User:Aubrey Dartmouth/sandbox

Ralph Juergens

Ralph E, Juergens (6 May 1924-2 November 1979) was a philosopher and writer who focused on pseudoscientific interpretations of cosmology. Juergens coauthored The Velikovsky Affair with Alfred de Grazia and Livio Stecchini. This book was largely compiled by de Grazia as a review of the reception of Velikovsky's 1950 publication, Worlds in Collision.

Early life and career

Information on Juergens' early life is lacking. However, before many of his publications, it is known that he retired in 1960 and moved to Hightstown, New Jersey.

Views on cosmology

Juergens was considered a follower of Immanuel Velikovsky, another philosopher focused on pseudoscientific cosmology. The fringe view that distinguished Juergens from other contemporary fringe writers was that, on top of believing that electricity-driven forces primarily acted on the contents of the universe as opposed to gravity, he considered the sun to act as a dominant electrically charged body in the universe. Furthermore, he believed that other planetary bodies were also electrically charged, and that different regions of the solar system and universe could be representative of ion gradients providing the electrical charge. Articles claiming to support this hypothesis include one positing that the geographic landmarks on the moon and Mars are artifacts of interacting electrical fields between them, instead of craters, activity from extinct volcanoes, or erosion and transport of ancient sediments when Mars likely had water. Juergens further differed from Velikovsky in that Juergens did not expand his focus to interpretations of ancient history and philosophy to supplement his view on cosmology. Juergens hypotheses include the following:

• The sun has emitted "stellar electrical discharges," which themselves may be caused by an ion gradient on a galactic scale, formed by a positively charged shell around a galaxy and a negatively charged galactic center.
• Furthermore, the sun acts as an anode, interacting with opposing discharge emanating from the perimeter of the solar system.
• The moon and Mars were in close proximity which he determined from their geologic structures interpreted as marks from electrical discharges (e.g., Tycho, Ma'adim Vallis, Olympus Mons).

As a writer associated with Velikovsky, Velikovsky himself seemed to be the primary focus of academic criticism as opposed to Juergens. However, Juergens' cosmological theories have been rejected my mainstream science along with Velikovsky's. While Juergens' ideas were derived from Velikovsky's, the primary difference between the two regards the phenomena that they attempt to explain. Juergens mostly focused on astronomic and cosmological phenomena. Velikovsky mainly used these domains of inquiry to support literal interpretations of mythology.