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Of the many mysteries we've explored on this series,
perhaps those that stand out the greatest are the ones in our own celestial neighborhood.
From consistently surprising atmospheric phenomena on planets; including the Earth,
to the enigmatic behaviours of comets, to the ongoing puzzles of the Sun.
The evidence for the electrical connectedness throughout the Solar System grows
with each new discovery.
In recent decades the discovery of completely baffling exoplanets systems
have led some astronomers to acknowledge the need
for a whole new theory of planet and star formation.
Today, Dr. Michael Clarage, a scientist on the SAFIRE project team,
proposes a foundation for a new model of the solar system
based on the principles of electrical engineering.
Our understanding of our Solar System has changed so much
in the past few decades that I'm standing back more often and asking myself;
well, what is the Solar System?
What are all these planets?
What about all these other planetary systems that the Kepler telescope has discovered;
thousands of star systems, each with their own planets.
Many of those star systems are a surprise to contemporary astrophysics
because a lot of them do not look very much like our solar system.
Before we had any idea what other star systems look like we assumed, as is reasonable,
that other solar systems would all look like ours.
That turns out not to be the case.
Some stars have giant planets orbiting very close to them,
binary star systems have planets which,
when I was in school, was explained to us how that would not be possible.
One system discovered has a planet that takes tens of thousands of years to orbit.
As we collect more data about star systems
we need to open our minds to what the data is telling us.
Many astronomers were actually surprised that other stars are surrounded by planets;
myself and many others had the opposite response - I would have been very surprised
if we found that other stars were not surrounded by planets.
I'm not surprised because of my understanding of what is a star
and what is a solar system.
Consider this diagram. I did not invent this diagram;
it is part of very old cosmological systems, it is a factual diagram.
We know all about the existence of cells, people, planets, stellar systems, galaxies
but the diagram is more than facts.
It conveys relationship. It conveys an emotional knowledge;
the facts are arranged, so to speak, underneath a larger idea.
Each of these entities on the diagram is part of a larger world
and is composed of smaller worlds.
When facts are arranged under a larger truth, then we can understand the facts.
One meaning of understanding is when facts stand under a larger truth.
If we are gonna understand the data we are gathering
about different kinds of planetary systems;
we will need to also understand the functions of such systems
and the larger world of the galaxy.
If we don't understand the various roles star systems can play in the Galactic world,
then we will never be able to understand what is a solar system.
To explore that statement further we can look in the other direction of the diagram
and ask about cells.
You and I have the benefit of knowing a lot about cells
but in 1860, when the leading naturalist of the day, Ernst Haeckel, was asked
"Should young naturalists study cells?", he answered - absolutely not.
They are un-interesting blobs of protoplasm, there is nothing useful to be learned.
He said that in part, because of his cosmology in which cells played no part,
so he had no way of understanding what he was looking at.
A lot has been learned since 1860 and now we know so much about cells
that it takes years of study to get a grasp
of how many different kinds of cells there are
and all the different functions they play in the body of an animal.
Each cell in your body performs very important functions,
there are no cells in your body that have no function.
Coming back to the cosmological diagram; if one starts with the proper cosmology,
then one can ask about function
and then one stands a chance of understanding what one is looking at.
If we are not asking about function, we will never really know what we are looking at.
One of The functions of planets is to transform solar energy
and every planet does it differently.
One aspect of such transformation is weather;
every planet has weather, every planet has very different weather.
On Earth, all the solar influences interact with our atmosphere, magnetosphere, lithosphere;
that interaction results in lightning, rain, blue skies, white clouds,
soft dew that covers your grass in the morning.
But the weather on Jupiter is different but do not think for a moment
that the weather on Jupiter is any less intricate than here on Earth.
Just as here on Earth weather encompasses the delicate opening of a flower
and also the violent explosion of lightning, so also there must be as much variety
of gentleness and strength on Jupiter and Saturn and Venus.
So even though all the planets share the same Sun, the uniqueness of each planet
results in different types of transformation of solar energy.
Let us take this idea of planets transforming the Sun's energy
and look at just the electrical aspect of that.
