'A New Science of Heaven'
by Robert Temple
Chapter 12: Plasma Comes Alive
Excerpts have not been perfectly edited, and the greater context will be found by reading the book 📖.
“By 1954, Alfvén had elaborated his ideas further and insisted that the planets and comets of our solar system (and by implication those of all other solar systems) were all formed as a result of the coagulation of dust particles in the solar nebula (the ‘dust cloud’ surrounding the early Sun) as a result of being electrically charged by plasma. (The dust was more important for the solid planets, of course, since the giant planets largely consist of plasma that is not solid.)
Many plasma scientists now suggest that stars form initially from dust. What happens is that the “charged dust in a large plasma cloud in space coagulates to form a dust ball, which constitutes what is called a proto-stellar core, around which more of the cloud slowly collapses until a star is formed.4 ”
“Since we know that more than 99 per cent of the Universe consists of plasma, what little solid matter there is seems to exist primarily in the form of solid dust particles and grains, most or all of which floats in the vast plasma clouds. That reduces even further the amount of ‘solid matter’ of the sort that we see around us every day here on Earth, and it makes planets and moons even scarcer than we had thought, in terms of proportion of what exists, compared to everything else. That does not mean that there are very few planets and moons, quite the contrary, for we now know that there are untold billions of them. But what it means is that no matter how many there are, they still form a negligible proportion of what exists.
I do not believe anyone has calculated how much solid matter is left, after you subtract the plasma-bound dust. But as we face these facts, our familiar world is shrinking in significance all around us in the most drastic fashion. And, as I have already pointed out, if we have a science that is entirely based upon living in an atypical world, our science is going to be atypical. So we must reform it at once!
Are some plasmas alive?....
“We have seen in the work of Peter Kapitsa that the crystalline structure of complex dusty plasmas makes them potentially far more complex than human bodies. There are soft, broadly crystal-like structures that grow into beautiful and intricate entities with the ability to transmit information over vast distances. Particles within a plasma can interact in concert with other particles.”
“We might thus be tempted to view Dust Balls as highly structured ‘intelligent’ systems capable of storing and processing ‘information’ and realize that they may have many more surprising and unexpected features. Indeed, such huge stable entities that have presumably endured for astronomical timescales and have steadily grown in complexity over billions of years may display spontaneously evolved phenomena resembling those of the most highly complex living entities.
This situation is not dissimilar to the brain-like like complexity of the ‘cosmic web’ discussed by Ginsburg et al. (2019), “although it is potentially even more impressive in its computational potential: the Dust Balls would contain an intricate combination of charged dusty plasma in gaseous, liquid, and crystal states, with regions of positive charge and regions of negative charge separated from each other by sheaths and double layers, and containing superconducting filaments, so that it would be difficult for us to speak of a Kordylewski Cloud as a whole being singly charged or having a total net charge (or zero net charge), since there would be so many multiple regions of varying charges that a total net charge for each cloud would only be relevant when speaking of the cloud externally, such as in relation to the solar wind which is known to be predominantly positively charged.”
“So we see that it is the spinning grains that generate the energy to form structured clouds, as if they were a vast army of microscopic power generators, which ‘create’ the organization of the whole cloud. The number of spinning grains inside each Kordylewski Cloud could be as many as 10 followed by 26 zeroes. As we point out (see Appendix 1), the electrical connections and current exchanges between adjacent charged grains, even if they are as much as a centimetre apart in a Kordylewski Cloud, would create a structure that might well be able to function as a gigantic computer/brain capable of storing and processing digital information.”
“This is what a dusty complex plasma is like. Every single particle is ‘one in a million’ and can be individually detected in principle, and yet this vast and seemingly tenuous grouping constitutes a powerful structure, unified, coherent and immensely complex, bound together with overwhelming invisible strength and powerful forces. For us feeble humans, who are not used to thinking of such things, we are like the public at the time of Copernicus (1473–1543), who simply
could not imagine an Earth going round a Sun. This is how fantastically different thinking about dusty complex plasmas is from anything with which we are familiar in our lives.
An analogy here on Earth would be if we were to claim that the ocean is a giant brain. Well, it is not. That is because it is here on Earth, is made of atoms, and is physical matter. This is how different plasma really is. With dusty complex plasmas, a tenuous and essentially invisible cloud in space can hold together and become a brain even bigger than an ocean, a brain so gigantic that it is many times larger than our entire planet. We have to get used to thinking like this, and to realize that these clouds in space are so different from anything we know in our lives, or anything we could have imagined, that all of our conventional notions are completely useless.
Another crucial thing to realize about plasma structures is that they maintain their integrity by means of something called the double layer, also sometimes called a bilayer, which has helpful electromagnetic properties.
Two different plasma regions of entirely different kinds can be rigorously separated from one another by these “rigorously separated from one another by these double layers. The double layers are like a double skin, being a sheet of positive charge on one side and a sheet of negative charge on the other side. For those familiar with microbiology, they are similar to the double layers that occur within our own physical bodies as walls of cells, called membranes, with a hydrophilic (water-loving) surface facing one way and a hydrophobic (water-hating) surface back to back with it and facing the other way.”
“It is such double layers that surround the Birkeland Currents in space, which were discussed earlier, and which transport electricity across interstellar and even intergalactic distances. Within those filamentary structures, the current spirals can be superconductive, which means that the current can pass without loss over vast distances, and there is no resistance to cause it to diminish at all.”
“A stable dusty complex plasma ball of immense size, which has possibly endured for aeons and experienced continual growth and expansion over countless millennia, is in principle capable of developing something resembling a much more complex nervous system than a human brain with its average lifetime of around a hundred years. A complex dusty Kordylewski Cloud that has existed for many millions of years might even have become self-aware, with all that this implies. ”
by Robert Temple
Chapter 12: Plasma Comes Alive
Excerpts have not been perfectly edited, and the greater context will be found by reading the book 📖.
