I have not been able to find any record of Birkeland ever having explicitly modeled the Sun in any published paper. When pressed, Mozina finally provides us with a link to an article in the New York Times, a review by a reporter of a public lecture given by Birkeland. I have read the article. Here is a full, complete and exhaustive list of elements in the model, which Mozina claims to be documented by this article.
- The sun carries a net negative electric charge.
- The sun is at a potential of approximately 600,000,000 Volts.
- The sun emits both negatively and positively charged particles.
There you have it, the full and complete Birkeland model of the sun, as published by the New York Times. Mozina presents a detailed model of the sun for which he gives Birkeland full credit. The electric universe websites, like
Thunderbolts, likewise credit Birkeland as the founder of their electric sun model. However, there is no published indication I can find of Birkeland ever presenting such a model of the sun. I suspect that Mozina cannot find any published record either, else he would have presented us with that science publication, rather than a newspaper article. If someone is lying here, it certainly seems far more likely to be Mozina than Gee Mack, considering the cold trail of this "Birkeland model". I think it's just Mozina and the other electric sun crackpots trying to borrow Birkeland's scientific credibility, since they have none of their own.
We notice constant reference to Birkeland, and his alleged model of the sun. Perhaps it is a good idea to say a few words about who Birkeland was, for the lurking crowd. Olaf Kristian Bernhard Birkeland was born in Kristiania, then the capital of Norway, on 13 December 1867 and died in Tokyo, Japan, on 15 June 1917. During the course of his career he was first to explain the true cause of auroral phenomena as streams of charged particles emitted by the sun, which we now recognize as the solar wind. He properly predicted the existence of electric currents aligned with the earth's magnetic field ("field aligned currents") which are now called by the proper name
Birkeland currents (note that properly used, "Birkeland current" refers
only to the field aligned currents in Earth's magnetic field that feed the aurorae and does not apply to field aligned currents in general). His theory of upper atmosphere electric current systems is his most important and most enduring scientific accomplishment.
Birkeland concentrated on aurorae and geomagnetic disturbances from about 1895 - 1917. Much of his work stems from the Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition, 1901-1902, which was documented in an extensive 2-volume report published in 1908 (volume 1) and 1913 (volume 2). During about 1903-1906 he concentrated on applied technology to raise money to fund his geomagnetic research, which remained his primary interest. He is credited with 88 scientific papers and 3 books, the largest of the books being about 800 pages over 2 volumes of the polar expedition. All of his work appears to concentrate on what we now call space physics, geomagnetism and geoelectricity. I can find no evidence of Birkeland ever publishing anything that could be considered a "model" of the sun. So it appears to me to be an adventure in false advertising at best, to credit Birkeland with the solar model presented by Mozina.
See
Kristian Birkeland's pioneering investigations of geomagnetic disturbances; Egeland & Burke, History of Geo- and Space Sciences ("an open access journal"), Vol 1, 13-24, 12 Apr 2010. I had no problem downloading the PDF. Most of what I have put in the previous two paragraphs I lifted from this biography.
Mozina constantly references Birkeland as providing the definitive science of the sun. But note that Birkeland died 93 years ago, and most of his relevant work was done at or before 100 years ago. The later years of Birkeland's life overlap with the early work of Einstein and the origin of special and general relativity, in 1905 & 1915 respectively. But quantum mechanics really did not flourish until about 1930, mid 1920's at the earliest. It was not until the 1930's that the process of nuclear fusion was finally worked out, as a power source for stars. And the discipline of plasma physics really does not become recognizable until the detailed studies of ionized gases begins in the 1930's. Nuclear physics, quantum mechanics and plasma physics are critical scientific disciplines required to understand any star, obviously including the sun. None of these sciences was available during Birkeland's lifetime. So, even if it were true that Birkeland had explicitly created a scientific model of the sun, it would be only of historical importance, but certainly not scientifically useful. On the other hand, electromagnetism was very well developed already during Birkeland's lifetime, and all of his works along the lines of space physics and geoelectricity has proven to be robust and reliable.
It is my explicit position that Birkeland and all of his work are irrelevant to the science of the sun today. We have powerful observational tools Birkeland could only dream of, and we have scientific disciplines developed in the post-Birkeland years that radically alter earlier ideas about the physics & evolution of the stars and the sun. Mozina only credits Birkeland for the purpose of deflecting all discussion into vague historical avenues, and away from any modern science. Remember that Mozina always speaks derisively of mathematics, totally overlooking the key role of mathematics in modern science.
Constant historical ramblings about Birkeland, constant derision of all modern science, and a total devotion to looking at press release pictures rather than science data are sure signs of a crackpot at work. The ideas Mozina presents are useless & baseless, make no sense at all, have nothing to do with anything Birkeland ever did, and should not be treated as ideas that deserve respect in the slightest at this time.
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