later when I suddenly realized
that to get any further, I had to discard Einstein's
way of looking at things. It was a necessary step, I had to take that step to take the ones that
were just to come,
just down a few years later. I had to dump Einstein and go back to the classical way of doing science. I was working in London at the time, and there was a scientist
who actually wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica for some years on Special Relativity, until he realized that he didn't understand what he was saying. And he developed a very simple argument, which ended up in the Times. It was a famous argument
in the London Times. It was never resolved. So he decided,
since he
never got a proper answer to a very simple question, to write a book called
"Science at the Crossroads." With that reinforcement, I was prepared for anyone who
attacked me on the basis that, you know, Einstein is a hallowed gentleman, and that no one can question him because everything that's ever
been done confirms his work. And that's so, simply because
he removed the standards of measurement of time and distance. So once you've done
that, then you can choose any arbitrary observer
i
n the Universe to match, to give you the results you want. Sure, you know. The fact is that that doesn't
actually prove anything, because his work is fundamentally,
physically meaningless. There are all sorts of
other aspects to this, but one of the main things
about the Electric Universe is that it re-establishes the
standards of measurement, and this is something
that Newton recognized, and some of the great
philosophers of the past, the standard is the fixed
stars, the rest of the Universe. S
o it's motion with respect
to the rest of the Universe, that determines the
energy and the actual speed of an object. - If you look at Einstein's
own work on General Relativity, he has a couple of pages
describing the assumptions or the principles that he uses, and then there's pages
of mathematical equations. Now most physicists would
be trained to look at his math, and then to train to look
at the field equations, and to kind of gloss
over the assumptions part. But all those assumptions are th
emselves up for debate or questionable. They're ways of framing the problem. - [Narrator] However,
physicists are not trained to question the assumptions. Well, this is the problem,
the way it's taught. Can you imagine you're going to school and everyone is chanting hymns to Einstein, you're going to be ex-communicated,
you know, tossed out. You'll never have an academic career. It's quite a challenge because each era seems to
work with its own mythology, and that sets the ground
rules for what
you believe and what you don't believe. And science is just
another myth, mythology. It's funny because science
of course is supposed to have separated from
religion, it never did. It even took the Creation Myth with it, and added math to it, to suit whatever they wanted to dream up. And so we've ended up with a scientism, you know it's really nothing
to do with real science. (pensive music) - Part of the problem
is that the scientists have taught what was taught in 1950, since 1950 and before.
- [Narrator] An example of someone who was thrown out of
school for challenging Einstein's ideas is Stephen Crothers, who was a Physics PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales. - I've done work on the
Special Theory of Relativity, General Relativity and its
related mathematical apparatus, Thermal Emission, that's including of course Kirchhoff's Law and Planck's equation, which I've done with Professor Robitaille who's been working on this for years and is essentially the prime mover o
n this, so we've written one
paper together on that. And I also do a bit of
work on electrodynamics. - [Narrator] Kirchhoff's
Law of Thermal Emission is a pillar of modern Physics. Assuming its validity, Max
Planck went on to formulate his famous equation which proposed that electromagnetic
energy could be emitted only in quantized form. Quantum Physics was then born. - Black holes, Big Bangs,
these things don't exist, it's all a fantasy. The cosmic microwave
background is essential to the Big B
ang cosmology, but we know that they can't possibly exist because first and foremost, all of this rests on the
validity of Kirchhoff's Law and the universality of Planck's equation. But as Professor
Robitaille has done recently with a very simple experiment, proving that Kirchhoff's Law is false. So, this is a very simple experiment that anybody can do in their kitchen, I mean literally in your
kitchen with a small amount of outlay for equipment,
maybe a thousand dollars. You don't need a
hundre
d-million dollar satellite, or hundreds of millions, or 750 million dollar satellite like many of these
various satellites have cost. And of course, these projects, who can reproduce these
so-called experiments? You have a one-off more or less. Or you have a small coterie of people who have controlled these projects, and they make ancillary projects to the project that they've done, to confirm their own claims. Well, there's no independent inquiry here, or no independent
confirmation, so it's no
t science. - I think there is a problem
with peer-reviewed things, especially when the peer
reviewers have an interest in the accepted theory. So they're going to be very
careful about letting you publish anything that's
contrary to their accepted theory. - Peer review doesn't work. It only works to protect the status quo, the settled science. Confirmatory bias is one of
the big problems in science. In other words, you forget your failures, in fact, half the time you
