South of Barcelona is Tarragona. A little north of Tarragona is a Roman aqueduct.

If you stand on the aqueduct with a hundred people, you can look directly West down the valley to see an eclipse.

This is my first total eclipse. I have heard from many that during an eclipse, everything hush… becomes quiet, people stop talking, insects stop chirping. In Spain one breaks into cheers.

During totality I sensed the depth, the spatial dimensionality of Earth, Moon, Sun. I have known intellectually about the geometry of all that, heck I have been studying it all my life. So thank God I got the chance to sense it, perceive it as a living, moving triad of celestial beings. To we humans, with our time-scale, eclipses are infrequent. At the timescale of Earth and Sun whole human lifetimes are less than the blink of an eye, so these eclipses, for the Sun and Earth, are happening like a very high frequency pulse. If we see the Sun and Earth and Moon as electrically connected, what is the result of a high frequency interrupt placed over a more steady connection? Some electrical cosmologist should look into that.

Then down to Granada in Southern Spain to see the Alhambra. The Alhambra is a very large fortress, built at the end of an Islamic civilization that flourished for 750 years in Southern Spain. I went there hoping to get some of my own perceptions of a culture that has been cartoonized into sound bytes. Think about how different America is now compared to 1776, or compared to 1850. All the changes in just 250 years. Now think about 750 years. How many flourishings and fadings did that Southern Spain civilization go through before the last chapter, and last stanza that we call the Alhambra and The Fall of Granada?

My perceptions for three days were filled with beauty and pain. The churning cycles of lives over 750 years. The exquisite Islamic art and poetry. In 1000 AD the best public schools and hospitals in the hemisphere. The clash of giant religions and armies and fortunes. All the architectural and political forces, how the Christians finally destroyed the Muslims. I am not cheering for either side, I am sure both sides had their fill of atrocities. And I am super glad that Christianity held its own. I walk the streets and feel the past like a darkly lit path going long into obscurity, all the death and heroism, the miracles, the love and the hate. In one sense thank God it all ends after 750 years and is all forgotten. What if every citizen of the future needed to also experience all the beauty and pain of the 750 years of the civilization before, and the one before, and the one before. Mercifully it ends, and start all over again lest we nurse revenge or idealize achievements only to become complacent. 750 years, enough. Beauty and Pain, Beauty and bitterness. I reflect that in Hebrew the name Mary (Mariam) means Beauty and Pain. “Hail bitterness and beauty, highly favored, the Lord God is always there present with you. Blessed are you among the receptive, and blessed is fruit of thy womb.” Who placed the womb into these terrestrial opposites which strive with each other for cycles of 30 generations? It all produces some fragments I see in stone and stories, but the most of it all plays out inside individual men and women, the very men and women I am striving to feel and to see now from my vantage in time. And then after 30 generations of creating and destroying, loving and hating, then it all collapses. Enough.

In 1829 the American writer Washington Irving spent a month at the Alhambra. It was a ruin. A shell. It was inhabited by beggars and bandits. The gypsum plaster wall designs had long ago deteriorated and fallen to dust. The stone walls were bare. No one cared about it. He wrote Tales from the Alhambra, and within a generation Granada was again on the map, the ruins being restored after 400 years of absolute neglect. Now we can know something about it all. There was no guarantee that would happen. The entire fortress could have just as easily been razed to the ground, as most all of history is. Every christian church in Granada has a little plaque on it saying something like “This church was built over a mosque, which was built over a Roman temple.” And what was there before the Roman temple?

Most of the Alhambra fortress art is modern restoration. Some is original. When I relax and listen my eye finds the older sections, which to me have a quiet and a long look to them. My plan was to spend 8 hours drawing the incredible geometry of the Nasrid Palace, the center of the large fortress compound. Here are the legendary plaster patterns of a 16-fold symmetric main section, surrounded by 8-fold and 12-fold objects. Then you see 5-fold and 4-fold objects, and… is that actually a triangle, how can a triangle arise out of 16-fold symmetry?! The main palace is filled with endless walls and roofs of fractal beauty.

Within the first 20 minutes of sketching in the palace I was descended upon by palace guards, no sketching, no pencils, no sketching!

I look around at dozens, hundreds of people looking at the wall THROUGH THEIR PHONE. Not even looking at the actual object. Racing through, tap tap tap, not really looking at anything except through their phone. I came to stand in one place, look, really see, draw, one tiny section for an hour. Then rest and do it again in the next room. But this is not allowed. What is encouraged is to race through collecting digital image babble, a nauseating surfeit of images penetrating no one’s soul - - yes that is allowed. I want my soul penetrated. I flew 5,000 miles to have my soul deepened and moved and filled, to have new rooms opened within myself. I drop it. There is no profit in railing against such absurdities. Luckily there are some places to sit in most rooms, so I switch gears and sit for long periods in several locations, quiet, looking, listening.

Luckily sketching is allowed in all other areas of the large fortress complex. From a south wall, I look out over the old town and across to the next mountain range, and begin drawing. My suspicious behavior was the subject of much radio chatter among the guards, but it was eventually decided that I was indeed an artist who was actually just standing in one place for an hour sketching.

Southern Spain is absolutely filled with the most beautiful women. For an ordinary guy like me, it was a bit dizzying! One woman sat still long enough for me to capture the outlines, and fill it in later.

Bonus two-fer

I turn in to bed by 10, just as the Granada night life is really getting moving. I just need to sleep. Maybe tomorrow I will take a proper siesta and enjoy the evening. I wake up at 1AM with the entire hotel shaking. I have never been in an earthquake. Granada is right on a fault line, and has many earthquakes, which I did not know. My senses reach down through the old stone of the hotel, down into the stone of the Earth. I have never sensed down into the Earth like that. The shaking was exhilarating. Scary, yes, but mostly exhilarating. Magnitude 5.2, nothing to sneeze at. Tourists empty on to the streets. The locals seem to be staying inside. Eventually I go back to bed and sleep gingerly. Now I get it, with earthquakes who knows? That could be it for the week, or in the next minute a huge one could let loose and we all get crushed. Something I have known statistically, but now sense with my body. In the night I wake to one more tremor, I learn later that it was a measly 2.4 magnitude - - everyday fare for Granada. Wake in the morning to wild lightning and thunder. The week-long heat wave is being broken through tremendous crashes and flashes. The rain and the crashes bring relief and smiles. Thank you Spain, I got the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and the atmosphere in great hearty helpings.

Mead is fermented honey. I dislike the term “honey wine.” No Celtic woman ever called it “wine”. It is not wine, it is mead. A little etymological work shows medb — “intoxicating”; and hence the connection to the legendary Celtic Queen Maeve (Meadhbh, Méabh) indicating “she who intoxicates.”

I have pictured here four half-gallon Mason jars of local honey on their way to becoming mead. I am using Mangrove Jack’s M05 yeast, and Fermaid-O yeast nutrients because, as awesome as honey is, it does not contain a balanced diet for Yeast, especially in the Nitrogen deoartment.

The next morning, watching the air locks bubble bubble, I am trying to imagine how many yeasts are in the jars, and how many more are to come. My thoughts go to Time.

Time is a funny thing. I am pondering the rate of flow of Time. Is the yeast unfolding through Time at the same rate as I am?

