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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.