Fusion lights the Universe...A correct view of cosmic evolution that abandons the Big Bang will help humanity take the next step in producing fusion energy here on Earth [Part 3]

In part 1 and part 2 of this series of articles on how cosmic evolution developed with neither expansion nor a Big Bang, we saw how electromagnetic forces formed huge filaments of current and plasma. Then gravitation and magnetism combined to collapse these filaments into a hierarchy of stars, galaxies, clusters and superclusters of galaxies.

When stars formed, a new process came to dominate evolution: fusion of nuclei in the dense stars, releasing immense amounts of energy and creating the chemical elements.

The cosmos is still in this phase of evolution: Fusion energy is right now the power that drives the Universe. We are made of the elements formed by fusion energy. Fusion is also the power that we on Earth are trying to harness for humanity in this decade. It is this process of fusion evolution that we describe in this third and final part of the series.

Up to the time when the first stars formed – how long ago we don’t know yet, but more than 100 billion years ago – the Universe was a pretty dark place, illuminated only by the dim glow of electric currents flowing through plasma, heating it.

But within the dense cores of stars, fusion reactions can take place. The first step in the fusion, the fusion of two protons (hydrogen nuclei) to form a deuterium nucleus (one neutron and one proton), takes millions to billions of years depending on the size of the star.

But because fusion reactions release thousands of times more energy than it takes to form the stars, the energy flows are increased many-fold from the previous stage of evolution.

In the initial fusion reactions in stars, hydrogen nuclei (protons – here represented by red dots) slowly combine over millions of years to form deuterium nuclei (proton changing into neutron – grey dot). The deuterium then reacts in hours with hydrogen to form helium-3. Then two He-3 nuclei combine to form helium and two protons. Chart: Creative Commons

The energy flux at the surface of our sun, powered by fusion, is 30 times greater than the energy flux of the electromagnetic beam-emitting proto-star (called a Herbig-Haro object) that gave birth to it, which was powered by gravitational attraction. The sun’s radiation will last ten billion years while the Herbig-Haro object it emerged from lasted only 150,000 years.

So stars pour millions of times as much light into the cosmos as the preceding processes did. As stars turned on, the Universe began to look like the awesomely glowing sky we see today.

With the new processes came the production of new structures: the chemical elements. First, hydrogen fused to helium, a process supplying the main source of energy for stars during most of their lifetimes. But as individual stars exhausted their hydrogen, their cores compressed, reaching higher temperatures and fusing helium to carbon, and carbon to oxygen and nitrogen.

The Cat’s Eye nebula is an example of the huge clouds of plasma that dying stars eject into space, seeding the cosmos with new chemical elements made from fusion reactions within the stars. Photo: NASA

Old stars, the size of our sun or not much larger, blew their outer layers off as they shrank down to white dwarfs, spreading new chemical elements through the galaxy. In addition, plasma processes in the stars’ atmospheres sent spumes of accelerated particles – cosmic rays – into the galaxy. Collisions of these cosmic rays with nuclei in the interstellar medium produced light elements as fragments: more deuterium, lithium, beryllium and boron.

Stars more massive than about 12 times the mass of our sun ended their lives in spectacular supernova explosions, creating in the process all the other chemical elements from nitrogen up to uranium.

The plasma-based theories of gravitational-magnetic contraction described in part 2 of this series allowed predictions of the evolution of the abundance of all these elements. Theory predicted that the less dense the plasma, the more massive the stars that form from it (within a certain range of densities).

So as a galaxy contracts, the most massive stars – massive enough to blow up as supernovae – form in the disk region where the range of densities for forming stars is first reached. Somewhat later, but still in the first 200 million years or so of a galaxy’s life, stars with masses between four and 12 times that of our sun form through the much thicker, nearly cylindrical bulk of the collapsing galaxy.

The larger a star, the faster it burns through its hydrogen, producing helium. Papers based on the plasma theory of galaxy formation showed back in the 1980s that these stars would produce, in just these first 200 million years of a typical galaxy’s life, quite close to the observed 24% helium we see in our own and other galaxies today.