A mouse looks to you and me like it is racing around and breathing way too fast. But the mouse does not experience itself that way. It’s just moving around and breathing. The mouse lives for 2 or 3 years, I live for 80 years. That’s a factor of 40. Does a mouse live as much of a life as me, just 40 times faster? During the first World War, from studies of speeds of wound healing of different aged soldiers, Pierre Lecompte Nouy collected data that showed that younger people healed quicker from their wounds than did older people. Duh, I think we all knew that. But Nouy quantified that difference and showed that it was logarithmic. Biological time unfolds logarithmically, not linearly. If I am twice your age that does not mean my wounds will heal half as fast as yours, but the time of wound healing increases with the logarithm of the person’s age.

Nouy proposed that there is a thing called Biological Time. This has been further developed by authors such as F. Roles, H. Wright, R. Collins to systematize the fact that different living creatures live at different rates. We can, and should have two categories of time: physics time and biological time. By Physics Time I mean how we can make clocks that are tied to the motion of the Earth around the Sun. Biological Time is the living creature’s experience of time. Since my inner experience is the only thing that is truly, directly real to me, it makes sense to have a version of Time that is tied to my inner experience.

An animal’s sense of time is tied to its metabolism. The mouse metabolism is faster than mine, which allows the mouse to experience everything more quickly than me. A memory just popped up of me as a 10 year old boy, inside a grain silo that was filled with wheat, trying to catch a mouse. I recall the shock of how quickly the little guy moved. I was able to catch it by the tail. I yelled out to the adults, “I caught it”. Then it bit me on the finger and I let it go. Where was that? What the heck was I doing inside a grain silo filled with wheat? End of memory. Back to metabolism being tied to my personal perception of time, there is a conceptual leap to take here, which is that all creatures have equally full lives. A mouse does not have 1/40th the life experiences that a human has. The mouse has just as many meals and poops as me; just as many breaths, as many smells and laughs and fights and health problems and family dynamics. At the end of 2 years, and at the end of 80 years, both mouse and man have had the rich full life allotted to them.

Keeping this conceptual leap, getting back to mead, what then of yeast, which spawn a new generation every hour or two of our time? What can we say about the speed at which yeast are living? If people give rise to a new generation every 20 or 30 years, and yeast give rise to a new generation every hour or two, then yeast are living 125,000 times faster than us. The bulk of the fermentation process for mead takes about a week my time, which translates to about 2000 years in yeast time. I pause to let that settle in. Is it an accident that 2000 years of human time is what we call an Age? Our Sun travels through the Zodiac, spending about 2000 years in each sign. The ancients considered that a major cycle of human civilization was tied to this 2000 year pulse. Is it really an accident then that a full cycle of yeast fermentation lasts 2000 years in “yeast time”?

I do not know what the inner life of yeast is like. Like all living creatures on Earth, they have a youth, grow old and die, they have immediate family. They can feast on honey for generations then die of starvation and the poison of their own waste. In that sense, we have a tremendous amount in common.

Now my imagination is really running. 2000 yeast years, huh? I think of the past 2000 years of human Western Civilization with all its millions of human-cells. I’m not saying the yeast have governments and create art, but I bet there is a whole lot we do not know about what goes on through so many generations of yeast. I note that the value for me is not really the lives the yeasts have lived. What matters to me is the refined final product, called mead, which will need to sit and mellow for several months of my time, which is 40,000 yeast years. I wonder, are all the results of European civilization being captured in some much larger celestial brewery, to be enjoyed only after mellowing for 40,000 human years?

More and more I am looking at the different plants around me asking: what particular function are they serving? I don’t mean generally, like providing Oxygen. I mean like why is there a ring of poison ivy around most public wooded areas? Seems to me the forest is saying “humans, stay out.” I was recently looking for pre-historic stone structures in Massachusetts, and was hunting down one that had no clear address, no labeled path, only directions like, “east of the main ridge, up local hillsides …” The deeper I went the more dense became the Stinging Nettle.

I don’t know if you have ever experienced the delights of Stinging Nettle. Thousands of very soft, very tiny hairs on the stem. Lightly brushing them across your skin will give you an electro-chemical shock of surprising intensity. Decent clothing protects you, but only to a point. I walked on further. The forest started getting that expansive deep connected-ness, at least that’s how I perceive it. You start to feel the forest as a single entity, with an intelligence not at all human; and it has an opinion about you being there. I stopped and said my hellos, and thanked the forest for being there and might I please come and go in peace. Ten more minutes on and I lose the trail. The stinging nettles were thickening. I found myself a bit frantic. So I stopped, became quiet, relaxed. Then my eyes saw two stones stacked on top of each other over to the right about 20 yards up the hill— humans had gone that way before. Another 15 minutes, slope increasing, more Nettle, I lose the trail again, it’s hot and humid, my skin is vibrating here and there with Nettle juice breaking through, I am sliding more often downhill on wet stones. I stop. Relax. Become quiet. Way up the hill to the left I see several stones stacked on top of each other— someone had gone that way. Another 10 minutes and I lose the thread of the tail. It sure feels like there is something up that hill. But the Nettle is now blanketing the landscape as far as I can see. My thin summer clothing is no longer providing real protection. The message seems loud and clear: stay away human. I turn back to regroup with my hiking mate.

Back to Chicory. I wanted to add some to my garden. I want to make tea of its roots and leaves. But where to find it? I turn my walking abouts into looking for chicory. Not finding any, I do a little reading. The botanical writings say it is found where soil is poor. Next week I’m walking to the farmer’s market in the neighbor town. This town is NOT known for its open green spaces. Turning a corner, there is a little patch of dirt sandwiched between a parking lot and a road, and a profusion of Chicory, see below.

I would not call this “poor” soil, I would call this a shit show. No one waters this. It is surrounded by asphalt. And the Chicory is beyond happy. Thriving. DOING ITS JOB!

Then it all clicked into focus, and I decided to write this essay. Plants have jobs. They are “sent” or “placed” in various locations to serve a function. This of course flies in the face of Classic Darwinism, which says that in the random throw of the dice, no other plant can survive there, and Chicory has found its niche. Now, for me, in this clarity on the way to the farmers market, I see that this is like saying that in the random throw of the dice only skin cells can survive at the boundary of your body, so that’s why you find skin cells at the boundary of your. We know this is absurd.

Our senses usually only show us plan and purpose of creatures that are our size or smaller. We can look at a liver cell and see its function in the larger organism. But when it comes to knowing the plan or purpose of entities larger than us, our, what I might call “senses operating at their lowest level” see no plan or purpose to all these separate plants and animals, all these separate planets and suns, all these separate galaxies. Does Organic Life on the surface of the Earth has its own coherent intelligence? Does it have agency? Can it have goals and work towards those goals? For me now, being momentarily lifted up, my senses are seeing that Chicory is thriving on these impossible soils because that is its job. It is happy. It’s doing its job. Chicory goes in to where the soil is so broken and cut off, and it rehabilitates that soil, making beautiful light blue flowers on the way, ‘cause that just how She rolls. Our five senses work differently when we are lifted up. Same eyes, just seeing more.

Here is the youtube version. Thanks as always to the excellent production quality of the Thunderbolts team.

