It is interesting how our childhood hobbies and passions sometimes accidentally find us in adulthood. When I was very young I was fascinated by cosmology. I wanted to know everything I could about the origin and development of the universe (though I probably did not call it the universe back then). Basically, I was interested in the big questions: What is this thing we all experience; how did it come about; what is the driving force, etc? These questions are as much philosophical as they are scientific. Indeed in the times of the ancient Greeks, philosophy and science were the same discipline. I retained my fascination with the nature of the universe into high school and university and also wondered if cosmology could explain some of the inexplicable phenomenon I had experienced over the years (precognitive dreaming, etc), but because I was not very good in math I focused on the social sciences instead.
Today I have a BA and MA in the Social Sciences and a PhD in the Humanities and center most of my writing and research on socio-political analysis. However, I’ve held onto my philosophical interest in cosmology throughout the years and reading about it has been kind of a side hobby for me. While I do not have a scientific background, the current mainstream cosmology, which is based on the Big Bang, gravity and Einsteinian relativity, always seemed lacking in some way. It does not seem to provide a very tenable explanation of the universe and many of its suppositions are still shrouded in mystery; things like black holes, wormholes, dark matter, all seem to generate more questions than answers.
Mainstream scientists tell us that we cannot understand these things because, unlike Einstein, we are not geniuses. Black holes, dark matter, and all the other speculative elements of Einsteinian gravitational cosmology are simply too complex for non-genius minds to comprehend. Einstein has become synonymous with genius, and the cult of Einstein makes it almost impossible to question his theories of relativity and his mathematics. Yet Einstein never proved his theory of general relativity and, to this day, high school students are taught Newtonian gravity and mechanics (meaning classical gravity).
But gravity as the driving force of the universe has come to be challenged with the space age (and the advent of new technology) and the confirmation of a force billions of times stronger than gravity. That force is electricity. The space age has allowed us to directly observe and sense (with sensors that are actually out in space) the universe in a way that has led some scientists to argue that the key to understanding objects in deep space and the workings of the physical universe is electricity, not gravity. Continue reading
