down the rabbit hole

It is very difficult to attempt to study everything in the “world” in a relatively short period of time, but there is so much to know and such little time and I am so ignorant. In the physical world everywhere I look I find new information that both amazes me and baffles me.

For example last week it was reported in the New York Times that new “stuff” was discovered in the center of our own galaxy. A group of scientists working with data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope said Tuesday that they had discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The bubbles, they said at a news conference and in a paper to be published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal, extend 25,000 light years up and down from each side of the galaxy and contain the energy equivalent to 100,000 supernova explosions.

This energized me to begin to study the area. This effort threw me into a area of physics and cosmology of which I knew nothing. Plasma physics. I felt very much as I believe Alice must have felt as she tumble down the hole into another vision of existence. While down there I met a man by the name of Hannes Alfvén (1908 - 1995).

In 1937, Alfvén argued that if plasma pervaded the universe, it could then carry electric currents capable of generating a galactic magnetic field. After winning the Nobel Prize for his works in magnetohydrodynamics, he emphasized that:

In order to understand the phenomena in a certain plasma region, it is necessary to map not only the magnetic but also the electric field and the electric currents. Space is filled with a network of currents which transfer energy and momentum over large or very large distances. The currents often pinch to filamentary or surface currents. The latter are likely to give space, as also interstellar and intergalactic space, a cellular structure. His theoretical work on field-aligned electric currents in the aurora (based on earlier work by Kristian Birkeland) was confirmed by satellite observations, in 1974, resulting in the discovery of Birkeland currents.