No, I absolutely would not agree. In fact I pointed out to Tom that Kristian Birkeland had already answered his question 100+ years ago, in the *very text that Bridgman cited* in a previous post!querious wrote: Hi Michael,
I think it's kinda hypocritical of you to accuse Bridgman of ignoring your submitted comments on his blog when you keep ignoring the most basic question about *any* electric sun model: How is the potential maintained? -Which was the entire point of his blog post.
Wouldn't you agree?
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogI ... 460&bpli=1
Kristian Birkeland himself already pondered, addressed and even answered Tom's question over 100 years ago, but apparently Tom doesn't want to hear the correct answer right from Birkeland's own writings.That is also false. At least one of his suggestions, as well as the discovery of sputtering does change that as I will now demonstrate from the very quote that you personally selected from Birkeland’s work, yet failed to understand or acknowledge:
Even Birkeland recognized these problems (NAPE, pg 668):
Emphasis mine. It has since been confirmed by satellites that indeed there are a surplus of positive ions coming from the sun as well as just electrons, just as he “predicted’ in 1903."It is at present not easy to see how a negative tension should be continually created by the sun in relation to space.
It is of course possible to imagine that a surplus of positive ions is always being carried away from the sun or that negative ions are always being carried towards the sun, and that the negative tension is produced in this manner; and that the balance is maintained to some extent by distinct disruptive discharges, as we have presupposed."
August 10, 2015 at 7:35 PM
Sputtering wasn't particularly well understood in the early 1900's, but it is well understood in 2015. I even provided him with links. The upper atmosphere around the sun ends up acting as the 'target' of the sputtering, as does every particle in interplanetary space.
Furthermore it has already been demonstrated by Themis spacecraft that "magnetic ropes" (current carrying filamentary devices) form between the Sun and the Earth:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... ec_themis/
This "fact" about the known existence of current carrying magnetic ropes that form and which connect the sun to the Earth has been understood and written about by NASA since 2007. Has Mr. Bridgman been living under a rock for the past decade or what?Scientists have been tracking and studying substorms for more than a century, yet these phenomena remained mostly unknown until THEMIS went into action.
Even more impressive was the substorm's power. Angelopoulos estimates the total energy of the two-hour event at five hundred thousand billion (5 x 1014) Joules. That's approximately equivalent to the energy of a magnitude 5.5 earthquake.
Where does all that energy come from? THEMIS may have found an answer:
"The satellites have found evidence for magnetic ropes connecting Earth's upper atmosphere directly to the Sun," says Dave Sibeck, project scientist for the mission at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "We believe that solar wind particles flow in along these ropes, providing energy for geomagnetic storms and auroras."
I've cited several works now where Birkeland actually anticipated Tom's question, he asked himself the very same questions, and he wrote down very specific solutions and answers for Tom that have since been verified by multiple different satellite systems in space.
Birkeland very much expected that the solar wind particles would be composed of electrons, but he predicted that they would contain an equal number of positively charged particles that were being dragged along by the constant flow of electrons, and by the effect that we call 'sputtering' today.
Any actual transfer of positive ion flow into the solar circuit would necessarily be occurring *through the heliosphere* in Birkeland's model. Birkeland's model even allows for electrons from the universe (and any other types of negatively charged cosmic ray, to enter into the solar wind process and interact with it.
What Kristian Birkeland *never* predicted however was the erroneous solar wind diagram produced by Brigman where only electrons are outbound, and only positively charge ions are inbound. That's certainly not what Birkeland predicted. How unprofessional is that?!?!?
Tom has accused *me* of misrepresenting Birkeland's cathode model, when it fact it is Mr. Bridgman who is falsely attributing ideas and claims to Birkeland which he never actually suggested. Birkeland's solar wind diagram has both types of charged particles flowing from the sun, into space and to the heliosphere. Only inside of a double layer at the heliosphere does Birkeland's model have different particles moving in different directions, but not *inside the solar wind process*!
Bridgman's drawing of the solar wind particle flow pattern in Birkeland's cathode solar model is totally FUBAR. When is he going to fix it?