Space Plasma Physics Book Reviews

[orrery]

I was searching through ebay for books on Space Plasma Physics and ended up with the following listing:

http://books.shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw= ... m270.l1313

Has anyone read or recommend any of these books? I've already read Electric Sky, The Big Bang Never Happened, Thunderbolts, Electric Universe. I was hoping to find something more textbook than monogram.

[nick c]

hi orrery,
Here is a (general) plasma text book available on line.
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/plasma/380.pdf

Nick

[jjohnson]

Good for you for doing your homework, orerry. Here are some that I use as references and self-education as best I can. Not all are concerned with plasma physics from a strictly EU perspective, but never rule out learning useful stuff at the hands of a good mainstream physicist.

Besides Peratt's classic Physics of the Plasma Universe, which seriously gets into plasma physics and its cosmic implementations but is now nearly unaffordable when it can be found, Paul Bellan's Fundamentals of Plasma Physics is excellent, but its applications are not typically directly linked to cosmic phenomena. His plasma physics lab at Cal Tech has a vacuum chamber in some ways like a Terrella, but he uses it to study solar filament and prominence phenomena. look here: http://ve4xm.caltech.edu/Bellan_plasma_page/ Good photos of that stuff, but not found in his textbook. I also have J.A. Bittencourt's book with the same title but find it less satisfying, with the usual implied emphasis on contained hydrogen fusion experiments. Neither book extends a whole lot into the electrical side of the plasma physics, and they tend to overlook Alfvén's warning about that omission.

Fundamentals of Cosmic Electrodynamics by Boris V. Sumov is a textbook you want to have on your shelf. It gives the processes and the math you'll need to describe and understand a wide range of phenomena, such as 16.1 Models for flare energy and release. The Russians are great physicists and mathematicians, and think very deeply about these subjects, IMHO.

A rather difficult book, translated and published by Oxford Press, is Physics of Strongly Coupled Plasma by Vladimir Fortov, Igor Iakobov, and Alexey Khrapak. So what? you ask about strongly coupled plasma. Along with the usual Earth-bound energy-generation interests outlined in the Preface, the authors note, "Modern progress in understanding the structure and evolution of giant planets in the solar system, as well as astrophysical objects, is largely based on the ideas and results from the fields of highly compressed plasmas... Along with pragmatic interest in high-pressure plasmas, purely fundamental interest is gaining momentum, because it is in this exotic state that the major part of matter in the universe finds itself. In fact, estimations show that about 95% of matter (without taking dark matter into account) are the plasmas of stars, pulsars, black holes and giant planets of the solar system..." Okay, they said black holes; I can't deny that. But they don't discuss that subject in the book.

The Magnetic Universe by J. B. Zirker is all about magnetic fields and their pervasiveness at all scales in the cosmos. It is "consensus" in the sense that the electrical side is largely overlooked, but from the perspective that you can imagine that his descriptions always have electrical currents underlying the effects he describes, it is instructive. A second book along this general line, not a textbook, is Nearest Star, the Surprising Science of our Sun, by astrophysicist Leon Golub who works with NASA's solar TRACE experiment and Jay M. Pasachoff, the Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College. It devotes only a passing reference to electrical forces (in the discussion of nuclear forces and fusion, which is how they view the Sun as being powered).

I also recommend The Virtue of Heresy and also The Static Universe by South African radio-astronomer Hilton Ratcliffe. He doesn't mind calling a spade a spade if he sees it that way, and he is also well known in alternative cosmology circles. Look athttp://www.hiltonratcliffe.com.

Miscellaneous recommendations; On Being Certain, Robert A. Burton, M.D. The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb. QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard Feynman. Cosmic Plasma, Hannes Alfvén. The Trouble With Physics, Lee Smolin. The Un-Unified Field, Miles Mathis. The Big Bang Never Happened, Eric Lerner. Seeing Red, and Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies, Halton Arp. Electromagnetics, and Physics for Engineering and Science, both in the Schaum's Outline Series from McGraw-Hill, in paperback only.

Good reading!

Jim

[jjohnson]

Here's another source for a free downloadable PDF book on plasma physics (general):
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309109434

Jim

[orrery]

jjohnson, I started reading your book but had to stop when I read on page 5

"Plasma is found almost everywhere on Earth and in space; indeed only the invisible dark matter is more abundant."

Had to exit out at that point.

