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Watch America 250: The Breakthroughs That Built American Science — Part 2
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In 1958, physicist Eugene Parker at the University of Chicago theoretically predicted the solar wind, arguing that the sun's corona, at millions of degrees Kelvin, could not stay bound to the sun but must stream outward as an extension of the sun's atmosphere reaching all the way to Earth and beyond. The prediction was confirmed in 1962 by NASA's Mariner 2 mission.

  1. 01

    Parker submitted the paper to the Astrophysical Journal, where editor Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar sent it to referees who called the math correct but the conclusion implausible, telling Parker he needed to revisit basic solar physics.

  2. 02

    Chandrasekhar himself won a Nobel Prize for his work on the white dwarf mass limit.

Transcript

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4:26All of this stuff is now in textbooks, >> 100%. We're still in 1958 with theorization of the solar wind. Yes, this is near and dear to me because my father is a solar physicist and this is one of his great, you know, seinal papers in America. So, this this one um shout out to my dad. He actually told me to put this in there. This was Eugene Parker at the University of Chicago. He published a landmark paper at in the astrophysical journal where he theoretically predicted that there should be something like the solar wind. He looked at the corona and the fact that the corona is millions of degrees Kelvin and he said that this is not something that can be sustained just

5:07around the sun. There has to be an offshoot. The corona needs to be extending its atmosphere all the way to earth and all the way out into space. It was later confirmed in 1962 by NASA's Mariner 2 mission. And when he published when he submitted this paper to the astrophysical journal um Subramanium Chandra Shaker who is the great physicist Nobel Prize winner for the white dwarf limit, he was the editor and he sent it out to referees or he sent it out to you know um yeah the the referees to like give feedback and the referees came back being like the math is correct but this can't possibly be true. I think this guy needs to look at basic solar

5:48physics to figure out what went wrong. And it was scathing scathing remarks. Turns out turns out he was all right. >> It's uh also uh Chandra Shaker, also known as the Thunder Shaker, was referenced in uh I believe it was your interview with uh Dr. Michael Blandon. Yes. >> Um in one of the uh NASA space-based detection platforms. We are moving on to still in 1958 invention of the perceptron. >> Yes, this is the building block of every artificial neural network. It started here in 1958 by Frank Rosenblot at the

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