A Plasma Universe with Changing Zero Point Energy

Scientific Paper
Title	A Plasma Universe with Changing Zero Point Energy
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Barry John Setterfield
Keywords	Zero Point Energy, universe, plasma, magnetic fields, solar system
Published	2011
Journal	Proceedings of the NPA
Volume	8
No. of pages	10
Pages	535-544

Read the full paper here

Abstract

Plasma physics has recently opened up new vistas in astronomy based on the interaction of electric and magnetic fields. Yet the magnitude of these electric and magnetic interactions is dependent upon the strength of the Zero Point Energy (ZPE) which controls the properties of the vacuum. The physical evidence indicates that the ZPE strength has increased with time. This has the effect of reducing voltages and current strengths and the speed of plasma interactions as time increased. Research indicates that a weaker ZPE in earlier times has the ability to account for some otherwise inexplicable astronomical phenomena. In particular, it gives a new understanding of the role played by electro-magnetic processes earlier in the history of our solar system. Several examples are discussed.

Overview

Setterfield's paper joins two dissident programmes that are usually pursued separately. The first is plasma cosmology in the Alfvén–Peratt tradition, in which the large-scale structure of the universe is shaped by Birkeland currents, Bennett pinches and Marklund convection rather than by gravity and dark matter. The second is Setterfield's own long-running claim that the Zero Point Energy of the vacuum has grown stronger through cosmic history, dragging the "constants" of electromagnetism with it.

The synthesis is straightforward once stated. Plasma processes depend on the electric and magnetic properties of the vacuum; if those properties have changed, plasma processes ran at different rates in the past. Setterfield derives the scalings and finds that a weaker ZPE means higher currents, higher voltages, higher ion drift velocities and faster filament formation, while forces, resistances and magnetic pressures stay fixed. Galaxies, stars and planets could therefore assemble far more quickly than either gravity or present-day plasma physics allows — which he offers as a solution to the problem of mature galaxies at high redshift — and planetary plasmaspheres, today in "dark" mode, would once have been in glow mode, bright enough to be seen from Earth. He ends by proposing that interplanetary electrical discharges lie behind ancient myth, and that the 1908 Tunguska event was one such discharge from Venus.

The argument

Part 1: the plasma universe

The first half is a review, largely following A. L. Peratt's Physics of the Plasma Universe and D. E. Scott's The Electric Sky. Plasma is "the fourth and most fundamental state of matter", existing in dark, glow and arc modes; even 1% ionisation suffices. Setterfield rehearses the history — Crookes 1879, Langmuir naming plasma, Birkeland's terrella of 1908, Sydney Chapman's long opposition, the Triad satellite confirmations of 1973–74, Alfvén's Nobel Prize in 1970 and Chapman's death in the same year, and the belated acceptance of the term "Birkeland current" in 1969.

The physical chain is: a magnetic field implies a current, since "this is the only known mechanism whereby magnetic fields are produced"; charged particles follow field lines, producing field-aligned Birkeland currents; those currents generate circumferential fields that pinch the plasma into filaments and ropes. The Bennett pinch follows from the magnetic pressure p_m = B²/2μ. He then stresses the scale-invariance of the phenomena, from laboratory filaments to auroral electrojets carrying ~10⁶ A, to solar prominence filaments at 100 billion A, to Venusian flux ropes 20 km across, to Verschuur's galactic filaments carrying ~10¹³ A, to the Yusef-Zadeh galactic-centre filaments 500 light years long and 3 light years wide, to Perley's radio-lobe filaments exceeding 65,000 light years — "consistent behavior from about 1 meter up to 10²⁰ meters or a scale factor of 10²⁰."

He quotes Peratt's figure that electromagnetic forces exceed gravitational ones by 39 orders of magnitude, and that even in weakly ionised gas (1 part in 10,000) electromagnetism is 10⁷ times stronger. The force between parallel currents, F/l = μI₁I₂/2πr, falls off as 1/r rather than 1/r² and grows with the product of the currents. Marklund convection sorts elements radially by ionisation potential, bringing the lowest-potential elements closest to the axis, which he applies both to the composition gradient of the solar system and to the layering of the Earth's interior — offered as an alternative to the "iron catastrophe", which he says is contradicted by Jack Hills zircons indicating a cool, wet early Earth.

Part 2: the Zero Point Energy and the scaling of the constants

The second half is Setterfield's own. He recounts the standard ZPE history — Planck's "second theory" of 1911 with its temperature-independent ½hf term, Einstein and Stern's 1913 remark that an irreducible vacuum energy would give the Planck spectrum "without the need to invoke quantisation at all", Nernst's 1916 cosmological proposal, Mulliken's 1925 boron-monoxide shift, the Lamb shift, and the Casimir effect verified to 1% by Mohideen and Roy in 1998 — and argues that physics took the wrong fork in the mid-1920s, adopting QED where Stochastic Electrodynamics (SED) was available.

