James P Hogan's "Cosmic Electricity" (non fiction, cosmology)

The single most interesting thing I found in this essay was the picture on the right (click image for original full size picture). At least I'd not seen this detailed a closeup of a sunspot. I'm not sure it's an artist's illustration or an actual photograph; accompanying text only says "a sunspot, where a hole penetrates through the photosphere to the interior."

Rest of the article is generally a rant about mainstream astronomers not giving enough consideration to electromagnetic influences in shaping the physical universe, & giving far more importance to gravitation than it deserves. I didn't quite follow all the arguments, but there are a lot of examples of cases that can probably with explained by including electromagnetism - from sunspots to alignment of galactic discs to peculiar physical distribution of galaxies through the universe to dark matter to a simple explanation of the peculiar shape of spiral galaxies, & more.

Running through the story is an argument that universe has massive electric circuits - where galaxies are tiny nodes. Apart from other cosmic electric circuits.

See also.

1. Hal Clement's "The Foundling Stars": A story about creation of stars out of nebulae, with speculations about the kind of forces that must be aiding this process.

Fact sheet.

First published: Jim Baen's Universe, #13 (June 2008).