Let us look at the entire Solar System as an electrical transformer.
This is a beautiful sketch of our Solar System;
the Sun is at the center, the entire body of the system is moving through the Galaxy
and each planet is revolving around the Sun at a different speed.
This picture is not to scale but it gives you a good feeling
for the solar system as coils within coils.
Think of the planets not as points in space
but think of what their orbits look like over the span of hundreds or thousands of years.
Picture not the planet but the orbit of the planet, and picture that orbit as a wire
which is electrically conductive and can be a part of an electrical circuit.
This is not so far from what we know
as each planet is surrounded by highly conductive plasmas.
Most of the planets in our solar system have strong magnetic fields,
which means there are strong electric currents flowing in and out of the planets.
We know that the Earth has regularly about 10 million Amperes
flowing in and out at the poles at any given time.
Here's the same sketch of our solar system from a different point of view.
As centuries of our Earth, years go by.
The inner planets will take many turns around the Sun,
the outer planets will make fewer turns.
In our solar system, seen as coils of wire;
the inner planets make many turns around the Sun
while the outer planets are wound fewer times,
taking the planets, Mercury through Neptune,
we see there are eight coils around the central primary of the Sun.
The outer coil of Neptune goes around the Sun every 165 years
and that time the other planets will orbit the Sun these number of times;
In that time Mercury will go around 684 times, Venus 268 times and so on.
The image I'm describing is well known to every electrical engineer;
that of a center core alternating current electrical transformer.
The solar system as an electrical transformer
is an idea we need to explore if we are going to understand functions.
Since Michael Faraday's time we have learned much about electrical transformers.
Electrical transformer is an idea that everyone should try to know something about.
It will change the way you see the world.
In 1830 Michael Faraday discovered something that completely changed our world.
He showed the first examples of electromagnetic induction.
This picture is one of the Faraday's original coils.
This is an iron ring, you can see the black iron underneath the coils.
Around that soft iron ring he wound wire in two sections;
on the left, covering a little more than half the ring,
is one section of wire coming in on the upper left
and winding round the iron ring about a hundred times and then leaving.
On the right of the ring there's another wire coming in; winding round, then leaving.
The surprise, the magic that changed all of human history
was the finding that if you quickly surge current through the left wire,
that induces a surge of current in the wire on the right.
In the world of electricity and magnetism, changes that take place in one location
will cause changes in another location, by induction.
Changes in one place induce changes in another place.
We will look at just one more idea from transformer theory
and then we will turn our attention back to stars and planets.
This idea is that of a step up or step down transformation of electrical activity.
Here is a more schematic drawing of Faraday's induction experiment.
Notice on the left, the wire wraps around the core twice as much as on the right.
Because of this, voltage changes on the left will induce voltage on the right
that is only half as strong because the induced voltage changes on the right side
are only half of those on the left.
This is called a step-down transformer.
Voltages are stepped down because there are fewer turns of the coil on the right.
The ratio of the voltage fluctuations on each side
is the ratio of the number of turns the wire makes around the core.
If the left-hand side had a hundred times the number of turns on the right,
then whatever voltage fluctuations came on the left
would induce one one-hundredth the size fluctuations on the right.
I know the electrical engineers in the audience are miles ahead of my explanation
but at least we're all at a similar starting point.
Now take the idea of electrical transformer
and bring it to the level of stars and planets.
In this picture, the Sun is the driving force, the primary coil.
The Sun is constantly sending out voltage and current fluctuations.
These induced voltage and current fluctuations are around the Earth and each planet.
Now this is an observed fact, it is not some fanciful theory.
For example, planets with strong magnetic fields like Jupiter and Earth
take x-ray emissions from the surface of the Sun
and transform those into radio emissions around the planet's equator.
Here are low frequency radio emissions around Jupiter
resulting from different fluxes of very high frequency x-rays emitted from the Sun.
In part 2 of this presentation, Dr. Clarage will further develop the idea
of the Solar System as a central core Electrical transformer.
He will also show the results from initial experiments to actually build such a transformer.
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