Slashdot Mirror
Can Electricity Travel Through Space on Astrophysical Jets? (mdpi.com)
Slashdot reader Chris Reeve writes: An October 2017 paper titled Electric Currents along Astrophysical Jets reports that "Several researchers have reported direct evidence for large scale electric currents along astrophysical jets." A review of the citations at the end of that paper and others (here and here, for instance) would seem to suggest that one of the great Internet science debates has finally been settled: Electricity does indeed travel through space over vast cosmic distances.
What has been interesting to watch about this unexpected development is that science journalists have so far not explicitly reported this as a shift in theory, and commenters on sites like phys.org appear to deny that any change has even occurred: "The jets have been shown not to be electric currents, the energy and the physics involved are certainly not electromagnetic." This comment completely rejecting these new findings was highly rated by other phys.org readers, suggesting that the failure to explicitly report this as a change in theory has left this controversial topic in a highly confused state.
The paper summarizes what it calls "observational evidence for the existence of large scale electric currents and their associated grand design helical magnetic fields in kpc-scale astrophysical jets." And the original submitter details the history of the question in a follow-up comment arguing that at our current moment in time, "a mistaken bias against electricity in space continues to dominate conversations."
What has been interesting to watch about this unexpected development is that science journalists have so far not explicitly reported this as a shift in theory, and commenters on sites like phys.org appear to deny that any change has even occurred: "The jets have been shown not to be electric currents, the energy and the physics involved are certainly not electromagnetic." This comment completely rejecting these new findings was highly rated by other phys.org readers, suggesting that the failure to explicitly report this as a change in theory has left this controversial topic in a highly confused state.
The paper summarizes what it calls "observational evidence for the existence of large scale electric currents and their associated grand design helical magnetic fields in kpc-scale astrophysical jets." And the original submitter details the history of the question in a follow-up comment arguing that at our current moment in time, "a mistaken bias against electricity in space continues to dominate conversations."
Plasma seems to be the quintessential complex system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Although the underlying equations governing plasmas are relatively simple, plasma behavior is extraordinarily varied and subtle: the emergence of unexpected behavior from a simple model is a typical feature of a complex system. Such systems lie in some sense on the boundary between ordered and disordered behavior and cannot typically be described either by simple, smooth, mathematical functions, or by pure randomness. The spontaneous formation of interesting spatial features on a wide range of length scales is one manifestation of plasma complexity. The features are interesting, for example, because they are very sharp, spatially intermittent (the distance between features is much larger than the features themselves), or have a fractal form. Many of these features were first studied in the laboratory, and have subsequently been recognized throughout the universe."
Wow, you picked the wrong person to argue with here.
I spent my time in grad school leading the student government, and bringing to light the issue of the 50% of people who leave PhD programs. There is a lack of a link between dropping out and academic problems. I got bad administrators fired, I talked about this nationally, I lobbied Congress. What are you doing? Posting online?
I've chewed out Chancellors, Deans, Admirals, Grant Managers, and CEOs. I've quit jobs, left tenured positions, and put myself in financial distress to prove my points. And I'm a more successful, better scientist for it.
You don't study physics because it's too hard for you.
"Physics" isn't a side. It's work. It's offensive to use people like Jeff in your argument. He's put in the work. And the physics community ended up supporting him.
Go away back to the corners of the internet and know that you can't compete with people like me. You're too lazy to walk into the room where the discussions happen.
homosexuality was Scientifically acknowledged by Scientific experts to be a disorder.
Not to contradict the point you are awkwardly trying to make, but this part is wrong.
Whether or not homosexuality is classified as a disorder, or a benign variation, has little to do with science. Like the medical definition of addiction, it depends on how it affects your life.
If you live in a society where sodomy is frequently punished by death, but you keep doing it, you have an illness.
Societies fault perhaps, but an illness still. Social context can change the medical classification, without any changes in the hard science.