The Northern Lights, page 27
During the service a hymn was sung whose poignancy reduced many of the mourners to tears. It reminded them of Birkeland’s extraordinary life, climbing Arctic peaks to gaze at the Northern Lights, bringing the universe into his laboratory and combing the deserts of Africa for ultimate proof of his prophetic theories.
Imagine when once that mist has disappeared
That is obscuring our life down here,
When the bright, eternal day has dawned
And brilliant rays of light surround all my small steps.
Imagine when every puzzle on Earth is solved,
Every “why” that I have pondered upon
But could not answer for all my trying, is mastered.
Imagine when I the ways of God shall clearly understand.
Imagine when every heartache is extinguished
Every wound is healed and every longing satisfied,
Every tear of pain is wiped away and each deep sigh is
Quenched in the embrace of love.
The appearance of the aurora borealis in the North at Bossekop (Finnmark)
Epilogue
I have dwelt a long time on his publications because they make clear that the first correct theory for the aurora is Birkeland’s. For such a problem, the idea is not only the first thing, it is also the greatest thing— the basic solution was Birkeland’s and no one else’s. What he achieved in his fifty years will be remembered in our science for a long time. His work The Creation of the Worlds ends with the words of Henri Poincaré: “Our thinking is like lightning in the dark night. It was dark before man started thinking and it will be dark again if we stop.” Birkeland’s work was such lightning.
SEM SÆLAND, memorial address, 22 September 1919
BIRKELAND’s treatise, which he had described to Helland as important and which he worked on furiously in the final months of his life, was given by Professor Nagaoka to the Norwegian consul to post to the University of Christiania. Perhaps the consul thought it safer to send it with the rest of Birkeland’s belongings, which were entrusted to Captain Johan Bang-Melchior of the ship Peking. A 360-foot Swedish steamship, the Peking left Karatsu harbor on Kyushu Island at the southern tip of Japan on 31 August 1919, bound for Hull in England. A wireless communication was received on 2 September from the vessel north of Korea, where it was struggling in a violent storm that had pushed it off course, but it was never heard from again. The Peking was entered into Lloyd’s List of Missing Ships in October with the captain, crew, and cargo deemed “Missing.”
After Birkeland’s death, Johan Bredal told Olaf Devik of the strange telegram he had received from Tokyo, and they decided to try to make contact with Birkeland’s spirit. They wrote to Sir Oliver Lodge, an extremely eminent English physicist, author of nearly a hundred books and a pioneer of radiotelegraphy who was also known for his efforts to reconcile the ideas of science, religion, and the paranormal.
Christiania, Norway 23 May 1918
Dear Sir,
I should like to call your attention to an event, which might be of interest to you. It relates to Kristian Birkeland, whom you undoubtedly know very well from his nitrogen process. He some years ago attended séances in Christiania by the medium, Mrs. Wriedt, although at the same time he found no proof of the hypothetical connection with the next world. Last year, Professor Birkeland died in Japan and two days before his death, a friend of his in Christiania (also a member of the committee to assess Mrs. Wriedt) received this telegram from Professor Birkeland: “Remember Wriedt Committee.” Undoubtedly, Birkeland meant that if there was any way for him to contact us, he would do his utmost.
Could you ask some of the best mediums to try to communicate with the professor, taking care to write down everything, even if not understood by them? Obviously, Prof. Birkeland might give special references, only known to us three. The communications should be sent separately to us (friends and former assistants), Professor Helland-Hansen, Karl Devik, and myself, who would then reply to you about the possible meaning of the communications without conferring with each other beforehand.
I think this would be a crucial test and I should be very glad to hear your response to my suggestions.
Yours very truly,
Olaf Devik
Birkeland’s spirit, however, remained silent, and memory of him faded as his friends aged and died.
For fifty years after his lonely death his scientific reputation sank inexorably into oblivion along with the Peking. One man in particular, Sydney Chapman, continued the tradition of opposition by British scientists to Birkeland’s work. Chapman had seen Birkeland checking some magnetic records in Greenwich en route to Egypt, but they had not spoken. He was a young, ambitious mathematician who became the leading scientist in the field of geomagnetism after the First World War, holding a dominant position in British science until his death in 1970. Chapman’s career was the mirror opposite to Birkeland’s. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1919 at the early age of thirty-one, was invited to serve as president of five important scientific societies, and was awarded numerous prizes for his work.
Chapman considered Birkeland’s intrepid expeditions into the Arctic unnecessary and anachronistic and the Norwegian professor’s theories too “curious” for consideration. His antipathy was caused primarily by his disbelief in Birkeland’s main hypothesis: that cathode rays from the sun were guided into the Earth’s atmosphere along magnetic field lines, causing the Northern Lights and magnetic perturbations. Chapman himself had once written, in a paper in 1918, that rays of a single charge could stream from the sun, but when his theory was attacked he abandoned the idea and ridiculed Birkeland for suggesting it. Apart from being somewhat hypocritical, Chapman’s criticisms revealed an ignorance of Birkeland’s work. In 1916 Birkeland had published a paper outlining his theory concerning the rays emitted by the sun, in which he stated: “From a physical point of view it is most probable that these new solar rays are neither exclusively negative nor positive rays, but of both kinds.” Chapman later advocated this correct theory, without reference to Birkeland.