don't even publish them, thi
s is one of the other difficulties. So we have this skewed view of where science is really up to. And people who have relied
on an expert in one field to give an answer which they can rely on, is often misleading
people in another discipline. And so you get these knock-on effects and the results are that science at present is a real shambles. The real scientists are the ones, usually the first ones to admit it. The ones who are just there for the show, (chuckles) will say anything
to maintain th
eir position. Oh the quantum business,
well, that's not science either. Physics died at the Solvay
Conference, you know, the one where Einstein and Bohr and all of those other big
names of science were assembled. We had Einstein in the front row, they're all seated of course, this is settled science
so they're all seated. He was the one who destroyed Physics by removing the standards
of length and time. And in the second row, second
from the end was Niels Bohr, who removed cause and
effect from
Quantum Mechanics, which meant that that
was no longer Physics. So we've limped along for, since that early part of the 20th century, not doing Physics. The problem is we see all of these things that are put as facts and conclusions, which are not facts and
they're unsupportable. - Big Bang is based on the
General Theory of Relativity. And Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is riddled with contradictions, impossible Physics, so-called Physics, it's a bit of an oxymoron to say Physics, but i
mpossible Physics,
and invalid mathematics. There are two things that a
physical theory must satisfy, it must be logically consistent and it must be in accord
with reality or experiment. Well if it fails on either
one, then it doesn't hold. And in the case of Einstein, certainly on the question of logic and self-consistency itself, it's false. So that doesn't hold. The second thing is it's
been experimentally proved to be false because, as I
said about Kirchhoff's Law, without that law, the whol
e of Big Bang
cosmology is untenable. Well, Kirchhoff's Law is false, that's it. So we know for sure that
this Big Bang mysticism is mysticism, it's not science. And it's a fantasy. (soft music) - No, the Big Bang is nonsense, it's been called the ultimate free lunch 'cause you start with nothing and you end up with everything. (laughs) It's only there because of a
misinterpretation of Red Shift. And there's a lot of
ironies in science too, because no one bothers to check the history or the docu
mentation, they just, you accept what you're
taught because in University, it's a hothouse. You've got to get through
and do what you're told to do in order to get your degree. You don't have time to go back and look at the controversies, and the thoughts and
the context at the time. Edwin Hubble thought that
the expansion of the Universe was the least likely answer. And he was right, right
to his deathbed he thought that the Big Bang
scenario was the wrong one. But of course, he's now
up there,
another icon, and history's been
re-written by the winners, and unless you go back
and do your own checking, you would never know it. And it's the same with most of the so-called big
steps forward in science. The politics of science
is such that Nobel prizes are misattributed to people
who didn't invent something, or didn't discover something,
but later developed it. And because this person who discovered it wasn't a card-carrying
member of the fraternity, so to speak, he gets
discarded and the
person who develops it gets all the prizes. This has happened repeatedly. - The singularity of a black
hole is supposedly composed of a finite mass which has
zero volume, infinite density, and infinite space-time curvature. Well, in General Relativity,
there are no forces of gravity. There are forces but
gravity is not one of them, because it's space-time curvature. Well, infinite space-time curvature therefore equates to infinite gravity. But there is no such thing as
a finite mass of zero vol
ume, infinite density, and infinite gravity, no such thing exists, this is a fairy tale. - It's like in Mathematics
in high school, you know, where you have the
equation for Young's Modulus and the stretching of a spring. It's like applying that formula endlessly until the spring's long broken, but you're still using the formula. This is what has happened. And the introduction
of infinity into Physics and the re-normalization that they use, I mean, that's nonsense. If you hit infinity, you're no
longer dealing with numbers, and your mathematics
is no longer mathematics, I mean it's a waste of time. - [Narrator] Is Science
still focusing on theories that have long ago lost touch with the physical realities
they were made to explain? Biologist and Science
Historian Rupert Sheldrake spoke at an Electric Universe conference, outlining the Ten Dogmas
of Institutional Science that are still taboo to question, even though they can be easily disproved with the existing evidence. - There's a co
nflict
in the heart of science between science as a method of inquiry, about the testing of hypotheses,
looking at the evidence, finding out what's really going on, open-minded subject
correction, and so forth, the ideal of science
which many people think of as what science is, as
what science ought to be, and I agree with that ideal. The reality, as many of us have encountered through bitter experience,
is rather different. For many people, science
has become a belief system, a world view. This
is sometimes called Scientism, where people take the
dogmas of science to be a kind of religious belief system or
quasi-religious belief system. And it's this dogmatic
