Magnetic Reconnection in Plasma - Stanford Solar Astro Site

[Jarvamundo]

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/magnet ... smsun.html

One important aspect of magnetism on the Sun is magnetic reconnection, which can be better understood if we first examine what plasma is. Plasma is a state of matter occurring at high temperatures where electrons are not bound to the nucleus. As a result, ions and electrons are free to move about the material. The free movement of charges makes plasma highly conductive, thereby causing magnetic field lines to be "frozen" into the plasma.
In reconnection, fluid motions in plasma bring together two "frozen" and oppositely directed magnetic field lines. These field lines then reconnect into a lower energy state. As we found out in the Magnet Acrobatics activity, magnetic fields can store energy. Energy is stored in reconnection when the "frozen" field lines become distorted as a result of fluid motion. Reconnection reduces the amount of distortion, which in turn causes energy to be released. This can be illustrated in the following activity with rubber bands.

Reconnecting Rubber Bands - Since magnetic reconnection occurs in plasmas, which cannot be feasibly produced in a high school lab, we will have to be content with an activity using rubber bands to model magnetic reconnection. This activity requires two people.

hmmm... oops Faraday and Maxwell ain't guna be happy...

Stanford need Scott (from the Donald Scott Bridgman rebuttal)

The major point, that Bridgman and most other astrophysicists ignore, is that in order to have a
magnetic field, there has to be an associated electric current. If that current is abruptly
interrupted, the magnetic field quickly collapses, resulting in an explosive ejection of whatever
matter constituted the plasma. There is no such mechanism as ‗reconnection‘ – neither in free
space, in magnetized plasma, nor anywhere else.

So D-Scott went to NASA to talk last year... Stanford this year?

Hang on wait... we sure he went to NASA? http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... 31aug_mms/ (jk)

Was the Goddard buildings yeah? http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/new ... netic.html

sheesh

[jjohnson]

Good find on the MMS mission, Alex. Not too widely publicized, although I read their Marshall solar site regularly.

I predict it will be good to read of their findings re "magnetic reconnection". I predict it would be even better for them to read Alfven's "Cosmic Plasma". As these spacecraft take years. sometimes decades, to design, fund and build, you can bet that it would be "too big an experiment to cancel" at this point. I prefer that they go out and do their research, although how they plan to "see" field lines "reconnecting" is beyond me, as you cannot see field lines at all except on something designed or drawn by humans.

The other thing that might be good would be for them to conclude from the evidence they obtain (assuming that such a conclusion will be possible from whatever it is they are collecting) that maybe those cool reconnection events are just collapsing magnetic fields themselves, and not the stripey little field lines that mark the boundaries of equipotential surfaces.

JJ

[CTJG 1986]

Rubber bands - The gravitational astrophysicists' "empirical evidence" of theoretical(non-existing) plasma activity...

All joking aside I doubt any amount of talking on Scott's part will convince these kinds of people of the truth as they are not real scientists as proven by the fact they have so called "scientific beliefs" that are ingrained in them from childhood.

Only a few of such individuals I have met have even been capable of understanding the contradictory nature of having "scientific beliefs", forget about getting them to give them up and start engaging in real science and discovering the reality that so far has evaded them. And they get really angry when you point out that having "beliefs" is anti-scientific in nature as science is about understanding empirical facts and not having "beliefs" in anything.

The only thing I believe in is the Empirical system of scientific discovery - which tells me magnetic "reconnection" does not exist. Evidence is almost completely meaningless to the mainstream abstract mathematicians that call themselves scientists these days however so the concept of empiricism is lost on most of them and as such I expect to continue hearing of magnetic "reconnection" from the mainstream community for a long time to come.

And yes I know I am "bashing" on them quite a bit in this post but in this case you can't deny they deserve it, can you?

Edit: "I prefer that they go out and do their research..."

I agree with you on that to some extent, the problem I have is that they most likely will misinterpret the findings of their research based on their preconceived "belief" systems and end up leading science further down the wrong path. Then again maybe their research will lead to them finally seeing the proverbial light and realizing the error of their ways, but I doubt it.

[Jarvamundo]

Any freshman who has studied maxwells can prove this BS wrong.

MIT now makes this knowledge freely available to the world of inquisitive laymans, with detailed in your face experiments.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02E ... /index.htm

The detail, maths and empirical experiments of magnetic field collapse are here.

If these astronomers have really proved re-connection can occur, they will have created a monopole... they will make ALOT of cash from that discovery.... and we'd all be riding around on hover boards...

It gets better/worse... check out the animation here http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/mov ... _burst.mov

Look at what the sun does to those magnetic rubber bands!

