Wallace
Thornhill earned a degree in physics and electronics at the
University of Melbourne, Australia, and began postgraduate studies.
Before entering university he had been inspired by
Immanuel Velikovsky’s best-selling book, Worlds in
Collision. However, the lack of curiosity and the frequent
hostility toward this challenge to mainstream science convinced
Thornhill to pursue an independent path outside academia.
While working, first with IBM and the prestigious IBM Systems
Development Institute in Canberra, followed by the Australian
Department of Foreign Affairs, Thornhill devoted much of his
life to the study of plasma and electricity in astronomy,
following in the footsteps of twentieth century pioneers. His work
often took him to the Research Schools at the Australian National
University, which gave him excellent access to libraries and
scientists.
Thornhill was invited to attend the first international
Velikovskian conference at McMaster University in Hamilton,
Ontario, in 1974, on the subject of The Recent History of the
Solar System. There he met Talbott and Velikovsky.
On a subsequent visit to Velikovsky at his home in Princeton,
NJ, Thornhill posed the key question raised by the theory of
recent planetary catastrophe – what is the true nature of gravity?
That question led to a re-examination of accepted ideas across many
disciplines, culminating in the formulations of the “Electric
Universe” hypothesis.
Thornhill has since written many papers for the U.S. journal,
Aeon, and the Review of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies
(SIS), in England, and served as a council member of SIS.
The “Electric Universe” was first presented at a World
Conference in Portland, Oregon, in January 1997, and provoked
great interest from the astronomers, engineers and scholars in
attendance. Just prior to the conference he spent some thirty days
with David Talbott, persuading him that the celestial
configurations Talbott had reconstructed, beginning with
The Saturn Myth, were plasma discharge phenomena.
Workshops and conferences were subsequently held in Portland and
Seattle. In 2000, Thornhill was a keynote speaker in
Portland, along with the noted astronomer, Halton Arp, from
the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics, Germany, and
the plasma cosmologist, Anthony Peratt, from the Los Alamos
Laboratories, author of Physics of the Plasma Universe. Later
that year he shared the podium with Halton Arp at University
College, London.
In 2001, Thornhill was a keynote speaker at the “Intersect
2001” conference in Laughlin, Nevada. The broad scope of the Electric Universe may be gauged by the new alliances that
emerged from the conference, including Oxford biologist,
Rupert Sheldrake, the cellular
biologist, Bruce Lipton, and the psychologist, Garry
Schwartz, of the University of Arizona. At the conference
Anthony Peratt provided experimental evidence confirming that
the powerful electric force is paramount in the universe,
proving that gravity-only theories can no longer be sustained.
Thornhill has a website, HOLOSCIENCE, rapidly gaining
popularity with educational institutions in the U.S. It summarizes
the Electric Universe Model and provides an up-to-date
alternative view of recent news in the sciences.
