Aug 23, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. Up to this point, the electron had not yet been discovered. Around 1879, the French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1908) reasoned that “solar spots are cavities by which hydrogen and other substances escape from the…
Aug 18, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. The ideas of the Irish-English physicist Osborne Reynolds (1842-1912) marked a further intellectual milestone. In a few little-known articles dated to 1870 and 1871, he suggested that cometary tails are not appendages ‘evaporated’ from…
Aug 16, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. Might the solar corona not just resemble, but actually facilitate the terrestrial aurora? The German baron Carl Ludwig von Reichenbach (1788-1869) professed as much when he posited, in 1851, that the earth’s magnetic field is…
Aug 11, 2016 PART I “The usual fate of attempts to found a cosmo-physical theory upon experimental results is scarcely such as to encourage imitators.” —Eugen Goldstein (1881) ‘Electric sun’ is a vague term, as equivocal as it would be to speak of an ‘electric earth’ or a ‘gravitational sun’….
Mar 29, 2016 That mythology has an appetite for bizarre imagery is hardly a secret. A remarkable motif in the world’s creation myths, rarely even recognised, is that of the ‘edible sky’. A few examples will suffice to give a flavour of the theme. A 19th-century Greek myth concerning the…
Jan 18, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. In a paper published in 1904, the Swedish physicist and chemist Svante August Arrhenius (1859-1927) maintained that radiation pressure accounts for comets’ tails and the build-up of negative charges on “the atmospheres of…
Jan 15, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. Up to this point, the electron had not yet been discovered. Around 1879, the French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1908) reasoned that “solar spots are cavities by which hydrogen and other substances escape from…
Jan 13, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. The ideas of the Irish-English physicist Osborne Reynolds (1842-1912) marked a further intellectual milestone. In a few little-known articles dated to 1870 and 1871, he suggested that cometary tails are not appendages ‘evaporated’ from…
Jan 8, 2016 PART I “The usual fate of attempts to found a cosmo-physical theory upon experimental results is scarcely such as to encourage imitators.” —Eugen Goldstein (1881) ‘Electric sun’ is a vague term, as equivocal as it would be to speak of an ‘electric earth’ or a ‘gravitational…
LEFT: BARON CARL LUDWIG VON REICHENBACH (1788-1869). © RUDOLF HOFFMANN (1820-1882). COURTESY SMITHSONIAN LIBRARIES, WASHINGTON, DC. RIGHT: ARCS AND POLAR STREAMS ON ONE OF BIRKELAND’S MAGNETISED TERRELLAE. © BIRKELAND. Jan 6, 2016 In an earlier post, it was shown that Kristian Birkeland was by no means the first to conduct…
