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When two current filaments are pulled together under their mutual interaction, the forces acting are not center-to-center but offset, like the courses of the skaters. This is what causes filaments to twist around each other and braid into more complex forms. By the sixties Alfvén was proposing this as the basis of the formation of the entire Solar System. It was generally rejected on the grounds that electrical currents could not be supported in such plasmas. Ironically, the reason that was given went back to work on solar electrodynamics that Alfvén himself and a few colleagues had done during the early years of World War II, in which Sweden remained neutral.

This carries the corollary that eventually everything will arrive at the same equilibrium temperature everywhere, at which point all further change must cease. " Applying these premises, Lemaître developed his concept of the "primeval atom," in which the universe exploded somewhere between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago out of an initial point particle identified with the initial infinitely large singularity exhibited by some solutions to the relativistic equations. According to this "fireworks model," which Lemaître presented in 1931, the primeval particle expanded and split up into progressively smaller units the size of galaxies, then stars, and so forth in a process analogous to radioactive decay.

For one thing, despite all the publicity it had been accorded as providing the "clincher," there was still a problem with the background radiation. Although the equations could be made to agree with the observed temperature, the observed value itself was just too uniform—everywhere. An exploding ball of symmetrically distributed energy and particles doesn't form itself into the grossly uneven distribution of clustered matter and empty voids that we see. It simply expands as a "gas" of separating particles becoming progressively more rarified and less likely to interact with each other to form into anything.