[jjohnson]

The NASA sun and CME depiction is just a fairy tale. If you look closely and step through it, it looks like the simulation treats the magnetic fields as surfaces of revolution to indicate the 3-D surfaces of equal magnetic strength. That's really good, so far, and actually more intuitive than a flat 2-D representation needed on, say, paper.

But then they show how this surface sort of does a flip and turns itself inside out, sort of like taking a T-shirt off over your head and ending up with it inside out. That works fine with a T-shirt because it has an opening at the lower end, which can slip over your head (which is the Earth!).

It is this open lower end which is the 3-D analogy to snipped or "disconnected" rubber bands. Magnetic field lines or surfaces of equal strength or constant polarity always have to close somewhere, on a charged object opposite in polarity to the one where they were initiated, or at infinity if there is no "nearby" charge on which to "land". Magnetic surfaces are "closed bags" They can, as a whole, shrink down to zero value (slowly or suddenly and catastrophically) or expand as an increasing charge field moves the location of that potential farther from the charged source, but you can't put holes in them. Magnetic fields are analogous to "smooth" (differentiable) curved surfaces in calculus. No abrupt disconnects or infinitely small-radius changes of direction, in their domain. Gauss's Law says flux in equals flux out.

That said, here's a simple hands-on "lab test" of the rubber band analogy. Take a bundle of rubber bands or cords. This could be closed loops, for the most realistic simulation, as magnetic field lines are said to extend from one pole to an opposite pole, either on the same charged body (a single bar magnet, for example) or on a separate bar magnet's opposite pole, a slightly more complex field set-up. Let's clamp or apply a large bead of glue at a point where all the rubber bands are fixed immovably together, passing through one area. Then each loop of rubber band is a closed loop, each loop passing through the glued point. If you were working with two or more magnets you just have more glue beads at fixed positions along these loops where all the rubber bands pass through the immobile clamping glob, to simulate the field "lines".

Now apply force to the rubber bands to stretch them out (compressive forces don't work very well on rubber bands - they just deform and squash as they try to keep the impressed force reaction inside the long axis and fail at it). So pull them -tensile force - until one or more break and snap apart to release the tension. The flexible rubber "magnetic field lines" have just disconnected. Ta-da-a-a! But wait; there's more!

Now try to reconnect them, and reconstitute a closed-loop "magnetic field" with your model that you can pull and stretch again as nicely as when you started. Rubber cement? Not as strong as the original. Epoxy? Too rigid and may not stick, or is globby and ugly and won't take bending very well. Maybe splints? -Or whip the ends together with finer rubbber bands and tie off the whipping, as in a fisherman's splice?? Use square knots to reconnect?

As long as they don't break, rubber bands might be analogous to what happens within a field, but this is a distressed analogy because if a band is broken, the model has failed and has two discontinuous ends flapping in the solar wind.

The funny thing here is that, instead of using a flawed mathematical approach to justify or simulate a theory about how a physical thing works, the scientists use a flawed mechanical analogy (rubber bands) to try to show how their erroneous theoretical construct of magnetic field lines works. Not to mention sophisticated "movies" to "prove it".

Sir, I think there's a flaw in the ointment.

[MGmirkin]

Any freshman who has studied maxwells can prove this BS wrong.

MIT now makes this knowledge freely available to the world of inquisitive laymans, with detailed in your face experiments.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02E ... /index.htm

The detail, maths and empirical experiments of magnetic field collapse are here.

In addition, feel free to poke around in this class' web pages:

(Classical Electromagnetism - An Intermediate Level Course)
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/e ... tures.html

A few favorites:

(Magnetic Monopoles?)
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/e ... ode35.html

...the statement that magnetic fields are solenoidal, or that nabla * B = 0, is equivalent to the statement that there are no magnetic monopoles.

In fact, permanent magnetism is generated by electric currents circulating on the atomic scale, so this type of magnetism is not fundamentally different to the magnetism generated by macroscopic currents.

In conclusion, all steady magnetic fields in the Universe are generated by circulating electric currents of some description. Such fields are solenoidal: that is, they never begin or end, and satisfy the field equation nabla * B = 0. This, incidentally, is the second of Maxwell's equations. Essentially, it says that there is no such thing as a magnetic monopole.

(Helmholtz's Theorem)
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/e ... ode37.html

steady electric and magnetic fields cannot generate themselves. Instead, they have to be generated by stationary charges and steady currents. So, if we come across a steady electric field we know that if we trace the field-lines back we shall eventually find a charge. Likewise, a steady magnetic field implies that there is a steady current flowing somewhere. All of these results follow from vector field theory (i.e., from the general properties of fields in three-dimensional space), prior to any investigation of electromagnetism.

Best,
~Michael Gmirkin

[scotty]

Trace the lines back to find a charge.
In this case some rain drops.

-----------------------------
Scotty.