Beats me. I realize now however that there is an intentional self defense mechanism at play. It's actually pretty incredible the lengths that astronomers will go to in an effort to avoid even discussing the overall electrical properties of the plasma of the solar system, let alone a galaxy, or a supercluster or a moving filamentary structure of flowing galaxies and clusters.nick c wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 4:38 pmEuphemisms are a way of dealing with unpleasantness without having to face the implications.Michael Mozina wrote:Astronomers end up speaking a completely new language of their own creation that is based on trying to eliminate the need for acknowledging electrical current in plasma
Definition: Solar Wind.... "The outflow of charged particles from the solar corona into space."
Definition: Electric Current....."the movement of electrically charged particles, atoms, or ions
How has this equivalence and its implications escaped modern Astronomy?
It's pretty obvious even with the Parker solar Probe folks that the term "magnetic switchback" is the "accepted" term to avoid dealing with changes in current flow direction.
Their model is *so* overly simplistic as to be painful. They have to "dumb it down" to magnetism alone, lest their whole dark universe come crumbling down upon them, and they'd be forced to embrace circuit theory in space as Alfven suggested.
At the macroscopic level, there are effectively *three* fields that have an effect on the movement of plasma, and dust and objects embedded in plasma, gravity (however you choose to define it (GR/Newton/Future QM version of choice), the magnetic field and the electric field. It's really just an *electromagnetic* field, but astronomers insist on ignoring the electrical parts entirely so they need a new language to try to describe it.
Think about it for a moment. Here you have a room full of 21st century physicists cannot simulate in the lab something as rudimentary as a sustained planetary aurora or a solar corona. Birkeland did that much in his lab in the very early 20th century.
Terms like "magnetic reconnection" and "magnetic switchbacks" give astronomers an acceptable (to themselves) way of attempting to discuss charged particle trajectories, but alas they refuse to embrace the fact that it's the particle movement and current alignment which drives the magnetic field configurations in the plasma.
Any hope I had that the Parker Solar Probe might beat the Europeans to embracing reality went away when I read the term 'magnetic switchback' in their first round of papers.
The only way that we have here on Earth to heat plasma to millions of degrees, and sustain it at very high temperatures over hours and days is with electrical current and a lot of it. For whatever reason however, astronomers look a solar surface that is full of "magnetic ropes" (AKA Bennett Pinches in plasma according to Alfven), and they refuse to embrace the electrical aspects of the process, so attempt to dumb it all down to magnetism alone. Astronomers and astrophysicists *still* can't simulate the "easy" things (aurora,corona) with magnetic reconnection yet in a real lab experiment.
Go figure.