Eric W Crew

Eric W. Crew
Born	1917
Died	2006
Residence	United Kingdom
Nationality	English
Scientific career
Fields	Electrical Engineer

Eric W. Crew (1917 – 2006) was an English electrical engineer who, in retirement, wrote extensively on the role of electricity in astronomy. Drawing on the electrical discharge theories of C. E. R. Bruce, he argued that lightning-like electrical processes shape matter throughout the cosmos, a viewpoint associated with the Electric Universe tradition and the work of Velikovsky. His paper "Lightning in Astronomy" appeared in Nature in December 1974.

Biography

Crew was born in Stoke-on-Trent and trained as an electrical engineer. He joined British Petroleum in London and travelled widely installing switchgear in power stations. He was a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and in retirement he developed a fire protection system for cables used in industrial plants and underground railways.

Passionately interested in all aspects of science, and especially astronomy, he became a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a council member of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS). A prolific writer with a wide circle of correspondents, in his later years he was in contact with the Hungarian scientist Laszlo Kortvelyessy on the electrical aspects of the Sun. Kortvelyessy recalled that Crew's "theory of the universe was based on the fact that electricity can shape matter," and that Crew identified many celestial bodies whose features he attributed to electrical effects.

Crew married twice. His first wife, Catherine, died in 1964. He was survived by his wife June and five children, three of them from his first marriage. A lifelong recycler of humble origins, he was, in accordance with his wishes, given a green burial beneath a tree in a bamboo coffin. Outside his scientific interests he was a keen naturist, walker and gardener, contributing articles on attitudes to nudity to the magazine Starkers.

Scientific contributions

Crew's astronomical writing was strongly influenced by C. E. R. Bruce, who in 1941 argued that a jet ejected from the Sun had the characteristics of lightning, and who extended this electrical discharge interpretation to other stellar systems and to galaxies. Crew took up and developed these ideas, proposing that terrestrial and astronomical lightning were manifestations of the same electrical processes and that such discharges could account for a range of phenomena in the Solar System and beyond. This electrical approach to astronomy falls outside mainstream astrophysics, which explains the same phenomena primarily through gravitation, nuclear and magnetohydrodynamic processes.

His paper "Lightning in Astronomy" was published in Nature in December 1974, and he contributed a series titled "Electricity in Astronomy" to the SIS Review. Over his career he had papers published in Nature, The Observatory, the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Journal of Meteorology, the SIS Review and other outlets.

Abstracts

• 2002 - "Ion Jets in the Fifth State of Matter"
• 2000 - "Terrestrial and Astronomical Lightning"
• 1988 - "Erratic Events in the Solar System"
• 1974 - "Lightning in Astronomy"
• 1973 - "On Cosmic Electricity"

External links

• Obituary: Eric Crew (The Guardian, 26 May 2006)