What is Digg?Sponsored by HowLifeWorks
How to Make Your PC as Fast as the Day You Bought It view!
howlifeworks.com - What's the fastest way to restore a computer to its original blazing glory
15 Comments
- APODNereid, on 11/12/2009, -0/+4We have a communication breakdown, I fear.
"laboratory plasma physics is NOT inconsistent with what we now know of Saturn": it's not the lab results which are consistent, inconsistent, or indeterminate, it's the *application* of those results, via models, to attempt to account for (or explain) observations of Saturn (etc).
Does a model which successfully accounts for all relevant observations of Saturn's radiation belt have to include plasma physics? Yes.
Does a model which successfully accounts for all relevant observations of Saturn's ring spokes have to include plasma physics? Almost certainly yes.
Does a model which successfully accounts for all relevant observations of super-rotation in Saturn's atmosphere have to include plasma physics? Possibly, possibly not.
And so on.
Do the professional scientists who study planetary phenomena ignore plasma physics? No (how did you form the opinion that they did?) - APODNereid, on 11/11/2009, -0/+4It's almost like you live in some alternate universe, pln2bz ...
"It should be noted that Kristian Birkeland struggled his whole life to be heard out over his mainstream nemesis, Sydney Chapman"
We're talking Kristian Birkeland, 13 December 1867–15 June 1917, and Sydney Chapman, 29 January 1888–16 June 1970, right? Birkeland, whose terrella work was published in 1913, and whose aurora work was done primarily in the closing years of the 19th century ... and Chapman, who didn't even graduate until 1910!
Birkeland's scientific life was almost over before Chapman took even his first job ... doing research in pure mathematics!
I am not 100% sure, but Chapman did no work on any of the areas of research Birkeland published in ... until well after 1917.
Dude, if you can't get even simple historical facts right, it's no wonder you also badly misunderstand Birkeland's experiments, astronomical observations, Alfvén's papers, ... and even basic plasma physics. - APODNereid, on 11/12/2009, -0/+4Well, at least Jago seems to have the historical dates (of events) correct ...
... pity about her understanding of plasma physics though.
I think you're a big fan of Peratt, right? So no doubt you're familiar with the piece he wrote for Sky & Telescope magazine, on Birkeland (in 1985, I think). Among other things, Peratt says this: "He then shot clouds of electrons towards this simulated Earth to produce a light phenomenon that looked like the aurora. (We now know that the solar wind also consists of positive ions, as well as negative electrons.) Birkeland could see that bunches of electrons curved down towards and around the Earth's poles. While the actual process was somewhat more complicated than he envisioned [...] his results were surprisingly good."
In other words, he was lucky.
If you get a chance to read Birkeland's 900+ page (Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition 1902-1903), do so; it's clear that he was a very good scientist.
However, he was limited by what was known at the time; for example, quantum physics - and even plasma physics - were in the future, so it's not the least bit surprising that he got many things wrong (but it's a measure of how good a scientist he was that he sometimes recognised, and acknowledged, the limits of his ideas ... for example, he explicitly realised that his simple model of a current flowing from Sun to Earth, with electrons producing aurorae, must be wrong in at least one key aspect, because his model predicted the electrons would be moving at speeds that were far too high).
And so we come back to Saturn, and its rings.
Birkeland's ideas - as presented in that 900+ page tome - are inconsistent with what we now know (the physical processes for ring formation and long-term stability are completely different than what BIrkeland proposed), and inconsistent with even the astronomical observations of the time (or, to put it bluntly, in this case, a blunder, a scientific boo-boo). - 0bamaclintobush, on 11/10/2009, -1/+4This is the best APOD Pic Evar!
- Starman3, on 11/10/2009, -0/+3It's the long awaited return of the ring.... s
It is a beautiful shot of our amazing solar system. - pln2bz, on 11/10/2009, -3/+6"It seems almost incredible that such a ring of cosmic dust should be able to exist for ever, so to speak, without other governing forces than gravitation..." -- Kristian Birkeland, 1913.
Kristian Birkeland's replication of Saturn's rings in his terrella experiment using electromagnetism ...
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/0712 ... - IVAN3MAN, on 11/13/2009, -0/+3pln2bz: "Were it not for additional evidence supporting the view that [Saturn's] rings are electrical in nature, the dismissal might actually go unnoticed."
On July 1, 2004, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft FLEW THROUGH THE GAP between Saturn's F and G rings and achieved orbit, after a seven year voyage. Among Cassini's wide range of instruments to measure magnetic fields, radio waves, cosmic dust, infrared and ultraviolet light, as well as wide-angle and narrow-angle cameras, it also included a PLASMA SPECTROMETER to measure charged particles and solar winds.
