Permeability & Magnetic Reconnection
Do the formulas involve "permeability"?!?!????
No. The formulas do not involve permeability at all. So all of your whining about it is pointless & irrelevant.
All of
Mozina's carrying on about permeability is dead wrong for two reasons:
Reason 1: Clinger's equations do not in fact involve permeability at all, revealing a critical weakness in
Mozina's basic knowledge of electromagnetism.
Reason 2: Even if we were to grant that the equations did involve permeability, and therefore inductance,
Mozina fails once again at the very basic level: "inductance" and "induction" are physically quite different, despite the similarity of the words. People who actually know what they are talking about would spot this at once.
Mozina does not, therefore revealing that he actually knows far less about electromagnetism than he claims to know.
Explanation for reason 1
Quite simply,
Mozina does not know what the symbols used in equations of electromagnetism mean, revealing a level of understanding that would be sub-standard even in a high school physics class. See
W.D.Clinger's post #4186, where we find this:
Michael Mozina, being totally ignorant of electromagnetism, saw the Greek letter µ in those equations, looked it up, saw that it had something to do with permeability, knew or looked up that permeability had something to do with inductance, and began shouting.
In CGS units, Ampère's law doesn't contain µ
0.
Since the other equations I quoted are derived from Ampère's law, Michael Mozina's argument about inductance is equivalent to believing that SI units are more real than cgs units.
Move along, folks, nothing to see here: It's just the same old preacher on the same old soapbox on the same old corner.
W.D.Clinger reinforces the point again in
post #4254 (
MM explains his confusion, part 3).
Of course, if there were actually a real physical process involved, it would appear appropriately the particular equations, regardless of the units.
Mozina mistakes a unit normalizing constant for a physical process, a mistake that would never be made by anyone who actually had ever studied electromagnetism, as
Mozina claims to have done. It is an elementary level mistake.
Hence, the physical property of permeability, and thus the physical process of inductance, are not involved.
Explanation for reason 2:
Let us now assume for the sake of argument that
Mozina is correct, and both permeability and inductance are involved. What does this really mean, as
Mozina would say, "at the level of real physics"?
A while back I asked
Mozina some direct questions:
Look up "
inductor", look up "
Faraday's Law of Inductance", then go back to my magnum-opus,
Magnetic Reconnection Redux V (30 Dec 2009). Compare the "induction" equations in Stenzel, Gekelman & Wild, 1982 and in the webpages listed, with the induction equation in my post. Now, you are the one who asked the key question, "
Which formulas did those authors use ...?", so ...
You tell me if the equations from Stenzel, Gekelman & Wild, 1982 look like the equations in my post.
You tell me if you think their equations and my equations address the same physical processes.
You tell me if you think their "induction" and my "induction" are the same thing, physically (not the same
word, but
the same thing physically).
How you answer these questions will determine the details of my further responses.
Mozina declined to answer. I asked these questions quite deliberately because I assumed that he would make the mistake that he did eventually make, mistaking "inductance" for "induction", another beginner's level mistake.
As I said above, "Look up
Faraday's Law of Inductance" (I should have said Faraday's Law of
Induction; a poor choice of words on my part, but not a fundamental error). Simply put, Faraday's Law tells us that "
The EMF generated is proportional to the rate of change of the magnetic flux". This tells us that if an electrical conductor (such as the wire in an electrical circuit) experiences a time-variable magnetic field, it will as a result also experience an induced voltage, and therefore an electric current in response to the induced voltage. Note that this is the physical process relating the rate of change of a magnetic field to the appearance of a voltage and the flow of an electric current.
Now look up "
inductance". As the webpage tells us, "
In electromagnetism and electronics, inductance is the ability of an inductor to store energy in a magnetic field."
So what does
Mozina's "inductance per distance unit" mean? It means, "the ability to store energy in a magnetic field, per distance unit". Permeability is the ability of the magnetic field to
permeate, either in a vacuum or in some other medium. Hence, even if "inductance per distance unit" were involved, it would refer to the ability of (perhaps free space or perhaps of a plasma) to be permeated by a magnetic field. This is not the same thing as having a magnetic field in a plasma induce currents.
Further comments
As I pointed out before (
Magnetic Reconnection Redux V; 30 Dec 2009), induction cannot explain the energetics of a solar flare (nor is it physically correct to interpret Dungey's 1958 paper to support the claim of induction supported flares).
Reference the book
Magnetic Reconnection: MHD Theory and Applications by Eric Priest & Terry Forbes, Cambridge University Press, 2000. [...]
"In space physics the distinction between ideal and non-ideal processes is important because simple estimates imply that magnetic dissipation acts on a time-scale which is many orders of magnitude slower than the observed time-scale of dynamic phenomena. For example, solar flares release stored magnetic energy in the corona within a period of 100 s. By comparison, the time-scale for magnetic dissipation based on a global scale length of 105 km is of the order of 106 yrs."
Priest & Forbes, page 6
Mozina's long & tiresome arguments about induction powering solar flares has never made physical sense and does not now make physical sense. It is an argument and a claim built on a solid foundation of ignorance.
Mozina knows far less about electromagnetism, plasma physics, and most other topics in physics, than he thinks he does, and provides a constant stream of documentary evidence in support of this claim.
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