Eugene Bagashov

Of the voices that carried the Electric Universe to a wide audience, Eugene Bagashov was the one who came to it from inside working physics. A theoretical physicist from Minsk with an active research career in quantum chromodynamics, he became, through the second half of the 2010s, the Thunderbolts Project's resident physicist — the on-camera explainer who walked through each month's space-science headlines and argued, finding by finding, that the data fit an electric cosmos better than the textbook one.

Bagashov is a researcher at the Joint Institute for Power and Nuclear Research – Sosny, an institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, where he works in theoretical particle physics. His training and his published research are in quantum chromodynamics — the physics of quarks and the strong force; with the physicist V. I. Kuvshinov he has treated quark colour confinement as a form of decoherence in the turbulent "stochastic vacuum" of QCD, along with squeezed and entangled states of gluons. His highest confirmed degree is a master's in theoretical physics, and he undertook doctoral research in this area. That mainstream work ran in parallel with his Electric Universe presenting — he is, unusually for the field, a practising particle physicist who chose to spend his public energy on a heterodox cosmology.

Gravity's second hand

Bagashov's signature argument, set out in his EU2015 conference talk "Creator's Second Hand," is that gravity alone cannot account for the motions of the cosmos — the rotation of galaxies, the formation of solar systems — and that a second force has been left out of the picture. That force is the Lorentz force, the push a magnetic field exerts on moving electric charge:

In a universe filled with charged plasma threaded by magnetic fields, he argues, this force is everywhere and cannot be neglected — it is the "second hand" working alongside gravity to shape what we see. It is the analysis he is most associated with originating within the Electric Universe, and the lens through which he read everything that followed.

Space news from an electric universe

As the presenter of the Thunderbolts Project's Space News segments through the late 2010s, Bagashov took the steady stream of new results and asked, each time, whether they sat more comfortably with the standard model or with an electric one. He argued the eccentricities of cometary orbits support the electric-comet picture (Electric Comets — Tempel 1, Wild 2, and 67P); read the surprises from the asteroid sample-return missions to Ryugu and Bennu, and the anomalous acceleration of the interstellar visitor ʻOumuamua, as strain on the conventional account; and ranged across Mars geology, Pluto's origins, and the "Planet Nine" hypothesis. His most sustained contribution was a four-part series placing the entire solar system within a galactic-scale Birkeland current — a plasma filament of the kind Hannes Alfvén had championed — and asking what that would mean for the Sun, the planets, and Earth's own history. He was a fixture of the wider movement too, speaking at the 2019 Electric Universe gathering in Bath alongside Wal Thornhill, and lending his physics to the community's The Thunderbolts Project — People and History.

The particle physicist

It is worth keeping his two lives distinct, because the first lends weight to the second. Away from the Electric Universe, Bagashov is a genuine, publishing physicist. His peer-reviewed papers — in EPJ Web of Conferences and Springer journals such as Theoretical and Mathematical Physics and Physics of Particles and Nuclei — work on how a quark's "colour" charge becomes effectively confined as its quantum state decoheres against the seething QCD vacuum, and on the quantum-optical character of gluon fields. It is orthodox, mathematical particle physics, with no Electric Universe content at all. What he brings to the EU, then, is not a borrowed authority but a working physicist's habits — and a willingness to point them at questions most of his colleagues will not touch.

Sources & talks

His flagship thesis, from the 2015 conference:

Eugene Bagashov: Creator's Second Hand | EU2015YouTube

A long-form conversation on his work and outlook:

Eugene Bagashov | Thunderbolts PodcastYouTube

The opening of his four-part Birkeland-current series:

Eugene Bagashov: Birkeland Currents — Cosmic Distance and Other Puzzles | Space NewsYouTube

More: 'Elec-centricities' of Cometary Orbits (EU2016, d3u5YH7fcmQ); Mars Mysteries Reopened (R7VxjirT8vA); Pluto's Origins in the Electric Universe (QdWXuzbMF9E); Plasma Geometry (Electric Universe UK, o-h-oWA6ntY).

Primary sources: his Thunderbolts talk pages at thunderbolts.info · his peer-reviewed physics in EPJ Web of Conferences and Springer · his Russian-language "Electric Earth" notes on VK.