Birkeland and the Solar Wind.
OK, I have a 994 page pdf compendium of Birkeland's writings. That's a lot. But since you have already read it perhaps you can tell me exactly where Birkeland tells us that the solar wind comes from electrical discharges? Or just point me to where in all those 994 pages that Birkeland explicitly models the solar wind generation process at the Sun.
He does his early calculations on page 330ish? Type in "uranium" in the search options, I think that should take you to within a couple of pages of his early calcs.
Not a bad guess. On page 325 of your 994 page document (numbered page 311) we find the beginning of the chapter entitled
The Energy of the Corpuscular Precipitation. The Source of the Sun's Heat. Seems like a good place to start. Let me now quote directly from Birkeland, beginning on page 328 of the document (numbered page 314), and going on to the next page.
Birkeland in 1908 said:
We then obtain (6.7x1015/7.3x1010) x 100/3600 gr. calories, answering to about 14 h.-p., which is the amount of energy that is set free by the disintegration of the sun's matter, which would answer to the quantity of rays emitted from it in the form of these corpuscular rays.
This amount corresponds, as already stated, to the amount of energy that the sun sends out in the form of light and heat. If the solar constant equals 3, we find a radiation from every square centimeter of the sun's surface of about 13 horse-power.
A disintegration such as this in the sun does not necessarily presuppose the presence there of great quantities of radium, uranium or thorium.
Rutherford, in his work titled "Radio-Activity" says:
"There seems too be every reason to suppose that the atomic energy of all the elements is of a similar high order of magnitude. With the exception of their high atomic weights, the radio-elements do not possess any special chemical characteristics which differentiate them from the inactive elements. The existence of a latent store of energy in the atoms is a necessary consequence of the modern view developed by J.J. Thomson, Larmor and Lorentz, of regarding the atom as a complicated structure consisting of charged parts of rapid oscillatory of orbital motion in regard to one another."
Under the temperature-conditions prevailing on the sun, it is possible that ordinary matter may be so radio-active, that it is not necessary to assume the presence in great quantities of the radio-elements known in ordinary temperatures.
It was pointed out by Rutherford and Soddy that the maintenance of the sun's heat for long periods of time did not present any fundamental difficulty, if a process of disintegration such as occurs in the radio-elements were supposed to be taking place in the sun.
We may perhaps succeed, in the way here indicated, in obtaining a distinct idea of the amount of heat that can be developed in the sun by disintegration; and thus an important contribution will be made to the old, and to natural philosophy so important, question of the origin of the sun's heat.
Well, there you have it, in Birkeland's very own words. This quote comes at the end of the book
The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition 1902-1903, volume I. The book was printed in 1908, and the archaic ideas are fairly obvious. The book was written at a time when Thomson's
"plum pudding" model of the atom was predominate, the idea of + and - charges suspended in some wiggly medium; its mechanical normal modes of vibration were thought to be responsible for spectral features. Plank had only started his ideas of quantum mechanics in 1900.
Rutherford scattering, and the downfall of the "plum pudding" atom came in 1909, the year after Birkeland's book was printed.
Obviously Birkeland thinks that the source of the sun's heat is radioactive decay, what we would call nuclear
fission, as opposed to nuclear
fusion, which we now accept as the primary energy source. Furthermore, considering his use of the word "disintegration" in describing the origin of the particles creating the auroras, it certainly looks like Birkeland thought that what we now call the "solar wind" was made of particles liberated by the radioactive decay of the sun. He is not quite to explicit there, so it is something of a guess.
But in any case, I can find no reference to electric currents in the sun, either as the source of the sun's heat, or as the source for his "corpuscular precipitation". Since you are so convinced that Birkeland has demonstrated the electrical source of the solar wind, and since you are the self-appointed expert on things Birkeland, you will have to stop guessing and show explicitly where Birkeland has modeled, or even mentioned, the electrical source of the solar wind, assuming you want to maintain any credibility at all on that point.