belief system which I think is now constricting and holding science back in a very serious way. In almost every branch of science, we see the Law of Diminishing Returns, more expensive research yields fewer and fewer really new results. And I think the reason for all that is this dogmatic belief system. If science could be set fr
ee
from it, new experiments and new possibilities
open up in every area. What I do in my book "Science Set Free" is take the 10 dogmas
of institutional science, which are part of the
scientific world view, and turn these dogmas into questions, treat them not as beliefs or truths, but as hypotheses that can
be tested against the evidence. I then look at them
scientifically to see how well they stack up when you take
into account the evidence. None of them do. In every case, new possibilities open
up. Science would become regenerated when we undergo this process. (light music) Now within science itself of course, people at the leading edge of research in many ways have moved
beyond this belief system. Research scientists are
not necessarily committed to this in every detail, but they're usually only at
the frontier of one region. A physicist might be at
the frontiers of cosmology and had gone beyond some
of these dogmas of Physics, but they wouldn't question the dogmas of Psychology or B
iology, those would remain more or less intact. So there are various people
who question bits of it, but there's very little that's been done to question the whole thing. This is essentially the
Materialist worldview, and it became the dominant view of science in the 19th century. Science was, as it were,
hijacked by Materialist philosophy, and since then has been
a wholly owned subsidiary of Materialism. There's really no reason why
science has to be Materialist, it wasn't Materialist
before th
e 19th century, and I think we can go beyond
that to a new, more inclusive, more organic, organismic
paradigm for science. So what if the electrical
patterns in the sun are an interface with the sun's mind? What if the sun thinks? Now as soon as you raise that question, you realize this is an
utterly taboo subject. You're not allowed to ask that question, it's, "Matter's unconscious
since the 17th century." Materialists had assumed, and Dualists, had assumed that matter's unconscious. It's simpl
y off-limits. However, all traditional cultures have treated the sun as alive, and indeed the planets and the stars. Children when they draw the
sun, draw it with a smiley face. So this in itself is taken as evidence against the fact that the
sun can be alive or conscious, because if children see it that way, it shows it's a primitive, childish way of looking at things. And the fact that people all
over the world show it that way until science comes along, again proves it's
primitive and superst
itious, we've risen above it. I don't think we've risen above it at all. I think we've sunk below
it to a level of dogmatism which simply closes off a
whole area of questions, for no reason other than the fact that a French philosopher
in the 17th century chose to divide up the world in such a way, that he defined matter as unconscious. - The movement into the
Renaissance was the loss of meaning. Then you moved to Bode's
Law which gave you a formula for the distances of the
planets, and that was
good. What you needed were
formulae, calculations, and so forth, and if it meant nothing,
it didn't matter anymore. And after the Renaissance,
we moved into a period where things didn't have
to mean anything anymore, there was no cosmic vision behind it. They just had to match up and work out. That has many, many more implications than what I'm saying there, but I have the feeling
that we reached a crisis in the contemporary period
where the lack of meaning is problematical again. - Well, scien
ce would improve by going back to a more classical style of teaching, where the scientists in the
past had a classical background, they learned about
ancient cultures and so on, as well as investigating electricity and magnetism and astronomy, and so on. There was a sense back then that science was all about simplification, that you tried to find a more simple way of looking at things. But it seems that after the
two wars in the 20th century, that government funding
became very important, that t
he command was
to shut up and calculate. There was an awful lot of
mathematical work involved, which is rather deductive
rather than inductive, and the way of operating back in the classical era was induction. You performed an experiment,
you saw strange things happen, and then you tried to think
of where you might have seen that kind of pattern of
behavior somewhere else. Now it was the case of, if the mathematics didn't
agree with the results, then you'd just fiddle with the mathematics until
it did agree. But that didn't teach you anything new. - Something happened in the Renaissance, which isn't often fully described. Here you have this free being
who's able to make choices, but what actually happened is, that man lost his identity at that moment. And there's a whole other way of seeing what actually happened, which has to do with the
loss of personal meaning, and the loss of personal connection. It's terribly sad that young
people who have this impulse where things are meaningful,
and there's a starry sky is amazing and you want to discover more, and it's all turned into
this abstract language which doesn't make sense anymore. And it's happening in almost
all professions and all areas. How many wonderful
young people have I known that went into the medical profession because they wanted to