Funny how that $3.3 BILLION probe managed to MISS all that alleged electrical activity in Saturn's rings, isn't it? I absolutely don't know why N.A.S.A. spends so much money on such state-of-the-art equipment to analyze the nature of Saturn's ring system, when all we need to do to learn "the truth" about them is to rely on Kristian Birkeland's 100-YEAR-OLD bloody basement laboratory experiments(!). - APODNereid, on 11/11/2009, -0/+3What's odd is that even then, in the early years of the 20th century, Saturn's rings were known to shine by reflected light (the Sun's), so Birkeland would have known (had he 'done his astronomy homework') that his terrella model could not possibly be replicating the rings (in his terrella, the rings are self-luminous, and much brighter than 'Saturn'). This seems like an unusual blunder for him ...
- jamikr, on 11/11/2009, -0/+3So Kristian Birkeland was able to replicate saturn 100 years ago in his own lab?
- Stoyanov, on 11/10/2009, -0/+2Amazing.
- agentsrecord, on 11/10/2009, -2/+4Beautiful... but strange.
Like a fat chick in front of the horizontal mirrors in the haunted house. - CitizenSnipps, on 11/10/2009, -0/+1That's no moon.
- pln2bz, on 11/12/2009, -3/+1Okay, you're right on your technical point. But it only gives me an opportunity to dive into the story even deeper. From The Northern Lights by Lucy Jago ...
For fifty years after his lonely death his scientific reputation sank inexorably into oblivion along with the Peking. One man in particular, Sydney Chapman, continued the tradition of opposition by British scientists to Birkeland's work. Chapman had seen Birkeland checking some magnetic records in Greenwich en route to Egypt, but they had not spoken. He was a young, ambitious mathematician who became the leading scientist in the field of geomagnetism after the First World War, holding a dominant position in British science until his death in 1970. Chapman's career was the mirror opposite to Birkeland's. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1919 at the early age of thirty-one, was invited to serve as president of five important scientific societies, and was awarded numerous prizes fore his work.
Chapman considered Birkeland's intrepid expeditions into the Arctic unnecessary and anachronistic and the Norwegian professor's theories too "curious" for consideration. His antipathy was caused primarily by his disbelief in Birkeland's main hypothesis: that cathode rays from the sun were guided into the Earth's atmosphere along magnetic field lines, causing the Northern Lights and magnetic perturbations. Chapman himself had once written, in a paper in 1918, that rays of a single charge could stream from the sun, but when his theory was attacked he abandoned the idea and ridiculed Birkeland for suggesting it. Apart from being somewhat hypocritical, Chapman's criticisms revealed an ignorance of Birkeland's work. In 1916 Birkeland had published a paper outlining his theory concerning the rays emitted by the sun, in which he stated: "From a physical point of view it is most probable that these new solar rays are neither exclusively negative nor positive rays, but of both kinds." Chapman later advocated this correct theory, without reference to Birkeland.
He appeared to have a general disregard for Scandinavian science, making condescending comments about Birkeland's colleague Stormer, and the Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven, whome he called "that Swedish engineer." Over five decades he effectively eradicated the memory of Birkeland's work and entirely dismissed his contribution to science, as can be seen from his opening address to the Birkeland Symposium in Sandefjord, Norway, in 1967:
"Though Birkeland was certainly intensely interested in the aurora, it must be confessed that his direct observational contributions to auroral knowledge were slight.
"The apparently unshakeable hold on Birkeland's mind of his basic but invalid conception of intense electron beams, mingled error inextricably with truth in the presentation of his ideas and experiments on auroras and magnetic storms. His breadth of mind and wide interests led him astray."
One young American scientist at the symposium, Alex Dressler, questioned Chapman about Birkeland. "I asked him whether Birkeland's work had any influence on him at all. He glared at me and said, 'How could it? It was all wrong.'"
In the last three years of Chapman's life, however, space satellites found incontrovertible evidence supporting Birkeland's ideas of a flow of electric particles from the sun. In 1962 instruments on board NASA's Mariner II spacecraft on its way to Venus recorded the presence of an electrified gas traveling through space at speeds ranging from 300 to 700 kilometers per second. A similar phenomenon had been observed the previous year by the Soviet Lunik 2 spacecraft on its way to the moon, but western scientists had dismissed the Soviet data as unreliable. After Mariner, other craft were launched into space and soon it was acknowledged that "empty space" was not empty at all but filled with a million-degree electrified gas, hotter, thinner, and faster than any wind on Earth, blowing at hundreds of kilometers per second through the solar system and now called the "solar wind." Composed of an equal number of negative particles, or electrons, and positive particles, mainly protons, this wind forms a neutrally charged "plasma." Birkeland had predicted a similar wind more than sixty years earlier (although the term "plasma" did not exist then and he called it "solar rays," "beams," or "pencils") when he wrote: "Small storms are almost continuously present ... almost any time pencils of electric rays from the sun are striking the earth."