When lightning strikes, we see only the final act of a strange drama. Where does lightning come from?

From the sky comes many, searching tendrils. The sky is looking, sending out its questions and yearnings in all directions. The electrical potential is so high that air breaks down into plasma along thousands of wandering, branching channels. Where will this all lead? No one knows where the lightning will strike.

From the earth also come plasma tendrils. These are fewer, thicker. Perhaps just one from each building or hilltop. These responses from dense matter, are just as great as the efforts from the Sky. Sky and Earth are searching for each other. They are striving to connect.

Our eyes, in their usual mode, see none of this. It all happens too fast, and gives off little light we can see. Eventually two channels connect, one option strikes - then ALL the energy from ALL the searchings, goes racing into that one option.

(camera overwhelmed)

Creating all those electrical potential options takes an enormous amount of energy. But once one potential becomes actual, all the energy from all the other options goes racing into that one, actual lightning strike. How does all the energy distributed over so many miles collapse in an instant? This is one of the properties of electrical systems.

Where does lightning come from? Let’s look up, pull back to the international space station, and look at a lighting storm happening on the horizon. The blue-white patch on the Earth’s horizon is a lightning storm caught in the act of a substantial discharge. You can see the green double layer that surrounds the Earth. Above the storm clouds and below the green boundary, we see red sprites, another electrical discharge. Where do those come from?

In the Electric Universe Paradigm, lightning near the ground is one of the last steps of a very elaborate electrical circuit that stretches from the interior of the Earth all the way up to the Sun. Academic science has not yet caught up with this, and still describes lightning as purely a product of heat and friction in the lowest part of Earth's atmosphere, disconnected from anything else that is happening in the cosmos.

The full circuit from Sun to lithospheric currents is too complicated to summarize easily. But all of us can understand the circuit’s purpose. The purpose of all the electrical machinery surrounding the Earth is to make the Sun's electricity digestible to the Earth, and hence to all creatures living on and in the Earth. Without this elaborate electrical machinery the surface of the Earth would be a barren, blasted and completely inhospitable place.

Let us walk through some of the main transformers in this cosmic circuit.

Sun plasma tubes to Earth’s magnetosphere

The Sun sends out plasma tubes, the walls of the tubes are made of plasma, the tubes also carry plasma, nourishment from the Sun. The tubes also carry information. The width of the tubes is roughly the width of the Earth. Every 8 minutes or so, one of these tubes connects to the Earth’s magnetic body, and transfers its contents into the outer skin of the Earth. We call this outer skin the magnetosphere. Once inside the magnetic body of the Earth, that solar energy undergoes many transformations. The raw solar energy is hot, on the order of 100’s of thousands of volts.

Van Allen Belts & Ring Currents

Next all this goes through the Van Allen Belts, which are torus structures of negative or positive charge. 20,000 volt double layers travel through these belts, bringing the matter and energy closer to Earthly conditions.

Cool movie of Ring Currents.

Polar Currents

At this point in the story the incoming current takes several paths. We will look only at the polar currents to the Earth’s poles. We have all seen movies of the aurora.

The aurora are the polar currents made visible. The voltage drop in the aurora is now few thousand volts. We have gone from 500,000 volt solar wind to 1,000 volt polar currents. Just like the electrical transformer on your street corner, solar voltages are being stepped down to something digestible by the Earth.

The polar currents flow both into and out of the Earth. In the drawing below you see some arrows flowing down into the Earth, and some flowing up and out. There are other currents in the image, which gives you a flavor for how complex this all is.

You can watch a movie of the electric currents flowing into and out of the North pole here, (Link should be starting at t=958 seconds)

When you ask, where does lightning come from, you need to picture all this. I left out many steps. The lightning we see is one of the last steps in a series of complex electrical transformations, stretching from the Sun down into the rocks beneath our feet.

Keep in mind that all this electricity in space was summarily dismissed as impossible after Birkeland first proposed the electrical connection, up to the 1970’s when the satellite data could no longer be ignored. If you ever hear that pompous tone of voice that accompanies statements like “We now know that…” Or, “What the Electric Universe people get so very wrong is…” Just remember that whatever youtube physicist is saying this is standing on a bandwagon that has been going in completely the wrong direction for decades.

AMPERE and Iridium data

Let us look more carefully at those polar currents going into and out of the Earth. AMPERE data, from the IRIDIUM satellites, has been collecting information about these currents since 2009. That’s a long dataset for anyone wanting to do some analysis.

Here is a plot of the net electric current flowing to the Earth over the 5 years 2013-2017. Top is the amount of current flowing into (red) and out of (blue) the North pole. Bottom panel is the same for South pole.

I mostly want you to see how variable this is. Very dynamic. We are talking millions of amps in each direction.

We can add up all the current flow, in-&-out for the entire globe, the bottom panel in the figure below.

You can see that sometimes there is a net current into the Earth, and sometimes a net current flowing out. This is very important, as it highlights the complexity of the Earth’s electric circuit. Where is this excess going to and returning from? Main stream will tell you that these currents do not go into the rocky body of the Earth. This is largely speculation. It is worthwhile pondering if the supposed “dynamo” inside the Earth creating the Earth’s magnetic field might not be at least in part a result of these solar currents entering and leaving the Earth.

One difficulty of the data published by AMPERE is that the researchers assume the net current flow should be zero, so they do various “corrections” to try and make this be true. But for any set of corrections, the variations persist. This is NOT simply a 365 day cycle. It is more complicated.

Connection to Earthquakes

Let’s look for a correlation between current flow and number of earthquakes, this time for data 2013-2023.

For the first correlation, if we look only at the current flowing into the North pole, when the current flow into the North Pole is substantially less than usual (blue line) then for the next 3 weeks, there are noticeably fewer earthquakes than usual. The horizontal dotted line and the grey shaded region show average daily earthquake numbers and how much variation you would expect just from randomness.

Another correlation, looking at the total net current to the South Pole, when the net current is higher than usual (red) then the number of daily earthquakes is less than usual for the next 2 weeks.

Another correlation: look at times when the total global current flows are very quiet, that is, not a whole lot total in or out. Maybe it’s the absence of a good robust current flow that causes some earthquake action. The plot below shows that after times of quiet current flow, the global earthquake count stays unchanged for a week, that is the green dots stay inside the grey average band. Then after about a week the global daily earthquake count jumps up. This has a p-value of 0.0005, which means it is super unlikely this is just due to randomness.

I am not claiming to understand why the Earth behaves this way. I am exploring, and finding that statistically speaking the electric current flow through the Earth is definitely correlated to earthquakes.

Connection to Lightning

Are the polar currents associated with changes in lightning? The plot below looks at times when the total electric current flow through the North Pole is much higher than usual (red), and much lower than usual (blue), and asks if there are then much more or less lightning strikes on Earth in the days following that. For two weeks after lower North Pole current (blue) there are about 10 more lightning strikes each day on Earth that usual. The opposite is true for the two weeks after higher North Pole current flow (red), there are fewer daily lightning strikes than usual . This particular graph “de-seasonalized” both the electric current and lightning strike data. The current flow and lightning strikes vary slowly together over months and years, I subtracted out those synchronized fluctuations, since I cannot distinguish there what is cause and what is effect. It’s almost like the Solar current and ground-based lightning are working oppositely. If there is less Solar current flow then the lightning needs to make up for it, somehow.