This accurate prediction was very significant because advocates of the Big Bang theory had long argued that only the huge explosion of the Big Bang, not stars, could produce the abundance of helium, which is the second most abundant element in the cosmos. But in the last decade, abundant observational evidence has shown that only the plasma-evolution explanation of helium abundance is possible, not the Big Bang one.

For one thing, there are now many observations of infant galaxies, with stars that are producing energy, and thus helium, at rates exceeding that of the Milky Way by hundreds of times, just as the plasma theory predicted.

In the swirling plasma clouds of an early galaxy, some clouds get dense enough for smaller stars to form, a few small enough to have lifetimes that extend to the present day. Since the plasma theory hypothesizes that helium forms during this early stage of each galaxy’s life, some of these rare small stars should have less helium than stars created more recently, when the galaxy was enriched with helium for older stars.

And that is exactly what observations find. These very old stars can be identified by the small amounts of elements heavier than helium that they have. They show helium levels down to half those of most stars at present. This would be totally impossible if all the helium was produced in the Big Bang, as that hypothesis assumes.

This graph plots the abundance of helium by mass in nearby stars against the amount of heavy elements in the stars. Older stars have fewer heavy elements. The red horizontal lines show the amount predicted by the Big Bang theory – no stars should have less helium. Yet in fact, the older stars do have much less helium, as predicted by the plasma theory. Graph: Portinari, L., Casagrande L. and Flynn C., 2010, MNRAS 406, 1570

The observational story is the same for lithium. Here we observe stars that have lithium abundances right down to zero (too little to be observed) just as expected from the plasma theory, which hypothesizes lithium is produced by cosmic ray collisions and again in total contradiction with Big Bang predictions that all lithium was created in the Big Bang.

Here abundance of lithium in parts per billion(relative to hydrogen) is plotted against abundance of iron, again an indicator of the age of a star, with older stars having less. The red lines indicate the limits of Big Bang predictions of lithium, while the dots show the actual measurements, dropping towards zero, as predicted by plasma theory. Chart: Eric Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened-A Reassessment of the Galactic Origin of Light Elements (GOLE) Hypothesis and its Implications, Researchgate, October 2022.

Only with deuterium are the predictions of both hypotheses in agreement with each other and with observations – the one correct prediction at present of the Big Bang hypothesis.

Thus, another key present feature of the Universe – the abundance of light elements including specifically helium, deuterium and lithium, which has been used to support the Big Bang hypothesis – actually is strong evidence for the alternate cosmic evolutionary history in which these elements are all created by stars in the early lives of individual galaxies. As Carl Sagan said, we are made of star stuff (not Big Bang stuff).

Cosmic microwave background as radio fog The enormous amount of energy released in converting about a quarter of the hydrogen in the cosmos to helium is equal to the energy contained in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the low-temperature microwave bath that pervades space.

This equivalence has been known for many decades but Big Bang cosmologists have insisted that it is a mere coincidence, one of very many, and that the CMB is the faint echo of the infinitely hot Big Bang. If we instead continue the plasma cosmology history of cosmic evolution, we see that the CMB is indeed the heat from trillions of stars’ fusion reactions, ongoing in the present day.

But how does the radiation emitted from stars’ surfaces at thousands of degrees K, concentrated in galaxies, become the 2.7 K CMB evenly spread across the sky? (The CMB has roughly the same spectrum as the natural heat radiation given off by a piece of matter when its temperature is 2.7 K: about minus 270 degrees Celsius.)

I outlined in peer-reviewed papers published as early as 1988 the first step in this thermalization and smoothing of the radiation, showing that the plasma model of galaxy formation would lead to the production of enough carbon dust in early galaxies to be opaque to the ultraviolet energy emitted by large hot stars. Soot absorbs light whether in space or in the kitchen. The dust would be heated only to 40-50 K, a huge drop from the 10,000 K at a star’s surface.

The second stage of smoothing the radiation comes, again, from plasma filaments. These filaments, as Anthony Peratt and I predicted, would contain electrons that could absorb and re-emit microwave photons, scattering them and cooling the background further. In effect, the filaments would act as a radio fog. The dense filaments capable of doing such scattering are emitted in the beams of Herbig-Haro objects, active galactic nuclei and quasars.

