Electricity and Concilience. Part 1

"The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents... The sciences, each straining in its own
direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing
together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas
of reality... That we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from
the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
- H.P. Lovecraft

What Lovecraft is so melodramatically referring to is consilience, the unity of knowledge. This concept of intrinsic orderliness states that the world can be explained by a small number of natural laws. The idea goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, and was taken as a guiding force by many Enlightenment thinkers, who strove to achieve an ordered system of knowledge from the cosmic to micro scales.

Consilience.

In his celebrated book, Consilience, biologist E. O. Wilson stated with a much different perspective than Lovecraft, " The goal of consilience is to achieve progressive unification of all strands of knowledge in service to the ... betterment of the human condition" (19). A careful look at advances in cosmology- the study of the universe - and electromagnetism may serve as a fruitful step on the path to consilience, for better or for worse.

E.O. Wilson, Jim Harrison-PLoS. Wikimedia Commons

Exactly what electromagnetism is, nobody seems to be in complete agreement upon, but it has to do with the energy-carrying capacity of electrons- the negatively charged particles of atoms, and their physical interactions. The physical characteristics of practically everything are a manifestation of electromagnetic forces, which determine internal properties and chemical interactions that make up all matter.

From light to computers, medical applications to advanced warfare technology, electrical forces have been well exploited in our modern world but their implications in the universe have been largely ignored. Conventional cosmological models leave much of the universe unexplained or unintelligible, and fail to account for many recent astronomical observations. Emerging evidence is now providing the groundwork for electrical models of the formation and dynamics of the universe, models that may prove to lead science in new and useful directions.

Part 2: https://steemit.com/science/@pinkspectre/electricity-and-consilience-part-2