The analyses I presented here are sketches. They are indications for future research. I am happy to share the python code and data sets with anyone that wants to pick up where I am leaving off.

Summary

Where does lightning come from? The EU model, which has been correct since 1908, says that a circuit stretches from the crust of the Earth up through the storm clouds, through the ionosphere, through the Van Allen belts, through the magnetosphere, through solar flux ropes, and all the way back to the Sun. The little local story of rising warm air off the ground and charged raindrops, all that is important in the picture of lightning. I am not saying those factors are irrelevant. I’m saying you need to see the whole. By analogy, when you look at the electrical diagram for the simple AM radio, and ask what is the “cause” of a voltage change in a particular resistor, sure, you could look at the one section adjacent to that resistor, but that is not going to help you understand anything. The AM radio is a whole, all its pieces behave according to the function of that whole. You need to see the whole.

Watching the rain drops fall off the gutter, musing on predicting when and where the next drop will fall. My mind goes to the idea of unpredictability in quantum mechanics. I’m thinking the story got told incorrectly. Who said that classical physics is all about complete predictability and therefore quantum uncertainty is in opposition to classical? Well, I know who said it, plenty of people said it, and still say it. I’m thinking now that was never really the point. Some bombast said “tell me the positions and velocities of all particles in the Universe and I will predict the future.” That bombast sent us down an alley that we need to get out of. Out my window I am looking at the wet asphalt shingles, and the drops appearing unpredictably, and realizing that no one, ever, EVER will predict the locations of all the rain drops. No one will ever be able to predict where the next drop comes from, not on my roof, and not on all the millions of roofs in New England that are getting wet today.

There is a practicality that gets lost to silly theoretical notions. To ever imagine that classical physics could actually predict the details of Nature is a fantasy on the scale with, “What if Napoleon had a B52 bomber?” Have you ever been present during one of those discussion? I say those discussions are just as useful as “give me the positions and velocities…,” because none of it has ever nor will ever take place.

Unpredictability is universal, it is not only in the realm of quantum mechanics. Let me refine that, no particulars are predictable. Ever. Anywhere. Large groups of people are quite predictable, and quite…how shall we say, easily manipulated using the tools of surveillance and mass media. This essay is not about that. This essay is only about individual people.

Back to Quantum Mechanics, I think the truly great contribution of Quantum Mechanics gave us was the sincere questioning of the role of the observer. No matter how we crack our little heads on this one, the problem will not go away. There is some connection between the instrument and the outcome, between the scientist and the instrument. The observer is part of the Universe - an obvious point when you say it out loud - so what the observer observes determines the progression of events just as much as an electric field or earthquake will determine the progression of events. I think this is really the place where classical physics went off the rails, or rather, where scientists went off the rails. To imaging that my awareness cannot have the slightest effect upon the unfolding of events, this is high idiocy, especially when we recall that the Greek adjective idios means “one’s own” or “private.” Only a true idiot would believe that their awareness is only their own and cannot affect anything outside themselves.

A simple experiment, How I look at my friend is connected to how the conversation unfolds. I mean my inner stance. Do I internally criticize them, or internally see them as a miraculous materialization of a ray from God, a temporal manifestation of an eternal idea, to try again to make the perfect human. Try those two options as an internal stance next time talking with a friend. See if there is any difference how the conversation unfolds. And do not tell them what you are doing.

We can verify that how we look at another person affects the future. But, can how I perceive the gutter affect which rain drops fall off the roof? Ah, here is always the counter argument to these quantum mysteries. No I cannot affect which drop falls. And thank God I cannot, because if all my internal images and wishes manifested immediately in the world, then chaos and destruction would quickly radiate from me. So where is the dividing line between what my inner life can affect and what I cannot? One of those dividing lines is my physical body. Take an every day occurrence: I can desire to reach for my cup, and presto! millions of cells obey that impulse, and the cup is grabbed. How does this happen? How is matter affected by a desire? I am blind to this daily miracle of how matter obeys wishes. The idea is made manifest, legs move, mouths speak. The logos is made manifest. How? I have some dominion over my cellular body. Here my wishes can be made manifest. This is truly a miracle, if that word needed a finer definition.

In early Christian thought, men and women were placed on a definite and limited scale according to what they could manifest, according to what wishes were made manifest. Heretics and non-believers were lost in the world of falsehood, and could do nothing useful. Believers were at least less destructive. The level of the faithful were able to be of use to the redemption of the World. The Saints, and here is where it gets interesting, the Saints were able to actually effect change in the world. Below saint, no one can really do anything. The words of a saint changed history. The heart of a saint changed the future. Every saint says that they are not doing their own will, they are seeking to the will of God. There is a clear change here, where the ability to actually make a useful change is connected to obeying the will of something higher.

What is above a saint?

A prophet is above a saint. A prophet is something else entirely. A great example is from Ezekiel, I will quote it at some length, Young’s Literal Translation,

37 There hath been upon me a hand of Jehovah, and He taketh me forth in the Spirit of Jehovah, and doth place me in the midst of the valley, and it is full of bones,

² and He causeth me to pass over by them, all round about, and lo, very many [are] on the face of the valley, and lo, very dry.

³ And He saith unto me, `Son of man, do these bones live?’ And I say, `O Lord Jehovah, Thou -- Thou hast known.’

⁴ And He saith unto me, `Prophesy concerning these bones, and thou hast said unto them: O dry bones, hear a word of Jehovah:

⁵ Thus said the Lord Jehovah to these bones: Lo, I am bringing into you a spirit, and ye have lived,

⁶ and I have given on you sinews, and cause flesh to come up upon you, and covered you over with skin, and given in you a spirit, and ye have lived, and ye have known that I [am] Jehovah.’

⁷ And I have prophesied as I have been commanded, and there is a noise, as I am prophesying, and lo, a rushing, and draw near do the bones, bone unto its bone.

⁸ And I beheld, and lo, on them [are] sinews, and flesh hath come up, and cover them doth skin over above -- and spirit there is none in them.

please read the text further if you want to see where it goes.

In other words, a prophet can work miracles, that is, rearrange matter and life here on Earth. A prophet hears a higher level. The higher level instructs “say this”, not “do this”, but “say this”. A prophet is a person who can listen to the instructions of a higher level, then speak those instructions, and the word is made manifest. Coming back to ourselves and our bodies, each of us is a prophet to our muscles and bones. We wish, and the hand obeys and grabs the cup.

Let me tie all this back to the thread. We started with a world of rain drops which we cannot predict. This is the regular ole world around us every day. We then connected that to the world of quantum mechanics which has formalized this in terms that even the most ardent materialist cannot ignore, where the future is essentially unpredictable and the presence of an observation determines what actually happens. We then brought in human awareness, your awareness, my awareness. This awareness matters, it has real connection to the world. Your awareness affects the unfolding of events in time. We then looked at one particular tradition, which I know most about, and I am certain other traditions also speak about, we looked at one tradition where awareness can be at different levels. Someone, like you and me, who is only occasionally aware, can have some limited affect upon the world, thank God. But we can have an effect upon other people in our world according to how we perceive them. And then we broadened that to wonder if a person could make a VERY big difference in the world by being able to listen to something higher.