help people, nursing or other, and they got into a hospital situation, and they're the dispensary of medications or of operations or something. And the caring that was the initial impu
lse doesn't find its place anymore. And we can say this of
so many areas of learning, which lead us out of the
reason that we went into them, instead of developing and becoming something even more intense. And that's something that's
very true of our whole epoch, and it shows that something's amiss, something's dreadfully amiss. - It's one of the legacies of the split between philosophy and
science in the 20th century, is a strand of thought
that's sometimes called Logical Empiricism or Positivi
sm, which really greatly influenced science into this rise of the
Professional School of Science. It's to believe that science
has to be free of metaphysics, and that it's the ideal
is to have a science that's pure without having to
make any such grounding claims or any such framing devices. So in my view this is a delusion, and it would be much better
if we could speak openly about what the guiding assumptions or the premises for a theory are, and speaking about them openly instead of trying to
hide them away. (energetic music) - Well, despite Einstein's speed limit on the transfer of information, we know for sure that that's untrue, and that the Universe is
full, it's full of an ether. You must have a substrate for the Universe from which the visible things that we see, the planets, the stars and
everything, must be constructed. You cannot create matter
from nothing you know, there is no miraculous Creation Story for the Electric Universe. The big mysteries remain, but at least we ca
n now
begin to ask the right questions. But the essential thing
is this connectedness, and it's a connectedness at all levels, and it helps you understand the difference between living creatures,
how we are formed, how we're connected
with everything around us, the environment and so on, and how we're also connected to a kind of consciousness of the Universe. - And there's reason to
find either an organic sense or an integral sense, or some way of finding personal meaning and global meaning in
w
hat we're researching. And I think the Electric Universe does open that possibility
where things are connected, stars are connected,
galaxies are connected, time is not a question, there's timelessness across the Universe where we're in communication, and also the perceiver and what's perceived comes into a whole new relationship. And we're moving back into an area where meaning is meaningful, something that was lost
for many hundreds of years. (soft music) - It's all one, mm. We're a manifestat
ion of
something beyond ourselves, that's my view having
come this far down that path. To get to where I am, you have to be prepared
to stare into the abyss and still take the jump. And I've done that repeatedly, so that jump is one that's
not so difficult. (laughs) It's also very empowering because you don't get so
attached to meaningless things, you know, the meaningless things in life. The real meaning is your experience here, because we are the
self-referential part of the Universe. The Univ
erse learns through us, we manifest in order to understand, and to allow that understanding
to permeate the Universe. - [Narrator] If the Electric
Universe model can really help explain the Universe
more completely and accurately than our current understanding does, why is Institutional Science
so reluctant to consider it? - So prior to the proposal of the existence of electrical particles you might say, the electron, protons, and that, people didn't study things
that hadn't been invented yet. S
o there was no Electrical Engineering, there was no real Electrical Physics, electricity was unknown prior to, let's say the turn of the century, 1900, and so they never studied it. And astronomers, they're
trying to tell you, us, what happened far, far
away and long, long ago. Well as we all know, that's the way any fairy tale begins. So they can pretty much
say anything they wanna, because there's no way
in their particular science to test anything. Well it's a question whether
or not untestab
le hypotheses are science at all! And because they never had electricity, they explained everything
that they possibly could by any other means,
thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, now there's magnetohydrodynamics. Because they thought they could get away with ignoring electrical processes, and came up with a bunch
of hypothetical answers for how things work, that when other people came along and suggested that these causations, these mechanisms that
they wanted to explain were really better explain
ed
by electrical phenomena, they rejected it because
they never had studied it. I mean, in my 39 years of teaching, I don't think I had any graduate students from the Physics Department at all. - Right now we have cosmologists, or scientists more generally speaking, are setting all the terms
for how to approach and understand the Universe. And they're also the ones who judge whether they think a
theory has more merit or not. To some degree, the core of the model is taken as a matter of faith, an
d that if you are to question it, then you risk running
afoul of a lot of things regarding you know,
funding and career and so on, on the one hand, especially
if you are a scientist. You can build a career now on challenging some of the upper blocks, so to speak. For example, Dark Matter,
there is a real challenger to this particular part. I find very few scientists
are willing to look at the more questionable assumptions underneath the core building blocks of how we got here in the first place.
