[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by alatar

This thread is becoming the 'science blog.'

Not such a bad thing, eh?

Originally Posted by alatar

I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what makes it interesting. Science does not throw its hands up and says, "We can never know." It will start to chew away at that problem as it can, trying to gather data from different sources, hash out some hypotheses, and see where it goes from there. It will use the Law until an experiment shows it to be in error; better that than to start completely anew with no frame of reference.

What I meant be "throw everything out" was not actually to start from scratch. To ignore all the discoveries would be idiocy. The only thing (or set of things) I would like to see thrown out is the arrogance of not letting new ideas be funded and tested, even if they are 180 degrees opposite of those held by the current group in power. But it's just not like that. These things are always battles.

Originally Posted by alatar

You're not saying that plasma is in any way similar to blood?

Only by analogy. Here's the image I'm using to convey the point: plasma fields are equivalent to veins and arteries; the planets, asteroids, and moons are equivalent to pulses; the sun is equivalent to the heart; and the charged particles, electric currents, magnetic fields, and lightning strikes (that reach earth during thunderstorms for example) are equivalent to blood. The whole complex is meant to convey how the solar system (and the galaxy for that matter) is a physical unit (as the body is an organic unit) in which all phenomena affect each other.

Birkeland currents are huge electric fields that stretch across and through entire galaxies. When our solar system passes through a part of a galactic Birkeland current, it is going to have an effect on the solar system, indeed, on earth. What kind of effect? It depends upon the nature, intensity, etc., of the Birkeland current. Some physicists believe that Birkeland currents are responsible for sunspots (and thus solar wind and lightning storms on earth, which results in shifting weather patterns on earth, etc., etc.).

Originally Posted by alatar

Isn't the universe a glorious place? And yet we can feel something for characters created by a man who put them under a sun and moon possibly like our own.

Quite.