i haven't been much of a youtuber, until recently. you know of the long history as media-shunning luddite, and as consumer of liberated material subject to ownership claims. laggard on the mobile device and broadband, as a dialer-up, my consumption was minimal, focusing on audio for maximum value per transmitted unit of memory. i thus obtained months worth of educational books on tape of the university lectures on x, many of which i've studied or heard attentively during many long hours staring at the emails of corporate vice presidents and recognizing words.
since broadband i've discovered and consumed a bunch of video courses in the same vein, either about music (history theory personalities etc) or, broadly, cosmology: astronomy, astrophysics, relativity, big bangs, black holes, particle physics and string theory.
significant portions of the latter category were excellently reintroduced, at a somewhat superficial level but with much more recent, expensive and mind-blowing animated visualizations of more or less the same data, in neil degrasse tyson's recent reboot of carl sagan's "cosmos". =>aside: i am dismayed by one episode of the original, and much of the reboot, for the otherwise estimable hosts' unwarranted, defensive, patronizing and didactic lectures and digs concerning subject matter beyond their domain, plausibly intending better to delineate the boundary, but tyson exhibits about as much grace as penn jilette. as to sagan, well, what else would you expect of a scorpio astronomer with a taurus ascendant and sagittarius moon, given the podium?<=
and i have toyed with tedtalks. they routinely have a high pith quotient and top-shelf a/v, ultimately, though, amount to just another channel of edutainment. sort of like much npr programming, it is deceptively deep and informative, all the while smugly bolstering the status quo and soporifically lulling one to "stay tuned" (to the exclusion of other applications of attention, obviously).
unsatisfied with my dated (everybody is really excited about what they're going to learn when the large hadron collider at cern is turned on in, like, the two thousand and oughts) material, i turned to youtube.
much of the standard cant on the big bang and black holes is unsatisfactory, i became aware catching myself asserting bits as though i knew them to be facts. the standard cant on the big bang and black holes is well represented on the youtube, often by the very same astronomers from the very same educational institutions who were featured by that company in those educational books on tape/video that i consumed, and often by a notable few others. but there are some alternatives to the big bang, apparently. scientific ones, i mean; not that book with the alleged 6000 year timeline. string theory might offer a couple, and quantum dynamics might, too.
a fascinating thread of bandage supporting the big bang theory is this exciting notion of the inflationary epoch. the current syntactic indicator of the whole theory is, i believe ,"the hot-" dear reader, "the hot inflationary big bang cosmology" or something with hot inflationary big bang in it.
it holds that sometimes, instead of being a force of attraction, when there is no matter to attract but lots of energy anyway, gravity might briefly become a force that repels: causing everything (super hot proto quarkish plasma not yet cool and diffuse enough to radiate light or collapse into subatomic particles) to expand, doubling in size ten to the twenty-sixth times in a very short period. because repulsive gravity is "unstable" parts of "the universe" fall back into what we understand to be the normal gravitational mode (but, because expansion continues in those parts that have not "fallen out of expansion", and does so exponentially, even as finite regions continue to "fall out", the result would be an eternal infinite expansion producing an infinite number of "pocket" universes, an infinite proportion of which would be just like our own dear hubble volume, and so, leading to one of the four basic multiple universe theories).
alan guth is one of the inventors, has many excellent lectures on youtube and is reported as no longer satisfied with the theory. much of scientists-in-general aren't very comfortable with infinite inflation and the multiverse. i trust somewhere/when among their panoply of doppelgangers and near doppelgangers among the many multiverse doppelweldts are more sanguine at the prospect. also see string theory star james gates.
another interesting alternative is "loop quantum gravity" which apparently was the result of making some sort of simple, aesthetically-pleasing modifications to some of the equations representing general relativity which i do not understand, and results in a universe that starts and ends with a big bounce: expanding and collapsing infinitely. raised gullible in a big bang culture, i cannot visualize what it might mean with the images in my head from graphics presenting the standard model, but i can clearly see the theoretical physicists are excited about it, and a lot of them sound really cool. and some part of me knows that this is zarathustra's unspeakable dark thought: eternal recurrence. in that scenario, it is not the next expansion's repetition of all the things my present amor fati embraces in this expanding period that troubles me, but what the contracting period might be like. at least in the standard view the heat death of the universe is projected to be so far in the future that there is consensus human and imaginable transhuman life is projected to have been long extinct. so there's that.