It is much more convenient
to add things to the model and preserve the existing structure, than it is to radically rethink it. - And now scientists are
coming out of the closet, so to speak, and letting us know that we're in serious trouble. But of course, the media aren't interested. All they want is the
success stories from science, and that's all that the
scientific hierarchy want because they rely on government funding and confidence in what they have to say, what the experts have to say. T
he funny thing is, this
is just a local anecdote about Australia, we have a government
which promised innovation, and of course they asked the universities to head up this innovation. But they're the last people to ask because real innovation
comes from individuals. But the problem is how do you find them and how do you get the funds to them? And of course the universities would do everything in their power
to stop it, if they did. They get away with this kind of activity because they have their
own media departments now, the universities, and there
is no investigative journalism being done like it is in
the finance industries and in politics. It seriously needs outside scrutiny because they do what they like, they're practically
unaccountable to anyone. Being the experts, they're always called in to pontificate on who's
right and who's wrong, but they're the last people
in some ways to do that. So this is a real problem. If we want to get to
the science of the future, it's gonna take
a revolution. (frantic music) - Because of the vast sums of public money that are involved in projects, we're talking hundreds of
millions to billions of dollars, and so whenever this
kind of money is involved, you can rest assured
that there's corruption. The other thing of
course is that the scientists are supported on many of these fantasies by vested interests of
business and contractors, for instance. Just like in Defense,
they want to get contracts to be able to build these contraptions. W
ell, there's hundreds of
millions or billions of dollars of public money that's
pretty well unaccountable, and so it doesn't matter
if the machine doesn't work or if the scientists are
living in fantasy-land, as long as we get the contracts. So we'll have lobbyists with government, and we'll support the
scientists and tell everybody that we're looking for aliens
or whatever it might be, we'll turn it into science and that way this money can be made. - I think the expression that is used very oft
en is group-think, a group of people who
champion the existing idea, they feel comfortable
supporting one another. It's sort of like a family, they like to support the
well-being of one another. And when an intruder comes and says, "Well, your family has
a few problems here," they stick together. You might call it a mafia, some people have
called it a scientific mafia. They get together, they have a lot of power
and a lot of strength, and when the intruder
comes with a disruptive idea, it's very
uncomfortable for these people. (thunder booming) (signal beeping) - They have to basically admit that they can't explain all of it, that they've had it completely wrong, but Velikovsky's got to be wrong. That's part of the problem, because they vilified Velikovsky so much, that now you can't admit
that a lot of these things are correct because Velikovsky said that. We can't be associated
with anything like that. - There is a major paradigm that controls all science at a given time, and that ev
erybody within it
works within that paradigm. And what they usually do is, the newcomer proposes the paradigm and then everybody else
simply does experiments to refine and expand it, and they never question it, and they simply make it more complete. But when discordant anomalous data appears, and when it continues to
appear in great numbers so that the old paradigm cannot accommodate and explain all of these, then there is a period of turmoil, out of which comes a new
paradigm which can explain
all of the data more
inclusively than the old one did. And that's how revolutions
happen in the history of science. - It's more of a matter of a
whole bunch of little problems. Well, the funding, you wanna get a degree, you wanna get a job,
you wanna get a contract, all of those things are impediments to thinking outside the box. And in fact, in the book that I wrote, I referenced someone who says that the National Science
Foundation will not get off the beaten path until they've
completely beat
en the path. They just won't fund any odd-type stuff, although it may turn out to be groundbreaking,
earth-shaking, or something. - I mean, obviously they would much prefer that it came from within
their own ivory towers. So I mean, obviously
we're viewed as outsiders, and in some sense rightfully
so, we're not astronomers. The prevailing paradigm
doesn't really listen to naysayers from the
outside and so you know, you've seen that from
the time of Galileo on. The revolution doesn't come
easy to
the physical sciences. And so Arthur Koestler, in his discussion of the history of astronomy
called "The Sleepwalkers," he had a fascinating quote
where he said, you know, it's not the ignorant
people in the backwoods that are unamenable to revolutionary ideas, it's the guys in the ivory tower up there, the astronomers themselves
that are pretty stubborn about taking on new ideas. - Well, it isn't hard to grasp new concepts when they come through, they're easy. What's hard to do is
surrender th
e old concepts. It has to do with human
nature is really what it is, because scientists have
another occupation, you might say, they happen to be people. And when you have a person,
you have belief systems, you have a sense of your own security and your own standing, right? - Science is no different to
