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The Secret of the Sun's Heated Atmosphere
eldavojohn writes "There has long been speculation on why the Sun's surface is a mere ten thousand degrees while the atmosphere can reach millions. Space.com is reporting that the mystery has now been solved. Researchers looked for Alfven waves in the solar chromosphere and found them. Followup studies employing simulations demonstrated that the energetics work out to transfer energy from the Sun's surface to its overlying corona.. The magnetic waves may also be the power source behind the solar wind."
The waves are called "Alfven waves", with good reason. The fact that this then results in his name being attached to the theory is amusing, perhaps ironic, and arguably unfortunate, but hardly criminal. Shit happens when names are attached to things in math and science, it's something one has to just get used to.
(The name name "big bang" was meant be disparaging, and yet here we are. Look up "Fuchsian groups" sometime, too.)
And while you're at it, give astrophysicists a little credit. We do know physics, including E&M, pretty damn well. What's you're qualification to arm-chair quarterback on this?
They have spent a decade or three researching magnetic reconnection - in the lab, via in situ space probes, and by remote sensing (a.k.a. using telescopes) - and have developed descriptions of the behaviours of plasmas, building on Alfvén's work and these discoveries, that match the observed phenomena nicely.
Take a look at the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (http://mrx.pppl.gov/), as an example of lab-based plasma physics work on magnetic reconnection.
But maybe you know something about the behaviour of plasmas that the thousands of researchers - experimentalists, theorists, 'observers', and those who simulate plasmas in computers - don't, or have missed?
Why not write a paper to Nature, or Science, giving chapter and verse of the holes in their work?
If any reader is interested in reading more on this, right up to the latest ApJ papers, just holler!
Since your relatively recent arrival amid these savage Slashdot forums, you seem to have made a point of rebutting junk science in general, and investigating pln2bz's (among others') junk science in particular. Those are admirable goals, and on behalf of myself and I suspect others who read Slashdot I say welcome and glad to have you.
I know it takes time to do this, and it's a bother, but listing reliable links in comments (and quoting: even better) is an efficacious debate tactic and moreover a thorough demonstration of correctness. pln2bz does this all the time; he has an enormous list of URIs organized for his ready use in online propaganda efforts and a (small!) library of EU- and Velikovskian books at hand. You've perhaps seen his very statement of this fact in a post on either Slashdot or another forum (ahem), or probably inferred as much anyway. I think you would be prudent to at least meet this propaganda with fact by listing, say, at least one reliable paper on a subject, or at least pointing readers to or adsabs or even arXiv.org (being careful about the last, as there's some unfortunate copy there sometimes). pln2bz' organization and unshakable fanaticism are, in my experience, rare even among the Electric Universe hobbyists, and studying them and their ideas suggests that anyone trying to clean up their mess will at least need some level of organization and doggedness.
(ask an EU proponent about how much experimental support there is for the EU idea of what supports the Sun against gravitational collapse, to take just one example;
You say you've read through many/most/all of pln2bz' comments on Slashdot, and it seems you've also investigated his (and others') posts on his favorite Electric Universe forum and support group. Perhaps you recall that he was asked at least twice about the sun, gravity, and planetary orbits. Naturally these are damning questions that EU doesn't address (hah! yet, as we shall see), so he appealed to Wallace Thornhill for help. (In fact, it may have escalated to Thornhill after even the imaginative and sharp-tongued David Talbott, who usually answers pln2bz' Big Physics questions, couldn't come up with anything. Otherwise Thornhill seems rather quiet; I interpret this to mean even he can't imagine an answer to everything, and pln2bz and others just shrug it off as "Thornhill is a man of few words" verbatim.) Thornhill's response was a classic, jaw-dropping "EU is right if there's new physics" moment:
(from http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=358211&cid=21423145 )
It is important to note that this disallows any assumptions about the internal density and composition of celestial bodies to be made from gravitational perturbations!
Yes, Thornhill wrote a response to a Slashdot comment that flatly denies the nature of gravity, the nature of mass, and (as both a cause and effect of these denials; circular...) our ability to measure either via observation. pln2bz's central scientific philosophy was exposed when he said, almost verbatim: "Thornhill could still be right even if he doesn't know the math behind it." Since that comment, pln2bz and others on the EU fansite have spoken even more readily of unifying gravity within electromagnetism, and thus of anti-gravity, power projection, and the like. They have not one clue of how to formulate this as a quantitative law, and flatly deny relativity and most/all observations that support it.
I've seen the same pattern all over their goings on. I would encourage bystanders curious about the farcical nature of Electric Universe to investigate pln2bz' previous comments, check out his links, and pay special attention to the authors Charles Ginenthal, Wallace Thornhill, David Talbott, Don Scott, Dwardu Cardona, Anthony Peratt, Halton Arp, and Ralph Jurgens