DISCLAIMER

These contributions to the Thunderbolts Picture of the Day project must not be construed as support for every opinion expressed on the Thunderbolts website.

While I intuitively sympathise with the tenets of plasma cosmology for philosophical and science-historical reasons, some of its central questions , such as the origins of stars and planets or the age of the universe, are as irrelevant for 'plasma mythology' as is gravity-based astrophysics, simply because human memory does not reach back for millions or billions of years. More or less the same applies to 'electric universe' theory; whereas some of the ideas defended in these Pictures of the Day - such as a greater variability of the sun in historical times, subtle adjustments in planetary orbits and the former visibility of Venus' magnetotail - seem more elegantly and adequately explained in an 'electric universe', I do not feel qualified to take any other stance than an emotional one in the scientific debate. In addition, it can only be natural that pioneering thinkers exploring a fledgling paradigm should pursue somewhat different lines of thought and approach the subject from a variety of angles. It is my belief that such a competition of ideas, rooted in a shared base of principles, is not only salutary, but is a strong indicator that the embryonic paradigm is potent and viable.

The recognition that electromagnetic phenomena play a profound role on all cosmic levels and that human traditions owe much ideational input to observations of near-earth plasmas provides ample common ground to speak of a unified movement.