Book Review: Physics of the Plasma Universe, by Anthony Peratt
Springer, Second Edition, 2015
This book will be one of the standard textbooks for future generations of astronomers (If things progress in a reasonable way!) A look through the table of contents sets the tone, for anyone like me who grew up in college and grad school being told there can be no interesting electrical properties at cosmological distances:
- Power Generation and Transmission
- Electrical Discharges in Cosmic Plasma
- Birkeland Currents in Cosmic Plasma
- Biot-Savart Law in Cosmic Plasma
- Electric Fields in Cosmic Plasma
- Double Layers in Astrophysics
- Critical Ionization Effect in Interstellar Clouds
- Neutral Hydrogen Filaments and Dynamics of Galactic Bennett Pinches
- Dynamics of Field–Aligned Currents in the Laboratory, Aurorae, and Galactic Space
- Cosmic Filaments as Transmission Lines
The book balances observation with theory, and does an amazing job of exposing the reader to all the main areas of cosmological plasma physics. I had hoped he would do more to update the reported observations, since there is much new data since the book's original 1992 edition. But the different topics sufficiently reference the NASA / ESA data that the reader can easily Google one's way to copious amounts of research.
I am also impressed by the way he avoids the current hype around "Electric Universe" cosmology vs current "consensus" cosmology. He's just a physicist presenting experimental observations and enough math to clearly connect observations with E&M theory and accepted Boltzmann equation approximations.
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