Alfven hannes biography of martin luther

Purchase ITER-branded merchandise here. And why does his name keep cropping up in association with ITER? He earned 15 major awards, and was one of only a handful of scientists who was a foreign member of both the United States and Soviet Academies of Sciences.

Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics (MHD).

His parents were both practicing physicians—and his mother was one of the first female doctors to qualify in Sweden. As a schoolboy, he was fascinated by Camille Flammarion's book on astronomy, Astronomie Populaire , and he and his friends formed an amateur radio club, building receivers. He later attributed some of his future success to applying an electromagnetic point of view to astrophysical problems.

He then went on to spend six months in Cambridge, working with Ernest Rutherford who had himself won the Nobel Prize in , at the famous Cavendish Laboratory, before returning to Sweden. Essentially, he was predicting that magnetic field lines in a plasma, like guitar strings, could transmit a wave.

Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of a Nobel Prize in Physics.

Here on planet Earth, they can act as major particle accelerators. The letter to Nature resulted in the opening up of a whole new field of physics—that of magnetohydrodynamics MHD. At the time, there were no known applications, as plasmas only occur naturally very rarely on Earth—essentially only in the aurorae and lightning. By the s, however, technology advances meant that it was possible to generate high-temperature plasmas in the laboratory, and for these, an understanding of MHD was essential.

MHD—even by the standards of higher physics—is famously and fiendishly complicated, combining the challenges of hydrodynamics and electromagnetism. Patrick Blackett—who worked with Ernest Rutherford for a decade, and who himself won the Nobel prize in —is said to have told his students: "Electromagnetism is difficult, hydrodynamics is very difficult, but magnetohydrodynamics is damned difficult.

Artsimovich had become the head of the former Soviet Union's fusion power program in , and is widely credited as being the father of the tokamak, at the time a brand-new concept for a nuclear fusion reactor. Artsimovich was once asked how long it would be before the first thermonuclear reactor would start to work.