Hannes Alfvén

Hannes Alfvén is the frontier's most awkward figure for its critics, because he was no outsider at all: a Nobel laureate, the only plasma physicist ever to win the prize, whose name is attached to a fundamental wave and a whole branch of physics — and who spent the back half of his career arguing that mainstream cosmology had taken a wrong turn into myth. When a man who founded a field tells you the field is mis-reading the universe, it is worth hearing him out.

Born in Norrköping, Sweden, in 1908, Alfvén took his doctorate at Uppsala in 1934 and rose to a professorship at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, his chair retitled Professor of Plasma Physics in 1963; from 1967 he divided his time with the University of California, San Diego. In 1970 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics "for fundamental work and discoveries in magnetohydrodynamics with fruitful applications in different parts of plasma physics." He died in 1995, having published some three hundred papers and a dozen books.

Magnetohydrodynamics, and a wave

Alfvén's foundational contribution, the one the Nobel committee honored, was magnetohydrodynamics — the theory of how a plasma's motions, its electric currents, and its magnetic fields are coupled together. In a 1942 note to Nature he predicted a new kind of wave, now called the Alfvén wave: a transverse oscillation that travels along magnetic field lines through a conducting fluid, at a speed set by the field strength and the density,

It was, for years, treated with skepticism; today Alfvén waves are textbook physics, detected directly in the solar corona and tied by NASA's Parker Solar Probe to the heating of the corona and the gusts of the solar wind. It is the first of several cases where an idea Alfvén had to fight for was later confirmed in the data.

Thaw the field lines

Among Alfvén's most-cited results is the "frozen-in" flux theorem — the idea that magnetic field lines are carried along with a highly conducting plasma as if frozen into it. What is less often told is that Alfvén came to regard his own theorem as badly over-applied. He warned that treating field lines as universally frozen-in had become misleading, and urged colleagues to "thaw" the field lines and analyze cosmic plasmas the way an electrical engineer would: in terms of the whole circuit — the currents, the double layers, the sources and sinks of energy — not the magnetic field alone. He set this current-based view out in "Electric currents in cosmic plasmas" (Reviews of Geophysics 15, 271, 1977) and his book Cosmic Plasma (1981). The fullest modern statement of the field-lines-versus-currents choice is Syun-Ichi Akasofu's Alfvén Medal lecture — a tribute to Alfvén's approach, carrying it forward after his death.

He made the same argument observationally by championing Kristian Birkeland's field-aligned currents — electric currents flowing along magnetic field lines between the Sun and Earth's auroral regions — an idea long dismissed by the dominant school of his day. In 1973 the TRIAD satellite measured those very current sheets, vindicating Birkeland's century-old picture and Alfvén's defense of it.

A universe without a beginning

Alfvén's cosmology, developed with Oskar Klein, is the part the mainstream set aside, and the part he held to most firmly. The Klein–Alfvén model pictures a universe containing equal amounts of matter and antimatter, organized as a thin "ambiplasma" — Alfvén's own term for a plasma of mixed matter and antimatter. Cosmic electromagnetic fields and double layers keep the two apart, throttling annihilation so the ambiplasma is long-lived; where a vast region slowly contracts under gravity, the energy released as matter and antimatter finally meet halts the collapse and drives it back outward — the observed cosmic expansion, in this reading, powered by annihilation rather than by a singular birth. There is no Big Bang in it: the universe is evolving and, as far as the model is concerned, eternal.

For Alfvén this was not contrarianism but method. He argued that cosmology should be disciplined by laboratory plasma physics and by what spacecraft actually measure in space, rather than extrapolated from idealized mathematics. He put it bluntly: "It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be... To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth." And on the texture of the sky itself: "I have never thought that you could obtain the extremely clumpy, heterogeneous universe we have today, strongly affected by plasma processes, from the smooth, homogeneous one of the Big Bang." He laid out the plasma-universe cosmology a final time in the IEEE's plasma-physics journal: "Cosmology in the plasma universe — an introductory exposition" (IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science 18, 5, 1990).

This is the tradition that Eric Lerner carries forward, and the root of the wider The Plasma Universe — Birkeland, Alfvén, Peratt.

Sources & talks

A biographical introduction to the physicist and his plasma universe:

Hannes Alfvén: The Physicist Who Developed Plasma Physics (1908–1995)YouTube

"The Father of Plasma Physics":

Hannes Alfvén: The Father of Plasma Physics (Finnish Physical Society)YouTube

A walk through his cosmology and its quarrel with the Big Bang:

How have we ended up in such a mess with Cosmology? — Hannes Alfvén (See the Pattern)YouTube

Alfvén in his own voice: the 1982 Lindau lecture "How Space Research Changes our View of the Universe", and his 1970 Nobel lecture (PDF).

Primary sources: the Nobel Prize page and biographical note · books: Cosmical Electrodynamics (Oxford), Worlds–Antiworlds: Antimatter in Cosmology (W. H. Freeman, 1966), Cosmic Plasma (Reidel, 1981) · the 1990 IEEE plasma-cosmology paper · the Klein–Alfvén primary, Alfvén & Klein, Arkiv för Fysik 23, 187 (1962).