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Magnetic reconnection could be the Universe's favorite way to make things explode. It operates anywhere magnetic fields pervade space—which is to say almost everywhere. In the cores of galaxies, magnetic reconnection sparks explosions visible billions of light-years away. On the sun, it causes solar flares as powerful as a million atomic bombs. At Earth, it powers magnetic storms and auroras. It's ubiquitous. The problem is, researchers can't explain it.
The basics are clear enough. Magnetic lines of force cross, cancel, reconnect and—Bang! Magnetic energy is unleashed, with charged-particles flying off near the speed of light. But how? How does the simple act of criss-crossing magnetic field lines trigger such a ferocious explosion?
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2015/10mar_mms/
[Also Covered By]: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-nasa-magnetic-explosions.html
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2015, @05:47PM
The basics are clearly NOT understood or it would have opened the door to understanding it. When someone says they understand the basics but after all these years have no idea at all, well you missed something earlier. Probably some fixed idea that is wrong but everyone thinks must be that way, and all authorities that you so faithfully trust says so...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 13 2015, @06:03PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2015, @07:41PM
Yes, after all these years we don't understand anything. We can build huge, impressive tokamaks that squeeze the fuck out of ionized particles and use and do all sorts of really cool plasma physics shit with magnetic fields, but we don't understand anything.
You don't know fuck about how science and technology works, do you? What, are you like 12 years old with all this "authorities that you so faithfully trust" and adolescent "don't trust authority" bullshit?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2015, @03:24AM
One of my friends has a PhD in physics, something to do with lasers and weather forecasting.
One day, he took it upon himself to explain to me that I should not trust anybody who says AGW is real, because he's an expert on the topic and I'm not, and anybody who disagrees with him is simply an evil commie or socialist who's trying to erode his freedoms. (I kid you not.)
Later, he told me that as a species we have no idea how magnets work, therefore (his particular version of) God.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by zeigerpuppy on Saturday March 14 2015, @03:45AM
Had a long discussion with a fundamentalist Christian the other day.
Damn frustrating but I try to be civil.
The basic issue was that he refused to understand the difference between evidence and faith. I tried to sum it up by saying that evidence is those things which you can demonstrate by observation and show to others to form an impression (hypothesis) of what is going on. And that the same evidential method can refute and refine ideas. He said his radical belief in Jesus is evidence of God's existence.
It was impossible to get further. He actually believed that all of science is a conspiracy to get people away from the true moral way. It astounds me how blind we can be as a species sometimes.
He was also a climate change skeptic. We agreed that the world is not going in a good direction because of supra-national powerful interests that control global energy supply and finance; but his limp response was "Jesus will come again an fix it". To which I politely said, "get off your arse and take some fucking responsibility, the big man in the sky ain't goin to get us out of this mess".
He was extreme, no doubt, but sums up why religious zealots are such a drag on the rest of humanity and can justify just about anything by their fantasies.
Wake up people!