Something new under the sun

[Zeuzzz]

Well, I would certainly prefer a model that explains everything but can calculate nothing, to a model that can calcuate everything and explain nothing.

If you can calcuclate everything, but explain nothing physical from them, then why do the calculations at all?

Be sure to sign your name to all the bridges you build, I don't want to drive over them!

You just fire from the hip don't you, I don't suppose that if people come out with all sorts of physical demonstrations that it will matter to you.

Blind faith that you are always right is a sure sign of a lack of critical thought. You are engaging in cynicism not scepticism, that is why you just refuse to actually discuss the models and why they are wrong. You are making grand philospohical statements that have no bearing on the physical world either, the fact that the models you say are abstraction doesn't mean that they don't make accurate predictions.

You have yet to explain anything either. Your lack of math and formal description to counter the statements modeled by others is rather telling. You just wave your hands and foam a little, that is not critical thought in the least. that is philospohy.

So why not admit your reason is as follows: you don't like it. Try a physical critique of the model then, see if you can come up with something concrete and not philosophical to counter the model. You have yet to present physical evidence that can not be explained by the model, not have you offered a better model, thus you are a cynic.


So please stop the posturing and present you data, numbers and events that demonstrate that what the model being presented is, is false.

Can you, will you? Or are you all thunder and no substance? (And please spare us the argumentation by spam (ala BAC), present a clear, concise and formal critique of the model you don't like.)

That was the only slightly philosophical statement i made all day. And it was just an observation that the opposite situation of what he described would be equally bad, you have to have a mixture of both. Not even relevant to this topic. The other statements i made are all facts. Feel free to quote me on one if you will.

 

[Reality Check]

What machines?

Did you find the data of this splicing reaction between two lines that seems to have illuded everyone else?

If you did, post it here.

DD is probably referring to the 3 machines in the previous links, i.e. the Versatile Toroidal Facility, the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment and the Swarthmore Spheromak Experiment .

N.B. each site has a list of publications that you may want to look at. They should have "the data of this splicing reaction between two lines that seems to have illuded everyone else".

P.S. This is a random paper from the sites: Study of driven magnetic reconnection in a laboratory plasma

 

[Tubbythin]

That was the only slightly philosophical statement i made all day. And it was just an observation that the opposite situation of what he described would be equally bad, you have to have a mixture of both. Not even relevant to this topic. The other statements i made are all facts. Feel free to quote me on one if you will.

Unfortunately for you, your model of surface fusion calculates nothing and explains nothing. Without core fusion there is nothing to balance gravity and therefore no hydrostatic equilibrium. The star would just collapse until something stopped it like, oh, I dunno, fusion in the core.

 

[Zeuzzz]

P.S. This is a random paper from the sites: Study of driven magnetic reconnection in a laboratory plasma

II. PHYSICS ISSUES OF MAGNETIC RECONNECTION
To describe the motion of magnetic field lines in a
plasma, Eq. ~1!, for the evolution of the magnetic field B, can
be derived by combining Maxwell equations and Ohm’s law
]B
] t
5“3~v3B!1
h
m0
¹2B. ~1!
The first term on the right-hand side represents motion of
field lines frozen-in to the plasma.1

Not looking good so far, they are using the plasma as a perfect conductor for a start. Which it isn't. I'll have a look at the rest tomorrow.

 

[Reality Check]

Not looking good so far, they are using the plasma as a perfect conductor for a start. Which it isn't. I'll have a look at the rest tomorrow.

Forget about the theory - look at the experimental results actually measuring magnetic reconnection. Figure 7a should look familiar to you.

 

[ben m]

Not looking good so far, they are using the plasma as a perfect conductor for a start. Which it isn't. I'll have a look at the rest tomorrow.

Don't look too hard Zeuzzz, you might find yourself back at http://www.glue.umd.edu/~drake/ , the source of the Maxwell-based animation you're carefully ignoring, where the plasmas aren't perfect conductors. Then you'd have to ignore that, too.

 

[Reality Check]

Unfortunately for you, your model of surface fusion calculates nothing and explains nothing. Without core fusion there is nothing to balance gravity and therefore no hydrostatic equilibrium. The star would just collapse until something stopped it like, oh, I dunno, fusion in the core.

The EU response is probably on the lines of "it is electricity providing the hydrostatic equilibrium".

Another thing their "model" has to explain is why the flux of neutrinos that has been detected from the sun matches the predictions of the fusion model. Another EUist (BeAChooser) has already admitted elsewhere "I'm convinced that the sun might be mostly nuclear powered" but he will probably say that "might" and "mostly" does not rule out an electric sun.

 

[sol invictus]

Not at all Sol, this is the crux of the issue here. You are claiming that the field that you showed exhibits magnetic reconnection, when it doesn't.