[...]
Birkeland now has a crater on the moon named after him, which, together with Birkeland Currents sand the wider acceptance of his work, should prevent his memory from fading, BUT REJECTION OF HIS THEORIES PROBABLY SLOWED THE ADVANCE OF GEOMAGNETIC AND AURORAL PHYSICS FOR NEARLY HALF A CENTURY." [emphasis mine] - pln2bz, on 11/11/2009, -3/+1Re: "What's odd is that even then, in the early years of the 20th century, Saturn's rings were known to shine by reflected light (the Sun's), so Birkeland would have known (had he 'done his astronomy homework') that his terrella model could not possibly be replicating the rings (in his terrella, the rings are self-luminous, and much brighter than 'Saturn'). This seems like an unusual blunder for him ..."
Actually, the similarity between Saturn's rings and Birkeland's terrella rings represented just one of several plasma physics experiments by Birkeland which would demonstrate intriguing similarities between electromagnetic plasmas (as if there was any other kind ...) and real-world astronomical objects. Compare, for instance, this image of Io ...
http://picasaweb.google.com/mgmirkin/Physics#50671 ... ...
... with this image of one of Birkeland's terrella experiments ...
http://picasaweb.google.com/mgmirkin/Physics#51411 ...
It should be noted that Kristian Birkeland struggled his whole life to be heard out over his mainstream nemesis, Sydney Chapman. Birkeland was a quintessential scientific heretic who as an outsider would be passed up for Nobel prizes numerous times, and whose ideas about the Earth's polar aurora would eventually be proven right over Chapman's terrestrially closed system. The idea that Birkeland needed to have done his astronomical homework completely ignores this history as well as the fact that progress in science oftentimes requires assistance from outsiders. On occasion, the ideology of entrenched mainstream views can blind conventional scientists who in Gerrit Verschuur's words, "know too much". Sometimes, we actually observe science to move forward specifically because scientists refused to do their "astronomy homework".
To give you a feel for how little respect some astrophysicists have for laboratory work, Hannes Alfven would later replicate Birkeland's terrella and attempt to show it to Chapman. Chapman refused to even look at the device. Even as the scientific community shifted its consensus to supporting Birkeland, Chapman would refuse to ever admit that Birkeland was right. I have no doubt that Nereid and regrettably much of the APOD crew will likely follow in Chapman's footsteps. They actually already are, as there already exists volumes of evidence that suggests that we can better understand the universe (whose preferred state of matter is the plasma state) by studying plasmas within the laboratory. In other disciplines of science, at least, this technique is revered as the unassailable "empirical method".
Nereid's claim that Birkeland's terrella rings were too bright for the experiment to suggest an explanation for Saturn's rings is nothing more than a dismissal. We should expect more of somebody who works for NASA at the APOD, in the face of laboratory experimentation (after all, the public is paying scientists to search for the truth, regardless of where that search leads them -- not to prove their preferred theory which they were taught in college).
Were it not for additional evidence supporting the view that the rings are electrical in nature, the dismissal might actually go unnoticed. However, in their quest to minimize electricity's role in space, Nereid and others must also turn a blind eye to the electrical nature of, "inexplicable hot spots on Saturn; 'astonishing' megalightning; the incongruous 'spokes' of the ring system; the plasma torus around the orb of Saturn; Saturn’s radiation belt; the super rotation of Saturn’s atmosphere; Saturn’s X-rays; and (most recently) X-rays from the ring system." (from http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0609 ... To be clear, an electrical cause could be inferred from every single one of these independent Saturnian observations. But, we're told once again that even though we see evidence for electricity throughout the entire Saturnian system, that gravity -- a force which is 10^39 weaker than electricity -- is the dominant force responsible for the rings.
Were Nereid to spend even half the amount of time she spends arguing against the Electric Universe online, learning about the behavior of plasmas within the laboratory (independent of the highly questionable plasma models which she and other astrophysical experts are taught in college) she might come to better respect the empirical method which has brought mankind out of the grip of religion and pseudo-science. - pln2bz, on 11/12/2009, -3/+1Re: "Birkeland's ideas - as presented in that 900+ page tome - are inconsistent with what we now know (the physical processes for ring formation and long-term stability are completely different than what BIrkeland proposed), and inconsistent with even the astronomical observations of the time (or, to put it bluntly, in this case, a blunder, a scientific boo-boo)."
The key here is that laboratory plasma physics is NOT inconsistent with what we now know of Saturn. In fact, all of the recent unexpected observations of Saturn can be explained with fundamental plasma physics principles. That you guys choose to ignore them so that you can propose additional proofs for the cosmology you were taught in college demonstrates a disrespect for laboratory science and a clear failure when it comes to philosophy of science.
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is