Plasma Double Layer = Local Fluff in Cosmology Lingo!

[WCSally]

Beginning immersion into your theoretical waters: ... Age of Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, Ancient Approaches to Plato's Timaeus, David Bodanis Electric Universe, J.A. Bittencourt Fundamental's of Plasma Physics, The Magnetic Universe by J.B. Zirker

This is what I was able to scrounge up quickly.
If any of it is not up to speed, or if there are other things I should be looking for (and yes the book by David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill Thunderbolts of the Gods is requested at my library, and should be there shortly), please let me know. ... I came over to get a handle on this view point, and want to do a good job of it, so warn me away from biased or skewed viewpoints, please.

Just getting over a lovely(not) abscess of the jaw, so sorry for absentia, I was just not up to much besides hot packs and hot food.

[jjohnson]

Welcome back! and hope you're feeling a lot better by now.

I am unread in Bodanis's and Zirker's books, and as a rule am not in that part of the EU Venn diagram that includes Velikovsky and other ancient studies and mythologies which are enjoyed by many on this Forum. Sorry about that.

I got Bittencourt's book for Christmas, as it is a later edition on plasma physics than Anthony Peratt's, and I wanted to compare them. Bittencourt's book is good basic plasma physics, but it does not seem to be the type of plasma physics, so far, that is cosmological plasma physics as the EU interpretation views it. It sort of seems aimed more at the conventional fusion crowd, wherein they are trying to contain a reaction "like is at the center of the Sun" so as to produce a clean power source on Earth. That hasn't worked for decades, yet, and for me, I have no expectation that it will.

In his preface, Bittencourt writes that it is a "...comprehensive, logical and unified treatment of the fundamentals of plasma physics based on statistical kinetic theory."

In Ch.3, Bittencourt approaches Occurrences of Plasma in Nature, including the Sun and its atmosphere (including a fusion powered interior, not unexpectedly), the solar wind (in which he notes that "the solar magnetic field tends to remain frozen in the streaming plasma due to its very high conductivity", also as a heading in Ch. 12.4; our ionosphere, and plasmas beyond the Solar System, including stars, interstellar space, galaxies, intergalactic space, and far beyond. The far beyond includes interstellar shock waves from supernova explosions, X rays from neutron stars, pulsars and "the remarkable black holes". He points out the steep temperature gradient into the Sun's corona, but has no comment on why this should occur. He hardly mentions the filamentary nature of plasma or that it is the conductor of huge, low density electric currents across huge regions of space, per the EU viewpoint. He has equations for electric conductivity, electric charge density, electric current density, and the electric permittivity of vacuum, but ignores the consequential effects of electric currents in plasmas altogether.

He notes that this is not a complete treatment of plasma, and his perspective is more or less the consensus viewpoint as to the impact of plasmas on astronomical and cosmological events and phenomena and energy transfer between galaxies and galaxy clusters, covered lightly with a lot of missing information and several mistakes in adopting fluid dynamics and "frozen-in" nomenclature. In chapter 15 he discusses magnetohydrodynamic waves in plasma in the context of propagation of very low frequency waves in a highly conducting fluid (despite the fact that plasma is not a fluid state of matter, being neither gas nor liquid, and obeying electromagnetic dynamics in its behavior), and Alfvén warned in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech not to use electrohydrodynamics for plasmas in space. He did that himself, at first, but recanted, so he should know, since he invented the subject.

Chapter 4 is perhaps the most revealing, in terms of where students may end up working after mastering plasma physics, and that is Applications of Plasma Physics. His subjects include controlled thermonuclear fusion, the magnetohydrodynamic generator, plasma propulsion, and other plasma devices. Eric Lerner's work on controlled fusion energy apparently comes too late as the book was published in 2004, but there is not even an illustration of the plasma focus device or how it works, nor of lightning or arc welding or fluorescent bulbs or the plasma torch or Saturn's and Jupiters and Earth's auroras, and so on.

It is a well-illustrated book in terms of diagrams of vectors and spiralling trajectories and the like. I am not a physicist, but the book appears on the face of it to be clear, and is probably a good introduction to the science in some ways but it is not usable, except as detailed background understanding, when it comes to explaining what we see going on in the universe at large.

It has a good discussion of the pinch effect, but no link to what might compress the tenuous plasma in interstellar space into a dense spherical population of condensed matter in the evolution of, say, a star, or a planetary nebula's typical shape. There are no photographs apparent in a quick thumb-through of its 650+ pages. Photos are probably considered irrelevant to a largely theoretical and mathematically oriented discussion of plasmas, as they show real stuff.

For a better understanding of the type of plasma physics which to me seems to constitute one of the main legs upon which the EU paradigm rests, there is no contemporary comparison to Dr. Anthony Peratt's Physics of the Plasma Universe. I hope you can find it in a nearby library; it is out of print and apparently very rare these days, judging by the asking prices quoted by rare book dealers. I hope that study of Bittencourt's book may help me understand some of the basics a little better, but for sheer explanation of how the physics works in the real universe Peratt's book is the better introduction by far.