His mechanism for ZPE growth is the conversion of the potential energy invested in space by the initial expansion into the kinetic energy of the zero-point field, "in a similar way [to] a stretched rubber band" — rapid at first, then slowing, and continuing even in a universe that later became static.

The scaling scheme is the heart of the paper, and it is built from two anchors. The intrinsic impedance of free space, Ω = √(μ/ε) = μc = 1/(εc), must be invariant, otherwise the vacuum would be dispersive and distant objects would appear blurred; this fixes Ω at 376.7 ohms and forces ε ~ μ ~ 1/c. Setting the ZPE strength U ~ ε ~ 1/c and taking Planck's constant as the measure of the ZPE, h ~ U, gives the central result

hc = invariant (8)

Invariance of the fine structure constant α = (e²/ε)·1/(2hc) then forces e²/ε = constant, hence e² ~ U, and atomic masses are taken to behave as m ~ U² ~ h² ~ 1/c². From these the electromagnetic quantities follow:

electrostatic force F = (e²/ε)(1/4πr²) = constant
electric field E ~ √c ~ √(1/U); voltage V ~ √c
capacitance C = e/V = 4πεr ~ 1/c ~ U
current I ~ √c ~ √(1/U), from μI₁I₂ = constant
power P = IV ~ c ~ 1/U; resistance R = V/I = constant
H = I/r ~ √c; B = μH ~ √(1/c) ~ √U
Bennett pinch pressure p_m = B²/2μ = constant
ion drift velocity v = E/B ~ c ~ 1/U
filament accretion rate dM/dt = (2πr)²ρE/(μI) ~ c
dust-grain potential V = −2.51kT/e ~ √c
axial vorticity W = e(N_e − N_i)/ε ~ √c

Part 3: consequences

Because drift velocities, accretion rates and vorticity were all higher when the ZPE was weaker, "the problem of the time it takes for galaxy formation, that James Trefil so clearly enunciated, completely disappears", as does the difficulty posed by the maturity and iron lines of galaxies such as UDFy-38135539 at redshift 8.55. Centimetre-sized chondrules could be agglomerated electromagnetically.

Solar output is addressed in three steps: the emission rate of photons goes as c; each photon's energy E = hc/λ is unchanged, since hc is invariant and wavelengths are fixed, so colours do not change; and the energy density of a wave, hence its amplitude squared, goes as h ~ 1/c. Multiplying amplitude squared by velocity, "the radiation intensity, or brightness, of the sun and stars remains unchanged as the ZPE varies. A lower ZPE thus means a greater flux of photons for the same brightness."

Finally, planetary plasmaspheres in glow mode: Venus's tail streaming out "like a woman's head of hair", as the ancients described it; Jupiter's plasmasphere up to 14 million km across, 1.5° wide from Earth and thus "the largest object in the heavens", possibly the source of its title "king of the gods"; discharges from Jupiter's tail onto Saturn behind the thunderbolt legend. He notes the Moon's surface potential shifts by over 1000 volts when the Earth's magnetotail sweeps it near full moon, and proposes that the Tunguska event of 30 June 1908 — a blue streak seen for three minutes, a 10–15 megaton blast flattening 2,150 km², a magnitude-5 earthquake, and no unambiguous cometary or meteoritic fragments — was a discharge from Venus, then near inferior conjunction (6 July 1908).

Assessment

The algebra is correct. This deserves saying plainly, because it is unusual. Every scaling in section 2 was checked and each one follows from the stated premises. Ω = √(μ/ε) = μc is right, and 376.7 ohms is the correct value of the impedance of free space (376.730 Ω). α = e²/(2εhc) is the correct SI form. Given ε ~ μ ~ 1/c, h ~ 1/c, e² ~ 1/c and m ~ 1/c², the chain E ~ √c → V ~ √c → C ~ U → I ~ √c → P ~ c → R = constant → B ~ √U → p_m = constant → v = E/B ~ c all reproduces exactly, including the square roots, which are easy to lose. Two further consistency checks that the paper does not perform also pass: the Rydberg energy me⁴/8ε²h² and the Bohr radius εh²/πme² are both invariant on these scalings, which is what is needed for the paper's assumption that "r is unchanged" and for spectral lines not to shift. The scheme is a genuinely well-constructed piece of dimensional bookkeeping, not a bag of ad hoc adjustments, and the review of plasma physics in part 1 is accurate and well sourced.

