'A New Science of Heaven'
by Robert Temple
Chapter 3: A Brief History of Plasma Research
Excerpts have not been perfectly edited, and the greater context will be found by reading the book 📖.
"If plasma research is little known even in many academic and scientific circles, it is pretty much unknown to general readers. In fact, many of the greatest and most brilliant scientists of the age have been involved in researching the area, including several Nobel Prize winners. I am proud to have counted some of them as my good friends, to have corresponded with them and discussed their ideas.
This book includes a historical view of plasma research. I have written it partly because its implications for our “understanding of extraterrestrial intelligence and indeed our own intelligence are astonishing.
I will start with a brief account of how the terminology of plasma evolved, and this chapter will also introduce some of the eccentric personalities, mind-blowing ideas and amazing discoveries that feature later in the book.”
“Also in 1958, the United States exploded a ten megaton atomic bomb in the high atmosphere (at 75 kilometres, or 46.6 miles) in order to produce an artificial aurora and study the plasma regions above the planet. (The follow-up studies were still going on a year later, so lasting was the damage to the high atmosphere.) Many more such atomic blasts followed. It is now believed that all of these atomic explosions, apparently about one hundred of them, and other crazily ill-advised military ‘tinkering’ with the high atmosphere by both sides in the Cold War, contributed to the instabilities of worldwide climate that we see today."
“We need to keep uppermost in our minds that the question ‘What is life?’ is not going to go away, and we will need to bring it to bear when we consider the question of whether or not plasmas can be said to be living, intelligent and conscious.”
“What Prigogine discovered and proved was that energy brought into a chemical system, instead of always contributing by a process known as the increase of entropy (‘the progressive increase of disorder’), could be dissipated away into other directions and purposes that were productive and could form open, interactive structures such as life forms, known technically as ‘dissipative structures’.
These structures, being like isolated islands of positivity in a sea of increasing entropy and hopelessness, could instead become increasingly complex and self-organizing systems.
“Prigogine built upon these discoveries his concepts of self-organization, which are now at the heart of what we are finding in dusty complex plasmas. So what Prigogine did was no less than explain the central role of life in the Universe.
Although this was by no means heard by everyone, it was the philosophical death knell for the mechanical Universe.
And so we return to Tsytovich and his colleagues, and to plasma. Here are further comments made by Tsytovich and three colleagues in 2000:
Self-organization processes in dusty plasma are expected to be very important since the latter is an open system with a high rate of dissipation … a high rate of dissipation provides rapid development of self-organization processes and formation of long-lived dissipative structures … Dusty plasma is an open system where the rate of dissipation ...
“The importance of dusty plasmas being ‘open systems’ is that they can absorb energy from outside, which then fires the growth of complexity. The Kordylewski Clouds undoubtedly ‘feed’ on energy from the Sun in this way.
The next year, in 2001, Tsytovich published a paper ‘Evolution of Voids in Dusty Plasmas’ on the important subject of voids, or empty spaces, inside dusty complex plasmas. ‘It is shown that formation of dust voids is a general phenomenon in dusty plasmas.’17
Voids are of immense importance in general, though rarely recognized. “He went on to explain that whereas both dust structures and dust voids are formed in some plasmas, this cannot happen in a purely homogenous dusty plasma. There can be no internal architecture if the dust structures are not separated from one another by voids. A structure must be separated from the rest of the mass by a space, for otherwise it is no longer a distinct structure.”
“Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on … physical mechanisms of plasma interactions … As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles [dust] is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging … These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter … We examine the salient features of this new complex ‘state of soft matter’ in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis [autopoiesis refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself] principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.21
This outspoken declaration could almost constitute a manifesto for the Kordylewski Clouds (though it was published twelve years before their existence was confirmed). Of course helical structures in humans have functions of storing and communicating information, so the crucial question raised here is: could helical structures in plasma have the same function? And could these be the seeds of an alternative, evolving form of life?”
“The passage specifically says that helical dust structures can replicate, in other words, like helical DNA molecules, inside dust clouds. Inorganic living entities are then formed that ‘compete for food’ in the form of sources of incoming plasma, which they eat. (As we have seen, in the case of the Kordylewski Clouds, most of their ‘food’ consists of the solar wind coming from the Sun.) All of this happens at a far faster rate of evolution than is the case with organic life, and in its development would outpace organic evolution by billions of years, hence clearly gaining dominance.
From this point of view, we as organic humans are rather primitive latecomers to a fantastically ancient tradition of inorganic life forms. ”
“With ‘dust’ made by the plasma itself replacing ‘atoms’ as the building blocks, living bodies can be formed. We might consider the charged dust to be ‘dust atoms’, or perhaps more accurately, ‘dust molecules’. And from them, charged plasma entities can emerge by the process called self-organization. That means that no outside source needs to create them, as they can create themselves.
By this means, plasma people can exist, who are imperceptible to the optical nerves of the ‘physical people’ who are made not of plasma but of flesh and blood. Because we are incapable of directly perceiving the plasma people, we do not know they are there. And furthermore, they may be of such diffuse matter that they can pass through our dense physical matter and emerge intact. Scientists know that ball lightning does this, as we will discuss in Chapter 4. Spiritual beings such as angels are also said to have this capability, which we will come to in Chapter 6.
If what these scientists are showing – and I for one think they are – is that the internal structures of the two clouds could be so complex, and at such a vast scale, then they surpass any possible human knowledge at this time…
“The presiding consciousnesses, or what psychologists call ‘the executive ego states’, of the two clouds will have personalities so alien from our own that we cannot conceive of them...."
by Robert Temple
Chapter 3: A Brief History of Plasma Research
Excerpts have not been perfectly edited, and the greater context will be found by reading the book 📖.
