A Beginner's View of Our Electric Universe - New

Langmuir also invented what came to be known as the ‘Langmuir Probe’. This is a special voltage measuring
device that can be inserted into plasma without the probe itself being affected by the formation of a double layer
around it. The Langmuir probe is therefore capable of obtaining differential voltage measurements from within
plasma fields. This is a very important ability that scientists continue to rely on today, especially at NASA.
Langmuir was also responsible for a number of other inventions, including the electronic vacuum tube, longlife
tungsten filament bulbs and gas welding. He was honoured with many notable accolades from the science
community and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1932.
Professor Hannes Alfvén (1908 – 1995) [5-3]
This is the man who is now regarded as the father of Space Plasma Physics. He
started as a teenager on his career of scientific discovery in his native Sweden to
eventually achieve significant respect from within the global science community.
In his youth Alfvén set the direction of his life by reading books on astronomy
and learning the ropes of electricity and electronics at his local radio club where
he built his first radio receiver. His deep interest in radio and electromagnetism
was the basis for the doctorate he earned in 1934 for which he wrote a thesis on
extremely high frequency radio waves. Throughout the career that followed, his
scientific contributions were many in the areas of electrical and plasma science,
magnetohydrodynamics, and cosmology in general. But it was for his work in
the area of magnetohydrodynamics, the study of induced electric current flow in
ionised liquids and gases, that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970. Alfvén’s
work essentially carried on from that of Kristian Birkeland, but because of his
own particular style and the fact that many of his theories directly contradicted
the orthodox science of the day, he often found that getting his work published was a nigh-on impossible task
to achieve. Alfvén also lamented the direction that science was apparently going in, by commenting on things
such as the dilution of professional behaviour in scientific research, the financial distortions that good research
had benefited through and then ironically suffered from, and the money-led entity in general that the science
establishment had become. In 1986 he said:
“We should remember that there was once a discipline called Natural Philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline
seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the
Natural Philosophy aspect. Scientists tend to resist interdisciplinary inquiries into their own territory. In many
instances, such parochialism is founded on the fear that intrusion from other disciplines would compete unfairly
for limited financial resources and thus diminish their own opportunity for research.”
6 | The work of the honourable but ignored
Hannes Alfvén
Credit: Welinder Jaeger Bergne