Category:Plasma Cosmology

This category collects work in plasma cosmology — the programme, descending from Hannes Alfvén, that treats electromagnetic forces in cosmic plasma as the dominant organizing influence in the universe, in place of gravity alone.

Its claims are that the universe is filled with plasma threaded by Birkeland currents and magnetic fields; that these currents form filaments which pinch under the z-pinch effect to produce stars and galaxies; that galactic rotation curves and structure may follow from electromagnetic rather than gravitational dynamics, removing the need for dark matter; and that laboratory plasma experiments scale predictably to cosmic dimensions, making the field testable in a way that a gravity-only cosmology is not.

Alfvén, who received the 1970 Nobel Prize for magnetohydrodynamics, argued that cosmology had gone wrong by extrapolating from mathematics rather than from plasma laboratory practice. See also Category:Plasma, Category:Electric Universe, Category:Big Bang and Category:Cosmology.