-----Original Message----- From: Alan Fletcher > Don't trust uncalibrated photographs. The exposure is most likely set for the brightest area, and anything less bright will appear dark. Think sunspots.
Alan ... good point but it does not go far enough ... since "prior assumptions" enter the picture as well. In fact, the filament of a clear 60 watt lightbulb is visible in photograph, appearing "black" as opposed to looking at the bulb- or as compared to a frosted bulb, where the filament is not visible. Yet we know for a fact that the filament is where the heat is produced. This provides a lesson, of sorts - for Parkhomov. It is incorrect to assume that the windings in a Parkhomov tube are "cooler" than the interior, since like the photo of the light bulb - we are dealing with assumption, not facts. Moreover ... in thinking about sunspots, vis-à-vis lightbulbs where the power which can be represented by brightness in the visible spectrum, the standard explanation for sunspots may yet benefit from an understanding of dark matter. Dark matter (assuming it is real) could actually bolster the DDL perspective, when this parameter becomes integrated into the big picture, which includes the sun. It is all based on prior assumptions which may not be accurate at any point in time, once another modality is accepted. But as for the original post - it was a bit tongue-in-cheek and was posted to show that we have no real understanding of the thermodynamics here, nor of the light emission dynamics. In addition, the only way we can measure the lower apparent temperature of a sunspot is by relative photon emission, which of course creates its own logical error (aka: circular reasoning). In fact the sunspot could appear colder - but be hotter in fact - if its emission spectrum has shifted to soft x-rays. We only know that sunspots are regions of the solar surface where the magnetic field becomes localized and highly concentrated, by three orders of magnitude of more. These are massive magnetic fields. Light emission interacts with magnetism - as this image illustrates: http://tinyurl.com/pt58ocv Thus the magnetic field could be hiding the "real temperature" of sunspots since much of the photon emission is vectored differently. This is similar to the situation in the Parkhomov tube, where the wires carry a magnetic field. Since we know that the emittance of visible light can be altered by the activity of a magnetic field (and by SPP formation where a weak field is converted to a strong field) what appears to be "cooler" may not indicate a decrease in temperature - but could represent a decrease in entropy. The main point is that what we consider "visible" may not reflect the underlying energy involved if the higher energy release comes in the form of invisible x-rays, or if the light is vectored differently. True - standard physics now says that unequivocally that sunspots are lower in temperature, but... temperture can only be measure by photon emittance which assumes no local magnetic field to distort the measurement. It is a fascinating subject, and the implications will grow with every new replication. I think that this month we will see more efforts like that of Jack Clark, and from others overseas, perhaps in Europe and Asia, and that each new finding can add something to our understanding, so long as we take the time to analyze it properly. This could be a very interesting New Year. Jones