any other human endeavor. All the base elements that are present in other aspects of society
are present in science. The idea that science is an altruistic type of self-sacrifice to look for
the t
ruth is just a fantasy. It's not true at all, although you're told that
at school when you're young, just like politicians will tell you things when you're young and
you believe them, right? Well, science is no different. - We are still in the phase now, where the old way of life is resisting, it has dug in its heels and
it doesn't want to let go, because they have a lot
to lose, all their money, all their power, everything else, you know, all their status. Even the scientists don't
want to say
electro-magnetism is right because then they'll
have to give up their jobs and bring in other people
to teach Physics at Harvard, and so on. So there is tremendous
reluctance and resistance, but they ain't gonna stop it. This is the wave of the future. - So we're talking about human nature, and it hasn't changed. You know, everybody knows the Galileo story but it goes on from
Galileo to this very day. In fact, there are very few scientists, I know quite a few in different fields, who have actual
ly succeeded
in gaining acclamation or recognition for their ideas that run against the mainstream. Some ideas are perhaps
bizarre ideas that don't really have any chance of, you
know, they're crackpot ideas. But others are not, and there are many of them around many thoughtful, intelligent people who have new ideas that fit
so naturally with the evidence, they run into obstacles. And they're not scientific obstacles, they're obstacles that
have to do with people. - We are today in the
midst of
a revolution. How long it will take for the war to end, I think the outcome will be in our favor. Certainly the old way, no
matter how much it resists, no matter how much they
control the centers of power, they control the universities, they control all the large experiments, they control all the
Departments of Physics, they control who's gonna spend $20 billion on another CERN accelerator, and so on, "We won't give it to you, we'll build another one of our own and we'll tell the whole world tha
t we found the Higgs boson." Well, they haven't found it. But they have to show
that they've done something, which means give us more
money to build another accelerator, an even bigger one, and so on. So it's big business, it's power, it's status, it's entrenched
unwillingness to change ideas. But we really are at a pivotal moment, if you look back on it. And if I could live another hundred years, I would look back upon this period and say, "That's when the change started, and it kept increasing
until finally more people came around to that point of view." And the old power center,
which are still very strong today, would be seen as dinosaurs
and the dinosaurs would die out. And that's the way I see
the Electric Universe now. - The money that's being wasted, it's funny in some ways that
the Electric Universe work has been helped enormously
by NASA's space shots and so on, but only by accident. The very fact that they
visited all the planets in the solar system has
helped us enormously,
because we've been able to predict in advance what would be found, and been correct when
everyone else has been wrong in the scientific community. And we've done that repeatedly. I was the only one on planet Earth who's predicted what they would find when the Huygens lander
sank through the clouds of Titan. I was the only one on
planet Earth that predicted the flash on that comet
in the Deep Impact mission, and I did it when they
announced the mission before they even got
there, four years befo
re that. So I'm quite happy to
make these predictions because I'm so confident. And I think if your mind is open and it's prepared to accept
ideas like this, that is easier. It's much easier than if you try and come from a traditional
trained background, and then try and take
that leap into the dark. This way you're not so
concerned by the dark. - [Narrator] In conclusion, the Electric Universe
group provides a model, not just for a new
cosmology of the Universe, but also a model for a
community
seeking to break through the shackles of a prevailing paradigm, in order to transform
stagnation into forward progress. Perhaps the co-operation and collaboration of a diverse community
of like-minded individuals dedicated to the task, is the only way to bring
forth the necessary revolution, which humanity needs now more than ever. - We are talking to people who have, by random courses seemingly,
accidental courses, and so on, come together in a sense of incredible inspiration and unity. I mean
, everyone in our
group recognizes that there is a wall that is almost
impossible to penetrate. But we see these little symbols and signs of breaks in that wall, cracks occurring in that wall. And conventional science
has been moving toward the Electric Universe. It is coming into the Electric Universe one little step at a time. Now will we accelerate that at some point? I think most intellectual
revolutions go like this, you know, so where is that
juncture at which it just soars into human cons
ciousness
within the sciences? - In our case, it's pretty
certain that modern astronomy, modern cosmology is just
gonna go right in the garbage can. And so you're gonna
have to become acquainted with the idea that the solar system is of relatively recent date, the order of the solar system, and that it is subject to radical change. So that's a shocking idea, kind of like Copernicus showing that woops, the sun doesn't really go around the Earth as we always thought, but the Earth actually moves.