He appeared to have a general disregard for Scandinavian science, making condescending comments about Birkeland’s colleague Størmer, and the Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén, whom he called “that Swedish engineer.” Over five decades he effectively eradicated the memory of Birkeland’s work and entirely dismissed his contribution to science, as can be seen from his opening address to the Birkeland Symposium in Sandefjord, Norway, in 1967:
Though Birkeland was certainly intensely interested in the aurora, it must be confessed that his direct observational contributions to auroral knowledge were slight.
The apparently unshakeable hold on Birkeland’s mind of his basic but invalid conception of intense electron beams, mingled error inextricably with truth in the presentation of his ideas and experiments on auroras and magnetic storms. His breadth of mind and wide interests led him astray.
One young American scientist at the symposium, Alex Dessler, questioned Chapman about Birkeland. “I asked him whether Birkeland’s work had any influence on him at all. He glared at me and said, ‘How could it? It was all wrong.’ ”
In the last three years of Chapman’s life, however, space satellites found incontrovertible evidence supporting Birkeland’s ideas of a flow of electric particles from the sun. In 1962 instruments on board NASA’s Mariner II spacecraft on its way to Venus recorded the presence of an electrified gas traveling through space at speeds ranging from 300 to 700 kilometers a second. A similar phenomenon had been observed the previous year by the Soviet Lunik 2 spacecraft on its way to the moon, but western scientists had dismissed the Soviet data as unreliable. After Mariner, other craft were launched into space and soon it was acknowledged that “empty space” was not empty at all but filled with a million-degree electrified gas, hotter, thinner, and faster than any wind on Earth, blowing at hundreds of kilometers per second through the solar system and now called the “solar wind.” Composed of an equal number of negative particles, or electrons, and positive particles, mainly protons, this wind forms a neutrally charged “plasma.” Birkeland had predicted a similar wind more than sixty years earlier (although the term “plasma” did not exist then and he called it “solar rays,” “beams,” or “pencils”) when he wrote: “Small storms are almost continuously present . . . almost any time pencils of electric rays from the sun are striking the earth.”
It was not until 1966, however, when a U.S. Navy navigation satellite observed magnetic disturbances on nearly every pass over the polar regions, that Birkeland’s own star began to rise. Since 1967 scientists have been looking at the satellite data in relation to phenomena such as the Northern Lights, rediscovering Birkeland’s extraordinarily prophetic theories and completely reassessing his work. Today, he is credited as the first scientist to propose an essentially correct explanation of the aurora borealis, supported by theoretical, observational, and experimental evidence. He was also the first to give a three-dimensional and global picture of the currents giving rise to polar elementary storms, now called “polar substorms.” Birkeland suggested that these magnetic perturbations were caused by horizontal currents running along the auroral zone, maintained by a “constant supply of electricity from without” that flowed almost vertically down to auroral heights along the Earth’s magnetic field lines. The vertical currents, first christened “Birkeland Currents” in 1967 by Alex Dessler, are now understood to cause substorms and auroras and to drive most of the current systems in the ionosphere—the region, about a hundred kilometers above the Earth’s surface, where ionized particles can reflect radio waves.
Birkeland’s understanding that the same charged particles that caused magnetic storms also caused the auroras is fully accepted today, although a more sophisticated model of how the particles reach the poles is now available. Satellites have shown that the magnetic field around the Earth is strongly deformed by its interaction with the solar wind, compressing the field on the day side to about ten Earth radii and stretching into a cometlike tail on the night side, typically ten times the moon’s distance or more. The magnetic field lines are drawn so far out into space in the tail that they explosively collapse back toward the Earth, generally every few hours, accelerating the plasma particles back up to the poles and creating the dancing auroral displays.
The magnetic field is constantly reacting to the solar wind, which, like an ordinary wind, has gusts and gales created by strong eruptions from the sun, called “flares” (explosive events related to complex groups of sunspots) and “coronal mass ejections” (usually referred to as CMEs). During these eruptions large amounts of plasma escape the sun’s magnetic field and are accelerated outward. If the plasma travels toward Earth, it can cause substantial disruption to telecommunications, electric grids and pipelines, magnetic disturbances, and bright auroras. The sun also has “coronal holes,” areas where hot plasma streams out unhindered by the sun’s magnetic field, that can survive several solar rotations, giving rise to patterns of magnetic activity on Earth that are repeated every twenty-seven days—the time it takes for a complete rotation of the sun. Birkeland noticed this periodicity during his first expedition to Haldde and correctly linked it to particularly active regions of the sun emitting corpuscular radiation associated with, but not issuing from, sunspots. Large solar eruptions occur more frequently during the most active period of the sun’s eleven-year cycle, although Birkeland’s “polar elementary storms” are much more frequent, with two or three occurring most days, even during the sun’s quiet phase. As Birkeland surmised, all these explosive events on the sun, which have a dramatic effect upon the rest of the solar system, are electromagnetic in nature, controlled by Maxwell’s equations and not Newton’s gravity.
