Hot Neon

[StevenJay]

Scientific truth is a thin layer of frosting on the cupcake of scientific politics.

I really like that one, Mel - especially the "cupcake" reference!

[jjohnson]

NASA increasingly is trying out "talking the talk" (see below) but they sure don't "walk the walk".

The following snippet is from a NASA/Worldbook collaboration I stumbled over when researching some stats about the Sun. All the right beginning words are there, but as the Bard said, it is all for naught, "...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

It is as if a high school student had been told to do some research on plasma and explain what it is and how it works in the cosmos, and she went to the trusty Web and scrounged up some catchy "facts and phrases" about "plasma" and copied it into her word processor and handed it in to the teacher. -and here it is!

From: http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/sun_worldbook.html

The sun provides light, heat, and other energy to Earth. The sun is made up entirely of gas. Most of it is a type of gas that is sensitive to magnetism. This sensitivity makes this type of gas so special that scientists sometimes give it a special name: plasma.

The inside of the sun and most of its atmosphere consist of plasma. Plasma is basically a gas whose temperature has been raised to such a high level that it becomes sensitive to magnetism. Scientists sometimes emphasize the difference in behavior between plasma and other gas. They say that plasma is a fourth state of matter, alongside solid, liquid, and gas. But in general, scientists make the distinction between plasma and gas only when technically necessary.

The essential difference between plasma and other gas is an effect of the temperature increase: This increase has made the gas atoms come apart. What is left -- the plasma -- consists of electrically charged atoms called ions and electrically charged particles called electrons that move about independently.

An electrically neutral atom contains one or more electrons that act as though they form a shell or shells around its central region, its nucleus. Each electron carries a single unit of negative electric charge. Deep inside the atom is the nucleus, which has almost all the atom's mass. The simplest nucleus, that of the most common form of hydrogen, consists of a single particle known as a proton. A proton carries a single unit of positive electric charge. All other nuclei have one or more protons and one or more neutrons. A neutron carries no net charge, and so every nucleus is electrically positive. But a neutral atom has as many electrons as protons. The net electric charge of a neutral atom is therefore zero.

An atom or molecule that comes apart by losing one or more electrons has a positive charge and is called an ion or, sometimes, a positive ion. Most of the atoms inside the sun are positive ions of the most common form of hydrogen. Thus, most of the sun consists of single protons and independent electrons.

The relative amounts of plasma and other gas in a given part of the solar atmosphere depends on the temperature. As the temperature increases, more and more atoms become ionized, and the atoms that are ionized lose more and more electrons. The highest part of the solar atmosphere, called the corona, is strongly ionized. The corona's temperature is usually about 3 million to 5 million K, more than enough to strip away over half the 26 electrons in its iron atoms.

The remainder of this article follows the general practice of scientists by referring to both plasma and other gas simply as gas.

Italics mine for emphasis, and that's how NASA treats "the gas that is so special that it has a special name - plasma" - as just another gas, and hopes that the public cannot reason well enough to discern that this sleight of hand conceals the power and applicability of cosmic plasma physics (not plain ol' MHD) and the inevitable electric currents which accompany it in space.

For people who can mouth "plasma", the lights still don't appear to be coming on anytime soon.