i quickly got tired, dear reader, of trying, myself, to evaluate the standard theory of universal cosmology and any alternatives thereto, and went to see how ufos, terrifying weather phenomena, renegade archaeology, crop circles and the electric universe had been getting along since long before youtube when the internet was mostly made of words. they're all doing just fine. even better, in fact, in many ways.
and if i like those, youtube recommends a bunch of end times christian catastrophists who know what a bunch of enslaved scribes eight thousand years ago intended, with their copies of shreds of older texts they had preserved and salvaged, and myths, about the regional politics of us right here right now and want me to be afraid, or smug, or prepared, or feel superior to people who aren't christians as much as we or maybe not at all. poor devils.
apparently there is a good deal of overlap there among the ufo, alien, megalithic archaeology, storm footage community (there are a lot of storm-chaser videos too, but those aren't generally what i mean; periodic compilations of global media footage of natural disasters is what i mean ... so obviously armageddon, right?!). oh, i didn't leave out the people who channel alien messages, did i?
and then, when i added mom's neighbor's inquiry about the global-warming-denying russian solar scientist abdusammatov into the mix, well, youtube showed me suspicious syntax that caught my eye, a channel called suspicious0bservers, which produces an excellent, thoroughly footnoted, daily global weather news product by masterfully wielding publicly available tools godawful early every morning.
notable thunderbolts-affiliated scientists include halton arp, david talbott, mel acheson and wallace thornhill . i think it is thunderbolts who convene and produce videos of the sessions of the electric universe conferences, which will give you a sense of the range of personalities from loons to evident authorities and all degrees in between. they all seem to be real scientists however.
find the 2013 sessions playlist here, among which i would especially recommend michael clarage, and dean radin's "the men who stare at photons."
find the 2014 sessions playlist here, among which almost all of them are good, informative and interesting. michael clarage again, robitaille's three presentations are impressive, as are dowdye and ap david. ben davidson, the man behind suspicious0bservers, presented at this conference.
oh. there are also some strangely-angry would-be debunkers of the electric universe and its theoreticians and proponents; they don't sound very scientific, though. and a disturbingly coherent preacher of the christian and electric universe gospels.
following a link in the suspicious0bservers morning news, some cycles ago, i read scafetta and willson's 2013 planetary and space science paper "planetary harmonics in the historical hungarian aurora record (1523-1960)," in which, pursuing prior evidence of "correlation between planetary alignment and the largest solar flare eruptions," the authors interpret the "longest auroral sighting records available" as "a frequency index of the most energetic solar eruptions that are capable of causing aurorae observable at the low latitudes in hungary," comparing it with "other auroral catalogs" (and finding satisfactory correlation) and the sunspot record, and characterizing it through harmonic analysis "by at least four major spectral frequencies that form an almost perfect harmonic scale" that are "close to the four major resonance frequencies of the orbital alignments of jupiter, saturn, uranus and neptune, and are part of the harmonics of the basic period . . . that characterizes the solar system." (capital letters and citations omitted).
scafetta's paper is exciting insofar as it strongly suggests that the orientation of the other planets in the solar system has demonstrably produced results detectable by normal persons for centuries, apparently through those bodies' collective influence on the sun, which then behaves in a way that influences the magnetic fields producing visible light on the ground. take that would-be facile astrology debunkers and carl sagan.
it was in an effort to track down details in the discussion of major spectral frequency peaks , such as, say, the "fourth harmonic of uranus-neptune synodic cycle," or the "jupiter-saturn major tidal beat cycle," that i stumbled across word "barycenter" and several visualizations of the principle that i thought were very interesting and wanted to share: the earth-moon system, the solar system, and screenshots from a software product illustrating the isolation of individual planetary influences.