Yes, it does. By definition.

By definition, magnetic reconnection is the release of energy from the lines of the field reconnecting, from the wikipedia page;

"field lines enter the separator from two of the domains, and are spliced one to the other,"

That is precisely what happens in the field configuration Zig and I gave. By your own definition, that field configuration reconnects.

Well, I still dont know what 'spliced' means, and i still dont know what the equations are for the splicing energy released by two metaphysical lines.

Look "splice" up in the dictionary. It's what happens at x=y=0 in the field configuration I gave, as you vary a and b.

As for the energy, that's in general changing as you vary a and b. The energy density for that field is proportional to a^2 x^2 + b^2 y^2, so it's a function of a and b.

Ok, so if they didn't assign any property to the lines, what is creating the energy?

The changing magnetic field.

Again: they solved Maxwell's equations. The solution tells them how much energy is released, as well as everything else they might want to know.

Then they plotted the solution and drew the field lines. They didn't "assign any property" to the lines - they just plotted them.

Which part of that do you fail to understand?

 

[Tubbythin]

The EU response is probably on the lines of "it is electricity providing the hydrostatic equilibrium".

Except if it was near the surface where fusion was taking place then a reasonable proportion of photons emitted would arrive at Earth without undergoing multiple scatterings. We'd then see peaks in the Sun's spectrum corresponding to the energy released in the various fusion processes (way up in the gamma-ray region). Its only because of the random walk that photons do on their way out from the centre that the Sun has a pretty good black-body distribution.

 

[Ziggurat]

Not looking good so far, they are using the plasma as a perfect conductor for a start. Which it isn't. I'll have a look at the rest tomorrow.

They are explicitly NOT doing that:
"The second term describes diffusion of magnetic fields with the diffusion coefficient proportional to the plasma resistivity."
In other words, the fact that they aren't dropping the second term means explicitly that they are NOT treating the plasma as a perfect conductor. Which you should have realized from the part you quote where they mention Ohm's law - you know, that little equation having to do with currents and resistance. Which in turn is something that perfect conductors don't have. You keep stumbling over the glaringly obvious.

 

[Belz...]

But this cloud of plasma is in a gaseous state

Careful what you say, around here. Somebody will certainly blow a fuse for because you said "gas" in relation to plasma!!

 

[Belz...]

As far as i can see, reconnection (or cancelling) of metaphysical lines describing the magnitude of an abstract vector field should not result in any release of energy. This is what you described.

So, now you're confusing reality with the model of reality and using the fact that the model is not reality in order to bash the model ?

This is a good one. I'm presuming that your joking on all of these completely illogical assertions?

Well, I certainly hope you are, for your sake.

"Damn, can't answer those points. Better sound clever, now."

 

[Belz...]

I see your confusion extends beyond the particular field of science under discussion to the very nature of science itself.

The entire point of science is not simply to explain. Mythology works fine if all you want is an explanation. The point of science is to predict. And calculations (as opposed to explanations) give you the most precise predictions that we can make.

Bravo, Zig. Pnwed.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Classical vs contemporary physics

Way back when the underlying cause(s) of electricity and magnetism were not known. Fast forward a century or two and today we know about electrons, ions, electron spins, orbitals, etc, etc, etc.

If you look at plasma processes in terms of what the electrons and ions (and neutral atoms/molecules too) are doing, how does a magnetic field arise (excluding externally imposed fields)? Given that moving charges create such fields, does the existence of such magnetic fields - in the solar wind say, or the Sun - automatically mean that there are currents (in terms of contemporary physics)?

Is there a quantum mechanics version of Maxwell's equations?

I'm quite interested in all folk who've been actively participating in this thread recently to reply to the these questions; I'm particularly interested to hear from iantresman, Zeuzzz, and BeAChooser on the extent to which you think Alfvén, Birkeland, Peratt, Scott, Thornhill, et al. modified/extended plasma physics (a branch of classical physics) to incorporate the reality of the actual charge carriers (electrons and ions).

 

[iantresman]

I'm quite interested in all folk who've been actively participating in this thread recently to reply to the these questions; I'm particularly interested to hear from iantresman, Zeuzzz, and BeAChooser on the extent to which you think Alfvén, Birkeland, Peratt, Scott, Thornhill, et al. modified/extended plasma physics (a branch of classical physics) to incorporate the reality of the actual charge carriers (electrons and ions).

