Word: alfven
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...planets condensed from a single great cloud of gas. But they disagree, sometimes sharply, about the details of how it happened-and none of the theories have ever quite fitted together to give a satisfying solution to one of science's most baffling puzzles. Now, from Professor Hannes Alfven of Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology, comes a promising explanation. To explain the solar system, Alfven says, other scientists have used plain old hydrodynamics (the behavior of fluids, including gases); if magnetohydrodynamics (the behavior of ionized gases in a magnetic field) is used instead, many things become clear...
...Alfven points out in Britain's New Scientist that ordinary hydrodynamics rules only in tiny crannies of the universe, such as the earth's ocean and the lower levels of the earth's atmosphere. The great bulk of the universe, including the stars and most of the matter between them, is made of ionized gases whose atoms have electric charges caused by the effects of heat or radiation. Unlike the earth's familiar water and air, most of whose atoms are electrically neutral, ionized gases are influenced by the magnetic fields that pervade space...
Three Parts. When the sun formed in the heart of a hot and ionized cosmic cloud, Alfven believes, the sun's powerful magnetic field fended off the distant, electrically charged parts of the cloud. Gradually the cloud cooled, and some of its ionized atoms combined with electrons, making the atoms electrically neutral and permitting them to fall toward the sun. After they had fallen a few hundred million miles, they acquired tremendous speed, collided with the thin gas that surrounds the sun, were ionized again by the energy of collision, and then were stopped in their tracks...
...used to believe they were liberated in interstellar space during the coalescence of light elements into heavier ones. Dr. Fritz Zwicky of Caltech believes that cosmic rays may be the products of individual stellar explosions which occur all the time in some region or other of the universe. Hannes Alfven of Sweden's Upsala University holds that the rays are free-moving particles in space accelerated to cosmic ray energies by the magnetic fields of spinning double stars - somewhat as the man-made machine called the cyclotron speeds up atom-smashing particles to high velocities by means of repeated...
Following is the program for tonight's pops concert at 8.15 o'clock in Symphony Hall Boston: 1. March from "Tannhauser" Wagner 2. Overture to "La Gazza Ladra" Rossin 3. Waltz, "Vienna Blood" Strauss 4. Fantasia, "Othello" Verdi 5. Rhapsody, "Midsomarvaka" Alfven 6. Reve Angelique Rubinstein 7. Norwegian Dance Grieg 8. Ouverture Solenelle, "1812" Tschaikovsky 9. Suite from "Carmen" Bizet 10. Serenade, "The Millions of Harlequin" Drigo 11. Slavonic Dance, No. 3 Dvorak