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Good post...

It should be pointed out, because it is a little unclear, that only Hannes Alfvén and Irving Langmuir were awarded Nobel Prizes in Physics because of their work with Plasmas.

Kristian Birkeland never received the Nobel Prize although he was nominated a record seven times.

It was reported that Birkeland did not receive the prize because the committee thought he had "commercialized" his work by developing an electrically based method of fixing Nitrogen into fertilizer by blasting it with artificial lightning. That was not acceptable for a pure research scientist and his work was somehow tainted because he had commercialized it and made monetary gain. Therefore, the no prize.

Interestingly, Hannes Alfvén was awarded the prize for his earlier work in which he erroneously concluded that Plasmas could be "magnetized" and it was the residual magnetic force that made Plasmas act as they did... but on accepting the Nobel, he used his speech to plead with the scientific community to ignore the work for which he was nominated and won... because he was WRONG! He said that instead of residual magnetic force accounting for the phenomena, it was a continual creation of magnetism because of the flow of electrons through the Plasma.

THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE (LINK)

"The cosmical plasma physics of today is far less advanced than the thermonuclear research physics. It is to some extent the playground of theoreticians who have never seen a plasma in a laboratory. Many of them still believe in formulae which we know from laboratory experiments to be wrong. The astrophysical correspondence to the thermonuclear crisis has not yet come." —H. Alfvén, Plasma physics, space research and the origin of the solar system, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1970

Alfvén was considered a brilliant maverick. He railed against the consensus of big bang cosmology and insisted that we live in an electric universe. He argued that it was not enough to treat magnetism in space without considering the electric circuits in space necessary to generate and sustain magnetic fields. Yet no book on astronomy mentions electricity or circuits. Future historians of science will find this beyond rational understanding, like the belief in a flat Earth. Astronomy labors in the space age under the yoke of gaslight era science. Our model of stars is little better than the ancient one of a 'campfire' in the sky. Only the fuel is different.

Thirty-seven years after Alfvén's speech, the astrophysical crisis is becoming more obvious. Adaptive optics and space telescopes give us much clearer views of stars, nebulae and galaxies, which theorists are floundering to explain. Some express mild concern that their models aren't working. No one recognizes that there is a deep crisis. Denial, minimization and obfuscation can be expected before a paradigm shift begins...

I don’t follow the personalities of science all that closely. It is more than I can handle to deal with the math and the conceptual models. I don’t believe that the universe runs on mathematics but it seems that math can describe if not explain most data that might be collected. The more the detail, the worse the math, that much seems to be the case. It has been said that Maxwell originally had 20 equations rather than four and that he used quaternions and other things that were discarded by Heaviside and maybe it is so, but what are the missing 16 equations? Quaternions and even octonians are still in use, in geology and in compouter graphics of all things.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6525.html

Bacteria are genetically modified by lightning
10:12 19 October 2004
Andy Coghlan

University of Lyon
Lightning research, NASA
Applied and Environmental Microbiology
Lightning is nature’s own genetic engineer. By opening up pores in soil bacteria it allows them to pick up any stray DNA present, report Timothy Vogel, Pascal Simonet and their colleagues at the University of Lyon in France.

This hitherto unknown phenomenon might help explain why gene swapping is so common among bacteria.

Mild electric shocks are routinely used to genetically engineer bacteria in the lab, so Vogel and Simonet wondered whether lightning could have the same effect. Although it would kill bacteria near the point of contact, those further away would get a milder shock.

The researchers persuaded physicist colleagues to blast bacteria with artificial lightning. So far they have shown that two strains of the soil bacterium Pseudomonas - as well as a lab strain of E. coli - take up “bait” DNA when zapped by lightning.

The researchers suspect the phenomenon is widespread, speeding up the rate at which bacteria evolve. Genetic studies show bacteria frequently pick up foreign genes, usually from other bacteria, but natural DNA uptake rates are too sluggish to explain the observed diversity.

Lightning might also have speeded up the evolution of the first bacteria, Vogel says.

Journal reference: Applied and Environmental Microbiology (DOI: 10.1128/AEM.70.10.6342-6346.2004)