[jjohnson]

orrerry - I know. Sometimes I have to thicken up my skin a little and not worry too much about what someone is writing about at one particular place in a book. The point of reading is to absorb as much as you can without being too mis-led, and then sit down at leisure and digest it critically, and form your own best opinions.

Sometimes I have to just laugh. "Dark matter is more abundant? How much more abundant has it been observed to be? Bwa-ha-ha-ha!!!"

I read through a difficult plasma physics text, and try to get the sense of what is being laid out from the author's surrounding text, even when I can't decipher the math. If I can de-cipher it, or can stick in values and figure out what is happening, I still rely on the writer to spell it out. Sometimes I don't particularly like what is being spelled out, but usually these writers are trying to explain something in a way that they believe is correct and convincing and that supports their viewpoint. Just understand that it IS their viewpoint, and it's wholly up to you if you want to adopt it, to only like part of it, or to decide it's not what you were looking for after all.

Sometimes, on the mathy stuff, you can look at the form of the equations, and see if something gets bigger or smaller as you vary some other part of the equation. If there are exponents, you know that there are logarithmic or power law relationships, which are larger in scale (or way smaller) and likely more complicated, than a simple algebraic equation without even a denominator. Can you work the equation? maybe not. But you can see that if you increase B, the magnetic field value, thus and such happens to, say, the radius of gyration of the electron in that field. Little glimmers like that here and there will help you become more confident about looking at the equations, too, and start seeing causes and effects spelled out symbolically. If you are already good at math, you are steps ahead of me!

[orrery]

Physics of the Plasma Universe by Perratt available on scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/42698942/Phys ... a-Universe

[jjohnson]

Who are running the SCRIBD website? Are they not subject to copyrights? Just curious.

[orrery]

Who are running the SCRIBD website? Are they not subject to copyrights? Just curious.

Dunno who runs it. I have been studying the one in scribe for a few months now and had thought it was already linked here. After checking up on thread here noticed that it was only referenced but not linked to so posted it here.

Scribe seems pretty legit though

[jjohnson]

Yeah; well, that 1992 copyright notice posted on the inside page by Springer-Verlag looks pretty legit, too.

It could be argued without much merit that Scribd is just trying to get as much material posted onto the web as possible in the hopes of defeating copyrights by sheer volume of (illegal) downloads. Of course, they say that they don't do that, that they are a law-abiding site, etc. That this may test out to be false could be determined by asking, "why don't they just look at the inside page where the publisher conventionally will print their copyright notice, date, edition, etc.?" Too busy to do that?

It could also be argued that this particular book is out of print (Springer only printed 847 copies of it, total; I asked and got the answer from their New York office), so there is no harm in circulating it on the web. Tell the rare book collectors that doing that won't decrease its potential value.

The best argument is that the book is not available to most who could use it as an educational tool. I'd almost buy into that, as I would like to see every astronomer get a copy and actually read it critically. But only after the copyright runs out. The web sure is challenging laws and social norms at the same time that it is freeing up people to learn and understand in ways never before so freely (so to speak) available. Let's hope more good than harm is accomplished thereby.

Jim

[orrery]

Sadly it seems now that Publisher "Springer Science+Business Media" is buying up all of the "Physics of the Plasma Universe" of Anthony Perratt and have been going on a campaign to remove it from sites like Scribd. They've even jacked up the prices on Amazon to almost $700 to buy the book. They obviously are trying to stop the development of Plasma Cosmology.

[jjohnson]

How did you discover that Springer is trying to buy up all the extant copies of Peratt's book? Are they advertising for it, or what? I'd like to hear that from the horse's mouth or see it on their letterhead.

The book has become rare, and now often fetches "rare book" prices, because Springer Verlag only printed 847 copies. I know this because I wrote them an e-mail about a year or so ago and got a polite answer from their New York publishing department. This makes the book scarce for those who might get the most use out of it, and it remains in the hands of libraries, collectors and rare book dealers, whose goal is to extract as much profit as possible from the sole fact of its being rare, on each successive sale. What's inside is usually of little interest to the rare book dealer. It's what they can put on the asking price sticker.

Why would Springer be doing something like that? THey are publishers, not rare book collectors. I cannot see that they would bow to the demands of someone else to "get these pesky things off the market", especially as they are not involved, in their publishing and distribution business, in the used or the rare book markets. Very curious, if what you claim is accurate.

Jim

[orrery]

Just that all of the ebook sites have been hit with requests by the publisher to take the book down. I have managed to find it on a very unknown ebook site but am keeping that to myself just in case. Anyone that would like to know where to find just send me a message.