In recent years we have read about
the “discovery” of black holes, neutron stars, cosmic strings, and such things
as dark energy and invisible matter. Anyone who reads Sagan, Hawking, and the
other popular astronomy writers can see how complicated and counter-intuitive
the concepts of modern astrophysics are becoming. Even so, until recently, I
assumed that astronomers and astrophysicists knew what they were talking about.
Now – I’m sure they do not.
It was when astrophysicists began
saying things that I, as an electrical engineer, knew were wrong that I began
to have serious doubts about their pronouncements. But I agonized over whether
those doubts were legitimate. Even though my life-long avocation has been
amateur astronomy, my formal background is in engineering – not astronomy or
cosmology.
Earning a doctorate in electrical
engineering eventually led to my teaching that subject at a major university
for thirty-nine years. What troubled me most was when astrophysicists began
saying things about magnetic fields that any of my junior-year students could
show were completely incorrect.
If astrophysicists were saying
things that were demonstrably wrong in my area of expertise,
could it be that they were making similar mistakes in their own field as well?
I began to investigate more of the pronouncements of modern astrophysicists and
the reasoning behind them. This book is an account of what I unearthed when I
started digging into this question.
It is becoming clear that knowledge
acquired in electric plasma laboratories over the last century affords insights
and simpler, more elegant, more compelling explanations of most cosmological
phenomena than those that are now espoused in astrophysics. And yet
astrophysicists seem to be intent on ignoring them. Thus, lacking these
fundamental electrical concepts, cosmologists have charged into a mind-numbing
mathematical cul de sac,
creating on the way a tribe of invisible entities – some of which are
demonstrably impossible.
I have tried to hack a path through
these hypotheses, contradictions, and alternative explanations that will be
clear and understandable for the average interested reader to follow. The
answers to the questions we ask are not stressfully convoluted and arcane –
rather, they are logical, straightforward, and reasonable – and long overdue.
I hope your journey through these
pages will be meaningful, educational, perhaps exciting, and most important of
all, eye-opening.
DES