We know all of this - you are just being stupid as usual Sol88.
We know that what
Albert Einstein gave science was a better understanding of the
universe.
Kristan Birkeland gave science a better understanding of plasma, aurora and some insights into the solar wind.
Something to be careful about here.
Card-carrying members of the EU cult have been engaged, for some time now, in an intensive campaign to re-write history wrt Birkeland and plasma physics.
The most outrageous lies concern crediting Birkeland with the discovery of a wide range of plasma behaviours, to which he attached names that are identical to contemporary terms. As this is quite easily shown to be ridiculous, it seems fairly rare that an EU cultist makes these claims (though those, like Sol88, who seem to be proud of their gross ignorance, may be exceptions): the modern terms are simply not found in any of Birkeland's writings.
The less outrageous distortions and misrepresentations are just as insidious, because they take away from Birkeland his actual, significant achievements and replace them with mythical and wholly unrealistic prescience.
Take 'plasma' as an example.
While various aspects of plasmas (contemporary meaning) were discovered in the late 1800s, Irving Langmuir is regarded as the founder of plasma physics, in the 1920s. Why? Partly because he was the first to use the term 'plasma', but mostly because he was the first to explicitly describe the key behaviours, and thus define what we, today, mean by the term.
Birkeland had passed the second Chandrasekhar limit by then.
However, Birkeland, like many physicists of his day, did have some understanding of some physical mechanisms and processes that we today recognise as playing a role in some aspects of plasma physics; further, he had some insights into others that later proved to be accurate (and, of course, some insights that later proved to be wildly inaccurate). In a broader picture, this is not at all exceptional; for example, think of the multiple aspects of what we today call relativity that were known - sometimes well-known - before Einstein published his paper on Special Relativity (in some ways EU cultists are like the crackpots who claim that relativity was *really* discovered Lorentz, or Poincaré, or ...).
Many EU cultists clearly are clueless when it comes to understanding physics, and some are quite open about this (e.g. Tresman); however, that hasn't stopped them making up plausible sounding explanations and infecting Wikipedia entries with them (and, as tusenfem has pointed out, a certain, totally stupid, NASA PR just made life easier for them) - look at how "Mgmirkin" was able to combine his superficial understanding of the physics with his EU love affair and the NASA PR to come up this total nonsense (in
the Wiki entry on Birkeland current; bold added):
In 2007, NASA's THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) project "found evidence of magnetic ropes connecting Earth's upper atmosphere directly to the sun," [9][10] noting "that solar wind particles flow in along these ropes, providing energy for geomagnetic storms and auroras," thus reconfirming Birkeland's model of solar-terrestrial electrical interaction.
.
There's a certain irony here; Peratt - who clearly does know his onions when it comes to plasma physics - in his 1985 Sky&Telescope article was careful to credit Birkeland with the work he actually did, but also to point out the only modest correspondence with what we understand today (well, in 1985):
Peratt said:
[Birkeland] then shot clouds of electrons toward this simulated Earth to produce a light phenomenon that looked like the aurora. (We now know that the solar wind also consists of positive ions, as well as negative electrons).
Birkeland could see that bunches of electrons curved down towards and around the Earth's poles. While the actual process is somewhat more complicated than he envisioned [...], his results were surprisingly good.
.
In closing, another irony: but for M Mozina's thread, I'd've not read Birkeland's giant, 994-page tome (Michael provided a link to it, in an attempt to make his case; of course, all it did was demonstrate just how little he actually understood, of physics or of Birkeland's work!), and from reading that material, I came to realise just how grossly people like Mgmirkin have distorted both history and the physics of the early 1900s.
Dude topped himself from the ridicule he received from his peers.
but that's what they did wasn't it, reconfirmed it (his prediction)
?