"If plasma research is little known even in many academic and scientific circles, it is pretty much unknown to general readers. In fact, many of the greatest and most brilliant scientists of the age have been involved in researching the area, including several Nobel Prize winners. I am proud to have counted some of them as my good friends, to have corresponded with them and discussed their ideas.
This book includes a historical view of plasma research. I have written it partly because its implications for our “understanding of extraterrestrial intelligence and indeed our own intelligence are astonishing.
I will start with a brief account of how the terminology of plasma evolved, and this chapter will also introduce some of the eccentric personalities, mind-blowing ideas and amazing discoveries that feature later in the book.”
“Also in 1958, the United States exploded a ten megaton atomic bomb in the high atmosphere (at 75 kilometres, or 46.6 miles) in order to produce an artificial aurora and study the plasma regions above the planet. (The follow-up studies were still going on a year later, so lasting was the damage to the high atmosphere.) Many more such atomic blasts followed. It is now believed that all of these atomic explosions, apparently about one hundred of them, and other crazily ill-advised military ‘tinkering’ with the high atmosphere by both sides in the Cold War, contributed to the instabilities of worldwide climate that we see today."
“We need to keep uppermost in our minds that the question ‘What is life?’ is not going to go away, and we will need to bring it to bear when we consider the question of whether or not plasmas can be said to be living, intelligent and conscious.”
“What Prigogine discovered and proved was that energy brought into a chemical system, instead of always contributing by a process known as the increase of entropy (‘the progressive increase of disorder’), could be dissipated away into other directions and purposes that were productive and could form open, interactive structures such as life forms, known technically as ‘dissipative structures’.
These structures, being like isolated islands of positivity in a sea of increasing entropy and hopelessness, could instead become increasingly complex and self-organizing systems.
“Prigogine built upon these discoveries his concepts of self-organization, which are now at the heart of what we are finding in dusty complex plasmas. So what Prigogine did was no less than explain the central role of life in the Universe.
Although this was by no means heard by everyone, it was the philosophical death knell for the mechanical Universe.
And so we return to Tsytovich and his colleagues, and to plasma. Here are further comments made by Tsytovich and three colleagues in 2000:
Self-organization processes in dusty plasma are expected to be very important since the latter is an open system with a high rate of dissipation … a high rate of dissipation provides rapid development of self-organization processes and formation of long-lived dissipative structures … Dusty plasma is an open system where the rate of dissipation ...
“The importance of dusty plasmas being ‘open systems’ is that they can absorb energy from outside, which then fires the growth of complexity. The Kordylewski Clouds undoubtedly ‘feed’ on energy from the Sun in this way.
The next year, in 2001, Tsytovich published a paper ‘Evolution of Voids in Dusty Plasmas’ on the important subject of voids, or empty spaces, inside dusty complex plasmas. ‘It is shown that formation of dust voids is a general phenomenon in dusty plasmas.’17
Voids are of immense importance in general, though rarely recognized. “He went on to explain that whereas both dust structures and dust voids are formed in some plasmas, this cannot happen in a purely homogenous dusty plasma. There can be no internal architecture if the dust structures are not separated from one another by voids. A structure must be separated from the rest of the mass by a space, for otherwise it is no longer a distinct structure.”
“Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on … physical mechanisms of plasma interactions … As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles [dust] is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging … These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter … We examine the salient features of this new complex ‘state of soft matter’ in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis [autopoiesis refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself] principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.21
This outspoken declaration could almost constitute a manifesto for the Kordylewski Clouds (though it was published twelve years before their existence was confirmed). Of course helical structures in humans have functions of storing and communicating information, so the crucial question raised here is: could helical structures in plasma have the same function? And could these be the seeds of an alternative, evolving form of life?”
“The passage specifically says that helical dust structures can replicate, in other words, like helical DNA molecules, inside dust clouds. Inorganic living entities are then formed that ‘compete for food’ in the form of sources of incoming plasma, which they eat. (As we have seen, in the case of the Kordylewski Clouds, most of their ‘food’ consists of the solar wind coming from the Sun.) All of this happens at a far faster rate of evolution than is the case with organic life, and in its development would outpace organic evolution by billions of years, hence clearly gaining dominance.
From this point of view, we as organic humans are rather primitive latecomers to a fantastically ancient tradition of inorganic life forms. ”
“With ‘dust’ made by the plasma itself replacing ‘atoms’ as the building blocks, living bodies can be formed. We might consider the charged dust to be ‘dust atoms’, or perhaps more accurately, ‘dust molecules’. And from them, charged plasma entities can emerge by the process called self-organization. That means that no outside source needs to create them, as they can create themselves.
By this means, plasma people can exist, who are imperceptible to the optical nerves of the ‘physical people’ who are made not of plasma but of flesh and blood. Because we are incapable of directly perceiving the plasma people, we do not know they are there. And furthermore, they may be of such diffuse matter that they can pass through our dense physical matter and emerge intact. Scientists know that ball lightning does this, as we will discuss in Chapter 4. Spiritual beings such as angels are also said to have this capability, which we will come to in Chapter 6.
If what these scientists are showing – and I for one think they are – is that the internal structures of the two clouds could be so complex, and at such a vast scale, then they surpass any possible human knowledge at this time…
“The presiding consciousnesses, or what psychologists call ‘the executive ego states’, of the two clouds will have personalities so alien from our own that we cannot conceive of them...."