“By 1954, Alfvén had elaborated his ideas further and insisted that the planets and comets of our solar system (and by implication those of all other solar systems) were all formed as a result of the coagulation of dust particles in the solar nebula (the ‘dust cloud’ surrounding the early Sun) as a result of being electrically charged by plasma. (The dust was more important for the solid planets, of course, since the giant planets largely consist of plasma that is not solid.)
Many plasma scientists now suggest that stars form initially from dust. What happens is that the “charged dust in a large plasma cloud in space coagulates to form a dust ball, which constitutes what is called a proto-stellar core, around which more of the cloud slowly collapses until a star is formed.4 ”
“Since we know that more than 99 per cent of the Universe consists of plasma, what little solid matter there is seems to exist primarily in the form of solid dust particles and grains, most or all of which floats in the vast plasma clouds. That reduces even further the amount of ‘solid matter’ of the sort that we see around us every day here on Earth, and it makes planets and moons even scarcer than we had thought, in terms of proportion of what exists, compared to everything else. That does not mean that there are very few planets and moons, quite the contrary, for we now know that there are untold billions of them. But what it means is that no matter how many there are, they still form a negligible proportion of what exists.
I do not believe anyone has calculated how much solid matter is left, after you subtract the plasma-bound dust. But as we face these facts, our familiar world is shrinking in significance all around us in the most drastic fashion. And, as I have already pointed out, if we have a science that is entirely based upon living in an atypical world, our science is going to be atypical. So we must reform it at once!
Are some plasmas alive?....
“We have seen in the work of Peter Kapitsa that the crystalline structure of complex dusty plasmas makes them potentially far more complex than human bodies. There are soft, broadly crystal-like structures that grow into beautiful and intricate entities with the ability to transmit information over vast distances. Particles within a plasma can interact in concert with other particles.”
“We might thus be tempted to view Dust Balls as highly structured ‘intelligent’ systems capable of storing and processing ‘information’ and realize that they may have many more surprising and unexpected features. Indeed, such huge stable entities that have presumably endured for astronomical timescales and have steadily grown in complexity over billions of years may display spontaneously evolved phenomena resembling those of the most highly complex living entities.
This situation is not dissimilar to the brain-like like complexity of the ‘cosmic web’ discussed by Ginsburg et al. (2019), “although it is potentially even more impressive in its computational potential: the Dust Balls would contain an intricate combination of charged dusty plasma in gaseous, liquid, and crystal states, with regions of positive charge and regions of negative charge separated from each other by sheaths and double layers, and containing superconducting filaments, so that it would be difficult for us to speak of a Kordylewski Cloud as a whole being singly charged or having a total net charge (or zero net charge), since there would be so many multiple regions of varying charges that a total net charge for each cloud would only be relevant when speaking of the cloud externally, such as in relation to the solar wind which is known to be predominantly positively charged.”
“So we see that it is the spinning grains that generate the energy to form structured clouds, as if they were a vast army of microscopic power generators, which ‘create’ the organization of the whole cloud. The number of spinning grains inside each Kordylewski Cloud could be as many as 10 followed by 26 zeroes. As we point out (see Appendix 1), the electrical connections and current exchanges between adjacent charged grains, even if they are as much as a centimetre apart in a Kordylewski Cloud, would create a structure that might well be able to function as a gigantic computer/brain capable of storing and processing digital information.”
“This is what a dusty complex plasma is like. Every single particle is ‘one in a million’ and can be individually detected in principle, and yet this vast and seemingly tenuous grouping constitutes a powerful structure, unified, coherent and immensely complex, bound together with overwhelming invisible strength and powerful forces. For us feeble humans, who are not used to thinking of such things, we are like the public at the time of Copernicus (1473–1543), who simply
could not imagine an Earth going round a Sun. This is how fantastically different thinking about dusty complex plasmas is from anything with which we are familiar in our lives.
An analogy here on Earth would be if we were to claim that the ocean is a giant brain. Well, it is not. That is because it is here on Earth, is made of atoms, and is physical matter. This is how different plasma really is. With dusty complex plasmas, a tenuous and essentially invisible cloud in space can hold together and become a brain even bigger than an ocean, a brain so gigantic that it is many times larger than our entire planet. We have to get used to thinking like this, and to realize that these clouds in space are so different from anything we know in our lives, or anything we could have imagined, that all of our conventional notions are completely useless.
Another crucial thing to realize about plasma structures is that they maintain their integrity by means of something called the double layer, also sometimes called a bilayer, which has helpful electromagnetic properties.
Two different plasma regions of entirely different kinds can be rigorously separated from one another by these “rigorously separated from one another by these double layers. The double layers are like a double skin, being a sheet of positive charge on one side and a sheet of negative charge on the other side. For those familiar with microbiology, they are similar to the double layers that occur within our own physical bodies as walls of cells, called membranes, with a hydrophilic (water-loving) surface facing one way and a hydrophobic (water-hating) surface back to back with it and facing the other way.”
“It is such double layers that surround the Birkeland Currents in space, which were discussed earlier, and which transport electricity across interstellar and even intergalactic distances. Within those filamentary structures, the current spirals can be superconductive, which means that the current can pass without loss over vast distances, and there is no resistance to cause it to diminish at all.”
“A stable dusty complex plasma ball of immense size, which has possibly endured for aeons and experienced continual growth and expansion over countless millennia, is in principle capable of developing something resembling a much more complex nervous system than a human brain with its average lifetime of around a hundred years. A complex dusty Kordylewski Cloud that has existed for many millions of years might even have become self-aware, with all that this implies. ”