Natures Third Cycle, Arnab Rai Choudhuri
Natures Third Cycle, Arnab Rai Choudhuri
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Nature's Third Cycle
A Story of Sunspots

Author: Arnab Rai Choudhuri

Narrator: Sean Runnette

Unabridged: 10 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/29/2019

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

The cycle of day and night and the cycle of seasons are two familiar natural cycles around which many human activities are organized. But is there a third natural cycle of importance for us humans? On 13 March 1989, six million people in Canada went without electricity for many hours: a large explosion on the sun was discovered as the cause of this blackout. Such explosions occur above sunspots, dark features on the surface of the Sun that have been observed through telescopes since the time of Galileo.

The number of sunspots has been found to wax and wane over a period of eleven years. Although this cycle was discovered less than two centuries ago, it is becoming increasingly important for us as human society becomes more dependent on technology. For nearly a century after its discovery, the cause of the sunspot cycle remained completely shrouded in mystery. The 1908 discovery of strong magnetic fields in sunspots made it clear that the eleven-year cycle is the magnetic cycle of the sun. It is only during the last few decades that major developments in plasma physics have at last given us the clue to the origins of the cycle and how the large explosions affecting the earth arise.

Nature's Third Cycle discusses the fascinating science behind the sunspot cycle, and gives an insider's perspective of this cutting-edge scientific research from one of the leaders of the field.

About Arnab Rai Choudhuri

Arnab Rai Choudhuri is a Professor of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science. He received his PhD in 1985 from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Eugene Parker, usually regarded as the most influential solar physicist of our time. Choudhuri has carried on theoretical research on the formation of sunspots and the eleven-year sunspot cycle. He was one of the originators of the flux transport dynamo model, the currently favored theoretical model of the eleven-year sunspot cycle. He is the author of two advanced textbooks, The Physics of Fluids and Plasmas and Astrophysics for Physicists, used in many universities around the world.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Beauregard on May 24, 2019

Science reveals itself, if we only take the time and listen to what it has to say. This book is an extraordinary detective story that reveals itself over 10 or so chapters and gets at how we know what we think we know about the sun and its phenomena and shows science revealing itself in an incredibl......more

Goodreads review by Charlene on May 07, 2019

I would call this book on sunspots, by Arnab Choudhuri an important, seminal work that probably is not on everyone's radar, the way other physics/cosmology books are, but definitely should be. Since I was unfamiliar with so much of his work, I had to read this book twice to really begin to understan......more

Goodreads review by Jeremy on March 20, 2019

A well-written and non-technical overview of solar physics. This is a book for a general audience but pitched about right for readers with a reasonable conceptual grasp of physics (angular momentum, gas laws, the relationship between electric and magnetic fields...) The author chose to structure the......more

Goodreads review by Sushan on January 03, 2018

An unusual book Click the above link to read about the author (who happens to be my university professor) and my formal review of this book.......more

Goodreads review by Suyog on May 28, 2018

Obviously loved the book. Given the illustrious career of the author and the impeccable writing style there was no other way but to fall in love with it. I first came to know about the book the author himself when he asked us to refer it and one other technical book, at the end of his presentation at......more