His great work, The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition, 1902– 1903, contained other ideas that were not to be proved until fifty years after his death:
“The earth’s magnetism will cause there to be a cavity around the earth in which the [solar] corpuscles are, so to speak, swept away”—an early indication of what is now called the “magnetosphere,” the region surrounding a planet or star in which the magnetic field controls the behavior of charged particles.
“It seems to be a natural consequence of our point of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying ions of all kinds. We assume each stellar system in evolution throws off electric corpuscles into space. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to think that the greater part of the material masses in the universe is found not in the solar systems or nebulae, but in ‘empty’ space.” Here, Birkeland predicts the “stellar wind,” a concept that emerged in astronomy after the solar wind was established. He then points out the possible existence and importance of stellar matter around which, in the last few decades, a discussion has been steadily growing. Today, interstellar matter is regarded as a key component of the universe.
That comet tails and their direction (pointing away from the sun) may be a result of the interaction of material sputtered off the comet head, interacting with the solar corpuscular stream.
Birkeland’s wider cosmogonic theory, in which he claimed that electromagnetic forces played a role as important as gravity in near and more distant regions of space, is certainly correct, although it took decades for his assertion to be generally accepted by astrophysicists. Since the satellite revolution, scientists can see even further into space, and the physics of plasmas and electromagnetic forces introduced by Birkeland has emerged from the shadows to dominate current views about the cosmic environment.
In addition to his extraordinarily advanced solar-terrestrial theories, his geomagnetic work, and his early application of Maxwell’s equations on a global scale, Birkeland was also hugely inventive. He showed the finest craftsmanship in his development of the terrella chambers with their unique artificial re-creation of the aurora and other cosmic phenomena. Birkeland’s development of photocell equipment came to revolutionize astronomy, although it was not used again for Zodiacal Light observations until the 1930s. His steady stream of patent applications is proof of his fertile imagination and the intense activity of his mind. Some patents were not very successful, although later versions of them have been, such as the idea to treat patients with radiation (the solar blanket), to advance the design of hearing aids, to produce margarine from hydrogenated vegetable fat, to make caviar from cod roe, and to use the force of cathode rays to propel rockets. No country’s armed forces ever adopted his electromagnetic cannon but the technology has since been developed to make “railguns” (electromagnetic mass accelerators) for the American Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars. Since the 1970s there have also been several proposals to use the same technology to launch scientific and military rockets and to design an electromagnetic carrier for mass transport between Earth and space stations.
Birkeland now has a crater on the moon named after him, which, together with Birkeland Currents and the wider acceptance of his work, should prevent his memory from fading, but rejection of his theories probably slowed the advance of geomagnetic and auroral physics for nearly half a century. The harsh treatment he received while he was alive also affected the people closest to him. Karl Devik, who was convinced that Birkeland’s life had been significantly shortened by the Norsk Hydro affair, was sufficiently disillusioned by the actions of his countrymen to leave Norway and start a new life in Rhodesia. He traveled to Africa in 1920, stopping en route in Egypt to sort out Birkeland’s estate there.
British Colony in Rhodesia 25 August 1920
Dear Father,
My private correspondence has been infrequent so far but many things have been very turbulent for me and I have postponed writing until I have got some order in my life.
It was wonderful going back to Egypt and our old friends there were very kind although the Norwegian consul in Cairo was far from a support to Birkeland and his behavior has been simply disgusting. It didn’t really suit him that I came out here to settle Birkeland’s affairs and a good deal of the mess is due to him.
The work concerning Birkeland’s estate was very painful and the whole tragedy around his death was all the time clearly before me. I realized that the time after I went home in 1916 had been terrible for him. His enormously intense work for many years and the very bad treatment he was subject to from Eyde and certain scientists eventually wore down his nerves to the extent that he no longer had confidence in any human being. In his darkest moments he even thought I was playing tricks and being evil to him. It will be to my greatest satisfaction to tell publicly what Eyde has done to damage Birkeland in many ways and that this has shortened his life by years. The truth will come out in future and it may well be that Eyde will meet his nemesis . . .
With warmest regards,
Karl
Karl’s prediction for Sam Eyde came true in some measure. After Eyde resigned from Norsk Hydro in 1917, he purchased a manor on the west side of the Christiania fjord and became a farmer. In 1918, however, he was elected to Parliament as a representative of the conservative party, Høire, with the support of the Farmers’ Association. His career as an MP was even shorter than that as a farmer as he was sent as a trade envoy to Poland in 1919. In 1920 he was appointed Norwegian ambassador in Warsaw, a position that gave him the title “Minister,” which he used on every possible occasion. Shortly afterward he was involved in a major financial scandal, and, although he was acquitted after a long public investigation, he resigned from his position as ambassador and went to live abroad. His reputation never fully recovered from the rumors that surrounded his resignation and he was written about unusually frankly in several publications after his retirement from public life. William Keilhau in The Life and History of the Norwegian People, published in 1938, wrote:
