Electromagnetic Force and the Historical Currents of Thought

(L) Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (London, 1889).
(R) Sir William Crookes. Courtesy U.S. National
Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland

Currents of Thought
Jan 1, 2014 | Thunderbolts.info | Rens Van Der Sluijs

Did Helena Blavatsky and Sir William Crookes inadvertently help to discredit early theories of electromagnetism in the cosmos?

Long before the Space Age, theories of a fourth, ‘radiant’ state of matter and electromagnetic explanations of the polar aurora, the zodiacal light, comets, the sun and indeed the entire universe circulated widely and were openly discussed. When space probes began to relay in situ measurements, the electrical nature of the aurora, as argued by Kristian Birkeland and a host of others, was vindicated definitively. Yet curiously, the intellectual forerunners of plasma-universe theory, with its emphasis on the predominance of the electromagnetic force across many orders of magnitude, met with a very different fate.

Many early speculations concerning electrical aspects of the zodiacal light, comets, planets and stars were never falsified, but became anathema to the astronomical and astrophysical mainstream in the period between 1890 and 1915. At that time, discussion of electromagnetism in space, outside the earth’s magnetosphere, became practically verboten – a taboo that is only now beginning to disintegrate, following a century of Dark Age myopia and limited progress in astronomical theory. Which psychosocial factors were responsible for the stigma? A definitive answer to this question is not yet available, but five likely factors can be proposed.  

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