.
You've hit the nail on the head. Alfvén notes:

.. we can describe electromagnetic phenomena in space either in terms of a magnetic field B or in terms of electric currents i. As magnetic fields are easy to measure, and, moreover, the mathematical treatment becomes simpler if i is eliminated, it seems obvious that we should use the field description and eliminate i. For example, when we treat waves propagating through a plasma, they are certainly associated with electric currents, but in many cases we can regard a current implicitly as the curl of the magnetic field and ignore it. However, in doing so we lose the particle aspect of the current; in other words, we neglect the fact that an electric current in space consists of motion of charged particles which have a certain mass, charge, and velocity, and which can often be considered as constituents of a gas with a certain temperature. -- Hannes Alfvén, Cosmic Plasma, (1981) "Electric Currents in Space Plasmas"​

 

[sol invictus]

Is there a quantum mechanics version of Maxwell's equations?

Yes. It's called quantum electrodynamics, or QED for short.

You should distinguish between the fact that the charge carriers are individual particles - which is perfectly possible to model using classical E&M - and truly quantum effects.

True quantum corrections to classical E&M are usually not important when you're interested in something macroscopic. In the case of plasmas, there are examples where QM matters (e.g. fusion) but for most phenomena the classical description is perfectly good. Particle effects can be quite significant in some regimes (very low density, for example), but again can be ignored much of the time.

 

[ben m]

Given that moving charges create such fields, does the existence of such magnetic fields - in the solar wind say, or the Sun - automatically mean that there are currents (in terms of contemporary physics)?

Yep, the fields are generated by electric currents, which can be generated by various dynamo processes (complicated) and self-sustained by standard inductance in a highly conductive medium.

Is there a quantum mechanics version of Maxwell's equations?

Quantum electrodynamics is a complete quantum theory of electromagnetism; it's been referred to as the most-precisely-tested theory in the history of science. If you want something easier, Schrodinger's Equation can be written in a semiclassical way (quantum particles interacting with classical fields). In either case, you don't expect any particularly quantum behavior in space plasmas; the de Broglie wavelengths of all particles are much smaller than most relevant distance scales.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Thanks iantresman, sol invictus, and ben m, for responding so quickly!

It'd be great to hear from Belz..., Dancing David, Reality Check, Zeuzzz, and Ziggurat too (as well as, going back earlier, BeAChooser, and MattusMaximus).

sol invictus and and ben m: do you think Alfvén, in the bit iantresman quoted, is right about the equivalence of treatment (B vs i), and the possible loss of some important aspects by using B instead of i?

iantresman: what about Birkeland, Bruce, Carlqvist, Fälthammar, Juergens, Langmuir, Peratt, Scott, Talbott, Thornhill and all the others cited on your webpage or introduced by Zeuzzz: to what extent does their work acknowledge the sorts of things sol invictus and and ben m pointed out (for example, that reality is QED, but that quantum and particle effects can be ignored for most plasmas that space scientists and astrophysicists study)?

 

[Dancing David]

Way back when the underlying cause(s) of electricity and magnetism were not known. Fast forward a century or two and today we know about electrons, ions, electron spins, orbitals, etc, etc, etc.

If you look at plasma processes in terms of what the electrons and ions (and neutral atoms/molecules too) are doing, how does a magnetic field arise (excluding externally imposed fields)? Given that moving charges create such fields, does the existence of such magnetic fields - in the solar wind say, or the Sun - automatically mean that there are currents (in terms of contemporary physics)?

I would have to take a back seat on this one, I would want to make sure that what I said was careful. So yes there woukld be currents, but the conditions and states of those currents would vary widely from situation to situation.

Is there a quantum mechanics version of Maxwell's equations?

I am a puppy here, whatever the big dogs say...

I'm quite interested in all folk who've been actively participating in this thread recently to reply to the these questions; I'm particularly interested to hear from iantresman, Zeuzzz, and BeAChooser on the extent to which you think Alfvén, Birkeland, Peratt, Scott, Thornhill, et al. modified/extended plasma physics (a branch of classical physics) to incorporate the reality of the actual charge carriers (electrons and ions).

 

[Ziggurat]

If you look at plasma processes in terms of what the electrons and ions (and neutral atoms/molecules too) are doing, how does a magnetic field arise (excluding externally imposed fields)? Given that moving charges create such fields, does the existence of such magnetic fields - in the solar wind say, or the Sun - automatically mean that there are currents (in terms of contemporary physics)?

There are two possible sources for magnetism in matter: the center-of-mass motion of charge carriers (aka currents) and the spin of charged particles (mostly electrons, which have much larger magnetic spin moments than protons). Electron spin rather than current is what produces ferromagnetism, for example.

The electron spins in plasmas should not, in general, be very significant. Thermal energies will tend to prevent significant polarization with the local magnetic field (low susceptibility). On a larger scale, dipole-dipole interactions will work to demagnetize a plasma, which means that the polarization of spins in a plasma cannot be self-sustaining even if the susceptibility is high.

So in short, yes, if you've got a magnetic field in a plasma, you've got currents.