Ok, I am a complete science nerd, but I've never heard of this person. After reading just an initial bit, I think I understand why….
Any smart anons with knowledge/insight? Thanks in advance!
The fascinating work of theSwedish physicist Hannes Alfvenlighted the tortuous path to the answer. In the 1950’s he discovered a kind of energy which nobody even thought existed, which he labeled“magnetohydrodynamic” energy. Abbreviated, it’s called mhd.Actually, it’s a combination of magnetic, electrical, and physical forces.
It can be described best with what I call a “kitchen example”. Suppose you took a glass cylinder containing mercury at room temperature – and everyone knows it’s “molten” or liquid under those conditions. It’s so dense that you can float a glass mirror on top of it. So let’s do just that, and make some scratches on the mirror. If you shine a light down on the mirror, the light beam will reflect on the ceiling and show images of the scratches in the mirror on the ceiling.
Now let’s put an agitator – like a miniature version of a washing machine agitator – in the bottom of the cylinder of mercury, with a shaft or axle going through the bottom of the cylinder, and fastened to the agitator. Let’s put a handle on the end of the shaft sticking out of the bottom of the cylinder. We can twirl the agitator back and forth with the handle (slowly only, because the mercury is so dense and heavy) and agitate the mercury in the glass cylinder.
When we agitate the mercury in this fashion we find that the slipperiness of the mercury, atom to atom, is so great that all of the motion of the agitator is absorbed by the mercury before it ever reaches to top surface where the mirror is. The mirror won’t budge.
If we wind a wire around the glass cylinder and connect it to a battery, we will have an electromagnet – following the same principles used in the doorbell or your home. There is an electrical current flowing around the cylinder, and a magnetic field going through the cylinder, end-to-end.
Now we find that things have changed. When we rotate the agitator back and forth, the mercury acts as if it were a plastic, or near-solid. The mirror makes all of the moves that the agitator does, showing that the mercury has lost its internal slipperiness, and is moving integrally as if it were almost solid.
Alfven tried a refined version of this experiment in his laboratory, and this is how the phenomenon was discovered. It was first reasoned that tiny electrical charges, called “eddy current”, were being generated in the mercury, which in turn were generating tiny local opposing magnetic fields, and this was causing the solidifying effect. He reasoned that if this were true, the larger the diameter he made the glass cylinder, the bigger the electrical current and the stronger the magnetic field would have to be to maintain the same physical force link between the agitator and mirror.
He built another agitator vessel with a larger diameter cylinder of mercury – and found the reverse to be true! The larger the diameter of the glass cylinder, the less magnetic field strength and electric current needed to maintain the physical force link between agitator and mirror. This seemingly broke all the rules of known Physics and Engineering.
Hannes Alfven realized that he had discovered the existence of a kind of energy, traveling from the agitator to the mirror, which was previously undetected by any scientist. His rigorous mathematical work in expanding James Clerk Maxwell’s three ingenious equations for expressing electromagnetic radiation (radio broadcast to you) showed that there were electrical, magnetic, and physical force fields acting as a combined field between the agitator and mirror.
Alfven expanded his mathematical research to show that space is literally as sea of mhd energy, and that, as weak as the magnetic field of any blue-white star is, it is strong enough to support an internal mhd energy structure within the star.