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Hannes Alfvén Quotes

Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics . He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves. He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics and electrical engineering. Alfvén made many contributions to plasma physics, including theories describing the behavior of aurorae, the Van Allen radiation belts, the effect of magnetic storms on the Earth's magnetic field, the terrestrial magnetosphere, and the dynamics of plasmas in the Milky Way galaxy. Wikipedia  

✵ 30. May 1908 – 2. April 1995
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Hannes Alfvén: 9   quotes 9   likes

Famous Hannes Alfvén Quotes

“Scientists tend to resist interdisciplinary inquiries into their own territory.”

Hannes Alfvén

Source: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents (1988), p. 192.
Context: Scientists tend to resist interdisciplinary inquiries into their own territory. In many instances, such parochialism is founded on the fear that intrusion from other disciplines would compete unfairly for limited financial resources and thus diminish their own opportunity for research.

“The key is not to confuse myth and empirical results, or religion and science.”

Hannes Alfvén

Source: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents (1988), p. 196.
Context: Since religion intrinsically rejects empirical methods, there should never be any attempt to reconcile scientific theories with religion. An infinitely old universe, always evolving, may not be compatible with the Book of Genesis. However, religions such as Buddhism get along without having any explicit creation mythology and are in no way contradicted by a universe without a beginning or end. Creatio ex nihilo, even as religious doctrine, only dates to around AD 200. The key is not to confuse myth and empirical results, or religion and science.

“Students using astrophysical textbooks remain essentially ignorant of even the existence of plasma concepts, despite the fact that some of them have been known for half a century. The conclusion is that astrophysics is too important to be left in the hands of astrophysicists who have gotten their main knowledge from these textbooks. Earthbound and space telescope data must be treated by scientists who are familiar with laboratory and magnetospheric physics and circuit theory, and of course with modern plasma theory.”

Hannes Alfvén

Source: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents (1988), p. 197.

“I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.”

Hannes Alfvén

Source: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents (1988), p. 197.

“The peer review system is satisfactory during quiescent times, but not during a revolution in a discipline such as astrophysics, when the establishment seeks to preserve the status quo.”

Hannes Alfvén

Source: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents (1988), p. 197.

“Most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe … every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy.”

Hannes Alfvén

Source: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents (1988), p. 196.

“We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.”

Hannes Alfvén

Source: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents (1988), p. 192.

“There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.”

Hannes Alfvén

Source: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents (1988), p. 196.

“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, dominated by gravitation.”

Hannes Alfvén

Source: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents (1988), p. 196.

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