So those are revolutionary ideas. - Yes, it's incredibly beautiful because it consists of recognizing patterns at all scales in the Universe, from the subatomic to the super-galactic, larger than galactic clusters even. And in this new paradigm, mathematics is not gonna be
the principal method of proof, visual intuition is. You see those patterns
there at every scale, you know something is going on. That's what I feel about the universe that the Electric Universe
paradigm shows us. - And I think
I feel that
way when I talk to people about the subject, that I feel like if you take it deeper, if you understand what's
happened, you know, it's really a catharsis
and a type of healing. So the messianic bits of people involved with Electric Universe, that we all think in
some way that, you know, our contribution is gonna go a lot towards helping people feel better that they've discovered
something that's really important, that's been hidden. (thunder rumbling) - Electricity is
important, don
't ignore it. We can explain things
by using electrical laws, like Maxwell's equations and Lorentz equations and stuff like that, that seems inexplicable
if you confine yourself to Newtonian Physics. - I think that the Electric
Universe community are contributing positively, in the sense that there are opportunities for people to speak of these ideas, to be able to question what's
the dogmatic mainstream ideas, which we know are wrong,
this in itself is a positive thing. Whether they have the
an
swers or not is another issue, and I would advise anybody
to approach Electric Universe or any other ideas or scientific endeavor with the same objectivity, because if it's a mistake it
also needs to be corrected and everybody needs to be able to correct errors along
the way as part of science. It's silly to be dogmatic
about some scientific doctrine, because it's not science
if it's a doctrine. (laughs) But I see positive things
in the EU in this regard, but I don't say that
they've got all the
answers. I don't think anybody has the answers, it's not part of science. So we have to be vigilant
that we as other thinkers don't fall into the same pattern as what science has now been in for the last hundred or more years, where it's disintegrated
into intellectual decrepitude. - Scientific revolutions have
been few and far between, if you think about it. There've been lots of
technological revolutions, right? iPhones, laptop computers, what have you. But if I were to ask you if you could n
ame a scientific revolution that's
occurred in your lifetime, that has succeeded in changing the world in the same way that the structure of DNA that was more than 60 years ago, or the splitting of the atom
more than 70 years ago, they changed everything, right? Everybody's concept, everybody's world. And can you name something that's happened in the past 30 years
that's equivalent to that? And it's really strange
because so much money is going into science, so much
money and lots of progress, t
he progress is incremental,
see, it's not revolutionary. Lots of progress but not
many scientific revolutions. We face a lot of problems
these days that need solutions, and often solutions will come
from scientific revolutions. The revolutions will breed technologies, the technologies will solve problems, and perhaps we can solve
some of the terrible problems that we face in our world today. - I think scientists have
begun to look more broadly. I think the evidence for
all kinds of taboo subject
s, it's just increasing over time. There comes a point, there's how much do you have to have before you take it seriously? And I know a number of scientists who have been doing
great work looking at ESP, remote viewing, all this kind of thing, and the beauty of it is
that I can see how it works from an Electric Universe point of view. Everyone else considers
it spooky and nonsense, but I can see how it works,
or at least the fundamentals, which allows researchers
to begin to ask the questions th
at may allow what the
scientists would be satisfied with, real data or ways of detecting those things in such a way that they can be confident. I mean, they like repeatable experiments. Now in an Electric Universe, that may not always be possible, because you realize
in a connected universe, the Electric Universe, the observer, the experimenter is part of the experiment, whether they like it or not. I mean, this has been
found a number of times where the thoughts of somebody can affect the outco
me of the experiment. Well, it's all connected. (soft music) (light uptempo music) (electricity sizzling)
Comments
Excellent movie documentary