I titled this essay “Unpredictable” because I really do think that our world is unpredictable, by design. Statements about an “All Knowing” God are to me bullshit of the highest order. Its right in there at the beginning of Genesis, after Adam & Eve have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, God is walking in the Garden And Jehovah God calleth unto the man, and saith to him, `Where [art] thou?’ God does not know where his Man is. This is profound. This pretty much throws out all the “God knows all” philosophy. And further, ‘Who hast declared to thee that thou art naked?’ God does not know what has happened nor how it happened. This is huge, and, I think, cosmologically and theologically correct.

For you and me, this unpredictability is a starting point. No one will ever predict when and where the next rain drop will fall off my roof. No Archangel can predict what you might, on a whim, say to that next person who crosses your path. And, somehow, at the same time, the larger world around me has a layer of protection against my worst whims.

We all start at a place where the next millisecond holds a surprise, and that is perhaps the highest gift we could have been given.

I just finished this. Egg Tempera on Wood Panel 12x16in. Natural pigments. Gesso is 7-layer rabbit skin glue and powdered marble. Based upon one of the version in the Book of Kells,

For sale on Etsy

Hilary White just published an excellent article on the 4 “beasts” of Christian iconography. I highly recommend Hilary’s substack site.

My interest in the Lion, the Bull, the Eagle, the Man has recently been revived as I learned that those four image metaphors are aspects of Conscience, or what it takes to contact Conscience, in the early Christian corpus. This is a new study for me, so I will not say much more about it. I was just tickled that Hilary is also having an interest in this rather profound topic.

My tarragon plant is slow to come back. The spring has been cold. I am impatient, wanting to know, TO KNOW are these various green leaves my tarragon or something else?

From Matthew Chapter 13, after the well known parable of the sower and the seed, we read, in Young’s Literal Translation:

24 Another simile he set before them, saying: `The reign of the heavens was likened to a man sowing good seed in his field,

25 and, while men are sleeping, his enemy came and sowed darnel in the midst of the wheat, and went away,

26 and when the herb sprang up, and yielded fruit, then appeared also the darnel.

27 `And the servants of the householder, having come near, said to him, Sir, good seed didst thou not sow in thy field? whence then hath it the darnel?

28 And he saith to them, A man, an enemy, did this; and the servants said to him, Wilt thou, then, [that] having gone away we may gather it up?

29 `And he said, No, lest -- gathering up the darnel -- ye root up with it the wheat,

30 suffer both to grow together till the harvest, and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather up first the darnel, and bind it in bundles, to burn it, and the wheat gather up into my storehouse.’

Darnel is a grain that looks just like wheat, until the “ear” appears, that is, until it has born its fruit, result, seed. You probably have heard it translated as “tares”, wheat and tares.

I know that this impostor plant is not tarragon, it is some flower that loves to grow in New England. Why does it look so much like my tarragon!? How did it’s seed know to land right here where it would be indistinguishable from tarragon?

The gospel passage might be referring to lives of individual people. Who knows how a life will turn out? You might say some child is on a bad path, and the garden would be better if that life were pulled. But the idea seems to be that not even The Great Gardener can know, we just have to wait and see how that person turns out.

The passage could also refer to responses that “grow” up inside of me as I live my life. I have an impulse to act a certain way, respond a certain way. Who can say if that impulse is “good” or “bad”? Maybe no one can say, not even The Great Gardener. Maybe I just need to let that part of me live a little, see where it goes, see what fruit or result is actually produced.

The physical fact is often the best metaphor.

Thank you so much Ben Davidson for re-publishing this 2017 presentation I gave at an Observing the Frontier conference.

Inside you will find

1. The general plan for the voltage around a planet.

2. How might the rather extreme voltage we see on Earth be maintained? Why does the Earth not quickly become neutral?

3. If there were a molecular sized astronomer in one of your blood vessels, what would they see

4. How the Russians are better at admitting our ignorance of the electrical circuits of the Earth, while Americans tend to like pretty pictures and will even invent “data” to fit those stories

5. Use the Iridium satellite data to study the solar electric current flow into and out of the Earth

6. The current flow into and out of the Earth is ~10 million amps, and fluctuates on a 27 day time scale, and also fluctuates on a 24-hour timescale.

7. There is a net current flow into the Earth. The flow in and flow out are not equal.

8. When the current flow into/outof the Earth is “stationary”, that is when there is not much net flow in or out, that is when most earthquakes happen. After the earthquakes happen, then the net flow resumes. Net flow is normal, when net flow stalls an earthquake shakes things up, gets things flowing again.

9. We cannot understand the electrical situation of a planet without FIRST knowing the large whole in which the planet sits, that is, we must know the place of the Earth in the Solar System.

10. The cellular layers in the human eye mimic the electrical layers between the Earth and the Sun.

11. Astronomy is stuck because we are not looking at the functions of all the structures we see

There is a second presentation on this video, I will make a separate post on that.

I was helping a young woman draw fractals. Fractals are the geometry of Nature. Every natural thing we encounter has a fractal geometry. Many of us learned Euclidean geometry: lines, triangles, squares. In Euclidean geometry a circle has a Radius, and a Circumference, and an Area. If we ask, what is the circumference of a tree trunk, hmmm, we might tie a rope around that trunk and then measure the length of the rope.

That gives an approximation. But we all know that the tree bark has all kinds of ins-and-outs. We could switch to a thread, and carefully lay the thread along all the variations of bark. This would give us a longer circumference, since we are now including the extra lengths of the bark pattern.

Someone then takes out a magnifying glass, and notices that the thread is not really catching all the small variations on the bark. We imagine using a micron-thin thread. This gives an even longer circumference.

Uh oh - we have a problem. Every time we zoom in we have to account for more variations in the surface. Every time we use a smaller ruler, the value for the circumference increases.

The question, what is the circumference of a tree trunk, ceases to have a single, objective answer. We have entered a realm a relativity different from Einstein’s. The answer is relative to the measuring device.

Every material thing we personally encounter has a fractal dimension, not a Euclidean dimension. The volume of a stone, the surface area of a wall, they are infinite, and yet we can know whether or not a stone dropped into a water bucket will cause the water to overflow, and we can use a finite amount of paint to cover a wall. These are delightful mysteries to be pondered. Let’s not rush to a simple logical answer to remove the unsettling sense of the infinite.

A 2nd quality of fractals is that they are patterns which are made up of the same pattern. The pattern has the pattern in itself. Perhaps with echoes of Genesis where all the created living creatures have their seed within themselves.

Take for example tike this hybrid of cauliflower + broccoli, which you can buy and eat.

The structure of the entire plant is constructed of smaller versions of itself.

And if someone shows you a close-up, you cannot easily say how big of a section you are looking at, because the pattern is made up of the pattern itself.

With all this as background, we now come to the conversation, which in less than a minute changed how I see the world.

Me: “Do you want any help getting started drawing a fractal?”

Her: “No, I already know what I will do.” She said with all the confidence of someone who had never thought about nor attempted the task in question.

She tried one fractal drawing but it was not actually a fractal, it was a tessellation, that is, the pattern was just repeated like a floor tiling that completely covers the paper.

