| Ever since I
saw "The Wizard of Oz" as a child, I have been fascinated and terrified by
tornados. This truly awesome phenomenon became so ingrained in my psyche I
began to have recurring nightmares of being caught in a funnel
cloud.
As an adult I
got the opportunity to study tornados in Air Force technical school for
weather observers, but the meteorological theory of what causes them left
my curiosity unsatisfied. It seemed more like a patchwork description than
a meaningful explanation. Years later I discovered an obscure (to
me) mathematical model that revived my interest in tornados. It was the
Lorenz attractor shown below:
The model is a
plot of equations describing convection, the thermodynamic process thought
to underly the formation of thunderstorms and tornados. MIT researcher Dr.
Edward Lorenz used the attractor to demonstrate that weather was chaotic
in nature and extremely difficult to predict.
But chaos theory
is not what caught my interest. At the time I was reading volumes about
astrophysics and I was immediately struck by the uncanny similarities
between black holes and the strange properties of the Lorenz attractor.
Both contain:
 Event horizons, boundaries beyond
which a trajectory can never re-emerge.
Infinite trajectories within a
finite space, leading to "nowhere."
A thermodynamic component (as
Stephen Hawking postulated for black holes).
Was this mere
coincidence -- or a clue to the hidden cause of tornados? Although black
holes are usually portrayed as massive entities in deep space, the
existence of mini-black holes only a few millimeters in size is considered
theoretically possible. One scientist has even speculated that the 1908
disaster in Tunguska, Siberia, was caused by a mini-black hole that passed
through the earth.
Meteorologists
admit they don't know precisely what triggers a tornado to form out of
certain cumulonimbus clouds. Their theories are limited to simplistic
earth-bound notions such as air mass movement, atmospheric pressure, etc.
-- as if the universal laws that govern a black hole in interstellar space
have no relevance to weather phenomena.
Perhaps the
spinning vortex of a tornado is actually a mini-black hole that makes a
brief appearance on our planet. That would certainly account for the
incredible power of tornados, which are far more destructive to a given
area than even hurricanes. Weather in general may not be the
totally mechanistic process that science imagines. Many early cultures
believed that weather was a spiritual phenomenon that could be influenced
by human behavior such as prayer, rain dances and other ceremonies. In
modern times psychologist Wilhelm Reich (seen below) developed a
controversial theory that storm clouds could be dissipated by a life force
he termed orgone energy.
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