At https://thunderbolts.info/wp/2024/01/01/currents-of-thought-3/ … is a post by Rens van der Sluijs.
In the last issue of C&C Review there was a book review of Stuart Clark’s ‘The Sun Kings: the unexpected tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of how modern astronomy began‘ which catalogued, among other things, a series of events that affected the career of Richard Carrington. He was the guy who noticed and recorded a solar flare on the Sun which gave rise to the Carrington Event shortly thereafter. A massive injection of plasma, and charged particles into earth’s atmosphere as a result of a big CME. It was a revolutionary discovery and was resisted by mainstream opinion even though a body of scientists went on to research the subject in more detail.
In the link above, van der Sluijs discusses several other things that came together at this time, serving to blunt research and cause scientists to distance themselves from electromagnetism in space. It put back research into electromagnetism for years. Instead, mainstream invented some novel ideas regarding space and its galaxies and stars, sidelining the likes of Birkeland and Alfven. Even Maunder’s research was shelved, resurrected many years later by Eddy. One can think of many other examples of this kind of shutting down a subject. For many years the idea of earthquakes destroying sites in earthquake prone regions such as the Aegean, Anatolia, and the Near East, as a result of ridiculing the work of Claude Schaeffer, led to many archaeological reports that never mentioned seismic forces even though walls were buckled and so on. There were the odd exceptions of course but effectively the subject was airbrushed out. The same thing happened with Alexander Thom’s work into archaeoastronomy. The archaeological big wigs made the subject of long sight lines a forbidden territory and such possibilities were lost from UK research for years – even though other countries were quite happy to include such ideas. One wonders how many articles on climate change have not seen the light of day for the same reason – the politicisation of research. No doubt, when the dam breaks there will be a flood of articles to the contrary of the consensus. It is just a matter of time.
Theories of a fourth radiant state of matter and an electromagnetic explanation for polar aurora, the zodiacal light, comets and solar phenomena, had been circulating widely in late 19th and early 20th centuries. Then it went all quiet. Why?
When space probes began to explore near and far space the ideas of Birkeland and Alfven took on a new surge of life. They were vindicated without a mention of why they had been suppressed for so long. If you believed some of the posts on the internet this was all down to modern astronomers. It wasn’t. They fell back on their distant forerunners. Even now a goodly proportion of cosmologists ignore electromagnetism in the universe and would rather ponder the idea of dark energy and dark matter. Van der Sluijs goes into some of the reasons why electromagnetism was ignored in a three part series of articles. Worth reading.