There was a second try, which was also not a fractal. She was getting frustrated. While she was trying for a third time, I mused out loud, “maybe on some other planet things work out just as you imagine on the first try. I wonder what life is like on that planet?”

“It’s destroyed,” she said, simply, with a flat tone like describing something obvious.

“Huh?” I asked, I was not sure I heard her correctly.

“It’s destroyed. That planet, where everything works out on the first try.”

“Huh? how do you know?” now I am totally riveted on her.

She looked up from her drawing, “Because the first time someone tried to destroy the planet, then it got destroyed, because everything just works perfectly the first time on that planet.”

“Oh,” I had never thought of it that way. Of course she is right. I could feel my neurons re-arranging themselves inside my head.

The interview is live on youtube and spotify. I wish I did not look like a crazy person on the youtube splash screen.

It’s a bit long, so maybe listen to it in pieces while you are driving, though there are some images that are very helpful.

I had never had so much time to talk through my research, and we only got to about 6 topics. Hopefully there will be another interview in the near future to go into other areas. Big thanks again to Matt and his team.

Three of us from the SAFIRE team jumped over to Bergamo Italy to see about signing an investment deal. All the right people were there, Ministers of the Italian government, an investment house funding new energy research, and many top scientists in the field of low energy nuclear reactions (LENR).

I so enjoyed being with Bob Greenyer, we have not been with each other in too many years.

I got to speak to an audience that included names like Cardone, Nagel, Biberian. These are the names of people who have devoted their careers to LENR, often with ridicule rather than praise. And here they were listening to me on stage. It was quite an experience, and I told each of them what a privilege it was to be there with them.

The location was a “campus” built by a multimillionaire who makes the best brakes for high performance cars, Brembo.

This is a campus of industrial research. I have never seen anything like it. There must be a dozen buildings, over 5 acres, each devoted to a different field of research. 3D metal printing is one of those fields. We spoke with Freddie, who like so many people there speak perfect English. He designs high efficiency cooling structures, like something you would place on the motherboard of your computer. He used AI to generate new 3D shapes that optimize heat transfer. A few of them are below. These are exactly the same 3D structures that you see on some butterfly wings under a scanning electron microscope. Not even sure what to do with that correspondence.

In Bergamo there is no Uber or Lyft.

The town made a decision, just local cab drivers, who own their own vehicles. The vibe in these taxis was amazing. I took taxis several times a day, and each one was exactly what you would want in a driver. I did not know that a town could stand up to the likes of Uber and Lyft.

Since Northern Italy is known for polenta rather than pasta, I made it a point of have polenta every night for dinner.

I found out the first night that maybe I have been making my polenta too firm. A loose polenta, with plenty of meat broth over it, and porcini mushrooms, is a delight to put one, me, over the moon.

The town was built and fortified by the Venetians in the 1400’s , to “solidify” their kingdom. The wall alone around the town is probably 5 miles circumference. At its base it must be 20 or 30 feet thick. At many areas it is easily 100 feet tall. All this is made of stone, blocks between 6” and 40” in size. I cannot comprehend how many cart loads were needed to build this city wall. I think I don’t understand anything about how people lived in the past.

Also flashing through my recollection are the copious written accounts in the 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th centuries of the cruelty and generationally repeating wars all through Italy. Not just killing, but terrible tortures of neighboring towns upon each other. There were real episodes of peace, after St Francis of Assisi, and after the initial Medici eras. Several generations of civilizing influence in each case.

And during all this such beauty created that has lasted to our day.

And now… what?… how is it that the towns no longer seek to murder each other every generation? You could say the advent of the Nation State solved that problem. Now it’s nations that seek to destroy and dominate each other. That is a partial explanation.

The second night the polenta was also much more loose, runny, than I have been making it. This time they must have had a different grind to the corn. Even though you needed to eat it with a spoon, and it was silky with parmesan, there was also a definite grit, a graininess. The contrasts of textures was invigorating.

The 3rd night we went to a “popular” restaurant, popular by some website. OMG what a contrast. The service was bad to the point of being comic. The polenta had greasy bacon ladled over it. Before the plate even hit your table, the polenta had already solidified into a solid mass, which had, somehow, no taste of its own. I took a few bites and left the plate alone. Too bad.

After this fiasco I went walking, as one is wont to do. Passing down several blocks beyond the commercial center, and what do I find? A late-night, outdoor polenta joint. The exact equivalent of a late-night pizza place you might find in an American college town.

This one had about 12 people chowing down on polenta at 10:30 at night. One table of 6 beautiful young Italian bucks, engineering students, found us super interesting, and wanted to practice their English, and just find out about us, because they were a great bunch of young men. I promised myself I would go back there tomorrow to sample that polenta, but alas that never happened.

I have high hopes for the Italian investors. They are very serious, and the SAFIRE team is one of their best choices, if I do say so myself.

And finally, my understanding of early 15th century Madonna and Child paintings was very much expanded. The Bergamo museum is amazing, and I went only to the egg tempera paintings. I have put some of the images here in the essay. For whatever reason, I have been exposed to a very limited type of Madonna and Child motifs. I thought Botticelli’s version was what everyone did. The versions I saw in the Bergamo museum, as they say, blew me away. Some had the styling I have only seen in 20th century works. Some were, well, sort of scary. Some were so clearly a particular woman, not some generalized Mary. The working of the egg & ground rock was unlike anything I have seen.

As soon as I got back, start three new panels, rabbit skin glue, linen.

then seven layers of powered marble mixed with rabbit skin glue, what was meant by “gesso” for about 1,000 years. Here is what it looks like with layer #1.

Just finished recording an interview with Matt Beall, in Sarasota Florida It should be live in a week or two.

Matt’s generosity is like I have not experienced in a while. And his standard for hospitality and attention to detail is clearly felt in his assistants Ryan, who is in charge of production, and Jo who in charge of making sure my schedule is seamlessly managed the entire time I am here. Matt has his feet in several worlds, including big business, and he is pulling it off with aplomb.

I will say more about the interview when I comes out.

Last night I went to the downtown area, which is new. I was trying to be a good sport, yet the entire area feels just like what would happen if a group of real estate big wigs and bankers made a super duper plan for what would, you know, really be a hopping area. Every restaurant was right on the surface, but never felt like just a regular place to hang out. After a while it felt too much like Disney Land for affluent adults looking for cool experience, so I turned in.

Tonight, after my delightful day with Matt and his team, I checked out one of the hotel bicycles and went riding around.

I rode North, along the coast. All beautiful. And strangely vacant. I guess everyone is inside? Are there no children North of Sarasota, no munchkins running around jumping off cliffs or hunting lizards?

Went to the Ringling Museum, yes, of Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus. Turns out he used some of his millions to purchase some high quality art. Rubens made 6 gigantic paintings called “The Triumph of the Eucharist”, which are oil paintings depicting the gigantic tapestries he designed. Why do this? The details have been lost to history, yet the paintings are all here, in little gem of a personal museum of a circus magnate.

I went to the Publix grocery store for some bread and cheese, and found that just a short hop North of where all the affluent adults were supposed to be having a good time was the place where you would shop if you were cleaning those pretty little restaurants.

The economics of all this elude me. I can feel large amounts of money flowing into this area. Every other block has new construction. Who exactly has all this money?

