A Beginner's View of Our Electric Universe - New

In terms of my personal motivation to write this book, and while again recognising the spark lit for me by my
radio club friends as I mentioned in my acknowledgements, I have always been a supporter of what I perceive
to be just causes. The strong desire to see good and fair things done and said has been a personal driving force
for as many years as I can remember. On occasion, I have felt the need to get personally involved due to some
particular manifestation of unfairness or inappropriate behaviour. As you will come to see, this is one such case.
However, this motivation does not stand on its own, for I am also intensely interested, as a hobby subject, in
how our universe really works and what everything in it is about.
As for my credentials, I have no academic achievements to parade for anyone to inspect but I do, through
my career, have knowledge and experience of electrical, electronic and computer engineering, a measure of
common sense and an ability to think logically. Ironically, perhaps, the absence of academic moulding may have
left me with an ability to fit in place, quite easily, many of the clues we are exposed to today as our awareness
of the world and the universe develops. Technical hobbies and group projects of a practical nature have always
been more to my taste than involvement with large crowds or a need to maintain a physical competitive edge.
One such area of interest gripped me strongly when I was very young; this being the subject of astronomy. I
remember listening to the comments my father would make as he gave his opinion to our black and white TV set
when Patrick Moore (eventually to become Sir Patrick) of ‘The Sky at Night’ programme fame, was explaining
from his own viewpoint the objects and events we could observe in those days in our heavens. Since then, a
lack of funds and cold and cloudy nights here in Scotland have steered my interest in astronomy towards the
intellectual goal of understanding what I can about the workings of our universe. Looking back, this could be
considered the low-cost option, because learning from the work of others through books does not need to come
with the additional expense of buying equipment. This change of emphasis was also the start of my journey into
cosmology, physics and some other related areas. As a period of learning, this was ultimately to unfold in ways
that I could never have predicted. So began the journey that has now led me to the realisation that there is a very
big and very important hidden story to be told, and that if we are to advance our knowledge through better ways
of doing science, then there are some fundamental changes that need to be made.
As individuals, I think we feel an inner drive to understand more about things around us but find ourselves
sometimes put off by an impression of complexity. I have tried not to see this as a barrier and so have worked
to develop a basic understanding of the theories I write about here. I am now motivated to pass on my thoughts
about how, through surprisingly common theories, everything in this amazingly dynamic universe can be better
explained than it currently is. Additionally, I want to highlight that ‘we the public’ must pay more attention to
science, and where it is correct to do so, we should question the quality and integrity of information provided to
us. What I have written is not intended as a condemnation of today’s science; rather, it is offered to complement
what we already have and to act as a wake-up call to the public to talk more about these things. Please understand
as you carry on that I am speaking as an individual through a heart-felt belief in the accuracy of what you will
come here to know as the Electric Universe model.
2 | Foreword