All this is my own personal judgment after reading both books (less intensely in the case of Bittencourt's text, of course, as I've had it less than a month), and none of this is meant to disparage or to promote sales of either book. What one reads is a matter of personal taste and choice. From what I have learned of the EU from the publications and forum on the Thunderblogs web site, though, the Bittencourt book is cast as very mainstream and narrow in its application, and doesn't seem to look outside past the math and derivations, to smell the Rose Nebula!

Arp's book Seeing Red or Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies are also good; Lucy Jago's Northern Lights on Kristian Birkeland's auroral studies, and Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics are in my small EU library, too. Don Scott's Electric Sky and Talbott &Thornhill's Electric Universe are, too. There is another recent book which discusses economics and its practitioners, but it's also a perfect mirror of dogmatic astrophysicists and how astronomy and cosmology are practiced today, too. A recurring theme in these troubled times seems to be the stagnation of scientific progress and understanding, and a dogmatic, instutionalized class of professionals who think that they have the knowledge market cornered. Read The Black Swan if you like humor and unwavering exposure of ignorant people by someone who knows more about risk and variability than anyone I've ever read. Eric Lerner's The Big Bang Never Happened is good reading, too. Several of these should be available in paperback, if you are acquiring them for yourself. They are surely in a good public library, except for physics texts. My next buy will probably be Alfvén's Cosmic Plasma by Springer-Verlag.

[mharratsc]

I wonder how many other 'plasma physicists' like this Bittencourt fellow are out there that are NOT members of the IEEE, and are only theoreticians and not laboratory scientists... :\

[WCSally]

Thanks!!
Dr. Anthony Peratt's Physics of the Plasma Universe is coming to the library shortly.

I do appreciate the list of books! And a general perspective on the authors.

One of the things I have found so wonderful about The Old Books (esp. Velikovsky) is --- he goes into full detail on things that are not brought up today because they have no answers for them.
The Comet Typhon, the day the Earth did not turn (and what that might have meant for the oceans --this would have had big time electric effects as well, right?); the rock fields of the Harras of Arabia (enormous stretches of scorched stones), .... and much more!!

How much energy it takes to evaporate a ton of water out of the ocean and into the atmosphere -- to make an ton of ice on the ice sheet ... (have you heard about that angle lately?) ...

Tyndall "...a quantity of heat was needed that would raise to the melting point a mass of iron five times the mass of the ice, ..." Pg 131 Earth in Upheaval By substituting hot iron for cold ice there is an appreciation of the amount of energy necessary to put that much water vapor into the air. .... Do our climate guys think like this? ... likely not ...
But maybe this is some idea of where the great Atlantic ridge came from? Oceans this hot may have sterilized any life we could have inherited from Mars? .. If we got their ocean from some unfortunate Mars impact? ...

That layer of red in the sand and silt and mixed with all the great piles of disarticualted bones found all over the whole Earth ... Iron and Nickle!! -- ???
Do we now know (from the Rovers) if we inherited the Ocean of Mars? Does it's signature match the red sand found in the destruction layer around the Earth? Mars looks like it got hit by a cosmic fast ball which almost split it in two. Perhaps disarticulated it's quartz core?

The upthrust mountains are also discussed, it was a very, very actionable time on the planet and one wonders how it really could have happened!! It is mind boggling! This was not in any of many years of schooling!!

All in all ... If you have not taken the Velikovsky magical mystery tour, you owe your mind the enchanting pleasure of the short trip found in his published works ... it is some of the more fascinating reading I have come across.

[WCSally]

Hello,

Has anybody noticed that the global temperatures seem to correlate to when we entered the local cloud?

Greenland temperatures over the last 130,000 years


Local Cloud

The Solar System entered the Local Interstellar Cloud at some time between 44,000 and 150,000 years ago and is expected to remain within it for another 10,000 to 20,000 years.

Coincidence?

Tom

However, I just heard that one of the Greenland Glaciers has sped up to 5 feet per day! That is racing for a glacier!

So this beam (of as yet undetermined origin) acting on this double dense outer plasma (outside the heliopause) .. (?) ~might be warming all of our solar system? Could it be sending in extra particles? .. Could it be magnetically aligned to our protective bubble in such a way as to allow particle accumulation (like the Earth is doing now)? ...

ACE had this for today .. interesting, but I lack the background (any comments?)
http://www.srl.caltech.edu/ACE/ACENews_curr.html
... and I wonder if anyone would recommend an HDF reader? for this data? The file from here looked odd: http://www.hdfgroup.org/

[WCSally]

The capacitor effect should happen across the heliosheath DL as well, on like an eleven year cycle or something.

So .. if this is the case, what is the "driving current" or current source for the 11 year cycle? Has it been determined (or is it awaiting publication before coming to attention on the web? --in which case I will wait. )?

This is such a novel view of the universe and how it works, I am slightly off kilter, and totally amazed!

And yet, it seems to have some very basic merits! Not conversant yet, but I'm getting a better idea of it.