Gee, will wonders never cease. You really are an enigma on many levels. In some ways your understanding is quite good. On other levels you reject Alfven's work on solar theory almost completely. Things never seem to quite add up with you. Thanks for the support on this issue at least.
Enigma is my middle name.
I only reject parts of Alfvén's work which have been shown to be incorrect.
I am not rejecting his "short circuit" in a coronal loop, but I do stress that this has to do with the "unwinding" of the loops, as described in detail by Raadu in section 10 [rul=http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989PhR...178...25R]of this paper[/url] where he discusses both A&C's model for solar flares and the Kaastra model of solar flares (figure 9).
I reject his dismissal of the "frozen-in condition" of the magnetic field, because is has been shown in measurements in space that that condition is well fulfilled for many processes taking place in space. (However I do realize that when he made that comment, the general attitude in space and plasma astrophysics was to unarguably claim frozen-in field, and not look whether the conditions like diffusion time vs. process time were fulfilled).
Sure, but it's a current carrying Bennett Pinch thread driven by the current flow inside the rope, and the *total circuit energy* according to Alfven.
This does not make sense, to say it is a curent carrying Bennett pinch as there cannot be a Bennett pinch if there is no current. The current comes first, the pinch might come later. (you are probably confused by the current carrying and non current carrying double layers, which are indeed different species).
However, the "total circuit energy" (whatever that is, please define this better, but I take it to be like I L
2) is not all there is, there is magnetic tension too in this process which is not included in this "total circuit energy."
The are common in all types of current carrying plasma, from the ordinary plasma ball on my desk, to the plasmas in space. These are indeed "ordinary" processes and very "natural" processes in current carrying plasma.
It is NOT the same as a plasma ball, i.e. the breakdown of a dielectric.
Ok, as long as we're both clear that the "flux" is *electro*magnetic energy, I agree.
I have not got the foggiest what you mean by "*electro*magnetic energy. It is magnetic flux that is talked about, a magnetic flux tube that enters the Earth's magnetosphere. That is why it is called a flux transfer event, the magnetic flux gets transferred from the solar wind to the magnetosphere. That is the definition, and whatever other processes may or may not occur are irrelevant for the definition of said process.
Then the next message:
And? This is where that enigma thing comes in. You should at least acknowledge that he compared the whole thing to the sun.
Well, for one, the strongly magnetized terrella was a model to explain (incorrectly) the rings of Saturn. Only when he reduced the magnetization (loops disappearing, streamers now being the main thing) did he start to say it might be like the sun, in order to find the zodiacal light (which basically is explained by dust and not by "particles in an electrical state that they can reflect sunlight") and then he claims that it looks like the corona.
We do have a "ring around the sun" of a flowing sort. It's called a Parker's Spiral. It's not a "ring" per se, but a "flow pattern" created by the current flowing toward the heliosphere and the rotation of the sun. If anything Birkeland seemed to underestimate the amount of material
Yes/No. That is not what Birkeland claims in the text that I quoted. He talks about emissions of "coronium" and that there is a RING which is also clear in his pictures. In no way at all does he claim on those pages that he is talking about a "solar wind", he is talking about a steady ring of particles around the terrella which he calls the corona.
As he was well aware that corpuscules were flying from the Sun to the Earth, I am sure he would have said that this could be these corpuscules, but he does not. He tries to explain, as an aside, the cororna. And it MUST be a steady ring, because otherwise his further calculations (on the pages that come after the pretty pictures) do not make sense, as he tries to show there how particles that are ejected from the Sun, can reach orbits and then somehow create the planets. That is what it is all about in my opinion.
Well, if might be less than convincing if he wasn't right about their existence in the solar atmosphere. Yes, it could be less than convincing had he been wrong, but the loops at least turn out to be a "successful prediction" of his model.
Existence of what exactly? The loops were not supposed to be the Sun, and as I read it, he never claims that those loops are the Sun, they are his idea about how the rings of Saturn are created.
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