I'm not so sure ben. They seem to buy into what Alfven himself called pseudoscience,
Yes, they think Alfven was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.
in favor or a theory that's never actually been empirically demonstrated,
Yes, nobody thinks your definition of "empirical" is worth the ergs you expend typing it.
even though Birkeland was personally able to demonstrate his ideas in the lab over 100 years ago. You guys are lagging.
Birkeland demonstrated the behavior of a magnetized iron sphere with a high-voltage wire plugged into it. We now know that this is a
partial analogy to
some phenomena (like aurorae) and totally irrelevant to others (Saturn's rings, the Sun). You are the only person insisting that Birkeland's analogies all hold up perfectly. You insist on this despite a century's worth of evidence to the contrary. You are wrong.
If you can't figure out solar wind, and Birkeland wrote all about it, don't you think you should at least read it before comparing his ideas to "Bigfoot"? Honestly ben, you're a better man than that IMO.
Lots of people wrote about the solar wind. Some people got things right and others got things wrong. Birkeland (writing before the first spaceflights) had to rely on guesswork and analogies on topics where others had direct measurements. As a consequence, Birkeland got things wrong that later work got them right. Just like most 100-year-old science. Wrong wrong wrong. Why are you blind to this idea? Why are you ignoring
everything other than Birkeland?
Seriously, Michael. You tell me "The sun is part of a giant electrostatic circuit that powers the solar wind". I don't care whether that idea comes from Birkeland, or Alfven, or whether you made it up yourself. I look at the idea, I compare it to what I know about electrostatics, circuits, and actual solar wind experiments in space, and
based on the physics it is obvious that the idea is wrong.
Ditto for the solid-iron sun, the magic transparency of neon, the magic 6000K spectrum of something that's nowhere near 6000K, the magic refrigeration cycle keeping the Sun cool ... it's obvious that these are wrong. I don't care where they come from---you, Alfven, Birkeland, Manuel, whatever---they're wrong because they disagree with the laws of physics, and the crappy "evidence" you cite for them does not justify discarding all of those laws.