By luck I found Owen’s Fish Camp, on Burns Court, a little side street off another little street, south of the Town Center I was last night. The total number of people last night on 12 blocks of downtown does not equal the number of people squeezed into this fish joint that has been here for 100 years. “A table is a 90 minute wait, sir” , “OK, put my name in”, “ah I see a spot just opened on one of the bar high tops, would you like to grab that?” “Yes, I would, thank you.”

A “camp basket” of lightly battered local seafood comes surprisingly quickly. I have a real connection with two locals sitting next to me. The atmosphere is loud, loud with a hundred people spread over many rooms and porches all having a great time. I compare that with last night’s joints which had loud music and DJ’s as a substitute for this natural energy. A DJ here at Owen’s Fish Camp would have been a joke. There was so much natural human vibration coursing through the place.

Out in back there was live music. Small. Over 60 minutes maybe three groups took the stage. I submit here one of them for your listening pleasure. As good as any record label could sign, and it was clear they were just locals playing their hearts out.

When lightning strikes, our usual vision sees only the final act of a strange drama.

From the sky comes many, many searching tendrils. The sky is looking, sending out its questions and yearnings in all directions. The electrical potential is so high that air breaks down into plasma along thousands of wandering, branching channels. Where will this all lead? The final result is not yet known.

From the earth also come yearnings, or are they answerings. These are fewer, more singular. Perhaps one from each building or hilltop. These openings from the ground have not traveled so far, but given that the electrical energy is being manifested from the cold, wet, dense ground, perhaps the exertions are just as great as the efforts from the Sky. Sky and Earth are searching for each other. They are striving to connect.

Our eyes, in their usual mode, see none of this. It all happens too fast, and gives off little light we can see. Amongst all this searching, where Sky and Earth first meet, the first two channels to connect - then ALL the energy from ALL the searchings, goes racing into that one option.

(camera overwhelmed)

Creating all those electrical potential options takes an enormous amount of energy. Which option will be chosen? No one can know. The world is too complex. But once one potential becomes actual, all the energy from all the other options goes racing into that one. How does all the energy distributed over so many mile

s collapse in an instant? What happens to all the unrealized possibilities? Our eyes see a single, blinding flash, while the drama leading up to that is hidden from us.

How many millions of sperm go off towards an egg? I think as students in school we were each struck wondering when we first heard the numbers. 200 million! Each one a possibility, a potential. For every baby conceived, there were 200 million other options, each just as much an individual. Each of those 200 million had an equally full possible life. What scale of energy is involved to create 200 million entire possible lives?

When one of the possible strikes to actual, all the energy from all the other possibilities collapses and goes rushing into that one completed circuit. When all the millions of possible lives collapsed into you, a blinding flash erupted from the egg and sperm now no longer egg and sperm but now something else entirely.

Scientists have witnessed the flash emitted by Zinc atoms. Go figure! The team observed billions of Zinc atoms all at once leave the zygote, and those Zinc atoms were excited, and gave off a flash which was every bit as blinding to the cellular world as a single lightning stroke on Earth is to us.

For two centuries we did not understand lightning on the surface of the Earth, because we were trying to explain it solely as an earthly phenomena, the rubbings of air against ground. We imagined the Earth was cutoff from the rest of the cosmos.

Above is a picture of a lightning storm, the blue white lightning is on the ground, above that red electric discharges connect up to the Electric Double Layer that surrounds the entire Earth.

From this interface the electric discharge continues up through the magnetosphere and out to the solar wind, sometimes shooting up bursts of gamma rays. The sequence of cause and effect is still not clear, as different measurements yield different results. In other words, the lightning flash we see here on the ground is only the very bottom, the lowest manifestation of an energy transfer that stretches up through several worlds into the larger cosmos, certainly to the Sun.

Similarly, the collapse of 200 million possible human lives into one life, which then plays out on the ground of the Earth, is the lowest manifestation of a something that stretches up through several worlds into the larger cosmos, and the drama leading up to conception is hidden from us.

Video version of a recent essay

The winter progresses. Tonight I need no gloves to shovel the latest snow. My body has adapted. Adapted? As someone who has studied genetics since the 90’s I go through many detailed pathways in my mind, what exactly happens when the body “adapts” to the cold?

A lot has to change. Above is an image of cellular changes we know about, pretty much every organ and system in the cell is affected. Even the DNA gets the message that “it’s cold out!”, as new types of proteins are requested that will go out to the rest of the cell as needed.

We can expand the diagram

There are several “worlds” between the snowy weather and your DNA. Your circulatory system is its own whole with clear definition and integrity and absolute clarity about what is part of the circulatory system and what is not. And the circulatory system is also a part of your body. Your body as a whole also has a unity and integrity and a clear definition of what is part of your body and what is not.

When I can shovel without gloves in February, while in December I had good gloves and was still nursing numb fingers, my body as a whole is now functioning differently, and the circulation and metabolism are functioning differently, and huge numbers of cells are functioning very differently, and the DNA is being asked to make many different strands of mRNA. When I finished the shoveling, I also saw, or better say, felt, that the outer world was also affected differently than my shoveling attempts in December. The shoveling job had a notable definition to it, was done efficiently, without blustering and wincing, looked, I don’t know… just nicer.

For one thing to change everything must change. And the change propagates up and down to larger and smaller worlds, each of which undergoes its own type of change.

Everything I just talked through is the “Get up and walk” part. This from the passage in the Gospel Matthew 9,

² And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.

³ And, behold, certain of the scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemeth.

⁴ And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?

⁵ For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?

⁶ But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.

This is a real head scratcher. The text is both linking and distinguishing between physical infirmity and spiritual infirmity. In the Greek, the term we translate as “sin” means “missing the mark”, as in shooting an arrow. You have a goal, you miss the goal, you have missed the mark. The gospels read very differently when you make that little translation back to the original.

What “goal” has the paralytic missed, and what could it possibly mean to be forgiven for missing a goal? Let us invent a plausible story to help pursue a point. Perhaps our paralytic has too often poorly treated his wife and daughter, perhaps he blames others for his own faults and complains about his life, perhaps he has capitulated internally and no longer has any optimism for any of the relationships in his life. He is internally paralyzed. In his inner life he cannot make the smallest move. How then can someone, even if that someone is the Christ, how can someone say your missing of the mark in all these areas is forgiven? Who know how much moral damage this person has created, how much bad karma, how many painful hours his daughter or wife must endure because of this man? How can you just undo that? Think of the levels: his own inner despair, the pain to those immediately around him, and the knock-on effects all of those people bring to their own families, to their own workplaces, how did all that propagate up to towns or nations. And you just come in and say all that is forgiven!

The reply is, which is easier, to say arise and walk, which would mean a complete reorganization of the man’s muscles and nerves, of the billions of cells that all must change and the required changes in the expression of DNA in each of those cells…or is it easier to say all the knock on effects of your behavior through those next to you, and those next to them, and the neighborhood, and the town, and the culture, all that can be changed. Which is easier?

.

Let’s apply electric plasma physics ideas to real data from real filaments out in the cosmos. For example, these beauties

these are filaments at the center of our galaxy, viewed with the South African MEERKAT radio telescope.