But the scheme predicts that its own central observation is unobservable. Work through one more step that the paper omits. Atomic energy differences ΔE are invariant (shown above), and h ~ 1/c, so every atomic frequency ν = ΔE/h scales as c, and every atomic clock therefore ticks c times faster when c is larger. Lengths are unchanged by assumption. A speed measured in unchanged metres per atomic second is thus c × (1/c) = constant. On Setterfield's own equations, the speed of light measured with atomic clocks and ordinary rulers cannot change — which is precisely how every determination of c from the 1930s onward was made, and it is those determinations that de Bray's downward trend is built from. The framework is constructed so tightly (α invariant, hc invariant, mc² invariant, Bohr radius invariant) that no local measurement can detect the variation; that is the price of surviving the quasar-spectrum and Oklo limits on α, and it is paid by the observational claim that motivated the whole programme. The paper does not address this, and a reader has to go elsewhere in Setterfield's corpus for the atomic-versus-dynamical-time distinction that is supposed to resolve it. Independently, the historical c record is better explained by the systematic errors the experimenters themselves quoted — the drift is a few km/s across methods whose stated systematics are comparable — and since 1983 c has been a defined constant, so the trend cannot be extended.

The solar brightness argument counts the same factor twice, in opposite directions. Section 3.2 states two things about the same radiation. First, the star emits photons at a rate proportional to c, each of fixed energy E = hc/λ — so its luminosity L goes as c. Second, the energy density of the radiation goes as h ~ 1/c. These cannot both hold. For radiation streaming from a source, the energy density at distance d is fixed by the luminosity: u = L/(4πd²c). If L ~ c then u is constant, not ~1/c; equivalently, if u ~ 1/c then the flux uc is constant and the star cannot be emitting c times as many photons of unchanged energy per second. Setterfield obtains "brightness unchanged" by taking the c from the emission rate as an increase and the 1/c from the vacuum permittivity as a decrease, but the amplitude of a wave train leaving a source is set by that source's output, not prescribed independently. On the paper's own photon-counting statement — c times as many photons, each of the same energy — a low-ZPE Sun is c times brighter, and the concern the section was written to dispel returns. This is the one place where the paper's otherwise tight algebra breaks, and it is load-bearing: an early Sun brighter by any large factor is incompatible with liquid water and with the fossil record the companion paper on gigantism appeals to.

Where it collides with measurement. The paper endorses a cosmos that "became static later" after an initial expansion. The (1+z) stretching of Type Ia supernova light curves is a direct measurement of that expansion, seen in the time axis of individual light curves rather than inferred from redshifts, and a static universe has to account for it. The 39-orders-of-magnitude force ratio, quoted correctly from Peratt for an electron–proton pair (for two protons it is about 10³⁶), overstates what is available in bulk: plasmas are quasi-neutral and Debye-shielded, so the long-range net electrostatic force between astronomical bodies is many orders of magnitude below the pair-wise figure — which is why gravity dominates on those scales despite being individually far weaker. The 1/r force law between parallel currents is likewise a property of the infinite-straight-line geometry, not a fundamental force law; two finite current systems far apart fall off much faster than 1/r².

The Tunguska attribution is the weakest section. The size of the blast, the 2,150 km² of flattened forest and the magnitude-5 seismic signal are all correctly quoted, but the inference is not supported: the ±7-day window on either side of Venus's inferior conjunction is chosen after the fact and is wide enough to capture a large fraction of any 584-day synodic cycle; the butterfly-shaped fall pattern of the forest is the signature of a shock wave from an atmospheric airburst at 5–10 km altitude, reconstructed independently from eyewitness trajectory reports; and it is not true that no fragments have been found — microscopic silicate and magnetite spherules with meteoritic nickel and iridium enrichment have been recovered from the peat layers and from resin in surviving trees. The mythological arguments (Jupiter's thunderbolts, Venus's hair, the fear of planetary alignments) are suggestive at best and are offered without any way of being wrong.

Smaller points. Alfvén's critical ionisation velocity of 5–50 km/s is correctly stated, but it is not "now often called the Alfvén velocity" — the Alfvén velocity v_A = B/√(μ₀ρ) is an entirely different quantity, and conflating them is a real error in a plasma-physics review. Langmuir's coining of "plasma" is usually dated to 1928 rather than 1923. The demonstration of large-scale filamentary structure is usually credited to the 1986 CfA slice rather than 1991. Equation (17) is printed as δF/δI where δF/δl (force per unit length) is meant, as equation (2) makes clear. Reference [10] points to "Hill, op. cit. [5]" while [5] is Dessler and Potemra. The assertion that a magnetic field implies a current because that is "the only known mechanism whereby magnetic fields are produced" passes over intrinsic magnetic moments, which is awkward given that the paper's own bar-magnet example invokes electron spin.

On balance: a carefully built and internally consistent scaling framework, an accurate plasma-physics review, and one clean self-refutation — the framework's own equations make the speed of light unmeasurable-as-varying by the very kind of experiment whose historical record is offered as evidence that it varies — plus a double-counted factor of c in the solar brightness argument and a speculative final section that outruns its evidence.