  Most cosmic rays are thought to be accelerated by the shocks of supernova
explosions of very massive stars. Here we review one quantitative proposal,
which predicted the spectral slopes, bend and cutoff about the cosmic ray
spectrum across the spectral bend or "knee" near 3x10^15 eV in 1993. Many of
the specific predictions have now been verified, and so it may be appropiate to
investigate the consequences of that proposal. The successful fit to the cosmic
ray data across the knee suggests: 1) very massive stars, above about 20 to 25
solar masses all converge to a common final state; 2) the supernova explosion
of these very massive stars is caused by a combination of rotation, magnetic
fields and the gravitational potential, just as proposed by G. Bisnovatyi-Kogan
in 1970, based on an earlier suggestion by N.S. Kardashev in 1964; 3) their
stellar winds as well as the explosion provide the main injection of magnetic
fields into the interstellar medium; 4) the explosive energy of these
supernovae is about 10^52 erg; 5) the explosion is extremely anisotropic, which
may unify several classes of observed supernova types; 6) gamma ray bursts may
be the ultimate version of such an explosion in the case the collapse leads to
a black hole; 7)it is plausible that the luminosity of the supernova integrated
over all aspect angles is also the same for all these massive star explosions,
leading to 8) a possibly very bright standard candle, if we could just find a
correction for the extreme asphericity. This may solve the problem of what the
mechanism of supernova explosions is for very massive stars, where most cosmic
rays and magnetic fields come from, and may also point the way to a unifying
scheme for supernova explosions and gamma ray bursts.