About these newly discovered filaments of super-heated plasma, I don’t even need to say it, but I will: “Scientists were surprised to find…” Surprised to find thin filaments of highly energized plasma radiating like a banshee in the radio bands? Yes, how surprising when you only have gravity and magically appearing magnetic fields in your astrophysics toolbox. In the case of these Galactic Center filaments main stream is forced to admit that there must be powerful magnetic fields compressing the filaments, but, as usual, main stream is struggling to account for the origin of the magnetic fields.

OK, enough of that old trope. Let’s dive in with an electric cosmology and talk numbers.

The Math

We will use the Carlqvist relation,

the left side is the compressive forces: Gravity and the inward pinch from the magnetic field created around an electric current. The right side is the expansive forces: thermal pressure, and magnetic field pressure. I will admit that magnetic field pressure is not so intuitive for me. The idea is that it takes energy to compress a certain amount of magnetic field into a smaller volume.

There are of course more terms we could add, such as electrostatic force, or some double layer geometries. But the goal here is to start somewhere that reasonably includes the electric currents that create the magnetic fields.

We seek data from the literature about the

• density of the filaments, which will play into the gravitational and thermal pressure terms

• Temperature of the filaments, which will play into the thermal pressure term

• Magnetic field strength in the filaments, which will determine the electric current, and also contribute to the magnetic pressure

• radius of the filaments, which enters into all the terms of the equation.

Below are the parameter values I adopted for the Galactic Core filaments, along with the reference sources, and some notes about why I chose the value I did. I will not include all this for all the other filaments I talk about here, but you can ask me for them if you want.

Putting these values into the Carlqvist relation, and solving for electric current, we get 7 x 10^16 amps. This is for me unimaginably large. The aurora on the Earth are powered by billions of amps constantly going into and out of the poles of the Earth. I think by now that most of us realize that these currents are involved with creating the magnetic field of the Earth itself, rather than the simplistic and sadly lonely picture of the Earth purely creating its own magnetic field all by itself, disconnected from its larger world. Our calculation gave that in the center of our galaxy there are filaments with 10 millions times larger currents flowing through.

Where do these galactic currents come from? We do not really know. I do know that we need the correct categories for thinking about this. We must see the galaxy as living, we must see the galaxy as a citizen of a larger world in which it is conceived, born, lives, has children, and dies. We must ask what are the function of these filaments in the body of the galaxy. We will not understand the filaments if we seriously believe they arose randomly and to serve no function. Your body is filled with all kinds of filaments, vessels, tubes. Some connect, some transport, some communicate controlling instructions. As the astronomical data pours in, we are being forced to admit that yes, also our galaxy is unimaginably complex and structured. The body of the galaxy is just as complex as your body, and your entire body is just as complex as a single cell in your body. Complexity has nothing to do with size. All cosmoses large and small have the same degree of complexity.

Getting back to numbers, we will collect data from three different size scales.

1. Interstellar medium (ISM) inside our own galaxy

2. Galactic Core of our own galaxy

3. Intergalactic filaments upon which hundreds or thousands of galaxies live

Interstellar Medium

From the ISM we look at the Musca filament

Taurus Molecular Cloud B211

Taurus Molecular Cloud 1506

Molecular Cloud IC5146

and the Pipe Nebula

Our Galactic Core

From our galaxy’s center we take the MeerKat Radio Arc

and MeerKAT G0.2+0.0

Intergalactic Medium

From the enormous scales of clusters of galaxies, we take Coma–A1367 Filament

and A399–A401 Bridge

and the Perseus–Pisces Filaments

Put all the assumed values into a table, along with the calculated electric current needed to balance the other forces,

That’s a whole lot of numbers to look at. Let’s make some plots. We will compare the value of the derived electric current to the other measured values.

First how current relates to the magnetic field,

then how current relates to the mass density

and finally how the current relates to the temperature,

I find it very satisfying to see the three regimes are obvious clumped together. If the blue, green, and orange dots were all scattered about randomly I would seriously doubt the results. But seeing each regime occupying its own section in the parameter space lends confidence to our approach. I am still pondering on the meaning of the three plots - its a lot to take in.

I will point out that for all of these, my calculations show the effect of gravity is quite small compared to the other factors, less than 10%. In the case of the filaments in our galactic core this is admitted by all, the mass densities are simply no where near what is needed to constrain such hot filaments. In the ISM and Inter-galactic scales I will let my analysis here stand as a contribution to whether gravitational collapse really can explain the formation of such filaments.

Looking one day for what are the natural sources of Quercetin, I read that this substance is produced in great quantity in the skin of red onions. Since a large number of onions pass through my kitchen, this was too good to be true. In modern bio-chemical terms, Quercetin is a potent flavonoid with anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. Many of us first heard of Quercetin in the dark days of 2020 as a molecule that will help you stay healthy during flu season. Vitamin D became my #1 molecule after all the shenanigans of 2020 and 2021. But Quercetin was still in the top 10. Seeing that a bottle of Quercetin tablets was $38, I wondered if maybe there weren’t a way to make some at home.

I generally dislike the idea of ingesting single molecules as a way to stay healthy. I think Nature’s intelligence is vastly superior to our modern science, and Nature just NEVER makes foods that are single molecules. So if there were an easy enough way for me to extract Quercetin along with whatever other substances it naturally occurs with, I would rather take that combo than a single isolated molecule, especially if that molecule were created in a chemical factory half way around the world.

Take off the outer dried skins of the red onion, chop them up a bit and put into a jar. For this adventure I did this only with organic onions. Over a few weeks the jar is “full enough” as we say in the home chemistry business. Pour in some organic vodka to cover. Every few days give it a shake. After a few weeks, done. The skins have become quite thin and translucent and lost much of their original color.

As you could imagine, the results are a beautiful red. This is juice. A little reading informs me that this concoction was well known over the centuries as a healthy tonic. In the past the skins were steamed in not too hot water for a few hours, and the beautiful water drunk. I do not know what other molecules are present in addition to the Quercetin, but I do not really care at this point. I have not done enough homework to know what studies were done on the isolated molecule, so I cannot weigh in on what about all the other red onion molecules that come along with. I like red onions. They are my long-standing friends. It’s well worth the try.

Have you ever noticed that most, and I mean MOST single molecules that are produced as medicines are pure white crystals. Each of these pure white powders is given its own fake color, which has NOTHING to do with its function. It still blows me away that MOST of our medicines are made in giant factories using harsh chemicals and feedstocks petroleum. We take the blackest of the black from under the ground, which is by the way very, very poisonous to us, and we do all kinds of chemistry to it making it into a white powder.

I’m learning as quick as I can about making my own helps for the daily bruises and imbalances of daily life. Like Comfrey. I love the power of Comfrey. Nature, which truly does provide powerful healing through plants & fungi, almost never produces anything that is white. Each food or root or leaf or flower has colors, which are meaningful, they are not arbitrary. I know that red onion skins are red, or purple, actually, for a reason that is not arbitrary. The color is one of the attributes to tell us there’s some good stuff in there to help us through the winter.

Speaking chemistry and white powders, I put a few grains of citric acid into one glass of the red onion extract, and a few grains of baking powder into the other. Naturally derived colors are often very dependent upon pH. The citric acid did nothing to the beautiful color. The baking soda immediately turned it a dull brown.