There has long been strong evidence that intergalactic space is not completely transparent to radio and microwave frequency radiation. For example, the radio emissions received from galaxies decrease with distance much faster than does their infrared radiation – just as, in a fog, the intensity of a headlight falls off much faster than on a clear night.

This evidence was published over 30 years ago and since then the evidence has gotten stronger with researchers pointing out that there are correlations of the cosmic microwave background with local galaxies that should not exist if the CMB originated with the Big Bang.

In addition, the dense, powerful filaments, which we derived from electromagnetic theory back in the 1980s, have much more recently been observed. Starting in 2019, observers using radio telescopes found rapid oscillations of signals from pulsars – star-sized sources of intense radio radiation in our galaxy.

In 2021, these observations showed that the objects causing the oscillations were laid out in extremely straight lines between us and the pulsars. From the speed of the oscillations, researchers calculated that the filaments producing the oscillations were only about 10,000 kilometers across, even though the filaments stretched across lightyears in length.

In a number of quantitative aspects, these are exactly the filaments predicted in my own papers three decades earlier.

This map of a small part of the sky shows pulsars(red stars) that are periodically obscured by the straight plasma filament (green line). Dense parts of the filament may be visible to the telescope in the insets on right. Chart: Yuanming Wang et al., ASKAP observations of multiple rapid scintillators reveal a degrees-long plasma filament, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 502, Issue 3, April 2021.

What causes the redshift? Three of the main features of the cosmos that have been used as evidence for the Big Bang – the large-scale structure, the abundance of light elements and the cosmic microwave background, can instead be naturally explained by an alternative plasma-based evolutionary history.

Unlike the Big Bang story, the plasma history has made correct predictions that have been later confirmed by subsequent observations – the key test of scientific validity.

But if the Universe is not expanding, if there was no Big Bang, then what causes the Hubble relationship, the well-observed correlation between a redward shift in the frequency of light with the distance of an object in space? Right now, we can only answer: “something that happens to light and other radiations as they travel long distances.”

As has been reported in other Asia Times’ articles and elsewhere, there is overwhelming evidence that the Universe is NOT expanding, so the redshift cannot be due to its expansion. In particular, measurements of the surface brightness of galaxies show that the surface brightness does not change with redshift, a clear sign that space in the Universe does not expand.

These and other observations also show that the redshift is linearly proportional to distance – and all distances. That is a simple formula that does not correspond to what would be expected from expansion.

So, the redshift is the one big cosmic phenomenon that still needs explanation. Fortunately, the Hubble correlation can be studied in the laboratory, if we have a big enough lab. Present-day instruments are sensitive enough to detect a redshift using spacecraft placed 5 million kilometers apart, such as in the planned LISA spacecraft array.

Since no one thinks the solar system is expanding, the detection of a redshift in such an experiment would be firm confirmation of what some scientists have called a “tired light” mechanism. Lab studies could then shed light on the nature of such a loss of energy.

In any case, it’s a big step to trade the many unknown phenomena of the Big Bang hypothesis – such as inflation, dark matter and dark energy – for one unknown process called tired light. More critically, unexplained phenomena do not contradict the validity of a theory – but wrong predictions do. Contrary to what some cosmologists say, a valid theory does not have to be a theory of everything. It just had to be right in what it does predict.

Contrary to what some cosmologists say, a valid theory does not have to be a theory of everything. It just has to be right in what it does predict.

The broad trend of cosmic evolution that results from looking at real observations, what I have called the plasma-cosmology approach, looks very different from that of the Big Bang story.

In the Big Bang theory, the universe is running down from a colossal explosion, slowly devolving to a future state of “heat death,” a future without stars or galaxies – or, of course, people. But the evidence of observation shows something that is completely opposite, a universe that is “running up” – with energy flows increasing enormously over cosmic time and the pace of evolution itself accelerating greatly from trillions to billions of years.

Doesn’t this contradict the famous second law of thermodynamics that any closed system steadily approaches equilibrium, the state without any flows of energy? No, it doesn’t.

Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine explained in many papers, and in popular books (such as “Order Out of Chaos”), how the second law only implies that systems already close to equilibrium will move closer to that state. In the general case, however, energy flows evolve so as to increase energy flows, moving farther from equilibrium – exactly what we see in cosmic evolution.

But Prigogine emphasized that any given mode of evolution of a system runs into natural limits and starts to decay until another mode takes its place. That, too, is what we see in cosmic evolution.

The growth of filaments reached limits set by gravitational instability, but then gave rise to the gravitational-magnetic collapse phase that formed the galaxies and stars.

That phase, too, reached limits as stars were too dense to support the filamentation process, and it was superseded by the current, ongoing phase of fusion energy-driven evolution. The Universe has become a giant fusion energy generator, inside which we live.

We can see the next phases of cosmic evolution playing out here on Earth and at an astronomically greater pace. Here on earth, and perhaps elsewhere, the generation of chemical elements by thermonuclear fusion eventually gave rise to chemical evolution of complex molecules and finally the biological evolution of life.

At first, life progressed to greater and greater energy flows not much faster than the evolution of the sun’s gradually increasing thermonuclear power. But with the evolution of multicellular life roughly 600 million years ago, the pace of evolution of the growth of energy flows here on Earth accelerated to doubling in hundreds of millions and then in only tens of millions of years.

Once human social evolution began, especially after the Neolithic revolution and the start of agriculture 10,000 years ago, the pace of evolution on Earth accelerated still more. Now human-generated energy flows are evolving at the pace of a century or even decades.

If we extrapolate present energy growth rates even 10,000 years in the future – not even a blink of an eye in the billions of years of galactic evolution – human social evolution will be the dominant force in the evolution of the galaxy. We are the future of cosmic evolution.

But just like cosmic evolution, human social evolution can’t proceed in one mode of evolution but requires a succession of modes. For our energy flows to continue to grow, we need a fundamentally new source of energy to supersede the fossil fuels that have dominated human society for the last two centuries.

That source is the same one dominant in the universe today – fusion energy. Fusion energy can give humanity practically unlimited energy growth far into the future, without pollution, safely and far more cheaply than existing energy sources.

Fortunately, we can learn from studying plasma in the Universe how to produce fusion energy here on Earth. A correct view of cosmic evolution will allow us to take the next step in that evolution.

I'm fine with this theory right up to the point where extrapolates plasma evolution to apply to human evolution.

But I do love the transition to seeing fusion energy as the solution to the worlds energy needs. (since this was the topic of my 1980 Master's paper)

This will really upset the Population Control crowd...{;^)

There was a Isaac Asimov short story, the Dead Past, about an invention that the government did not want to get out called a ‘Time Viewer’. It was a really simple device that allowed people to see into the past, on a TV screen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past

The gist of the story was the government had a section of people whose sole job was to prevent this device or any of its components from getting out to the public. They ultimate failed because some amateurs were able to piece one together with different parts and they published the schematics and plans on the equivalent of what would be the Internet today.

The government wanted to suppress this machine because it allowed people to see into the past. Now when does the ‘past’ start? Yesterday? This morning? a second ago?...

People could use the machine to spy on each other with perfect clarity, every action every place at any time.

I fear that is what the government will do to anyone who finally does build a fusion generator of whatever sort that works. It will be denied a patent, it will be ridiculed as a hoax, as a fake, as a con artist selling snake oil.

They will not allow fusion to be generally available to the populace, not now not ever..................

What I would like to see is a breakthrough in how man can travel faster than the speed of light. Then we can migrate throughout the universe to habitable worlds. Having fusion power would provide an unlimited source of energy—something that would be needed for light travel.

In part 1 and part 2 of this series of articles on how cosmic evolution developed with neither expansion nor a Big Bang, we saw how electromagnetic forces formed huge filaments of current and plasma

/-)

ok, so....what created the electromagnetic forces ?

this is just more
evolution myth
crapola.

Very interesting series, thanks. I’ve never bought into the Big Bang theory. It requires the very non-scientific “inflation” period right at the very beginning. This is the only way observed properties of the universe fit into the Big Bang. To me, the Biblical version: God says “Let there be light” makes more sense than some Cosmology Geek saying “Let there be Inflation”.

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