The Big Bang Never Happened

■ THE COSMOLOGICAL DEBATE ■ity and magnetism are applied every instant to run our factories,televisions, cars, and computers. Plasmas are studied not only tolearn about the universe but to study how radio and radar wavesare propagated, how computer screens can be more brightly lit,how cheaper power can be generated. Plasma cosmology derives,of necessity, from the interplay between the problems of astrophysicsand those of technology, between the celestial and themundane.The plasma universe is not only studied differently from theuniverse of the Big Bang, it also behaves differently. 'T havenever thought that you can get the extremely clumpy, heterogeneousuniverse we have today from a smooth and homogeneousone dominated by gravitation," Alfven says. But plasma becomesinhomogeneous naturally. From the thirties Alfven's scientificcareer has been devoted to studying and explaining the manifoldways in which plasma, electrical currents, and magnetic fieldswork to concentrate matter and energy, to make the universe thecomplex, dynamic, and uneven place that it is.■PLASMA WHIRLWINDSAs a boy in Sweden, Alfven was fascinated by the spectaculardisplays of the northern lights, the moving curtains of filamentsand spikes. "Our ancestors called them 'the Spears of Odin' andthey look so close that they might fall on your head," he jokes. Asa young scientist he learned that the Norwegian physicist KristianBirkeland had explained the aurora as the effect of electricalcurrents streaming through plasma above the earth. In his ownexperiments in nuclear physics labs, Alfven saw the same lacyfilaments: "Whenever a piece of vacuum equipment started tomisbehave, there they were," he recalls. They were there, too, inphotographs of solar prominences and of the distant Veil andOrion nebulas (Fig. 1.10).Many investigators had analyzed the laboratory filaments before,so Alfven knew what they were: tiny electromagnetic vorticesthat snake through a plasma, carrying electrical currents.The vortices are produced by a phenomenon known as the"pinch effect." A straight thread of electrical current flowingthrough a plasma produces a cylindrical magnetic field, which42