Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [92]
There has been little reaction to the warning. Perhaps that is appropriate. Although there are measures we could take – all technologically advanced nations, not just the United States, are at risk – the chance of this total wipeout happening are low enough to make it a threat we might get away with ignoring. Examine the history of this field of research, however, and it is hard not to conclude that the blind eye turned to the impact of a geomagnetic storm is not a measured response. It is the consequence of a long history of snubs to the physicists who work in this area.
That National Academy of Science’s report on a possible space-borne apocalypse stems from Alfvén’s obscure but ground-breaking paper. We now know Alfvén’s roiling streams of charged particles as plasma. The Sun itself is composed of plasma, and our knowledge of plasma physics forms the basis of our understanding of the Sun and its interaction with our atmosphere. This whole field, known informally as space weather, is now of vital interest. Thousands of artificial satellites now orbit our planet and perform a variety of tasks essential in modern life – TV broadcasting, navigation, military surveillance, telecommunications, weather and climate forecasting, for example – and they are extremely vulnerable to space weather: a heavy shower of plasma can fry a satellite’s electronics.
But Alfvén’s legacy is not just about space weather. For a start, plasmas are central to much of physics. Particle accelerators such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider create and analyse plasmas. Future technologies, such as fusion reactors that aim to release nuclear energy without an explosion, are all about learning to control and manipulate plasma. Alfvén made contributions in other fields, too. In 2010, President Obama gave NASA a new objective: to travel to an asteroid in order to probe its structure, which might give clues to the history of the solar system. Coming as it did from the mouth of the President, it sounded like a new and exciting idea. But go back to Alfvén’s Nobel lecture, given on 11 December 1970, and you’ll find the same suggestion.
Hannes Alfvén has been called a heretic, a dissident, an iconoclast and an enigma. He is also a heroic resistance fighter. With his defeat of Sydney Chapman and in establishing so many branches of physics, Alfvén slew his Pablo and blew the bridge. And he kept on fighting: he dedicated much of his later life to campaigning for nuclear disarmament, and was vociferous in his dissent against the Swedish Government’s take-up of nuclear power.
An anarchic spirit, you see, is not necessarily a bad thing. The story of the Spanish Civil War is largely a tale of atrocity, oppression and massacre, but there were also moments that created a light in the darkness. One such light is still shining, in fact: the anarchic spirit of FC Barcelona.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the people of Barcelona took control of the city’s street railways. Anarchy ensued: not anarchy as disorder or chaos, but anarchy as removal of the ruling classes. The workers’ union took over the railways and dismissed the directors, who had been paid eighteen times what the average railway worker earned. With the directors gone, the wages of the lowest earners went up 50 per cent. What’s more, the unions were able to radically