I hope they'll accept my letter to the editor for either publication or as the premise for a new article... I think it's well enough sourced, though I did forget a link to Birkeland's book. C'est la vie! So, hopefully they won't have any knee-jerk reactions to it.I wrote:To whom it may concern,
I have been following space news for the better part of two years now, and have learned quite a bit. I was quite impressed to see the high quality of two recent NASA press releases relating to the discovery by THEMIS of "Magnetic Flux Ropes" connecting the Earth's auroras directly to the sun:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/themi ... ights.html
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008 ... spring.htm
However, I have noted that they have apparently failed to make two critical connections:
1) The term "magnetic flux ropes" obfuscates the essential electrical nature of the interaction through the highly conductive, rarefied interplanetary medium (in the plasma state, as is 99% of the visible matter in the universe; not simply a "hot gas" as many press releases have mischaracterized it). As demonstrated by James Clerk Maxwell, dynamic magnetic fields have their genesis in dynamic net flows of like charged particles (electric currents). Alfvén likewise admonished that ignoring the currents that drive magnetic fields in plasma (field lines cannot be "frozen in" to plasma, as demonstrated in the lab) would set the science back some several decades.
2) The NASAs press releases also fail to acknowledge the "prior art" of and the intellectual inheritance from the pioneering scientist Kristian Birkeland, in the form of his monograph "Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition 1902-1903," published circa 1908, wherein he predicted precisely these kinds of (in his terms) "pencil" cathode rays directly linking the Earth electrically to the sun along magnetic field lines. In fact, his predictions were confirmed by the TRIAD satellite in 1973 when it detected large scale current sheets from and to space (currents must flow in a closed circuit). Hence, field-aligned currents now bear his name ("Birkeland currents").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland_current
It is my firm belief that acknowledging these two unassailable facts will put these new discoveries into their proper context and allow for a fuller understanding of the solar-terrestrial interaction and its scientific history.
As well, a tacit acknowledgment that electrical goings on do in fact occur and do in fact also have significance in the sparse plasma permeating the voids between ponderable bodies in space (akin to the contents of a vacuum tube or glow discharge tube) will allow for the opening of new vistas in space science research and a fuller understanding of the cosmos from an electrical standpoint.
Repectfully submitted,
Michael Gmirkin
Cheers,
~Michael Gmirkin